Sunday, May 12, 2002		Books

Subsumed under colonial discourse
Review by Anupama Roy

Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India (1858-1900) by Indrani Sen. Orient Longman, New Delhi. Pages 211. Rs.450.

REPRESENTATIONS of women were central to the construction of a male self-identity in the colonial period. The aggressive masculinity of the colonial enterprise, intertwined with the 'civilising' mission and racial superiority, contributed towards the construction of 'women' and the terms of their inclusion in the colonial enterprise.

Most studies that consider women and imperialism consist, therefore, of descriptions of both 'native' and British women as objects of colonial 'gaze' or male protection within colonial texts. Even those studies which attempt to recuperate women as equal partners in the colonial project see 'Englishwomen' as a subset of 'Englishmen', subsumed under the dominant male position, glossing over the specificity of the English woman. While the figure of the white woman oscillated between a dominant identity of race and a subordinate one of gender, the 'native' woman finds representation in colonial discursive writings as her subaltern shadow.

Indrani Sen's work stands apart from the above-mentioned scholarship. The work is different precisely because it unpacks 'woman' to bring out the manner in which the category was being produced discursively amidst a complex web of ideological, political and socio-economic forces. Sen looks at the literary and non-literary writings of the latter half of the19th century, and delineates the socio-cultural and political space within which the 'woman' came to be located. The colonial space emerging in the immediate context of the 'mutiny' was fraught with anxieties and fears of sexual threat to the British memsahib, sustained by the 'racial memories' of 1857 with its 'hysterical myths of rape of white women'. At the same time, the colonial state as the extended arm of the metropolitan state in England was devolved with the responsibility of 're-presenting' and preserving 'English' civilisation and culture amidst the polluting influences of the native civilisation. Significantly, the figure of the white women got foregrounded in both the narratives, as 'pure English womanhood', as the symbol of an Anglo-Indian identity distinct from, as well as existing in an interactive relationship, with both their 'English' identity and the 'native' culture which surrounded them. This identity was, however, premised on a series of exclusions and was traversed by contradictions and ambivalences on women's roles emerging from the imperatives of colonial rule.

These contradictions are examined and unravelled remarkably well by the author in six well-defined chapters. The first chapter explores the mapping of the colonial space in literary and non-literary discursive constructions of the 'white woman'. The author examines the various tropes of womanhood and the social and cultural contexts within which they were embedded, to show how gender was being produced in the colonial context marked by both race and class. It is not surprising then, that the writings of the period distanced the memsahib not only from the 'native women', but also from the women missionaries who crossed the boundaries of 'imperial aloofness', and the lower class English women — the 'barrack wives' — characterised by un-English demeanour. The second chapter examines the manner in which Anglo-India looked at, and in the process inscribed the 'native' women in its non-literary discursive writings. The 'obsession' in these writings with the zenana and its 'indelicate amusements' fed into the construction of the 'dangerous' sensuality of the 'native' woman. The author, however, identifies another strand which simultaneously foregrounded the 'myth of devotion'—of sati—who by her worshipful service, dominated the man she 'served'. The preference from the 1860s, for a 'self-contained' and 'aloof imperial lifestyle', not only meant that miscegenation was discredited, the Eurasian woman—the hybrid—came to be seen as having a destabilising effect on the colonial hierarchy of race and class. The next chapter explores the themes laid out in the preceding chapters in some popular literary productions of the period. Most of these texts are now forgotten, and the author's ingenuity in identifying them and locating them in libraries and collections is admirable.

The last three chapters focus on three influential literary figures of the time, Philip Meadows Taylor, Flora Annie Steel and Rudyard Kipling, all of whom in their specific ways contributed to the discourse on 'social reform', and the construction of women as 'victims' of oppression. Sen shows how Taylor's 'unusual' women oriented novels while inscribing the 'native women' as the subject of the 19th century agenda of social reform, eventually fed into a larger chivalric 'rescue script' within which the social reform project was located. Flora Annie Steel, unlike Taylor, was part of Anglo-India — a memsahib. Her 'romances', distinguished by the preponderance of 'native' characters and issues pertaining to 'native' women's social uplift, show an ambivalence akin to Taylor, in the construction of gender. Rudyard Kipling's literary productions, the author points out, afford a similar site for the exploration of gender and empire. Kipling writes within the paradigms of 19th century colonial discourse, consolidating many of the gender ideologies of the time. Yet, asserts the author, Kipling's works are significant because they also open up for scrutiny the class and race identities which informed the production of gender. Woman and Empire is extremely well researched, lucid, and cogently argued — an essential reading for all students and scholars of literary criticism, cultural studies, sociology, and women's studies.