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PIEBALD TRISAŃKU : TIIE EURASIAN IN ANGLO-INDIAN FICTION    189

The conlribulion of the Eurasians to the development of modem India has not been meagre. As H. A. Stark, one of their ablest spokesmen points out, ‘We are the first missionaries of the Christian religion, the earliest teachers in Indian schools, the pioneers of Western arts, induslries and Sciences... If England is the land of our fathers, India is the land of our mothers. If to us England is a hallowed memory, India is a living verity... If England is dear as a land of inspiring traditions, India is loved for all that she means to us in our daily life.⁹

How did the Englishman view the Eurasians in generał ? As noted earlier, the common Anglo-Saxon prejudice dcveloped during the nineteenth cenlury, the earlier periods having been mostly free from ii. This was largely the inevitable outeome of the nineteenth century view of Race. Owing to the inereasing Europcan contact with the non-White races in this century, the entire issue of Race had now comc to be of growing interest, and thinking on it was largely shaped by a rather loose application of current evolutionary theories, which came very handy for the purpose, of proving the intrinsic superiorty of the White race. Doelrines such as Nalural Selection and Survival of the Fittest, and the great Viclorian Idea of Progress were found extrcmely convcnient in justifying colonial exploilalion. This naturally led to the popular acceptance of the very useful notion of a regular hierarchy of races, with the White permanenlly on top and the darker ones inevitably at the bottom. The White race supposedly enjoyed the double advanlage of possessing superior physical and mcntal endowments, as also an environment conducivc to an energetie and enterprising way of life; the darker races manifeslly lacking both these advantagcs must inevitably remain inferior. Thcy deserved to be subjugaled and if necessary destroyed under the impact of their superiors.

One great difllculty in applying these nolions Wholesale to the Eurasian was that he was actually hall-White, and could not therefore be as bad as the ‘base Indian* or the ‘hcalhcn Chince*. Help was then sought from both History and Science in solving this sccmingly unsurmountable difficulty, and establishing the crippling inferiority of the Eurasian. Il was pointed out that in medicval Europę serfdom was inhcriled through the mother and not the father; that under the old Frcnch monarchy the half-caste child belonged to his mothcr*s and not his fathcr*s people and that evcn in the most primitive socielics, malernal descent preccded the patcrnal. Similarly, according to MendcFs Law, it was noted, Hybridization always spcllcd a reversion to the morę primilive type in which the native element ullimalcly tended to preponderate.¹⁰

It therefore became axiomatic for the Englishman to believe that the Eurasian as a rule illustratcd the process of a lcvclling down and not the other way round. A logical corollary to this was that the Eurasian somehow combined the w >rst in the two races which met in him. Sir Charles Trevclyan