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Memsahibs’
Writings: Colonial Narratives on Indian Women
Writings by memsahibs have become a small literary corpus of their own strewn with narratives of the roles played by the wives, mothers and daughters of the officers of the East India Company. The "company wives" who, in their own inimitable ways, endured the rush and tumble, the splendour and the demise of the Empire, became virtually integral to the play of imperialism. Indrani Sen’s Memsahibs’ Writings contains accounts of white women themselves recounting events about an alien culture in which they were placed as army wives, a culture quite different from their own. Aspects of their writing customarily included travelling and the modes of transport, camping, outdoor meals, river bathing, fairs, processions and durbars. Thus, tales of rides on palanquins and elephants, boating in the Ganges, or riding hill-ponies in the Himalayan regions along with the accompanying confusion of men scrambling for distributed coins were frequent. Sen’s book claims to be different by moving the focus from the white woman’s experience of the orient to the intricacies of their interaction with colonised women and thus hopes to correct the imbalance in white women’s accounts that are purportedly about household events, naked fakirs and other Indian "exotica". Notwithstanding, it has to be kept in mind that the local women belonged to a certain class with whom the memsahibs interacted in a relationship that could be only be one of master and slave: the dhobins, wives of malis, the wet-nurse or the children’s ayah were among their primary contacts. As for upper-class women, they observed purdah and could only be approached at "purdah parties". Unlike the early days of the Raj, post-1870 memsahibs led increasingly separate lives from their Indian counterparts. The few exceptions were Flora Annie Steel, Mrs Chapman and Maud Diver who had some information about Indian women derived from sources other than their ayahs. The white women who associated with the locals tended mainly to be missionaries. Whether missionary or not, the uplift of the exploited Indian woman was a concern among the proponents of the mission civilisatrice. Thus, white women who were inducted into social service were at some level pressed into serving the imperial aims of the Empire. But, with the emergence of educated bhadramahila, the scales were to tilt in favour of the Indian woman. Society was to become less rigid and some measure of equality was introduced to diffuse the hierarchy among women. One question that Sen raises quite candidly is the silence of the Indian woman in white women’s accounts. She indicates the political presence of women activists like Pandita Ramabai, Rakhmabai, Anandibai Joshi and Sarojini Naidu who could only have impinged forcefully on the mind of the memsahib and driven her to give them representation beyond the prejudiced gaze. The stereotype of the submissive Indian woman was broken very often in the writings of Mrs E. F. Chapman, Maud Diver, Mary Frances Billington and Elizabeth Cooper. Sen captures the complexity of such representations through a series of chapters, each controlling a category such as the "nautch" girl, or a theme like the relationships of Indian women and white men or their education and health or gender issues such as purdah or social reform. The passages in each of these 14 chapters are excerpted. One wishes, though, that there were fewer excerpts and more detailed passages from a smaller selection. The author could have also relied on some of the contemporary theories of gender relating to Third World women. As the author would know, the silence of the subaltern is a much-touted theoretical enterprise among the liberal western feminists and itself could generate the ground for comparison with memsahib-lit.
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IN
Swarnakumari Devi’s short story Biroda (Mutiny/Revolt), an
Indian woman sits rapt listening to a group of white memsahibs speak of
the events of 1857. Silent but fully comprehending, she constructs her
own imaginative response to the discussion into which she dare not
intervene. This may be one instance among many in fiction where the
workings of the memsahib’s mind is under scrutiny.