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Memsahibs

Author Ipshita Nath on Documenting the Intricate Lives of Memsahibs

From the annals of history, Ipshita Nath recovers untold stories of the British Memsahibs and their inner lives.

Read how the ipshita Nath wrote her groundbreaking book, Memsahibs.

Writing about Memsahibs’ writings: Between feminist historiography and a postcolonial vision

One of the biggest challenges that I faced while writing Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India, was my very decision to write the book.

The first time the idea was suggested to me by my friend and agent, Kanishka Gupta, I was wary of the reception. Would a book like this appeal to the postcolonial psyche? How would I address the challenge of fashioning a book about the female ‘colonizers’ without participating in the ‘Raj nostalgia’ that I had been critiquing vociferously for about seven years of writing my doctoral thesis on a related subject? It concerned me that I had the responsibility of viewing the women of the Raj through a critical yet feminist stance, to at once condemn their collusion in the colonial project while also lauding their efforts at carving a niche for themselves in a largely masculinist space of the empire. I decided that as a scholar of literature and history, I had to study their writings as ‘literary texts’ through which an important portion of colonial history – rather, women’s histories – could be recuperated.

Although my engagement with memsahibs began several years ago as I worked my way through many of their writings about their Indian experiences, I did not actually begin writing about them until much later. Admittedly, I had initially considered writing my doctoral thesis on the wide array of writings they left behind, about which substantial scholarly assessment had been done, as it needed further and consistent feminist engagement. Most of these writings were in the form of published accounts and memoirs, as well as letters and diaries, and the very first book I read of memsahibs, was the memoirs of a lady, Veronica Bamfield, who had been stationed in India with her army husband. However, when I chose my subject, it was about their representations in postcolonial Indian literature, rather than on their original writings. It took me several years to fully appreciate the scope and value of their works, so engrossed was I in comprehending the image of the memsahib in the postcolonial imagination.

Be that as it may, the stories of memsahibs stayed with me over the years, and I read as many as I could lay my hands on, purely out of my personal proclivity towards knowing the subjectivities of British women in India during the Raj, something that I found missing in colonial mainstream history. Not to mention, women’s perspectives on the Raj were scarce and obscure. Besides, I was curious to understand more about the Raj period in India on the whole, and their writings had too many fascinating details about life in the outposts – sometimes about nothing particular and everything in general – but which undoubtedly made the landscape come alive in a way that official narratives, or even narratives written by male writers, somehow often seemed to be unable to do. This may simply have been because memsahibs wrote of the women’s world, or perhaps the female gaze lent a completely different dimension to everything. After all, these women were chroniclers in their own right, creating copious accounts of their own specific activities precisely to provide a glimpse into the subjectivities of that gender that was left on the peripheries of imperial work.

Indeed, before me was a crucial body of records of women’s public and domestic experiences in India, completely unique to them as wives of the British sahibs, and who had chosen to pen down their strengths as well as fallibilities, often specifically for public consumption. These writings were candid and self-conscious alternatively, they were often flawed and politically incorrect, especially to a reader in the post-independence era. I must mention at this point, as I do in the preface of my book, that these writings were often replete with racial and religious biases. Selective historical amnesia was frequently apparent, and a deliberate attempt to sketch the East as savage or barbaric was also evident in many. Several memsahibs used hyperbolic language to describe their so-called adventures in the oriental spaces, while some seemed to have exaggerated and dramatized their supposed sufferings, despite the obvious privileges they enjoyed due to their British identities. Some were apolitical or  simply private writings that were later collated. And yet, these writings were essential archives of the Raj, which had been so often neglected in the largely masculinist mainstream history of the Empire. Essentially, I saw these documents as attempts of these women to claim a place in history, as if they records were muniments of the niche they tried to carve for themselves where it was impossible to do so as women in a male-centric order during the nineteenth century. More importantly, so often did I come across writings that deviated from the formulaic, pro-imperialist, arrogant viewpoints that writing about those women made more and more sense. Sometimes, I was taken by surprise at the utter radicality of their thought and endeavours. It was clear that writing this book meant going further and studying these writings as sources of information on the overall lives that were spent in India. And although I had anticipated a much wider lens this time, the arena that this project offered to me turned out to be much more wide for larger feminist interjections.

It was also important to understand that such writings demonstrated how these women became ensconced in colonial India through their own endeavours. At times, their writings became popularized enough to influence perceptions of India back home, for containing advice or descriptions of life in India, thus giving them the status of chroniclers of the Raj, like their male counterparts. The overarching question, then, was: were memsahibs heard? Did their writings afford them the capacity to draw their own portraits, or were they stuck in the moulds that writers like Kipling fashioned for them, as staid, spoilt, and indolent women languishing in the plains while their husbands worked? I found the stereotypes to be not just discriminatory, but also somewhat unjust and definitely inaccurate/partial considering the evidence of more unconventional and proactive attitudes that emerge through their writings. What were those historical mis-readings that caused such marked inconsistencies in the popular perception of the women of the Raj? How were there such wide disjunctions between these erroneous perceptions, and memsahibs as they emerge from their own writings?

