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This book examines how the identities of women and girls in colonial India were shaped by interaction with each other, a masculine raj and feminist and non-feminist philanthropists situated mostly outside India. These identities were determined by the emotional and sexual needs of men, racial hybridity, mission and religious orders, European accomplishments mentalities, restricted teacher professionalism and far more expansive medical care interaction. This powerful vista is viewed mostly through the imagery of feminine sensibility rather than feminism as the most consistent but changing terrain of self-actualisation and dispute over the long time period of the book. National, international and colonial networks of interaction could build vibrant colonial, female identities, while just as easily creating dystopias of female exploitation and abuse. These networks were different in each period under study in the book, emerging and withering away as the interplay of state imperatives and female domesticity, professionalism and piety changed over time. Based on extensive archival work in many countries, the book provides important context for studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial women in many colonial domains. The book also explains why colonial mentalities regarding females in India were so different to those on the nationalist side of the story in the early twentieth-century. This was even when feminist discourse was offered by a failing raj to claim new modernity after World War One and when key women activists in India chose, instead, to cross over to occupy spaces of Indian asceticism and community living.
This book explores Roman Catholic female missionaries and their placement in colonial and postcolonial India. It offers fascinating insights into their idiomatic activism, juxtaposed with a contrarian Protestant raj and with their own Church patriarchies. During the Great Revolt of 1857, these women religious hid in church steeples. They were forced into the medical care of sexually diseased women in Lock Hospitals. They followed the Jesuits to experimental tribal village domains while also catering for elites in the airy hilltop stations of the raj. Yet, they could not escape the eugenic and child-rescue practices that were the flavour of the imperial day. New geographies of race and gender were also created by their social and educational outreach. This allowed them to remain on the subcontinent after the tide went out on empire in 1947. Their religious bodies remained untouched by India yet their experience in the field built awareness of the complex semiotics and visual traces engaged by the East/West interchange. After 1947, their tropes of social outreach were shaped by direct interaction with Indians. Many new women religious were now of the same race or carried a strongly anti-British Irish ancestry. In the postcolonial world their historicity continues to underpin their negotiable Western-constructed activism – now reaching trafficked girls and those in modern-day slavery. The uncovered and multi-dimensional contours of their work are strong contributors to the current Black Lives Matter debates and how the etymology and constructs of empire find their way into current NGO philanthropy.
The introduction sets the scene by establishing how women in the colonial sphere in India viewed themselves and other women. The theoretical framework of the book is explained, especially network theory, and the theorisation that relates to knowledge transfer. Femininity and feminism are also deconstructed concerning colonial India. Three key themes are elaborated as they relate to gender, race and class in British India: namely, Eurasians and racial hybridity, the European educative context of accomplishments, and the complexities of defining what the state meant in the raj. The different Indian perspectives on femininity and feminism are also explained as a largely separate nationalist enterprise, including renovation of the Hindu polity in the nineteenth century on issues concerning Indian women such as sati, child marriage and widowhood. Both sides of the colonial/nationalist story are revealed as they focussed on the identity of women. This is done by explaining the different reasons why these women were still not placed by men on both sides of the struggle, either at the vanguard of directing the colonial project, or as leading mainstream nationalist activism and agitation.
Pre-British Indian learning for both elite Indian females and those of lesser status as early as 1,000 B.C. introduces this chapter. Complex female learning traditions were established for Indian females well before the arrival of the British. After 1818 British East India Company officials worried about the admittance of culturally insensitive Evangelical missions, whose networks threatened to undermine Company power and trade. The missions disrupted earlier emotional and partner relationships between Company officials and Indian women. These missions projected a story of emotional deficits in Indian females, contributing to the unravelling of orientalist-inspired knowledge transfer modalities that supported an equable relationship between East and West. The gender narratives coming out of CMS schools established a damaging contest with imaginative orientalist, village, schooling experiments in North India, as well as those sponsored by native education societies in Bombay. The initial easy harvest of ‘cholera orphans’ in CMS mission girls’ schools veiled the limited access such schools could have into the main Indian communities in Calcutta. Company and later state preference for missionary girls’ education led to perversions of state action in north India regarding female infanticide. Crude language policy for school teaching further undermined colonial claims to be educating Indian females.
