Between power and 'purdah': The white woman in British India, 1858-1900

Indian Economic and Social History Review

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 355-375

  Sen, Indrani ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELHI   (India)

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EID: 21944447933     PISSN: 00194646     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/001946469703400304     Document Type: Review

References (165)

1. Throughout this article the term 'Anglo-Indian' is used in its original sense of the British resident in India rather than in its later connotation of a person of mixed race.
2. Male emigration to colonies was three times as large as female emigration. By 1871 for every three women over 20 who were wives in England, there were two who were widows or spinsters. See Patricia Hollis, ed., Women in Public 1850-1900: Documents of the Victorian Women's Movement, London, 1979, p. 32.
3. W.R. Greg, 'Why are Women Redundant?', National Review, April 1862 (no pagination)
4. cited in Hollis, Women in Public.
5. Greg goes on to argue that emigration would 'afford relief to the whole body corporate - just as bleeding in the foot will relieve the head or the heart from distressing or perilous congestion', Women in Public ibid., p. 38.
6. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, Manchester, 1990.
7. In discussing colonial Nigeria, Helen Callaway points out how white women were seen as 'subordinate and unnecessary appendages, not as rulers': Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria, 1987,
8. cited in Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al., eds, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991, p. 16.
9. See 'Introduction' to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ibid., pp. 10, 16.
10. For nineteenth-century 'theories' on race, which sought to establish, in pseudo-scientific ways, the Afro-Asian's sensuality, inability to govern, fickleness, inherent backwardness and lack of vigour, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, Ithaca and London, 1988, pp. 21-24 and 35.
11. Also see Margaret Macmillan, 'Anglo-Indians and the Civilizing Mission, 1880-1914', in Gopal Krishna, ed., Contributions to South Asian Studies, Vol. 2, Delhi, 1982, pp. 82-85.
12. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871,
13. n.p. cited in Sudesh Vaid, 'Ideologies on Women in 19th century Britain, 1850s-70s', in Economic and Political Weekly (hereafter EPW), Vol. 2 (43), 26 October 1985, p. WS 66.
14. Economic and Political Weekly ( Ibid., p. WS 66.
15. M. Burrows, 'Female Education', Quarterly Review, Vol. 126, 1869,
16. cited in Hollis, Women in Public, p. 145.
17. Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation and in the History of the Earth, ed., James Hunt, London, 1864, p. 81,
18. cited in Rebecca Stott, 'The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard's Adventure Fiction', Feminist Review, No. 32, Summer 1989, pp. 76-77.
19. Rebecca Stott, Feminist Review, ibid., pp. 71-81.
20. Sander L. Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, 1985, pp. 204-42.
21. Jenny Sharpe, 'The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency', in Genders, No. 10, Spring 1991, pp. 33-34.
22. For a discussion on the myth of the black man's sexual potency, see Frantz Fannon, Black Skin White Masks, New York, 1967, pp. 164-71.
23. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, pp. 119, 208-9.
24. Lady Canning's Letter to Queen Victoria, Calcutta, 8 August 1856, in Charles Allen, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning, London, 1986, p. 26.
25. J.D. Rees, Modern India, 1910, p. 175,
26. cited in Macmillan, 'Anglo-Indians and the Civilizing Mission 1880-1914', p. 99.
27. For the invention of a vocabulary of ritual and gesture to signify power, see Bernard S. Cohn, 'Representing Authority in Victorian India', in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983.
28. For the social life of the memsahib, see Margaret Macmillan, Women of the Raj, London, 1988;
29. Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India: 1608-1937, London, 1973, first printed 1939, pp. 164-220.
30. For probable date of origin of the word 'memsahib' (i.e., 'madam sahib'), see The Oxford English Dictionary, London, 1961, Vol. VI, p. 332.
31. Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 58;
32. Kincaid, British Social Life, pp. 219-20.
33. Some missionaries were of lower middle-class or Eurasian origins. See Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj, London, 1980, pp. 112-15.
34. Christina S. Bremner, A Month in a Dandi: A Woman's Wanderings in North India, London, 1891, p. 25.
35. For 'social distance' as a component in the imperial identity, see Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p. 121
36. and especially Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, pp. 119, 208.
37. Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India, London, 1909, p. 133.
38. Many critics (e.g., Dennis Kincaid) tend to ignore the barrack-wife who is discussed by Macmillan, Women of the Raj, pp. 19, 122;
39. Joanna Trollope, Britannia's Daughters: Women of the British Empire, London, 1983, p. 121.
40. 'Review of the Progress of Sanitation in India', The Calcutta Review, Vol. 50 (99), 1870, p. 103, noted the higher mortality rate among barrack-wives and children as compared to that of the men. In 1870, with improved hygienic conditions the male mortality rate dropped to 26.55 per 1,000, that of women (46 per 1,000) and children (80 per 1,000) remained the same.
41. 'English Women in Hindustan', The Calcutta Review, Vol. 4 (7), 1845, p. 122.
42. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 124.
43. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 124.
44. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 121.
45. Cited in Charles Allen, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain, p. 29.
46. Phrase used by The Friend of India, 20 June 1872, p. 715, for both poor Europeans and Eurasians, who were often clubbed together in this category.
47. Other issues of the Anglo-Indian press on this subject include: The Civil and Military Gazette, 15 December 1875, p. 9;
48. The Friend of India, 28 January 1875, p. 82;
49. The Friend of India, 11 September 1875, p. 830;
50. The Friend of India, 2 October 1875, p. 918.
51. The Englishman's Saturday Evening Journal (hereafter ESEJ) Vol. VIII (36), 1870, p. 701.
52. The Civil and Military Gazette, 10 February 1875, p. 7.
53. ESEJ, Vol. VIII (36), 1876, p. 701.
54. The Friend of India, 6 November 1875, p. 909.
55. In 1880, out of 7,001 prostitutes in Calcutta, 65 were European and 46 Eurasian; in 1893 the number of European prostitutes was 70 and in 1894, 50. See Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, pp. 132-33.
56. Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 52.
57. Most of the white prostitutes were East Europeans. See Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p. 164.
58. The Sentinel, January 1888,
59. cited in Ballhatchet, The Sentinel, ibid., p. 125.
60. The Sentinel, Ibid., p. 125
61. The Sentinel, March 1894,
62. cited in Ballhatchet, The Sentinel, ibid., p. 134.
63. Cited in Ballhatchet, The Sentinel, ibid., p. 131.
64. The Sentinel, March 1894, ibid., p. 134.
65. Cf. 'And yet Calcutta has no vice flaunting itself outside as London has', The Friend of India, 12 January 1871, p. 35;
66. 'Vice may thrive, but it is silent . . . there is nothing to suggest sex in an Indian city . . . there is outward decency at least', Flora Annie Steel, India, London, 1929, first printed in 1905, p. 161.
67. J.E. Dawson, 'Woman in India: Her Influence and Position', The Calcutta Review, Vol. 83 (165), 1886, p. 347.
68. A. Duff and F.C. Skipwith, 'Married Life in India', The Calcutta Review, Vol. 4 (8), 1845, p. 399.
69. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 405.
70. More recent support of this myth is seen in Kincaid, British Social Life, pp. 164-67.
71. The Calcutta Review, criticising this attitude, uses these terms in Dawson, 'Woman in India', p. 351.
72. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 348.
73. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 351.
74. The Calcutta Review, Ibid., p. 350.
75. The Madras Mail, 12 March 1890, p. 9.
76. More recently, adultery is called, 'a fever which attacked in High Raj days', in Mariam Fowler, Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj, New York, 1987, p. 185.
77. Hill station flirtations debated in Edward J. Buck, Simla Past and Present, Bombay, 1925, pp. 204-21.
78. The Madras Mail, 29 April 1869;
79. The Friend of India, 12 June 1875, p. 551.
80. The grass-widower is treated with irony, as deliriously dancing with the prettiest girls, in The Times of India, 19 June 1861, p. 3.
81. Diver noted that, 'the large tolerance . . . slips all too easily into a certain laxity - mental, moral and physical', The Englishwoman, pp. 6-7.
