Jane McCabe's Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement is first and foremost a deeply fascinating, emotive read. Its retelling of the stories of a group of children born of Indian mothers and British tea planter fathers, their education in a home for Anglo-Indian children in the Himalayas, and their subsequent migration and adulthood in New Zealand has the makings of a novel as much as a work of history. But as well as providing a set of often tragic and sometimes heartwarming stories, and conveying how a particular heritage has been remembered, McCabe effectively uses this case study of resettlement within British imperial structures to shed new light on understandings of race, migration, and complex family structures in the twentieth century.
McCabe structures the book using the life course, or “lifeway,” of these children born in India from the turn of the century to the 1930s. In her first chapter she analyzes relationships between British men and Indian women and the children borne of them. In subsequent chapters she considers the experience of children being moved to and growing up in an institutional setting, the “Graham's Homes” of Kalimpong, in Darjeeling. Established by Scottish missionary and philanthropist John Graham in 1900, the homes housed hundreds of Anglo-Indian children. Some were to remain in India, but Graham thought it best to resettle children in other British colonies, believing that white settler colonies offered these children the opportunity to integrate and leave behind what was considered a “contaminated” background of mixed racial heritage and illegitimacy. New Zealand was Graham's preferred option, as he believed it represented an ideal in race relations, in which “racial amalgamation” and “mixing” were possible and encouraged (3). McCabe charts the Homes children's journey, tracking the young adults’ voyage to New Zealand, work, and later family life. This structure is roughly chronological, tracking the scheme's establishment in the early 1900s, its height in the 1920s as demand for labor and Graham's tactics in smoothing the immigrants’ passage to their new country led to a rise in numbers migrating (when in fact migration regulations were becoming stricter), and the scheme's demise in the 1930s in the wake of the depression. In McCabe's final two chapters she analyzes the legacy of this scheme and its meaning to descendants of Homes graduates, with a sophisticated analysis of the silences around this heritage and its significance.
This is a highly successful book. As McCabe notes, it is as much about the way stories are told as the story itself, and about the processes of history and the creation and use of archives. McCabe effectively explores how archives were a form of colonialism in and of themselves, used to forget those without power (the colonized, women) and paper over the more “difficult” questions of illegitimacy and mixed-race relationships. This is a rich, valuable case study of, as McCabe puts it, “the use of migration as a means of turning marginalized British children into productive imperial citizens” (45).
Methodologically, too, there is a lot on offer here. This is a personal story for McCabe: her grandmother, Lorna, was sent to Graham's Homes and resettled in New Zealand, and this project started as an act of family history. Her detailed, rigorous research tracking individuals, collaboration with families to explore their heritage, and reflection on her own grandmother's background demonstrate how historians can use personal histories to better access the emotional and the forgotten—those subjects on which archives can be quiet. Family history here, as McCabe highlights, is a highly unequal business; records are much more easily accessed for white, English-speaking researchers. But simultaneously, family history can help decenter the nation, and place individuals and familial networks ahead of national and colonial structures. Furthermore, this book usefully demonstrates how genealogical methodologies can be interweaved with other social history methodologies, and how family historians might have lots to offer other researchers.
It is important to remember this is not a book about the children of British men and Indian women in colonial India; it is a book about a very particular group of them. The subjects are children whose fathers were emotionally and financially invested in them, enough to send them to and usually pay for their education at Graham's Homes. Many other children, for better or worse, stayed with their Indian families. Though some of these families were affectionate, many relationships between tea planter men and Indian women were violent, characterized by highly unequal power relationships, and the children that resulted from them were often not in contact with their fathers. Moreover, the children studied by McCabe were the ones who were, in Graham's thinking, fortunate enough to migrate to New Zealand. And the individuals whose stories are most fully represented in the book, those of the six families whose personal files reside at the Graham's Homes’ archives and in the personal family archives McCabe uses, are by nature those who thrived, integrated, and married in later life—those who have interested descendants today. McCabe highlights and carefully contextualizes this in the book. It is by no means always a happy tale she tells, as she charts the many difficulties, traumas, and emotional turmoil individuals faced. But a less specialist reader, lacking detailed knowledge of the often brutal nature of colonial, white, masculine power in colonies such as India, might forget these are not typical children of mixed British and Indian parentage when reading extracts from the letters of fathers in touch with their children or Graham. These fathers may have been distant, and children frustrated at their lack of contact with them, but these men who did at least something to secure their children's futures do not represent a full range of experience. Furthermore, one important legacy of the Graham's Homes and the actions of tea planter fathers is a recurring tension throughout the book and for the descendants McCabe interviewed. Was the move of Homes graduates away from their mothers and eventually thousands of miles from their first homes a good or bad thing for these individuals and their children and grandchildren, who themselves in time felt a sense of loss at having no knowledge of their Indian grandmothers?
Overall, however, this is a great success. McCabe beautifully brings to light a truly fascinating story of a small group of children, and deftly analyzes their subjectivities and emotional experiences by tracking their lives. A lovely read.