Racial hybridity was an important determinant for policy initiatives in colonial India. A powerful example concerned the schooling of Eurasian girls, the official fear being that their increasing numbers and possible destitution would signify to antagonistic Indian elites something other than raj claims regarding the superiority of European blood-lines. The transmission of new teaching approaches out of Europe, especially as these related to the education of poor children, had already been embedded in key military asylums in India. These asylums were institutions where departing British soldiers could educate their children who had been the issue of their earlier sexual encounters with Indian or other Eurasian women. While possible instigators of later eugenic thought in England, these institutions were responsible for laying down a new racial imperative for Eurasian girls’ schooling in India for the rest of the century. This was at the expense of even very modest funding for Indian girls.
The new feminine prototype of the Eurasian schoolgirl was the outcome of official racialised policy concerning female education after 1860. Statecraft now fused this policy preference with the strong lobby mounted by the Unitarian, Mary Carpenter, in favour of teacher training in India. While appearing to be an advocate of female learning, as a social theorist Carpenter’s advocacy actually came from her work with destitute women and girls in England. Her focus, partly informed by an amateur anthropology, emphasized the conditioning of the female emotional body through teaching, in the absence of the mother, so their rightly oriented femininity could then later nurture well-adjusted children for the betterment of future society. Teacher-training was now given preference by Carpenter even ahead of school education first for females in India. Though not apparent to her contemporaries, and not sensitive to race in the way official policy now was, this social imperative sat oddly in colonial India. Carpenter’s stark teacher training institutions, embedded in local communities, invited opportunities for hostile Indians to rebel, creating potentially serious dispute based on the moral and sexual propriety of Carpenter’s female trainee teachers: the very grounds upon which these institutions were promoted by the colonial state.
After late1874 the mission compound was considered by the colonial state to be a safer space for the Western enculturation it hoped to achieve for females through education and evangelism. The favoured Eurasian racial prototype could be nurtured here along with wealthier and higher caste Indian females. Mission networks in India were driven by two levels of patriarchy: the bishops and male head missionaries, which still favoured the ‘training’ of Eurasian teachers as moral guides. Abuses occurred of young girls (some who were slaves ‘rescued’ from Africa) and there were child marriages to European missionaries, despite a supposed anxiety by the raj about the same happening amongst Hindus and Muslims. Yet, it was the activism of female missionaries outside the mission compound, in the village bazaars and the zenanas (household women’s quarters), which extended the reluctant hand of the raj, to engage with Indian female communities once more. New configurations of communication and connection emerged, away from the imperial gaze, within these restricted but significant networks of female missionary communication.
The activism of female missionaries created new networks where limited forms of Western femininity and feminism could engage with Indian communities. Rather than the classroom, these networks were now built around medical care. Procedural innovation regarding tropical sanitation and epidemiology that developed on the subcontinent created new terrain for missionary women to engage with Indian females. The dynamic created was so powerful that female physicians in India anticipated later developments at the metropole. As well, even with the decline of the raj in the early twentieth-century, it was the missions rather than secular medical efforts that continued to dominate the medical professional space in India.
This chapter examines how missionary education feminised medical learning outcomes in India. Male medical colleges in each major Indian province were citadels that were cleverly infiltrated by female medical activists. The activism of these European females was still driven by a largely unremitting Western feminine discipline that enshrined a strong belief in the sanitation procedures of the West, which offered remedies for an ‘unclean’ Indian East. This approach was especially apparent when large numbers of Indian nurses and dais (midwives) entered into some form of Western training, even though this training also broke down some of the race barriers still strongly in place concerning female teaching. Feminist doctors in India contested the operation by males of large funding bodies like the Lady Dufferin Fund. Yet they were to keep their struggle against colonial men within the bounds of their colonial European communities, rather than attempting to instil a similar brand of feminism in their Indian female counterparts.
Unlike colonial medical care, colonial classroom teaching continued to be restricted mostly to Eurasian females with teacher training as the focus. A new European Code was introduced in 1883 in north India that created official legal boundaries that formalised the racialization of colonial female teaching aimed principally at producing Eurasian teachers. A new influx of European women professionals to India began after the opening of the Suez canal in 1869. They deployed new networks of limited interaction. Now identified by name by the raj, these women professional teachers set about capturing an emerging middle class female student market, transferring accomplishments education more directly from Europe. The transference forced them to negotiate new feminine cultural terrain in India and, in this competitive market, compete with each other in ways that showed strong variability in their willingness to accommodate new teacher training approaches, particularly Froebel kindergarten philosophy. This chapter also identifies luminaries from this European cohort who were able to indigenize European pedagogy for the benefit of young learners who were Indian girls.