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fcels the urge to get Indianized even morę acutely than Victoria. He envies the people in a south Indian village for their serenity, which he feels will never be his, and he even wonders how long it will be before Chrisian Eurasians like himself would merge with the vast Indian majority.⁴³ Dennis Kincaid’s Tropie Romę provides an extremely rare example of a Eurasian retuming to her Indian roots. Here, the half-Indian molher of Gil, a descendant of a captain of Alphonso Albuquerque, becomes progressively Indianized after her husband'd death. She takes to Indian food, and even her way of worship is Indianized, Champak flowers and roses now being offered to the Madonna.

Most Anglo-Indian novelists share the British belief that in whatever way the Eurasian might try to resolve his identity crisis, he is, as a rule, bound to fail. The most favourite explanation oflered is of course that this was because the Eurasian somchow combined the worst in the two races. Alan Laurence in Diver’s Candles in the Wind sums up this popular thesis succinctly: The half-caste out here falls between two stoois... he is generaUy perverse enough to pick up the worst qualities of the Iwo races and mix them up into a product peculiarly distastcful to both.’⁴⁴ A charactcr in Perrin’s The Stronger Claim avers: ‘The Half-caste generally has alt the drawbacks of both nations and the virtues of neither.’⁴⁵

Like almost all British writers on the subject, Anglo-Indian novelists too do not appear to find it necessary to spcll out the ‘undesirablc traits’ in the White race, but they know very well all the worst llaws in Indian character, which the Eurasian of course imbibes with his mother’s milk, because as F. E. Penny obscrves in commenting on her Eurasian protagonist, Daphne in The Wishing Stone, ‘As is so often the case where the European traits show themsclves in the body, the mind was orienlal.'⁴* The list of morał tlaws (all of course of exclusively Indian origin) with which the Eurasian psyche is marred is a fairly long one. The Eurasian is often vulgar and common like the loud-mouthed termagant, Carrie in Diver’s Candles in the Wind; and has unclcan persona! habits, like Victoria’s mother in Bhowani Junetion (she is supposed to chew bctel-nut in secret). The Eurasian in Anglo-Indian fiction has no morał fibrę, no will-power, no strenglh, no stamina, and is (like all orientals, of course) an abjcct slave to wild passions and a constant prey to shifliness and dishonesly. The philosophy of Bclle, the worldly Eurasian girl in The Lion and the Unicom is, Tve becn only one thing, my fairness, my body, and I shall use it till I get what I want.’⁴⁷ Daphne in The Wishing Stone is engaged to marry Ralph but has no inhibitions in flirting with Dick, and when she kisses him, the novelist explains: ‘It was the kiss of the child of the East, who knows no restraint where her passions are aroused.’⁴⁸ And in F. Tcnnyson Jesse’s The Lacąuer Lady, Agalhy tells the Eurasian Fanny, ‘It’s elear to see you’re not English. You’vc been prying into my things—what a dishonourable thing to do.’⁴⁹

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