The orphaned colony

Abstract

This article examines British encounters with Indian, Andamanese, white and African orphans in colonial India in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that orphans provided colonial administrators with opportunities to articulate increasingly scientific constructions of race, which might undergird contemporary imperialism, and simultaneously to explore the limits of colonial authority. The absence of parents was doubly helpful to these discoveries. At one level, the removal of the parent isolated the child from the contamination of culture. This left it available to experts, who wished to study the nature of the biological material or to leave their own impressions. At another level, it eliminated a source of political interference in the relationship between the child and the unrelated adult, which could now be interpreted largely in terms of scientific, bureaucratic or political necessity, including the language of savage-repression that constitutes a part of the prose of counter-insurgency. Orphaning was not only a metaphor for governance, it was also a problem of governance, and in some situations, a technique for the management of colonised populations.