82. The Englishwoman, Ibid., p. 5.
83. While in England women outnumbered men 1,050 to 1,000 the opposite was true of India where at the highest point white men outnumbered their women 3 to 1; population figures for England, Patricia Hollis, Women in Public, p. 33;
84. for India, see Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 16.
85. A view echoed by contemporaries, e.g., 'The presence of English ladies . . . has helped to widen perceptibly the breach between the governors and the governed', Bremner, p. 20.
86. Critics in this century tended to support this theory till recently, e.g., Dennis Kincaid who cited the oft-quoted racist remark of a memsahib in the late nineteenth century: 'I know nothing at all about them, nor do I wish to. Really, I think, the less one knows of them the better', in Kincaid, British Social Life, p. 193.
87. More recent critics tend to contextualise it, e.g., Macmillan, Women of the Raj, pp. 60-65;
88. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, pp. 118-19, 208-9.
89. The Madras Mail, 5 March 1874 (no pagination).
90. The Madras Mail, 18 March 1874 (no pagination).
91. G.O. Trevelyan, The Competitionwallah, London and Cambridge, 1864, p. 444.
92. Duff and Skipwith, 'Married Life in India', p. 412.
93. Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 102.
94. Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India in 1857, London, 1980, pp. 212-13.
95. Sir Colin Campbell, Narrative of the Indian Revolt from Its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow, London, 1858, p. 20,
96. cited in Jenny Sharpe, 'The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency', pp. 33-34.
97. For the most informed discussion of 'Mutiny' accounts, see Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, Minneapolis and London, 1993, pp. 57-84.
98. Dawson, 'Woman in India: Her Influence and Position', The Calcutta Review, p. 353;
99. also see Diver, The Englishwoman, p. 83.
100. Anne C. Wilson, Letters from India, 1911, (no pagination)
101. cited in Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 60.
102. See Indrani Sen, 'Memsahibs: Women in "Purdah"', EPW, 13 January 1990.
103. Duff and Skipwith, 'Married Life in India', pp. 412-13.
104. Similar sentiments continued to be expressed in the press late in the century: 'To modest English women, dark-skinned nudity is of no more account than the nudity of cattle . . . Englishwomen will sometimes similarly disregard all the covenances [sic] before their male domestics', The Friend of India and the Statesman, 15 December 1880, p. 1157.
105. The Friend of India, 9 October 1883,
106. cited in Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p. 115.
107. ESEJ, 9 August 1890, p. 747.
108. It also complained that 'lower class' native men 'insult European or Eurasian ladies when they find them unprotected', and that Indian bystanders did not come to their aid when a 'whole body of students molested a lady who happened to pass them'. The Anglo-Indian press also made a hue and cry over an Indian allegedly intruding into a white woman's bedroom at night and touching her knee, The Friend of India and the Statesman, 28 July 1883, p. 1067.
109. Reactions to the Ilbert Bill discussed in Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p. 6;
110. Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849-1905, Princeton, 1984, p. 338;
111. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, pp. 89-90.
112. G.O. Trevelyan, The Competitionwallah, p. 445.
113. The Competitionwallah, Ibid., p. 445.
114. The Pioneer, 28 January 1881.
115. Trevelyan, The Competitionwallah, pp. 140-41.
116. Dawson, 'Woman in India', p. 347.
117. The Pioneer, 10 November 1888, p. 6.
118. Diver, The Englishwoman, p. 10.
119. Trevelyan, The Competitionwallah, pp. 140-41;
120. Dawson, 'Woman in India', p. 355.
121. 'Englishwomen in India', by An English Woman in India, The Calcutta Review, Vol. 8 (159), 1885, pp. 147, 150. It voices a widespread opinion when it warns that 'it is even more difficult to keep their minds healthy than their bodies', because of the possible influence of the low 'moral tone' of native servants, p. 150.
122. Also see Diver, The Englishwoman, who notes that keeping children in India would be to run the 'risk of handicapping them, physically and morally in the race of life', p. 42.
123. Dawson, 'Woman in India', p. 349.
124. 'Social Problems: Anglo-Indian Children', The Pioneer, 1 February 1882, p. 3.
125. In response to this a letter to the Editor from 'A Wife and Mother', defended the memsahib: 'That the necessity for such a choice should exist is the bitterest drop in the cup of our exile in this land'. See The Pioneer, 20 February 1882, p. 5.
