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    Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932
    Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932
    Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932
    Ebook639 pages9 hours

    Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

    By Tim Allender

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    This book explores the colonial mentalities that shaped and were shaped by women living in colonial India between 1820 and 1932. Using a broad framework the book examines the many life experiences of these women and how their position changed, both personally and professionally, over this long period of study. Drawing on a rich documentary record from archives in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North America, Ireland and Australia this book builds a clear picture of the colonial-configured changes that influenced women interacting with the colonial state.

    In the early nineteenth century the role of some women occupying colonial spaces in India was to provide emotional sustenance to expatriate European males serving away from the moral strictures of Britain. However, powerful colonial statecraft intervened in the middle of the century to racialise these women and give them a new official, moral purpose. Only some females could be teachers, chosen by their race as reliable transmitters of genteel accomplishment codes of European, middle-class femininity.

    Yet colonial female activism also had impact when pressing against these revised, official gender constructions. New geographies of female medical care outreach emerged. Roman Catholic teaching orders, whose activism was sponsored by piety, sought out other female colonial peripheries, some of which the state was then forced to accommodate. Ultimately the national movement built its own gender thresholds of interchange, ignoring the unproductive colonial learning models for females, infected as these models had become with the broader race, class and gender agendas of a fading raj.

    This book will appeal to students and academics working on the history of empire and imperialism, gender studies, postcolonial studies and the history of education.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2016
    ISBN9781784996369
    Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932
    Author

    Tim Allender

    Tim Allender is Associate Professor at the University of Sydney

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      Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932 - Tim Allender

      General editor: Andrew S. Thompson

      Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

      When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

      Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

      Image:logo is missing

      SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

      WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES

      ed. Andrew S. Thompson

      MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE

      Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities

      John M. MacKenzie

      MISSIONARY FAMILIES

      Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier

      Emily J. Manktelow

      THE COLONISATION OF TIME

      Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire

      Giordano Nanni

      BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE

      ed. Stuart Ward

      SCIENCE, RACE RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE

      Britain, 1870–1914

      Douglas A. Lorimer

      GENTEEL WOMEN

      Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910

      Dianne Lawrence

      EUROPEAN EMPIRES AND THE PEOPLE

      Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy

      ed. John M. MacKenzie

      SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

      ed. Saul Dubow

      Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

      Tim Allender

      MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Copyright © Tim Allender 2016

      The right of Tim Allender to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

      ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA

      www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

      ISBN 978 0 7190 8579 6 hardback

      First published 2016

      The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Typeset by Out of House Publishing

      Frontispiece  An accomplishments geography lesson learning about the ‘mother country’.

      This book is dedicated to the memory of

      Doris Embling

      A lifelong mentor and much loved friend

      CONTENTS

      List of illustrations

      Preface and acknowledgements

      List of abbreviations

      Glossary

      Introduction: learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

      1 Finding feminine scholars, 1820–65

      2 Shaping a new Eurasian moral body, 1840–67

      3 Mary Carpenter and feminine ‘rescue’ from Europe, 1866–77

      4 Both sides of the mission wall, 1875–84

      5 Female medical care: a new professional learning space, 1865–90

      6 Feminine missionary medical professionalism and secular medical feminists, 1880–1927

      7 Code school accomplishments and Froebel: race and pedagogy, 1883–1903

      8 ‘Better mothers’: feminine and feminist educators and thresholds of Indian female interaction, 1870–1932

      9 Loreto and the paradigm of piety, 1890–1932

      Conclusion

      Bibliography

      Index

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      Map: British India, 1915.

      1 Lithograph of Mary Ann Cooke’s central CMS girls’ school, Calcutta.

      2 Lawrence Military Asylum, Sanawar. Eurasian girls in the shade.

      3 Mrs Priscilla Winter, SPG.

      4 Mrs Margaret Elmslie and her rooftop zenana class.

      5 Dr Frances Reid, a SPG Eurasian physician (in white clinical European dress), taking the pulse of an Indian patient with nurses looking on.

