"Prince William's Indian DNA piques interest, not innuendo. That's progress"

[Lusos]

"Some Anglo-Indian people used to go to extraordinary, even tragic lengths to hide their heritage. Reactions to the story about Prince William's Indian roots are much more relaxed"

"A taint, a tint, a touch of the tar brush: these words and others like them died of shame deep in the last century, at least in any kind of enlightened society, and yet a fascination with miscegenation persisted long after. I remember talking to a well-known English writer about a distinguished English editor, and the writer speculating that the editor, who was dark, had "some Indian blood in him": what did I think? I didn't know. The year was 1982 and we were in a Fulham Road pub called the Queen's Elm, which, like the writer and the editor, no longer exists. His question had no particularly malign implication – it wasn't as though he would have thought worse of the editor had "Indian blood" been present. Still, it would have been difficult then to foresee the day last week when the second in line to the British throne would be declared to have a tiny portion of Indian ancestry, and that this disclosure should spark a mild interest and celebration rather than an oo-ah prurience and notions of a family's ancestral disgrace.

According to the research of a commercial firm, BritainsDNA, Prince William is likely to be between 0.3 and 0.8% Indian. One of his maternal ancestors was the daughter of a Scottish trader with the East India Company and his Indian housekeeper, who after her father's death was taken to Scotland to be raised by her Aberdeenshire grandparents nearly 200 years ago. Tests on two of her descendants, third cousins of William's maternal grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd, show the presence of DNA found only in South Asia and passed down the motherline to every child; this, in the words of BritainsDNA, confirms beyond doubt that the housekeeper-mistress, Eliza Kewark, was of Indian heritage. Such a degree of certainty invites questions. The prince himself has never been tested; could the rare DNA in his distant relations have a different source? But our main reaction should surely be relief that another myth of racial purity has been demolished, combined with a small delight that a community once so badly damaged by those myths should have the last laugh.

As defined by the Indian constitution, an Anglo-Indian is a person born in India who can show European parentage in the male line. Katherine Scott Forbes, born in 1812 to Eliza Kewark and the Scotsman Theodore Forbes, was therefore an Anglo-Indian, though until the first world war that term tended to apply to the British population who lived temporarily in India as administrators and businessmen, rather than people of mixed race who lived and died there as a subaltern class to the white rulers. As a community, Anglo-Indians were held in contempt by both caste-conscious India and class-conscious Britain, who tended to see them, in the words of one writer, as the products of "a temporary sexual weakness in an unfamiliar climate". One way to attain self-respect and social advancement was to deny the maternal, Indian side of their ancestry – to unmix themselves and become white, "to pass", as the saying went. Success depended almost entirely on skin colour.

Anglo-Indian settlements in India used to grieve that some of their most celebrated offspring denied or played down their origins, and many Anglo-Indians could recite a list of the stars they felt had in some way disowned or neglected them. In Lucknow, it was Cliff Richard; in Kolkata, Peter Sarstedt; in Chennai, Engelbert Humperdink. In the railway town of Chakradharpur, dull under its locomotive smoke, I once heard an unexpected boast that Marlon Brando's first wife, Anna Kashfi, had lived there. And it turned out she may well have done – as Joanna O'Callaghan, a half-Indian girl who emigrated with her family from Bengal to Cardiff in 1947. "There is no Indian blood in my family or my husband's family," her mother said, omitting the fact that her husband wasn't Kashfi's father, who was Indian.

Of course, we have no right to unmask the origins of others or to deplore the strategies they deployed against the prejudice they faced: people have their reasons. It remains hard, however, not to gasp at the bravura disguise of the movie star Merle Oberon, whose Who's Who entry in the late 1970s still recorded her birthplace in Tasmania and her father as a British army officer. People with long memories in Kolkata, where Oberon had worked the telephone exchange in the 1920s, knew differently, but only with the publication of Charles Higham's biography in 1983, four years after her death, was the tragic scale of her deception revealed. How she invented a studio biography, perhaps with the help of her husband, Alexander Korda, which never mentioned India. How her Indian mother, when she joined Oberon in England, was introduced to guests as her old ayah and maidservant. How, in the year before her death, she reluctantly accepted an official invitation to Tasmania to visit the theatre mistakenly named after her – Mumbai, not Hobart, was her birthplace – and in panic refused to leave her hotel. And, perhaps the saddest thing, how she ruined her complexion with skin-lightening cosmetics, and thus rarely appeared in colour films.

