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Between Two Words: Memories and Silences of Interracial Children in Colonial India

Rodin Bantawa

Published on

“I often think of you and remember you and my dear mother. I often dream that I am with you in India and that I see you both in the room you used to sit in. No day of my life has ever passed without my thinking of my dear mother.” These are the words of Katherine Aurora “Kitty” Kirkpatrick, written forty years after she left India, recalling her childhood to a grandmother she could no longer embrace. In her memory, India lingers like a half-open door: a place of warmth, love, and belonging, yet unreachable. “I can remember the verandah and the place where the tailors worked and a place on the house top where my mother used to let me sit down and slide.”1

Although Kitty belonged to a generation almost 30 years later than that of Sharaf-un-Nisa’s children, her emotions echo the quiet ache that defined many lives of interracial children born to Indian mothers and British fathers in the eighteenth century. Their stories are not always visible in official records, but they appear tucked into letters, wrapped in petitions, or passed down in the names of forgotten regiments. Most of the surviving material is composed of “hard facts”: records, numbers, and correspondences written by British men in positions of authority determining the futures of these children. The voices of the children themselves are far more elusive. The few first-hand glimpses—Kitty’s longing for her mother, Mary Wilson’s letters describing the vulnerability of being sent to a strange land, or Elizabeth’s diary with its strikingly muted account of family loss—stand as isolated case studies amidst a broader archival silence.2

This silence raises difficult questions. Why do we almost exclusively hear of mixed-race children who successfully “fit in” to British society? Why are there so few accounts of dark-skinned mixed-race children being sent to England, while fairer children appear more frequently in the historical record? These patterns do not diminish the narratives we do possess but rather underscore the gaps: the missing letters, the hidden diaries, and the unwritten emotions of those who remained in India or whose attempts to belong in Britain left no trace.

In the early part of the century, relationships like that between Gerard Gustavus Ducarel and Sharaf-un-Nisa were not unusual. Interracial unions were broadly tolerated, if not formally recognized, by the East India Company.3 With many British officers living far from England, these relationships often led to children who straddled two worlds. At first, the presence of such children was not viewed as a political or racial threat. In fact, some early measures sought to incorporate them into Company structures. Lord Clive’s 1770s pension legislation, for instance, recognized widows and children of British soldiers, implicitly acknowledging mixed-race dependents.4

However, the Bengal Military Orphan Society and the administration of Clive’s Pension Fund reveal how quickly questions of race and legitimacy entered these charitable frameworks. Although these institutions theoretically encompassed the “service family” of the Company, which often included Indian wives and their children, both organizations routinely resisted extending aid to them. This reluctance marks the emergence of a distinctly racialized discourse as early as the late eighteenth century, as hierarchies of belonging were codified in policy. Debates between London and Calcutta over whether “native” or mixed-race widows qualified for pensions exposed an implicit assumption in metropolitan policy: that the true beneficiaries of empire were European in both blood and destination, destined to return “home.”

The human cost of such hierarchies is vividly captured in correspondence between John Palmer and Warren Hastings regarding his three orphaned step-grandchildren. Hastings observed that the “two eldest [who] are almost as fair as European children… should be sent to Europe,” while the youngest, “of a complexion that could possibly escape detection,” ought to remain in India to make his way as a clerk. Ultimately, the “dark” child was left behind, while the two fairer boys were dispatched to Britain. Hastings’s later search for a school “where their birth and complexion would be no impediment” underscores how skin tone mediated access to education and social mobility.5

By the latter half of the century, such informal prejudices hardened into policy. The aftermath of the American Revolution destabilized imperial governance and heightened anxieties over loyalty. When Lord Cornwallis arrived in India in 1786, he brought not only administrative reforms but a new racial ideology that would profoundly reshape the status of country-born children.6 In 1791, an order barred anyone with an Indian parent from employment in the Company’s civil, military, or marine services. By 1795, only children of two European parents, interpreted as those born and raised in Britain, could hold positions of authority or own land. Mixed-race children were increasingly relegated to lower roles, if allowed to serve at all. Even exceptional men, such as James Skinner, the son of a Scottish mercenary and a Hindu woman, were classified as “irregulars,” their legitimacy perpetually in question.7

For many families, exile seemed the only route forward. Children were dispatched to England in the hope that distance might cleanse the ambiguity of their origins. Yet as Margot Finn has argued, the journey “home” rarely guaranteed acceptance; such children often grew up disconnected from both cultures, inhabiting a fragile space between love and law, memory and rejection.8 Sharaf-un-Nisa’s daughter Elizabeth’s diary offers a haunting glimpse of this dislocation. In a starkly unemotional tone, she notes: “Saturday Mama was brought to bed of a dead boy.” Whether this detachment reflects estrangement from her mother or the formal conventions of journaling is unclear. In contrast, her tenderness when describing her absent father suggests the emotional ruptures colonial policy enacted within families.9

The life of Mary Wilson, likely the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of Sir Henry Russell, underscores the intersection of secrecy, respectability, and identity. Raised discreetly in England under Major Robert Pitman’s guardianship, Mary’s letters trace her progression from a Clapham schoolgirl to a governess in Devonshire. Having no known family in Britain and knowing no one in Devonshire, she was intensely lonely. “I wish I was nearer Clapham,” she confessed to Pitman soon after her arrival. “There is no one near here who I know which makes me feel very uncomfortable. I hope you will write to me soon for that is the only pleasure I have receiving letters from friends.” Still only a teenager herself, she found responsibility for four young children overwhelming. Her later breakdown and desperate inquiries about her unknown parentage reveal the emotional toll of being deprived of knowledge of one’s origins. In 1839, on the eve of her marriage, Mary wrote that she could not complete the register because she did not know her father’s name. Russell’s refusal to disclose it, citing propriety and fear of scandal, illustrates the social and psychological burdens borne by mixed-race children in the shadow of the empire.10

As interracial unions became stigmatized, the children they produced were reclassified from kin to complication. What had once been a tolerated blending of cultures became a perceived threat to British supremacy. Christopher Hawes argues that this period marked the beginnings of a Eurasian community forged as much through exclusion as inclusion: denied full access to either side, these children built lives in the cracks of empire.11 And yet, amidst petitions, policy papers, and clipped correspondences of men in power, a few voices break through. Kitty’s yearning for her mother, Mary’s anxious handwriting, Elizabeth’s muted diary entries, they remind us of what the archive cannot fully capture: the inner worlds of children born between empires, reaching for a home that existed only in fragments.

List of Interracial children