'Between Power and 'Purdah': The White Woman in British India, 1858-1900' in 'The Indian Economic and Social History Review' (original) (raw)
Related papers
Popular Imperialism and Gender Roles in Victorian & Edwardian Britain (1870-1914)
Popular imperialism typically refers to the involvement of the general populace in colonisation, and furthermore ensuring the stability and progression of widespread imperial values throughout the empire. Porter notes that the "British Empire in the early and mid-19th century was not a 'people's' empire... as people were too busy and too poorly educated to care, while the middle class and upper class imperialists were happy to keep the empire to themselves". 1 Nonetheless post industrial Britain was to witness fundamental transformations, where the development of a complex economy combined with greater opportunities for leisure and education that economic growth fostered, enabled literacy skills of the population to grow rapidly, and consequently individuals became more able to participate as well as be influenced by aspects of imperial propaganda. Moreover, a growing geographical awareness throughout imperial Britain led empire to become a vital component of nationhood, where popular discourses such as literature and arts, along with the rise in technology, led British imperialists to adopt the view they were racially superior and comprised elements of 'Social Darwinism' in their thinking. 2 Enshrouded in rhetoric of militarism, professionalism and elitism, the cult of masculinity that dominated late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was a strategic mechanism designed to cultivate feelings of loyalty and emotion that would serve as future pioneers and defenders of empire. 3 To ensure stability and progression of empire both at home and within the colonies, men were often promoted as deserving social priority and luxuries over women through aspects of popular imperialism such as literature, education, institutions, and sport where Deslandes notes "individuals who embodied 'muscular Christianity' were regarded as future guardians of Empire". 4 In contrast, Strobel contends that "women occupied an ambiguous role in imperial society; they were the inferior sex within the superior race" deemed incapable of making rational decisions by themselves, hence required protection from the harsh and gruelling environment of the public sphere, where a duty was prescribed to them in the form
2017
Tim Allender’s Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820-1932 is a carefully researched and constructed book about British gender, class, and race agendas related to the education of girls and women in India. In a departure from much of the writing on this topic, which focuses on the education of Indian girls and women, the author considers the changing influences and networks of state-sponsored education under the East India Company and British Raj. Allender examines the classroom, hospital, and dispensary, spaces where women of different races interacted and carried out their work under the colonial state, to understand how female education reflected the East India Company and the Raj’s attitudes toward women.
Femininity and Imperialism - Women and Raj in Colonial Bengal (1880-1930)
The essential theme of this paper is to emphasize the colonial mentality regarding the Bengali Wan'' or women. The purpose of this paper is to make a critique of health and sanitation of the Indian women belonging to this particular period. The administrative tribulations of the British rulers in the early period were acute, and the justification of their rule was a matter of question. For many of them, India was a land of'dirt, dearth, peril and perish' which helped them to construct the notion of 'otherness''. Their racial arrogance made them the strong detractors of the Indian civilization. The 'otherness' and the sense of superiority became more pronounced in the post-1857 period.
Subjects and Sovereigns: The Husbands and Wives who Ruled British India, 1774-1925
2017
While men held the titles of governor and viceroy in British India, it was women who were responsible for cultivating and preserving the public image of these offices. This dissertation explores the evolution of domestic ideology in British imperial politics, popular culture, and historiography over the course of the long nineteenth century. Though scholars have outlined the ways in which domesticity was appropriated by the colonial and imperial government to maintain British sovereignty in India, no one has yet explored the ways in which Victorian domesticity became part of the identity of ruling elites, and how it was employed to help promote the empire to audiences in Britain. Focusing on the private correspondence of the governors' wives, as well as popular biographies of these ruling elites which developed over the late Victorian period, this dissertation argues women helped to establish a viceregal celebrity centered on domesticity, and reinforced the patriarchal and racial hierarchies upon which the empire relied for its preservation. When this system came under attack during the 1857 rebellions, the vicereines, led by the example of Queen Victoria, helped usher in the new Raj by promoting domestic values, such as charity and wifely devotion, in their capacity as imperial figureheads.
Review of Sex and Family in Colonial India by Durba Ghosh
Durba Ghosh's book Sex and the Family in Colonial India narrates a little-told story about British colonial rule in India. It is a story at once immensely personal and political, private and public, and fills a significant hole in our understanding of the modality of colonial power in India. This is the story of the innumerable cases of sexual and romantic liaisons between British men and Indian women and of the mixed families resulting from those companionships during the 18th and the early 19th centuries. Although commonly acknowledged, this phenomenon has only occasionally been studied. Ghosh tells this story through painstaking archival research poring through letters, wills, colonial diktats and court proceedings, creating a picture of colonial India at the turn of the 18 th century that stands in sharp contrast to the normative image of the Raj as an aloof and morally superior empire. As British men and Indian women came together—sometimes because of romantic interest, often due to mutual need—they disrupted the idea of the British self-image of being concerned only with implementing what Rudyard Kipling called " the inscrutable design of providence. " Far from it, Ghosh shows that the men who orchestrated and executed the day-today functioning of colonial rule were quite susceptible to the temptations of the flesh and often used their power to achieve those ends. The large Anglo-Indian population in India already bears testimony to the fact that British contact with India extended to the sensual and the corporeal realm. But the conditions that facilitated those encounters, the anxieties they produced in the colonial and the native mind, and the lingering aftereffects the encounters had on the women involved in these relationships required a much-needed close examination. In so doing, Ghosh's nuanced reading subverts the neat divisions—predicated upon a pure self and an impure Other—which colonial rule and anticolonial Indian nationalism both fed upon. More crucially, by highlighting the affective component of the colonial encounter, her story marks a departure from the existing debates within postcolonial studies that have largely focused on coercion or cultural persuasion.