'Merely birds of passage': Lady Hariot Dufferin's travel writings and medical work in India, 1884-1888

Women's History Review

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 443-457

  Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv ^a  

^a QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347319287     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020500530307     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. See M. Jacobus (Ed.) (1979) Women Writing and Writing about Women (London: Croom Helm), pp. 10-21
2. S. Mills (1991) Discourses of Difference: an analysis of women's writing and colonialism (London: Roulledge), pp. 1-23
3. I. Ghose (1998) Women 'Travellers in Colonial India: the power of the female gaze (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp. 1-18
4. See also J. Singh (1998) Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: 'discoveries' of India in the language of colonialism (London: Routledge), pp. 79-119, in which Singh usefully carries the argument further by drawing attention to the challenges faced by feminism in modern post-colonial societies from the conflicting demands of 'tradition' and 'the old colonial "rescue"' (p. 115)
5. For a parallel in the Australian context see P. Russell (2004) A Woman of the Future? Colonialism and Conservatism in New South Wales, Women's History Review, 13, pp. 69-90. My thanks to Prof. Margaret Allen, Adelaide University, at the India and Ireland Conference, National University of Ireland, Galway, June 2004, for pointing out this interesting similarity
6. For an excellent comparison of the anti-colonial movements in Ireland and India exploring connections between gender, nationalism, and colonialism, see S. Thapar-Björkert & L. Ryan (2002) Mother India/Mother Ireland: comparative gendered dialogues of colonialism and nationalism in the early 20th century, Women's Studies International Forum, 25, pp. 301-313
7. See T. G. Fraser (1996) Ireland and India, in K. Jeffrey (Ed.) An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 77-93
8. T. Bartlett (1997) The Irish Soldier in India, in M. Holmes & D. Holmes (Eds) Ireland and India:connections, comparisons, contrasts (Dublin: Foley), pp. 12-28
9. A. Mahler (1997) Missionary Links: past, present and future, in Holmes & Holmes, Ireland and India, pp. 29-51
10. See S. Guha (1998) From Dais to Doctors: the medicalisation of childbirth in India, in L. Lingam (Ed.) Understanding Women's Health Issues: a reader (New Delhi: Kali for Women). Reprinted at: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ Organizations/healthnet/SAsia/suchana/0603/guha. html. Guha comments astutely that 'to romanticise traditional childbearing in India would be to mock the women who die in childbirth, those who survive but suffer all their lives from the consequences, and those women who work as attendants because they have no alternative job that will either pay better or offer them more respect'
11. R. T. Jones (Ed.) (2001) The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling (Ware: Wordsworth Editions), p. 49. Kipling's poem was first published in the Allahabad newspaper, Pioneer ( 17 April 1888) for which Kipling was a 'special correspondent'
12. E. Arnold (1888) With Sa'di in the Garden or the Book of Love (London: Trübner), p. 37
13. See also The Book of Helen's Tower, pp. 33-35; 37. The Book of Helen's Tower was a privately printed collection of poems including some by Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Arnold and others; it was first released in 1861 and reprinted with additions in 1870, 1892 and later; the copy 1 consulted at Queen's University Belfast was printed in Belfast by Marcus Ward & Co. and can be dated between 1896 and 1913
14. H. G. Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1889) Our Viceregal Life in India: selections from my journal, 1884-1889, I (London: John Murray), p. 100. While Urdu, the official language of modern Pakistan, is usually distinguished from Hindustani in modern use, the two terms were used co-extensively in the nineteenth century to denote the language of the Muslim population in India
15. See T. Pinner (Ed.) (1996) 'The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, III (Basingstoke: Palgrave), p. 82
16. For example, see Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India, which provides only a passing mention to Lady Dufferin, p. 107
17. Even Marian Fowler (1987) Below the Peacock Fan: first ladies of the Raj (Harmondsworth: Penguin), dealing with Vicereines of the Raj, does not provide a treatment of Lady Dufferin
18. Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Our Viceregal Life, I, p. 11
19. Quoted in A. Lycett (1999) Rudyard Kipling (London: Phoenix), p. 180
20. K. Teltscher (1996) 'The Fearful Name of the Black Hole': fashioning an imperial myth, in B. Moore-Gilbert (Ed.) Writing India, 1757-1990 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 30-51
21. Dr Rukhmabai is now recognized as an important figure among early proponents for women's rights in India. See A. Burton (1998) From Child Bride to 'Hindoo Lady': Rukhmabai and the debate on sexual respectability in imperial Britain, American Historical Review, 103, pp. 1119-1146
22. See the article by R. Prasad, 'A Passage from India' The Guardian (22 September 2004), p. 12
23. D. Arnold (1993) Colonizing the Body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 263
24. For a study of childbearing in the post- independence era, see P. Jeffrey, R. Jeffrey & A. Lyon (Eds) (1989) Labour Pains and Labour Power: women and childbearing in India (London: Zed Books)