Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T21:56:57.090Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2014

Melissa Edmundson Makala*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina

Extract

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi K.The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Butterfield, R. A.The Domiciled in India.” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review 17 (April 1904): 407–10.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Charm. Country Life 28 (17 Sept. 1910): 404.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Rosinka. “Introduction.” Derozio: Poet of India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. xxilxxxi.Google Scholar
Crooke, William. Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906.Google Scholar
Dhar, Kiran Nath. “Some Indian Novels.” Calcutta Review 127 (Oct. 1908): 561–83.Google Scholar
“Eurasian.” The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language. Vol. 2. New York: Century, 1914.Google Scholar
Greenberger, Allen J.The British Image of India: A Study of the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960. London: Oxford UP, 1969.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Allen D.The Anglo-Indian Community: The Integration of a Marginal Group.” Journal of Asian Studies 18.2 (Feb. 1959): 227–40.Google Scholar
Hawes, Christopher J. Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. Surrey: Curzon, 1996.Google Scholar
Macdonald, Allan John. Trade Politics and Christianity in Africa and the East. London: Longmans, Green, 1916.Google Scholar
“On the Policy of the British Government towards the Indo-Britons.” Asiatic Journal 20 (Sept. 1825): 305–08.Google Scholar
Paxton, Nancy L.Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Perrin, Alice. The Charm. London: Methuen, 1910.Google Scholar
Perrin, Alice. 1903. The Stronger Claim. New York: Duffield, 1910.Google Scholar
Procida, Mary A.Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Reynolds-Ball, Eustace. The Tourist's India. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907.Google Scholar
Sainsbury, Alison. “Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel.” Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India. Ed. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. 163–87.Google Scholar
Sandberg, Graham. “Our Outcast Cousins in India.” Contemporary Review 61 (June 1892): 880–99.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Stronger Claim. Academy & Literature Fiction Supplement 65 (7 Nov. 1903): 507.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Stronger Claim. Athenaeum (19 Dec. 1903): 823.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Stronger Claim. Book Review Digest. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1910. 310.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Stronger Claim. Classified Catalogue of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 1902–1906. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Library, 1908. 1049.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Stronger Claim. Guardian (16 Dec. 1903): 5.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Stronger Claim. Spectator (30 Jan. 1904): 189.Google Scholar
Teo, Hsu-Ming. “Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels.” History of Intellectual Culture 4.1 (2004): 118.Google Scholar