In Wuthering Heights, is Heathcliff an orphaned Indian prince?

He arrives as a foundling, a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” found in the streets of Liverpool and deposited on the Yorkshire moors. He speaks “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” He is given a dead son’s name and raised among strangers who never let him forget he does not belong.  “There are lots of possible identities to him,” says Fowler, professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester and co-curator of the exhibition. “So one of them is, is he a gypsy? Some of the characters in the novel think he’s a gypsy, some of them think he’s a Lascar. So it could have been an Indian sailor. Some people think that he was descended from African people.”

The textual evidence is, by design, inconclusive. When Mr Earnshaw returns from Liverpool with the starving child, his wife threatens to throw “the gypsy brat” out. Later, the Lintons speculate that he might be “a little Lascar” – a term derived from the Urdu lashkar, meaning soldier or camp follower, and commonly used in the 18th century for Indian sailors employed by the East India Company.

But it is the servant Nelly Dean who opens the most intriguing possibility. Attempting to comfort the boy, she indulges in fantasy: “Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?”

As Fowler says, “Nelly even says, ‘if you were a regular black,’ and she also suggests at one point he might be an Indian prince.” That distinction matters. Heathcliff is dark, but not “regular black” – a qualification that opens space for imagining a non-European origin that is not African. An Indian prince. A Lascar sailor. The orphaned child of some distant colonial encounter.

Heathcliff: A name without a surname

In Emerald Fennell ‘Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff is played by Australian-Basque actor Jacob Elordi.

Perhaps the most telling detail is the name itself. Heathcliff arrives with nothing – no family, no history, no surname. Mr Earnshaw simply bestows upon him the name of a son who died in childhood.

“His name Heathcliff is made to stand for as a forename and a surname,” Fowler says. “So that’s again what you would find on the plantation records.”

The absence of a patronymic marks him as someone without standing in the structures of English inheritance. A person without a surname was a person without a place – a legal non-person, dependent entirely on the whims of those who claimed him.

“He was found as an orphan in Liverpool,” Fowler says. “Mr Earnshaw inquired of its owner.” That single word – “owner” – carries the weight of a system in which human beings were property.

That Heathcliff eventually learns to manipulate those structures – acquiring property through marriage, debt and coercion – is the novel’s great irony. The boy who arrived without a name becomes master of two houses, wielding the instruments of inheritance law against the families who once denied him entry. As Fowler puts it, he seeks “to take control of people, of the land which is his homeland.”

The Liverpool question

Heathcliff enters through Liverpool, and that geography has long occupied scholars. By the late 18th century, when the novel is set, the city was a major port. It was the endpoint of East India Company ships, where lascars – Indian sailors employed on Company vessels – were sometimes abandoned when their contracts expired, left to fend for themselves with no means of returning home. Their presence was noted in newspapers and missionary reports.

Liverpool does not settle the question. What it provides is a plausible point of entry for a child from anywhere in the empire – including India.

Brontës and the missionary influence

The Brontës did not grow up in isolation from the wider world. The parsonage at Haworth contained geography textbooks, missionary periodicals, and accounts of empire that shaped the children’s imagination. Among their reading material was The Children’s Friend, a missionary publication that carried stories from India and elsewhere.

A copy of The Children’s Friend in public domain. (Wikimedia Commons)

“We have copies of The Children’s Friend that they read,” Fowler says. “Versions that they read.” She adds: “You can see the missionary writings about India there.”

The influence extended beyond childhood. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë created St John Rivers, the cold, exacting missionary who tries to persuade Jane to accompany him to India. He is not portrayed kindly. Jane resists him, choosing passion over duty, and St John goes on alone, described in the final pages as labouring in India, says Fowler.

The missionary represents a certain kind of imperial masculinity – admirable but inhuman, demanding total submission to duty. It is no accident that Jane must reject him to claim her own life.

The Arabian Nights and eastern imagination

Any argument for Heathcliff’s Indian origins must reckon with what the Brontës read. The parsonage contained multiple editions of The Arabian Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian tales that had captivated English readers since the eighteenth century. One edition they would have known was translated by the Rev. Edward Foster and published in London in 1802. The book was an instant success and remained hugely popular throughout the Victorian era. Charlotte Brontë specifically mentions it in Jane Eyre and Villette.

“They definitely read the Arabian Nights, as translated by various Victorians,” Fowler confirms. “And so they will be very aware of those stories. Absolutely. And we know that they read those books because they doodled and wrote notes in the back of them. So they were definitely reading them.”

The tales – with their viziers and caliphs, their shipwrecks and foundlings who turn out to be princes – provided a template for thinking about identity as mutable, mysterious, subject to revelation. When Nelly Dean fantasises about an Indian queen and an Emperor of China, she reaches directly into that imaginative well.

The composite figure of Quashia Quamina

The most direct evidence lies in the Brontës’ childhood writings. Between 1829 and 1839, the four siblings created an elaborate imaginary world called the Glass Town Federation, a fictional West African colony populated by figures drawn from their reading. They filled miniature books – some no larger than matchboxes – with stories of imperial adventure, political intrigue and romantic drama, laying the groundwork for the novels they would later write as adults.

As Emma Butcher has shown in her study of the juvenilia, the early Glass Town writings “adopted and reimagined historical and contemporary people, place names, and events,” creating a “patchwork kingdom” assembled from the print culture of war and empire. The siblings were “avid readers,” Fowler says, and “their literary imaginations were fired up by what they learned about British colonial activity in Africa and India.”

One figure from these childhood writings is particularly significant: Quashia Quamina, a character created by Charlotte Brontë. Fowler describes him as “a kind of colonial composite, derived in part from the son of an Indian ruler who had been orphaned because of East India Company battles and in part from an Ashanti warrior’s son.”