Of all the colonists in 18th-century India, it was the British who were most concerned by dark skin. They found it incredible that other Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, should care so little about colour, and took to mocking any Portuguese Indian who wore European dress as a "To-pass". "Any man of colour, however dark, who wears a hat, passes for a descendant of the companions of the renowned Vasco da Gama," wrote an English observer disdainfully, as though race rather than culture or intellect was what should count most. And yet they were just as keen on inter-marriage with Indian women as the Portuguese, or at least on arrangements that allowed them sex and a family life. Troops formed temporary attachments with low-caste women and prostitutes, while officers, traders and officials set up households with native mistresses. One result was children of many shades who, if their fathers were rich enough, were often sent to school in England. According to one estimate of 1789, one boy in every 10 at English schools was "coloured" – but not too dark. William Palmer, aide to Warren Hastings, wrote of a compatriot's children that while two were "almost as fair as English children" and could go to England, a third was "too dark to escape detection" and needed to be educated in Bengal.

This tendency to select by colour still applied in 1820, when Prince William's ancestor, then aged eight, exchanged her home in Surat for a country house near Fraserburgh. She sailed with her younger brother, who seems to have become so homesick that he had to be sent back to rejoin his widowed mother and a third sibling. Perhaps colour played its part here, too – who came, who stayed, who returned. All we can safely know is that the kind of mixed-race phobia that made Oberon reinvent herself has nearly vanished in Britain, and that human dignity has been enlarged.

[Anglojew]

"Some Anglo-Indian people used to go to extraordinary, even tragic lengths to hide their heritage. Reactions to the story about Prince William's Indian roots are much more relaxed"

"A taint, a tint, a touch of the tar brush: these words and others like them died of shame deep in the last century, at least in any kind of enlightened society, and yet a fascination with miscegenation persisted long after. I remember talking to a well-known English writer about a distinguished English editor, and the writer speculating that the editor, who was dark, had "some Indian blood in him": what did I think? I didn't know. The year was 1982 and we were in a Fulham Road pub called the Queen's Elm, which, like the writer and the editor, no longer exists. His question had no particularly malign implication – it wasn't as though he would have thought worse of the editor had "Indian blood" been present. Still, it would have been difficult then to foresee the day last week when the second in line to the British throne would be declared to have a tiny portion of Indian ancestry, and that this disclosure should spark a mild interest and celebration rather than an oo-ah prurience and notions of a family's ancestral disgrace.

According to the research of a commercial firm, BritainsDNA, Prince William is likely to be between 0.3 and 0.8% Indian. One of his maternal ancestors was the daughter of a Scottish trader with the East India Company and his Indian housekeeper, who after her father's death was taken to Scotland to be raised by her Aberdeenshire grandparents nearly 200 years ago. Tests on two of her descendants, third cousins of William's maternal grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd, show the presence of DNA found only in South Asia and passed down the motherline to every child; this, in the words of BritainsDNA, confirms beyond doubt that the housekeeper-mistress, Eliza Kewark, was of Indian heritage. Such a degree of certainty invites questions. The prince himself has never been tested; could the rare DNA in his distant relations have a different source? But our main reaction should surely be relief that another myth of racial purity has been demolished, combined with a small delight that a community once so badly damaged by those myths should have the last laugh.

As defined by the Indian constitution, an Anglo-Indian is a person born in India who can show European parentage in the male line. Katherine Scott Forbes, born in 1812 to Eliza Kewark and the Scotsman Theodore Forbes, was therefore an Anglo-Indian, though until the first world war that term tended to apply to the British population who lived temporarily in India as administrators and businessmen, rather than people of mixed race who lived and died there as a subaltern class to the white rulers. As a community, Anglo-Indians were held in contempt by both caste-conscious India and class-conscious Britain, who tended to see them, in the words of one writer, as the products of "a temporary sexual weakness in an unfamiliar climate". One way to attain self-respect and social advancement was to deny the maternal, Indian side of their ancestry – to unmix themselves and become white, "to pass", as the saying went. Success depended almost entirely on skin colour.

