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Mapping Hybridity: Historicizing Cultural and Racial Hybrids in Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Contemporary postcolonial theories of hybridity often become unmoored from the specificities of geography and history, resulting in theoretical abstractions that do not adequately account for agency and historical change, or for the experiences of the "literal" racial hybrid. A literary analysis of the "Eurasian" in Indian literature that remains attentive to the neglected history of the Anglo-Indian community offers a means to identify the shortcomings of and need for modifications to current theories ofhybridity in literary and cultural studies. Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain challenges and rewrites the official colonial historiography of the "Eurasian" in eighteenthand nineteenth-century India and in this rewriting also offers a specific taxonomy of various hybridities. 1 In contrast to, on the one hand, the representation in British colonial fiction of the Eurasian as a static, psychologically schizophrenic racial hybrid, and, on the other hand, postcolonial theory's tendency to conflate racial, cultural, and other hybridities, Red Earth and Pouring Rain consciously and specifically maps the historically determined differences between racial and cultural hybrids. In presenting a spectrum of hybrid figures, the novel charts the historical emergence of the very concept of hybridization as a conflict between monolithic categories. The novel presents the history of its mixed-race characters as both epic and tragic, and in their decline demonstrates the real and undeniable effects of a fixed body in history subject to processes of categorization. In