Postgraduate Students

Jane McCabe

Kalimpong Kids: New Zealand as destination for the mixed-race offspring of British tea planters in colonial India

In 1900, Rev Dr John Anderson Graham, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary in Kalimpong, North East India, opened a school/orphanage for the mixed-race offspring of British tea-planters. The children were, in most cases, permanently separated from their parents and provided instead with an exclusively European upbringing and education. Graham hoped to relocate them as young adults to various British colonies, thus sparing them the discrimination Anglo-Indians faced in India. By 1908 the first ‘Kalimpong Kids’ were settled in Dunedin. Over a thirty year period, approximately 120 students from the school were sent to New Zealand to pre-arranged billets or domestic positions. Utilising family and community records in New Zealand, school records in India, and interviews with descendants, this project sets out to uncover the remarkable stories of these young people upon arrival in New Zealand. Their experiences will be contextualised within the setting of 1920/30s New Zealand and Empire, a time of heightened racial anxieties that were often expressed in restriction of immigration along racial lines. This highly ambiguous group of migrants presents a unique opportunity to explore themes of New Zealand culture and identity in a transnational framework.

Supervisors: Professor Tony Ballantyne and Dr. Vanessa Ward

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