“There’s a short story by Charlotte Brontë called ‘The African Queen’s Lament,'” Fowler says, “which again figures Quashia Quamina, and that again is the composite Indian, orphaned Indian child and orphaned Ashanti child sort of being imagined in that story.”

The connection to Heathcliff is not direct – a one-to-one prototype would be too neat for a novel built on ambiguity. But the imaginative habit is the same: the Brontës repeatedly imagined children whose lives were shaped by imperial conflict, dislocation and the loss of inheritance.

“Given Heathcliff’s identity, which again is a kind of colonial composite and now we know is probably derived from Quashia Quamina – himself a colonial composite – to not be aware of a colonial dimension is always going to be a bit of a problem,” Fowler says.

The figure of the oppressed

Scholars have long noted the Brontës’ fascination with domination and resistance. In Charlotte’s work, this appears as an interest in the experience of being oppressed. In Emily’s novel, it manifests in Heathcliff himself.

“With Charlotte Brontë you can see always there’s this interest in the experience of being oppressed which is not entirely supportive of the pro-colonial, celebratory colonial narrative,” Fowler says. “And with Emily Brontë too I think there’s always an undercurrent of interest in the colonised figure, the figure of Heathcliff – the figure of the oppressed, of the badly treated, the person who is used to hardened treatments. And there are themes of enslavement, slavery, sort of quite nebulous but they’re there in her novel Wuthering Heights.”

This reading transforms the novel. Heathcliff is not merely a dark stranger who disrupts the Yorkshire gentry. He embodies something of the human cost of empire.

Light and dark

The novel’s persistent juxtaposition of light and dark reinforces this reading. The Lintons are repeatedly described as fair and “flaxen.” Heathcliff and Catherine are dark-haired, and Heathcliff is explicitly dark-skinned.

“In the novel that’s always been a juxtaposition of light and dark in problematic ways,” Fowler says. “The Lintons are fair and blonde, and Heathcliff and Cathy are dark haired and Heathcliff is dark skinned.”

Colonial figures across the Brontës

Heathcliff is not the only Brontë character whose identity is bound up with empire. In Jane Eyre, the most striking colonial figure is Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic.” Bertha is a Creole from Jamaica, brought to England by Rochester and then imprisoned. As postcolonial critics have noted, Bertha’s fate reveals the extent to which Jane’s triumph depends on the erasure of the colonial Other. Bertha must die so that Jane can live. The novel never gives her a voice; she is heard only through her mad laughter.

Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea was written explicitly to give Bertha – renamed Antoinette – a voice and a history, showing how the “madwoman” was made, not born.

The question of what survives

One frustration for scholars is how much has been lost. “We don’t know what Emily Brontë and Anne wrote because their writing is lost to us,” Fowler says. “We only know what Charlotte and Branwell wrote.” The juvenilia that survives – Charlotte’s extensive Glass Town stories, Branwell’s poems and tales – offers only partial insight into the imaginative world the sisters shared.

“They showed a great deal of interest in India,” Fowler says, though she cautions: “It’s quite hard to pinpoint which precise stories have influenced them. I’m sure if you researched it, you would probably find more. There’s a lot of writing. You would find correspondences.”

The new film

The question has returned with fresh urgency this month, as Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation arrives with Jacob Elordi – pale, Basque Australian – in the role of literature’s most famous dark-skinned antihero. The casting has reignited debate.

Fowler is measured in her response: “I also understand that everybody has each new generation has a new take on the novel and an adaptation is simply an interpretation of a novel. It’s not, you know, it can’t exactly match or it’s not better because it’s faithful or not faithful to the novel. It just is.”

But she notes the irony of the moment. The film’s premiere generated controversy when Margot Robbie wore a Taj Mahal necklace to the Los Angeles event.

“To not be aware of a colonial dimension of, you know, stolen jewels and artefacts which really belong to Indians and or the Indian nation is always going to be a bit of a problem,” Fowler  said, “considering that Heathcliff is played by a fair skinned man in this new film.”

She connects this to a broader literary tradition: “There is a history of novels. For example, Wilkie Collins, in the late 19th century, he wrote The Moonstone, which begins with the East India Company and the theft of the moonstone. And it’s all about this moonstone, this loot, and three Indian men who go in pursuit of this stone, which is rightfully Indian. And also we have a lot of controversy about the Crown Jewels because of the stone in it, which we know comes from India and it’s been discussed for a long time. And we have the British Museum, which is full of loot. So we know this. There’s a context in which these conversations happen and a bit more consciousness about those issues is always welcome.”

A possibility, not a certainty

The novel refuses to settle the question. Heathcliff’s origins remain deliberately obscure. Scholars have proposed African, Irish, Romani and Mediterranean genealogies, each supported by some evidence, none conclusive.

But the Indian reading has particular force, grounded in what we know of the Brontës’ reading, their juvenile writings, and the historical context of lascars in Liverpool. Nelly Dean’s fantasy – the Emperor of China, an Indian queen – was never meant to be taken literally. But it opens a space for imagining Heathcliff as connected to India without ever fixing that identity.

Perhaps the uncertainty is the point. Heathcliff is a figure produced by imperial circulation – a child picked up in a port city, inserted into a landed household, never fully assimilated. His lack of a fixed origin allows him to expose the fragility of the system that defines English society.

For Indian readers, there is something quietly powerful in that possibility. That the greatest antihero of English literature might have been, in his creator’s imagination, a boy who looked like us. That his rage and his longing might speak not just to the Yorkshire moors, but to every place where empire left its mark.