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What, exactly , were Anglo-Indian wives doing in India? If the man and woman on the Clapham omnibus had hazarded a response to such a query, they would undoubtedly have replied that Anglo-Indian women were doing good in India. That is, they were helping their less fortunate Indian sisters to ascend to the level of modern British womanhood
This book situates women at the centre of the practices and policies of British imperialism. Rebutting interpretations that have marginalised women in the empire, the book demonstrates that women were crucial to establishing and sustaining the British Raj in India from the 'High Noon' of imperialism in the late nineteenth century through to Indian independence in 1947. Using three separate modes of engagement with imperialism: domesticity, violence and race, it demonstrates the varied ways in which British women, particularly the wives of imperial officials, created a role for themselves. From the late nineteenth century, Anglo-Indians constructed an idea of family and marriage that was, both literally and metaphorically, the foundation for British imperialism in India. Although imperial marriage was very modern in its emphasis on companionship and partnership, it also incorporated more traditional ideas about husbands, wives and families. The politicized imperial home stood in sharp contrast to the ideal of middle-class British domesticity that had developed from the late-eighteenth century onwards in the metropole. Relationships with Indian servants, created and maintained primarily by women, were a complex mixture of intimacy and trust counterbalanced by feelings of fear and suspicion. For Anglo-Indians, the Mutiny served as a constant reminder of the tenuous nature of imperialism in India. The relationship between Anglo-Indian and Indian women was complex coloured by expectations about femininity and women's role in the empire. Indian men may have derided Anglo-Indian women as 'brainless memsahibs', but the British government similarly scorned their contribution to empire.
This book explores colonial gendered interactions, with a special focus on the white woman in colonial India. It examines missionary and memsahibs' colonial writings, probing their construction of Indian women of different classes and regions, such as zenana women, peasants, ayahs and wet-nurses. The three groups of white women focused upon are memsahibs, missionaries and, to a certain extent, ordinary soldiers' wives. Among white women in colonial India, it was the female missionaries who undoubtedly participated most closely in the colonial 'civilising mission'. The book addresses through a scrutiny of the literary works written by 'New Indian Women', such as Flora Annie Steel. Cross-racial gendered interactions were inflected by regional diversities, and the complexity of the category of the 'native woman'. The colonial household was a site of tension, and 'the anxieties of colonial rule manifest themselves most clearly in the home'. The dynamics of the memsahib-ayah relationship were rooted in race/class hierarchies, domestic power structures and predicated on the superiority of the colonising memsahib. The book also examines colonial medical texts, scrutinising how they wielded authoritative power over vulnerable young European women through the power/knowledge of their medical directives. Colonial discourse sought to project the white woman's vulnerability to specific mental health problems, as well as the problem of addiction of 'barrack wives'. Giving voice to the Indian woman, the book scrutinises the fiction of the first generation of western-educated Indian women who wrote in English, exploring their construction of white women and their negotiations with colonial modernities.
Nehru was probably confined to polite chit-chat, rather than touching upon any of the contemporary political events with which Nehru and Mrs Ford-Robertson, as the wife of an official of the Raj, were intimately engaged. This apparently trivial encounter encapsulates the uneasy relationship between Anglo-Indian women and Indian men played out over the last half-century of British
Her heartfelt regret and sense of loss at the end of British rule in India typifies Anglo-Indian women’s attitudes towards Indian independence. More significantly, the marked difference between her own nostalgic sorrow and her husband’s satisfied sense of a job well done reveals the existence of a gender gap within the ranks of the Anglo-Indian community on the issue of Indian
writing: my story of gender and imperialism; the missionaries’ account of their endeavours; and the story of Indian women. In the remainder of this chapter I make explicit the discursive procedure by which I brought these three histories into an uneasy and unequal relationship in an attempt to write a feminist, post-colonial history of British women missionaries
empire sustained and supported Britain’s imperial endeavours in India. Anglo-Indians’ subjective understanding of their roles in the empire, as revealed through these personal documents and reminiscences, were bound up with the course of imperial politics. The rise in popularity of the Anglo-Indian romance novel coincided with Anglo-Indian women’s growing involvement in imperial
Indian men and occasionally Indian women could speak to, engage with, and in many cases contest the interpretations of Indian society and culture that apparently well-meaning English reformers offered as unalterably true’. 6 First published in January 1871, The Journal of the National Indian Association ( JNIA ) changed names twice, to The Indian Magazine ( IM ) in
Eurasians in the 1890s. Some female spheres of action at various colonial peripheries even became new centres of influence in themselves, such as the medical care offered by female missionaries and, late in the nineteenth century, Loreto teaching outreach to Indian women and girls. State power relations were closely related to the growth and the withering away of these networks concerning Western feminine
, although usually professing to abhor caste, nevertheless often referred to their own and one another’s upper-caste backgrounds as a means of establishing their membership in British polite society. The behaviour of British institutions toward Indian women in the United Kingdom was somewhat more problematic than was their behaviour toward men, because Britain’s elite