Survey rumors triggered colonial residents to legalize their mixed-race children hastily

Evidence

Rumors were so rampant in Sragen that one Assistent Resident reported a respondent pleading with him to fill out an “act of legal recognition” before 1 January 1902 for the children he conceived with his native companion because he had heard rumors that after that date it would no longer be allowed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 927

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would a pauperism investigation trigger a rumor about the legal recognition of children of concubines? What anxieties connected the two?
• XREF: Shows how a knowledge project leaked into anxieties about racial/legal status — echoes the broader colonial commonsense the reader is tracking.