Anglo-Indian settlements in India used to grieve that some of their most celebrated offspring denied or played down their origins, and many Anglo-Indians could recite a list of the stars they felt had in some way disowned or neglected them. In Lucknow, it was Cliff Richard; in Kolkata, Peter Sarstedt; in Chennai, Engelbert Humperdink. In the railway town of Chakradharpur, dull under its locomotive smoke, I once heard an unexpected boast that Marlon Brando's first wife, Anna Kashfi, had lived there. And it turned out she may well have done – as Joanna O'Callaghan, a half-Indian girl who emigrated with her family from Bengal to Cardiff in 1947. "There is no Indian blood in my family or my husband's family," her mother said, omitting the fact that her husband wasn't Kashfi's father, who was Indian.

Of course, we have no right to unmask the origins of others or to deplore the strategies they deployed against the prejudice they faced: people have their reasons. It remains hard, however, not to gasp at the bravura disguise of the movie star Merle Oberon, whose Who's Who entry in the late 1970s still recorded her birthplace in Tasmania and her father as a British army officer. People with long memories in Kolkata, where Oberon had worked the telephone exchange in the 1920s, knew differently, but only with the publication of Charles Higham's biography in 1983, four years after her death, was the tragic scale of her deception revealed. How she invented a studio biography, perhaps with the help of her husband, Alexander Korda, which never mentioned India. How her Indian mother, when she joined Oberon in England, was introduced to guests as her old ayah and maidservant. How, in the year before her death, she reluctantly accepted an official invitation to Tasmania to visit the theatre mistakenly named after her – Mumbai, not Hobart, was her birthplace – and in panic refused to leave her hotel. And, perhaps the saddest thing, how she ruined her complexion with skin-lightening cosmetics, and thus rarely appeared in colour films.

Of all the colonists in 18th-century India, it was the British who were most concerned by dark skin. They found it incredible that other Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, should care so little about colour, and took to mocking any Portuguese Indian who wore European dress as a "To-pass". "Any man of colour, however dark, who wears a hat, passes for a descendant of the companions of the renowned Vasco da Gama," wrote an English observer disdainfully, as though race rather than culture or intellect was what should count most. And yet they were just as keen on inter-marriage with Indian women as the Portuguese, or at least on arrangements that allowed them sex and a family life. Troops formed temporary attachments with low-caste women and prostitutes, while officers, traders and officials set up households with native mistresses. One result was children of many shades who, if their fathers were rich enough, were often sent to school in England. According to one estimate of 1789, one boy in every 10 at English schools was "coloured" – but not too dark. William Palmer, aide to Warren Hastings, wrote of a compatriot's children that while two were "almost as fair as English children" and could go to England, a third was "too dark to escape detection" and needed to be educated in Bengal.

This tendency to select by colour still applied in 1820, when Prince William's ancestor, then aged eight, exchanged her home in Surat for a country house near Fraserburgh. She sailed with her younger brother, who seems to have become so homesick that he had to be sent back to rejoin his widowed mother and a third sibling. Perhaps colour played its part here, too – who came, who stayed, who returned. All we can safely know is that the kind of mixed-race phobia that made Oberon reinvent herself has nearly vanished in Britain, and that human dignity has been enlarged.

He's also descended from Genghis Khan and Mohammed amongst other historical figures.

[Smaug]

Why the hell is this article on the Portuguese section?

[Lusos]

^
Because I want to.
And this:
"Of all the colonists in 18th-century India, it was the British who were most concerned by dark skin. They found it incredible that other Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, should care so little about colour, and took to mocking any Portuguese Indian who wore European dress as a "To-pass". "Any man of colour, however dark, who wears a hat, passes for a descendant of the companions of the renowned Vasco da Gama," wrote an English observer disdainfully, as though race rather than culture or intellect was what should count most. And yet they were just as keen on inter-marriage with Indian women as the Portuguese, or at least on arrangements that allowed them sex and a family life. Troops formed temporary attachments with low-caste women and prostitutes, while officers, traders and officials set up households with native mistresses. One result was children of many shades who, if their fathers were rich enough, were often sent to school in England. According to one estimate of 1789, one boy in every 10 at English schools was "coloured" – but not too dark. William Palmer, aide to Warren Hastings, wrote of a compatriot's children that while two were "almost as fair as English children" and could go to England, a third was "too dark to escape detection" and needed to be educated in Bengal.

But no one speaks about Brits mixing around.