Abstract
The book begins by looking at the Kanpur Memorial, erected in commemoration of the women and children who died at the site during the Indian War of Independence. I argue that the statue marks a turning point in colonial discourse, commemorating the moment when British women were propelled to the centre of the imperial stage and Victorian femininity became an integral part of England’s national identity. In this new situation, British women retained a more visible presence and their actions assumed a greater significance. In particular, the wives of colonial employees were recruited as evidence of Britain’s imperial superiority and every aspect of their lives in India became a matter of public and political concern. A number of these women wrote about their experiences and their texts are the predominant focus of this study. I am interested in how the empire disrupted for them, actually and ideologically, a clear demarcation between the public and private spheres and how they took advantage of this ambivalence to gain for themselves, through their writing, a greater degree of power and authority, thereby contributing to growing feminist movements in the late nineteenth century.
My introduction sets up this analysis through a brief history of Victorian gender ideologies and women’s role in empire as the transporter of moral and cultural values to be set in opposition to those of the indigenous peoples. It then turns to a discussion of Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism which states that national identity is an imaginary construct based upon an identifiable set of cultural markers that connect a group of people. I argue that British women in colonial India contributed to this through their writing of familiarly feminine spheres of experience; in other words, colonial wives wrote about the so-called private sphere precisely because it was public and political.
More British than the British. (Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity: Being the Autobiography of Flora Annie Steel, 1847–1929, p. 156)
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Notes
- 1.
Current scholarship generally avoids the term ‘mutiny’ preferring either the Sepoy Rebellion or the First Indian War of Independence.
- 2.
Hariot Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India: Selections from My Journal, 1884–1888, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1889), 2: 23.
- 3.
Throughout this book I use the term ‘British’ to signify the geographical area of the United Kingdom, whereas English is used to signify a cultural and a national identity, in the way previously defined by Catherine Hall:
In constructing what it meant to be English, a further claim was constantly being made – that Englishness was British, whereas those on the margins could never claim the right to speak for the whole. A Welsh identity could never be anything other than distinctively Welsh: an English identity could claim to provide the norm for the whole of the United Kingdom, and indeed the Empire. (White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 205–6).
- 4.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 222.
- 5.
Spratt, Major F., R. E. Acklom, C. S. Symes, Sir A. H. Gordon, and H. Beauchamp, A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon Including the Provinces of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras…Etc. 8th ed. (London: John Murray, 1911), p. 305.
- 6.
This phrase is borrowed from Jane Robinson’s book of the same title, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Penguin, 1996).
- 7.
Charlotte Canning definitively stated that ‘There is not a particle of credible evidence of the poor women having been “ill-used” anywhere’ in A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning, ed. Charles Allen (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., Canning, 1986), p. 91.
- 8.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983. London: Verso 2006), p. 9.
- 9.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 9.
- 10.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7.
- 11.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.
- 12.
For example, Katherine M. Bartrum’s A Widow’s Reminiscences of the Siege of Lucknow (1858).
- 13.
Jane Robinson’s Angels of Albion tells a number of these stories.
- 14.
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 86.
- 15.
For Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of the mimic men, see The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 123.
- 16.
Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998b), p. 147.
- 17.
Quoted in Marion Fowler Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 193.
- 18.
Canning, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain, p. 70.
- 19.
Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son and Co., 1839), p. 38.
- 20.
For a more detailed discussion of the negotiation of discourses in women’s travel writing, see Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).
- 21.
Susan Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’ in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7.
- 22.
Mary Russell’s The Blessings of a Good, Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and their World (London: Collins, 1986) and Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998) were vital to the recuperation of forgotten women travel writers. However, post-colonial critics have taken issue with their lack of attention to the distribution of power in empire.
- 23.
Mills, Discourses of Difference, p. 18.
- 24.
Alison Blunt, ‘The Flight from Lucknow: British Women Travelling and Writing Home, 1857–58’ in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, eds. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 94.
- 25.
Sara Mills, Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester: Manchester University, Press, 2005), p. 33.
- 26.
Mills, Gender and Colonial Space, p. 13.
- 27.
Mona Macmillan, ‘Camp Followers: A Note on Wives of the Armed Services’ in The Incorporated Wife, eds. Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1984), p. 99.
- 28.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 125.
- 29.
From the late nineteenth century, the mixed-race community, previously referred to as Eurasian, campaigned for sole ownership of the term Anglo-Indian. The British colonizers strongly opposed this movement. Evidently, they saw themselves as very much connected to the home culture and attested to this connection. But, in 1911, the mixed-race community won the legal battle to use the title.
- 30.
Mary Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, defines the contact zone as ‘the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other’ (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 8.
- 31.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 153.
- 32.
Bhabha, The Locations of Culture, p. 159.
- 33.
Florence Marryat, Gup: Sketches of Anglo-Indian Life and Character (London: Richard Bentley, 1868), p. 150.
- 34.
North permitted her name to be conferred upon the five specimens she introduced to the Western world: Northea seychellana, Nepenthes northiana, Crinum northianum, Areca northiana and Kniphofia northiae.
- 35.
Raja Rammohun Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj, a rationalist Hindu movement, in 1828.
- 36.
Mrs R. S. Benson, Preface in Saguna: A Story of a Native Christian Life by Krupabai Satthianadhan, (Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari and Co., 1895), p.xii.
- 37.
For a more detailed discussion of the transnationalism of Besant and Sister Nivedita, see Elleke Boehmer, Empire, The National and The Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 38.
I would like to thank Elleke Boehmer for pinpointing this term for me.
- 39.
Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics, and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 7.
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Agnew, É. (2017). Introduction: Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India. In: Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India . Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33195-9_1
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