“Colouring the map red”: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund

Hunter, Sarah

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_14

“Colouring the map red”: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund

Sarah Hunter⁵

Chapter
First Online: 06 November 2019

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Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

The Dufferin Fund was established by the Irish vicereine Lady Dufferin in 1885, to supply medical aid and education to women in India. Undeniably, Lady Dufferin was aware of the political agenda of her fund, in extending a benevolent portrayal of imperial power in a landscape of rising nationalism. Using sources from the Dufferin Papers held at the Public Record Office for Northern Ireland and at the National Archives of India, this chapter will examine the extent of imperial networks required to administer a vicereine’s personal and political ambitions.

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Notes

1.
E. St. John Hart, [Great Thoughts]—A Lady of Mercy: The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, D1071/J/G/8/1, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter cited as PRONI).
2.
Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, “Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism, eds. Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–23.
3.
Barry Crosbie, “Ireland, Colonial Science and the Geographical Construction of British Rule in India, c. 1820–1870,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 963–87; and Christopher Shepard, “‘I Have a Notion of Going Off to India’: Colonel Alexander Porter and Irish Recruitment to the Indian Medical Service, 1855–96,” Irish Economic and Social History 41 (2014): 36–52.
4.
Headrick first expressed medicine as a tool of empire in Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire, Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also Ian Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire in India, 1896–1918,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 150.
5.
Anil Kumar, Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835–1911 (London: Sage, 1998), 101.
6.
David Arnold , “Introduction,” in Imperial Medicine, ed. Arnold, 18.
7.
U. Kalpagan, Rule by Numbers: Governmentality in Colonial India (London: Lexington Books, 2014), 230–36.
8.
Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 1–2.
9.
Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale (London: Macmillan, 1914), 1. Florence Nightingale continued to petition government to improve medical provision. In a letter to Lord Dufferin, Nightingale argued that health within the army could only be maintained if public standards of health were improved. Letter from Florence Nightingale to Lord Dufferin, 27 February 1889, PRONI, D2892/4/12/8.
10.
Maneesha Lal, “The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, 1885–1888,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 6, no. 1 (1994): 29–66; Seán Lang, “Colonial Compassion and Political Calculation: The Countess of Dufferin and her Fund,” in Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India, ed. Poonam Bala (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012), 81–96; and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, “‘Merely Birds of Passage’: Lady Hariot Dufferin’s Travel Writings and Medical Work in India, 1884–1888,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 3 (2006): 443–57.
11.
The Hamiltons of Killyleagh, three volumes of a typescript history of the family compiled by Hans Rowan Hamilton, 20th c., Mss. 9958–9960, National Library of Ireland.
12.
Ibid.
13.
Andrew Gailey, The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity (London: John Murray, 2015).
14.
Ibid.
15.
Lal , “The Politics of Gender and Medicine,” 33–34.
16.
The Times, 13 October 1881.
17.
Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Berkeley: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 112.
18.
Letter From Miss E. Pechey, M.D., in charge of the Jaffer Suleman Charitable Dispensary for Women and Children, Bombay , To His Excellency the Governor of Bombay, 31 January 1885, Provision for the medical wants of the women of India, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, June 1885, File No. 10, National Archives of India (hereafter cited as NAI).
19.
Letter from the Government of Bombay, 25 February 1885, Provision for the medical wants of the women of India, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, June 1885, File Nos. 9–11, NAI.
20.
Rosemary Fitzgerald, “‘Making and Moulding the Nursing of the Indian Empire’: Recasting Nurses in Colonial India,” in Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia, eds. Avril A. Powell and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 85–187.
21.
For more on the lives of British officials’ wives in India see Margaret Martyn, Married to the Raj (London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 1992).
22.
Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Berkeley: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
23.
Janika Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940,” in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 226.
24.
Geraldine Forbes, “Medical Careers and Health Care for Indian Women: Patterns of Control,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 517–24.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 193.
