This talk delivered by Dr Arunima Bhattacharya (Edinburgh Napier University) will map “whiteness” as a contested and politically constructed category in colonial Calcutta, the capital of British India until 1912. It will explore the race and class-based privileges that created degrees of “whiteness” in the colonial city officially divided into the “black” and “white” towns.

It will use examples from institutional and cultural life of 19th and early 20th century British India to show how discourses of hygiene were used to interpret race on the lines of contamination and physical corruption which by extension officially determined the social and moral nature of racial others. These racial others included racially different bodies of Indians and “Domiciled Europeans” as well as mixed-race “Anglo-Indians”.

Free event with booking

Book here or email amy@crer.org.uk