Abstract
Narratives by women travelers to European colonies from the early 19th century were marked by incomprehension because they experienced cultural unfamiliarity. Early encounters between European women and non-European people resulted in geographical and racial segregation in the “contact zones” of South Asia. Immigrant women's writings record strategies of utilizing their sense of spatial alienation. The notion, which was identified by colonial feminists such as Elizabeth Buettner and Mary Procida, establishes a narrative strengthening social fault lines in colonial India and South Asia. This chapter critiques relevant textual evidence to examine how women made use of reified moral/cultural coda from “home” (Britain) and reinforced racial identity in an alien land (India). The aim of the study is to establish how these uniquely gendered markers created colonial legacies of social entitlement in India.
TopIntroduction
There is an oft repeated anecdote about the Colonial Office in London, in the heyday of the British Empire. It is said that the officials in Westminster not only appointed young men as civil servants for offshore service but were willing to recruit suitable wives to accompany them. A commentator lightheartedly explained the reason for bureaucratic anxiety:
Providence no doubt arranges that the sort of chap who is the sort of chap they want in the Colonial Service chooses (or is chosen by) the sort of wife he ought to have. Certainly, if the wife is not the right sort she is likely to be disheartened by many kinds of difficulties which she would not come across in ordinary life at home difficulties of climate, difficulties of housing, difficulties of choice between husband and children, difficulties of isolation from relations, society, entertainments. (Jeffries, 1949, p. 156)
British women who came to India at the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to set up temporary domiciles at the “stations”, “cantonments” or “white towns” within larger urban settlements, had to cope with the absolute unfamiliarity that the abovementioned quote mentions. They also needed to create a new vocabulary to express this assault to their senses. Women fashioned narratives, which detailed their experiences as expatriates. In these, a search was made for the correct attitude to adopt in order to create a space filled with the comfort of familiarity of known objects and remedies as a response to their collective anxiety. “Cultural portability” is a term coined by John Plotz (2007) and it defines the ploy which gave expatriates or “self-styled exiles” a chance to “think of England as a tangible alma mater rather than a distant speck on the map” (Plotz, 2007, p. 659). The alma mater was the perpetually designated “home” to Britons, conditioned to think of the Indian experience as temporary while knowing it also to be hazardous, unpredictable but lucrative. A complex hierarchy was established and cemented in India (and other South Asian British colonies) by the material results of portable culture, explicated in immigrant women’s narratives. They deserve to be studied as examples of racial and cultural markers in the alien geography of a “contact zone”. “Contact zone” is Mary Louise Pratt’s (1986) influential definition of the battleground where encounters between people from separate cultures in unequal power structures take place. British women writing about surviving in India and maintaining racial identity through segregation in the nineteenth century may be credited with articulating strategies to successfully construct such a site of cultural confrontation. This paper, through looking at the works of early female immigrants from across the British Isles, maps how this and other attempts at acculturation were framed and recorded by their primary perpetrators: white women in India. The scope of the work is to identify the role of gender and spatial displacement in curating a collection of social identifiers for establishing hierarchy and racial identity. By exploring such instances occurring in books of travel, adventure and exploration, a connected narrative may emerge. The primary objective is to confirm that a rhetoric of self-identification by the observers influenced by residence in an unfamiliar terrain illustrate how racial and cultural markers are created and disseminated. Elizabeth Buettner argues that racial identity of colonial white people in the Indian subcontinent was predominantly a “hegemonic political, socio-economic, and cultural position” which was “reinforced by, elaborate mechanisms designed to maintain and police boundaries which divide them from less privileged groups” (Buettner, 2000, p. 292). Also relevant for the present discussion is her hypothesis that the mechanisms or strategies “deemed characteristic of a privileged racial identity (…) differed for men and women” (Buettner, 2000, p. 292). In India, in the early days of colonization, as this work will demonstrate, immigrant women rather than men were more invested in and took the lead in enforcing these strategies.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Nabob: White immigrant to colonial India who had amassed a fortune through trade (usually unscrupulously) in a short time. The term is an Anglicized version of ‘nawab’ an Arabic word meaning Muslim ruler. Female companions of nababs (or nabob) were termed nabobinas. The term was usually used in satire to denote a corrupt person.
Dastoori: An accepted traditional practice in India where servants in large households were given an amount of money by tradesmen as reward for bringing them custom.
Displacement: A change of location either voluntary or forced which may induce a sense of insecurity or anxiety.
Female Gaze: Concerns specific to women likely to influence their perception of a place, incident, experience, or person.
Immigrant: A person who takes an independent decision to move away from the country of his/her birth and relocate elsewhere on a long-term basis. The degree of urgency behind the decision to move to a different location differentiates an immigrant and a refugee.
Bunian: Also known as ‘sarkar’ these Indian men served white households in colonial India in the joint capacity of housekeeper and accountant. They were also moneylenders athey servednd often accused of ruining the young men by encouraging them to splurge and lending money at high rates of interest in order to do so.
Racial Segregation: A policy undertaken by those in power to maintain boundaries and restrict communication between people of separate races, communities, religions, and ethnic origins, usually a phenomenon perceived in temporal and geographical spaces like colonial South Asia in the nineteenth century where one ethnic community is more powerful than others.