27.
Ten printed journals by Hariot, Lady Dufferin in India 1884–1888, PRONI, D1071/J/C/1/8.
28.
Correspondence: letter to Lady Dufferin with memoranda regarding obstetric malpractice in Bengal, PRONI, D1071/J/G/3/2/1–3.
29.
Correspondence: Letter to Lady Dufferin from Dr E. Butler, Bengal, PRONI, D1071/J/G/3/2/3.
30.
Constitution, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4A/1.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Narin Hassan , Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge and Colonial Mobility (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 82.
34.
Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India, 16.
35.
Second Report of the Madras Branch, 1 January 1887–31 December 1887, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4B/4.
36.
Barbara Ramusack , “Women’s Hospitals and Midwives in Mysore,” in India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, eds. Waltraud Ernst and Biswanoy Pati (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 187.
37.
Addresses, Speeches, Memoranda: Special Appeal by the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, 1 January 1880–31 December 1890, PRONI, D1071/J/G/6/7.
38.
Letter from H. Copper to Mr Redmond, 4 March 1887, Minutes of proceedings of central committee beginning 21 December, ending 24 January 1887, PRONI, D1071/J/G/1A/1.
39.
Third Annual Report of the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, January 1888, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4B/1/1.
40.
Ibid.
41.
Letter from J. De C. Atkins, I.C.S., Secretary to the Government of Bombay, General Department to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 22 September 1896, Supply from the Government Medical Stores of medicine, etc. required for the Lady Dufferin Hospitals, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, November 1896, File Nos 186–8, NAI.
42.
Constitution, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4A/1.
43.
Letter from J. De C. Atkins, I.C.S., Secretary to the Government of Bombay, General Department to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 22 September 1896, Supply from the Government Medical Stores of medicine, etc. required for the Lady Dufferin Hospitals, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, November 1896, File Nos 186–8, NAI.
44.
Appointment of Mr. A. P. Dobson , a clerk in the Department of Revenue and Agriculture, in the Office of the Central Committee of the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, on a salary of Rs. 250–10–300 a month, to be paid by Government, Home Department Medical Proceedings, August 1899, File Nos 22–4, NAI.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Lang , “Colonial Compassion and Political Calculation,” 81–96. The Ilbert Bill allowed for Indian judges to try Europeans.
48.
Grant of Rs. 1,000 towards the house-rent for the cold weather of 1907–1908 in Calcutta of the offices of the Central Committee of the Dufferin Fund, the Victoria Memorial Scholarship Fund, and Lady Minto’s Indian Nursing Association, Home Department Medical Proceedings, September 1907, File Nos 28–9, NAI.
49.
Annual Grant of Rs. 50,000 in aid of the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, Home Department Medical Proceedings, September 1908, File No. 54, NAI.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Indian Medical Gazette, 15 January 1886, quoted in Harrison, Public Health in British India, 92.
52.
Hindoo Patriot, 13 February 1888, quoted in Harrison, Public Health in British India, 92.
53.
Fifty-first annual report of the National Association for Supplying Medical Aid by Women to the Women of India for the Year 1935, including the Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Women’s Medical Service for India, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4B/2/26.
54.
Fifty Years’ retrospect, India 1885–1935, PRONI, D1071/J/G/7A/8.
55.
Accounts: ledger detailing income and expenditure, UK Branch, PRONI, D1071/J/G/2/4.
56.
Constitution, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4A/1.
57.
Addresses, Speeches, Memoranda: Special Appeal by the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, 1 January 1880–31 December 1890, PRONI, D1071/J/G/6/7.
58.
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 March 1899.
59.
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 August 1912.
60.
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Bodies, Empires and World Histories,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 4–5.

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Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Sarah Hunter

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Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland
Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

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Hunter, S. (2019). “Colouring the map red”: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund. In: Roberts, D., Wright, J. (eds) Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_14

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_14
Published: 06 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25983-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25984-6
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