Memsahibs began publishing from the early nineteenth century, their fiction and semi-fiction narratives acquired wide readership over the years. Since there is a lack of sufficient data on the lives of British women in India, their personal, eye-witness accounts become indispensable sources of information on their daily activities, private and intimate lives, as well as public engagements. This begged the question – do personal and domestic narratives have a role to play in the grand narrative of the empire? These women did not have the power or authority to affect change even if they were inclined to do so. They were also not in the position to do so because of their mediated position as wives of sahibs and army officials, which means they were without any official role. To my mind, their marginality in the society they lived in was exactly why they were ultimately caricatured and stereotyped, rendered redundant and even farcical. Many memsahibs, through their writings, effectively explode many debilitating images associated with them, however, due to the steady effacement of their narratives, the stereotypes remain unchallenged. The causal nexus needs attention here: such effacement from mainstream history entails a trivialization of their writings, especially considering that they were largely personal, further causing a direct and steady obfuscation of women’s histories. Such obfuscation lead to the obscurity of their writings, which in turn impacted the overall body of literature on a given subject, making it skewed in favour of male perspectives. Considering women’s part in a larger narrative is of great importance, it is necessary to ensure that their work does not pass into obscurity, thereby preventing the formation of stereotypes and misconceptions. In fact, it is precisely the historical neglect of memsahibs’ writings that have led to the sexist and often diminutive portrayal of memsahibs in literature and cinema. Consequently, it was crucial to view the body of literature they created, as an insight into their role and position in the Raj, without falling into the trap of allowing stereotypes any kind of historical legitimacy.

Moreover, discounting the self-representations of memsahibs in their own writings risked the discounting of those writings that display a steady deviation from the prevalent trend of pro-imperialist writing. Even otherwise, the risk of neglecting these writings entail a glossing over women’s literature from a time period wherein such writing was not just unique but also limited. It would also mean overlooking, as indeed invisibilizing, yet again, women’s experiences (within an otherwise masculinist project of empire-making). Besides, even though they had been co-opted into the colonial project as wives, their insider-outsider position as wives of the actual agents of the raj, allowed them a kind of liminal position from where they could offer alternative perspectives to the dominant stance, contradicting official statements, and sometimes transcending barriers of race, class, gender, etc. Indeed, various feminist historians working in the area of gender and colonial histories prior to me have also commented on the nebulous position of memsahibs in the empire. Indeed, memsahibs’ writings supplement the hegemonic and mainstream colonial historical discourses, and serve as crucial modes of discerning the cultural histories of colonial India, and the British imperial pursuits within them.

Thus, it was imperative for me to bring their unique stories to the fore by having them heard in their own voices.  I use the term ‘epistolary chronicling’, for memsahibs’ writings, in cases in which they were in the form of letters and diaries. And so when I started planning this book, my instinct was to make sure that it contained passages from memsahibs’ writings in the form of substantial passages and quotes, to ensure that the reader is able to gauge the tone and tenor of memsahibs’ writings in a more or less unfiltered manner. The format I followed was to precede every section of the book with a passage from a memsahibs’ own work related to the theme of the chapter so that the reader could experience their expression, before viewing them or their style through my perspective. This is because as a scholar of literature, I know the significance of analysing the primary texts in their raw form before studying critical studies on the same – an approach I myself followed.

Furthermore, crucial as it is to understand and give credit to the counter-imperial voices in memsahibs’ writings, allowing them historical space also allows us to detect their collusion in orientalist discourses, as well as empire making in India. Indeed, various writings by memsahibs were rooted in colonialist agendas as they were often (predictably so) motivated by a racial imperative. Accordingly, studying all of such writings would allow for an uncovering of both the imperialist attitudes within them, as well as the counter-cultural and radical vision that sometimes peeked through. As I mention in my book, memsahibs were participating in the nineteenth century expansionist aims of the empire, like the sahibs, and modelling their writings on the male orientalists. They benefited majorly from the spoils of the colonial enterprise, and there were several accounts of memsahibs that expressed pride and solidarity with the imperialists. Thus, while their anti-hegemonic voices are examined, their compliance with the exploitation of the colonial project cannot be glossed over either.

Thus, the format of the book – of incorporating their writings as mentioned before – was necessary because the primary agenda of the book was to do a feminist historicist study of the writings of memsahibs’ works with a dual objective – firstly, to study the writings as pieces of literature from the nineteenth century, and secondly to glean the part and position of British women in the colonial society in India. On the whole, painting memsahibs in one single brushstroke would be, and has been, prone to error. Writing about memsahibs’ writings, complex, problematic, and variegated as they were, therefore had to be rehabilitative and revisionist at various levels. The idea was not to ‘redeem’ the women of the colonizing race by romanticizing or valorising them, or to villainize them either for their banal and predictable racist ideas whenever present, but to afford them a part in a historical narrative from which they were largely excluded. The book was one way of executing the resuscitation of their voices, and in some ways, rescuing them from historical misunderstanding, while also eschewing disproportionate sympathy for the sake of feminist historiography. Not to mention, delivering them from their postcolonial fate of yet again being stuck in stereotypes borne out of Raj nostalgia was important, to undo their mythification in popular understandings.

Memsahibs
About the Book - Memsahibs

For young Englishwomen stepping off the steamer, the sights and sounds of humid colonial India were like nothing they'd ever experienced. For many, this was the ultimate destination to find a perfect civil servant husband. For still more, however, India…

About the Author - Ipshita Nath

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