Such categorisations of the relative manliness and ‘essential’ qualities of various ‘races’ of Indian circulated widely throughout the British Empire and were so normalised that they were accepted as part of general knowledge. An incident when Nunda Lall Doss, a Bengali Christian, visited Australia in 1888, demonstrates the categorisation, pointed out by Sinha, of the Bengali as effeminate.^[37] A journalist from the Adelaide Observer who interviewed Doss was determined to represent him as an example of such an ‘effeminate Bengali’. In this remarkable interview, Doss can be seen resisting the deployment of this category against himself and other Indians. They had been discussing Chinese immigration and ‘coolies’ in general. Indeed, during the previous month, Doss had observed the great uproar that ensued in Sydney when some Chinese tried to land from the Afghan. ^[38] In Adelaide, the issue of the use of Chinese labour in the Northern Territory was being debated. The journalist, employing contemporary discourse around ‘racial types’, suggested that ‘the Indian coolies [were] physically inferior to the Chinese’.^[39] Doss disagreed, offering mock combat: ‘Look at me, don’t you think I am quite as strong as yourself?’ The journalist rejected this trial of strength, admitting that Doss was ‘physically, at any rate, my superior’. Determined to pursue the notion of the ‘effeminate Bengali’, however, he queried whether Doss was ‘a specimen of the average Hindu’. Doss replied, ‘Yes I am a fair specimen of the Hindus from the north of India. We have some very fine men amongst us.’ Not convinced, the journalist asked finally: ‘Are you a pure native?’ Doss laughed outright at this suggestion and, with a little jibe about British drinking habits, replied, ‘Yes I am glad to say that my ancestors never had a drop of spirits of wine in their veins’, and he continued, after this assertion of his ‘pure’ lineage, deftly to link Indian and British ancestry: ‘I have no British blood; but our native vernaculars when compared with your [W]estern languages show that after all the Indians and the British are very nearly related.’^[40]

Here, Doss skilfully turns the discussion towards a claim of longstanding affiliation between the British and Indians by his reference to ‘the theory of a common Aryan origin of Europeans and Indians’, effectively deflecting the journalist’s efforts to render him a mere object under surveillance.^[41] Supporters of the London Missionary Society, which brought Doss to Australia, were affronted by the journalist’s aggressive and denigrating line of questioning and sprang to his defence. This defence was, however, itself couched in terms of ‘racial types’, alluding in a patronising manner to the notion of the ridiculously verbose Bengali that was part of the colonial characterisation of the effeminate Bengali: