They weren’t the only ones, of course. The burden of ‘White Australia’ fell most heavily on Chinese and Pacific Islander Australians who upon Federation were already here in larger numbers. But as Kama Maclean explains in British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the Empire, ‘White Australia’ kept the modest antipodean population of Indians small indeed.

British India, White Australia tells the triangular story of relations between Australia, India, and Great Britain from Australian Federation in 1901 to Indian independence in 1947. It does so through the prism of British Indians’ aspiration to the rights accorded white citizens of Britain’s settler colonies as they evolved into dominions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It is a story of the hypocrisy of Britain, pushing its dominions to extend rights to British Indians not accorded them by the British in India itself, and of the pushback against this. It is the story, too, of how Britain’s hub-and-spokes empire network baffled British Indians in their representations for equity in an increasingly racialised imperial hierarchy, even as they contributed in vast numbers, like the citizens of the white dominions, to British war efforts. Most of all, this is an account of the impact on real people of the official racism perpetuated by Australian governments of both persuasions until the Whitlam government ended ‘White Australia’ in 1973 – a policy embarrassment too easily rationalised away as a matter of economics rather than of race, or conveniently forgotten altogether, by Australians today.

Without the didacticism to which a lesser writer might have succumbed, Maclean helps remedy this slippage. With a cool head, excellent archival research, astute use of visual evidence, and occasional wry understatement, Maclean allows us to see Australia and Australian policy through British Indians’ eyes as Britain’s grip on its colonies and dominions faltered.

She brings the Indian hawkers to life, for example, along with their isolated and enthusiastic female customers; explores racist naming practices that relegated British Indians to generic ‘Charlie’ status the way Indigenous Australians were collectively objectified as ‘Jacky’; and explores the significance of Norman Lindsay’s Indian ‘Chunder Loo’ cartoon character, featured in Cobra Boot Polish advertisements from 1909 to 1920.

Kama Maclean

Personal perspectives and examinations of popular racist tropes nestle neatly into Maclean’s account of British Indians’ persistent efforts, within and outside Australia at a multiplicity of levels, to get discriminatory policies changed. She recounts the efforts of a number of well-intentioned Australians to advance the Indians’ cause, and shows how they were stymied. Maclean notes the ‘sleeping dogs’ comment, for example, scrawled by hand on a Western Australian government file note in 1925 concerning the acting New South Wales premier’s letter pressing his Western Australian counterpart to respond to Indian requests for mining licences. Running dead was ruthlessly successful in maintaining the racist status quo.

Written from a South Asian Studies vantage point, British India, White Australia provides a richer, better integrated perspective of the ‘awkward triangular dynamic’ between Britain, India, and Australia than works coming from a purely imperial history perspective or from international relations.

Maclean notes that the existing scholarship mostly explains continuing brittle relations between India and Australia as an outcome of Cold War politics in which India was prominently non-aligned. ‘Many note that Australian attempts to engage with India have gone unrequited; few have tried to appreciate why this might be the case,’ Maclean says. This takes us to her core argument that a key reason has to be that ‘Australians have brought to the table a presumption of British Commonwealth synergies that simply do not align with Indian experiences’.

In this country, white Australians were the colonisers and white Australians remain dominant in the life of the nation. In their country, Indians were the colonised, in the most violent and rapacious of ways, and had to overcome people like us to seize back control of their nation. William Dalrymple conveys the roots of this in The Anarchy (2019), his account of the British East India Company’s takeover of the Indian subcontinent. A couple of centuries later, Australian Richard Casey was shocked, arriving in 1944 as the Winston Churchill-appointed governor of Bengal, at how little in the way of infrastructure or development Britain’s colonisation of India had yielded.

The book’s claim that Australians and their governments are trapped through ignorance in a ‘Commonwealth, curry and cricket’ trope that neglects India’s drastically different experience of empire is amply supported by the evidence presented. This blocks development of meaningful relations between our two countries. It’s time for Australia to do its homework.