Creole World, Purist Rhetoric: Anglo-Indian Cultural Debates in Colonial and Contemporary Madras

This article examines the 'postcolonialist' argument that, in considering the colonial encounter, analytical attention is most appropriately directed to emergent creolized cultures. Focusing on the Anglo-Indians, a 'hybrid' population in Madras, south India, over a period of several centuries, it demonstrates the porosity of cultural as well as social boundaries and the diversity of cultural practices both within and across the lines dividing the constituent groups which comprise the urban social order. In spite of such a creolized universe, bounded identities and pure cultures have been and continue to be asserted by sections of this hybrid community. The argument is that postcolonial or anthropological attributions of creolist or other similar labels to cultural m6langes must leave space for local discourses which can reveal alternative and even contradictory self-identifications. The success or failure of purist rhetorics which deny a creolized condition is related to local and global power structures.