The white population of Calcutta under the rule of the British East India Company was never really a monolith. Colonial chronicles often pictured the British in India as a homogenous elite. However, the social composition of White Calcutta was far more complex. Besides merchants, judges, civil servants, and industrialists, there existed a substantial group of subaltern Europeans, comprising soldiers, sailors, deserters, artisans, and domestic workers. And their looming presence haunted the moral and spatial order that the colonial elites sought to construct.
By 1866, the census recorded 11,224 Europeans in Calcutta. Yet over 4,000 of them—more than one-third—were either garrisoned soldiers in Fort William or sailors aboard 112 European-owned ships and twenty steamers in the port. These were not stable residents but transient laborers. Still, a portion of them, through desertion, dismissal, or voluntary discharge, remained behind and joined the pool of working-class whites in the city. Some integrated into the local economy as carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, cabinetmakers, coachbuilders, and domestic servants.
Evidence of this marginal group’s long-standing presence exists from as early as the 1766 census, which recorded European domestic workers and shopkeepers within the settlement. Their numbers increased in the nineteenth century. A handbook from 1844 listed 27 wine merchants under European management, as well as four dancing masters, five violin teachers, and two guitar instructors. European artisans operated independently or supervised Indian labourers in mixed workshops. Such employment, though a departure from imperial ideals of white gentility, became an unspoken part of the city’s colonial economy.
The class stratification within the white population was matched by deep anxieties about its social consequences. Elite Europeans viewed working-class whites with suspicion. Their perceived moral deficiency and physical unruliness were regarded as threats to racial and civic order. Sailors and soldiers were especially associated with violence and criminality. The events of 1795 illustrate this clearly: a gang comprising Europeans, Portuguese, Italians, and others plotted to rob the Hindostan Bank. One member turned informant. Six were executed. In the aftermath, seventy “vagrant whites” were arrested and two soldiers were sentenced to hard labour for committing highway robbery in the centre of Calcutta.
Even the East India Company, generally indifferent to municipal governance, responded with penal measures. White criminality was not merely seen as a breach of law but as a racial embarrassment. It exposed the limits of colonial authority’s ability to control its own subjects and maintain the civilizational superiority it claimed over the native population. Disorder among whites undermined imperial legitimacy.
The gender imbalance further complicated this subaltern white presence. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, white women were a minority, and the migration of single women—many of them from modest backgrounds—became a subject of social commentary and satire. Known colloquially as “the fishing fleet,” they sought marital prospects among officers and administrators. Public rituals such as “sitting up,” where women were displayed to potential suitors, underlined the transactional nature of such mobility. While some succeeded in marrying into respectability, many did not, and those who failed to integrate into elite society were pushed toward economic self-reliance or social marginality. European women in Calcutta ran taverns, boarding houses, and schools. Some became actresses, like Esther Leach, who managed the Sans Souci theatre.
There was also an unofficial integration of poor whites with local society. Many soldiers and sailors cohabited with Indian women, often without formal marriage. While Company officials and elite residents increasingly regarded such relationships as improper by the early 19th century, they remained widespread among lower-ranking whites. The children of these unions, often referred to derogatorily as “Eurasians” or “Anglo-Indians,” were excluded both from elite white society and from indigenous caste networks. Their marginalization further exposed the racial contradictions of the colonial order.
The presence of poor and working-class Europeans revealed the porousness of racial hierarchies in colonial Calcutta. Respectability, rather than race alone, defined inclusion in the white town’s social order. The elite enforced spatial segregation not only from Indians but also from their poorer racial kin. This was evident in the topography of the city, where areas such as Lall Bazaar and Bow Bazaar became liminal zones. As noted by Pradip Sinha, these formed the “intermediate town,” occupied by poor whites, Indian Christians, and persons of mixed descent.
Ultimately, the subaltern whites of Calcutta occupied an ambiguous position. They were racially privileged yet socially excluded, necessary to the colonial economy yet threatening to its moral claims. Their existence destabilized the simplistic binaries of colonizer and colonized. In a city obsessed with the appearance of order, these individuals embodied the disorder colonialism could neither assimilate nor erase.
Source
Marshall, P. J. (2000). The white town of Calcutta under the rule of the East India Company. Modern Asian Studies, 34(2), 307-331.
Arup K. Chatterjee 