About the Book
The word ‘memsahib’ conjures up visions of silly aristocrats, well-staffed bungalows, and languorous days at the club. Yet, these young Englishwomen had sought out the uncertainties of life in Britain’s largest, busiest colony—stepping off the steamer, the sights and sounds of colonial India were like nothing they’d ever experienced. For many, this was the ultimate destination to find a perfect civil servant husband. For others, however, it was a chance to fling off the shackles of Victorian social mores.
Memsahibs introduces readers to the likes of Flora Annie Steel, Fanny Parks, and Emily Eden, accompanying their husbands on expeditions, journeying solo across dangerous terrain, engaging with political questions, and recording their experiences. Yet, the Raj was not all adventure. There was extreme climate, disease, and great personal risk to young women travelling alone; for colonial wives in far-flung outposts, there was little access to ‘society’; cut off from modernity and the Western world, many women suffered terrible trauma and depression.
From the hill stations to the capital, Ipshita Nath’s Memsahibs is a sweeping, vividly written anthology of the lives of colonial women across British India. Their honesty and bravery, in their actions and their writings, shine fresh light on this historical world.
Praise for the Book
“Railing against ‘repetitive and limiting representations’ of
memsahibs, Nath champions, instead, their colourful personalities, creative output, and
considerable sociocultural impact, offering a vibrant alternative lens through which to view British women in the Raj.”
CHANDRIKA KAUL, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews
“Memsahibs shows through their own writings that British women in the Raj saw their lives as adventurous, within the confines of a colonial world ruled by gender, race, and class, and themselves as heroic, surviving Indian dangers and British tedium.”
INDIRA KARAMCHETI, Postcolonial literature specialist and Associate Professor of American Studies, Wesleyan University
About the author
Ipshita Nath has a Ph.D. in English literature and was formerly an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working in the area of health and medicine in colonial India at the Department of History, University of Saskatchewan. Her short story collection, The Rickshaw Reveries, was published in 2020.
For more information please write to sagiri.dixit@harpercollins.co.in
Non-fiction | Rs 699
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