126. Dawson, 'Woman in India', p. 356.
127. The Pioneer, 10 November 1888, p. 6.
128. Regarding the problem of colonial tension, Kincaid mentions 'a strange tension in the minds of these men, so that even in their most heroic moments is evident a mental condition that seems occasionally unbalanced and almost hysterical', Kincaid, British Social Life, p. 181.
129. The Madras Mail, 18 May 1869 (no pagination).
130. Anne C. Wilson, Letters from India (1911),
131. cited in Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 37.
132. In the first census held in 1881, there were 145,000 Europeans out of a total population of 250,000,000. See Macmillan, Women of the Raj, ibid., p. 42.
133. Trevelyan, The Competitionwallah, p. 241.
134. 'English women in India', p. 137.
135. Diver, The Englishwoman, pp. 8-9.
136. Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales From the Raj: The European Insane In British India 1800-1858, London, 1991, largely ignores this aspect.
137. For such valorisation of the memsahib, see Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India, London, 1976.
138. 'Englishwomen in India', p. 139.
139. Similarly, while Diver complained, like many others, of the hardships of the Indian climate, Christina Bremner pointed out that, 'I never heard of any lady being struck by heat apoplexy', Bremner, A Month in a Dandi, p. 18.
140. Diver, The Englishwoman, ibid., p. 23.
141. Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 55.
142. J.E. Dawson, 'The English Woman in India: Her Influence and Responsibilities', The Calcutta Review, Vol. 83 (165), 1886, p. 365.
143. Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, London, 1909, first ptd. 1888, p. 19.
144. The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, Ibid., pp. 2, 4.
145. Voicing the benevolent paternalism characteristic of British colonial administration, Steel and Gardiner observed: 'The Indian servant is a child in everything save age, and should be treated as a child; that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness', The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, ibid., p. 3.
146. Dawson, 'The Englishwoman in India', p. 363.
147. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper, p. 9.
148. Dawson, 'The Englishwoman in India', p. 362.
149. Duff and Skipwith, 'Married Life in India', p. 412.
150. Married Life in India Ibid., p. 412.
151. 'Women of India', The Calcutta Review, Vol. 36, No. 72, 1861, p. 327;
152. The Friend of India and The Statesman, 22 September 1880, p. 882;
153. Steel, India, pp. 159, 166.
154. Geraldine Forbes, 'In Search of the "Pure Heathen": Missionary Women in Nineteenth Century India', EPW, Vol. XXI (17), 28 April 1986.
155. Also see Revathi Krishnaswamy, 'Evangels of Empire', Race and Class, Vol. 34 (4), 1993.
156. Although the Calcutta School was formed in 1818 and the Bethune School opened in 1849-50, it was, significantly, in 1862 that the first zenana missionary was sent; for details about early female education, see Malavika Karlekar, Voices From Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women, Delhi, 1991, pp. 154-91.
157. Diver praised 'the splendidly practical Female Medical Aid movement which has brought such wondrous changes in dim zenanas where India's women lie in their pain and anguish, nursed by superstition and doctored by incantations and charms', Diver, The Englishwoman, p. 76. The Female Medical Aid Movement started in the 1880s.
158. Diver, The Englishwoman, ibid., p. 128.
159. The Englishwoman, Ibid., pp. 79-80.
160. Antoinette Burton, 'The White Woman's Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman', Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 13 (4), 1990, pp. 295-308,
161. argues about Imperialism underwriting Victorian feminism. The idea is developed further in Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, Chapel Hill, 1994.
162. For a fine analysis of Victorian feminism and its dilemmas with regard to Imperialism, see Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: Women, Racism and History, London and New York, 1992, pp. 119-66.
163. For the contradictions in Annette Ackroyd's involvement with the female education programme, see Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale, pp. 121-47.
164. Ackroyd is broadly defended in Kumari Jayawardena, White Women's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Colonial Rule, New York, 1995. The thrust of Jayawardena's argument tends to privilege gender over imperialism.
165. Barbara N. Ramusack, 'British Women Activists in India, 1864-1945', in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992, p. 133.