      6 Going home: SPG-trained midwife with mother and baby.

      7 Rosalie Harvey at Nasik in 1901 demonstrating a practical way to treat leprosy ulcers.

      8 Dow Hill Girls’ School, Kurseong.

      9 A bilingual nature study class: sunflowers for little girls.

      10 Loreto Darjeeling: middle-class schoolgirls taking in the air in the hills.

      11 A rare photograph of a Loreto woman religious bandaging the head of a Hindu patient in a village near Morapai.

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      In some ways this book’s history began over fifteen years ago while I was still a postgraduate student at Sydney University. Then my task was to try to find new ways to understand the impact of empire on India, particularly in new theoretical terms, drawing on what became important feedback offered to me by Professor Chris Bayly and others at a key conference in Kew in Melbourne. Their work, which engaged with this issue, was published not long after the conference. This was still at a time when talking about the European at all in India was an unfashionable enterprise – also signalling, as I imagined, to my more able and experienced peers, that here was a new scholar who lacked the imagination to escape the elitist white men’s postcolonial approaches of the past. The naivety evident in my scholarship naturally pointed to the need for broader thinking as my research deepened. My ongoing academic insecurities were only slowly lifted – though still not fully – by the kind encouragement of Kathy Prior, Carey Watt and Indrani Chatterjee. They were fellow students whom I was fortunate enough to meet, between teaching commitments in Australia, during my trips to the India Office, which in those days was temporarily located at Blackfriars in London.

      There were senior academics, as well, who were patient enough I think to see my struggles as a scholar in terms of someone who needed more time and reflection to better come to grips with the problem of finding new ways to see empire. These scholars included Jim Masselos, Geoff Sherington, both in Sydney, Dick Selleck in Melbourne, Clive Whitehead and Tom O’Donoghue in Perth, Richard Aldrich in London and Ruth Watts in Birmingham. They have been always willing to be my toughest critics, knowing that I have been able to hear their criticism because it was tempered through trusting bonds of scholarly community where many of their students are fortunate enough to belong. Robin Jeffrey, Peter Reeves and John McGuire then had much to do with the production of my first book, about male education in north India, and they could only be described as the most generous scholars in my field.

      Deciding to write this book, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, with gender and India as its theme, as a white male, seemed a strange choice to some. As I picked up the threads of my story, Joyce Goodman, Stephanie Spencer and Camilla Leach at Winchester University gave me impetus to think about gender in ways that might align with colonial histories of women settler communities ‘abroad’. While Gary McCulloch at the University of London and Elizabeth Smyth at the University of Toronto were kind enough to offer new forums for testing my ideas. My Visiting Research Fellowship at the Georg-Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany also gave me the time to reflect and write more on my themes under the inquiring mind of its Deputy Director, Eckhardt Fuchs.

      The theoretical layers of this book have come to me through many productive conferences and workshops in the USA, India, Canada, Australia and Europe as I have worked with the acute observations of those patient enough to endure my halting explanations of where my work might be heading, and to offer suggestions to bring it into better focus. I was particularly interested in sensitising my research to Indian academic perspectives concerning the colonial era and I am grateful for the History Fellowship I was given by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to confer with leading Indian scholars in my field and for a demanding seminar I was invited to give at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti, where my ideas about racial hybridity took greater form. In 2013, as a visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, and under the supportive Directorship of Professor Chetan Singh, I found the academic terrain especially rich in terms of engaging with Indian philosophical traditions, partly through its fine Tagore centre, and this has had a strong underlying influence on my book.

      This book includes a selection of images that are an important part of my story. For the most part I have preferred more obscure images of women and girls in poses of interaction, admittedly staged mostly for Western audiences. The image of Mrs Elmslie in a zenana, but taken on the rooftop, was probably determined by the need to use outside photography (perhaps as the only technology available for relatively quickly staged photographs). This outside location, instead of inside the Indian household, may have been necessary anyway to gain the permission of the Indian women concerned. Again, plein-air, is the geography lesson, shown as the frontispiece of this book. This image depicts due displays of deportment (see how the teacher is sitting on her chair), student dress – West and East – and there are also displays of knowledge that are unequivocally Western, conveyed through the use of maps of England. The relational aspects of the girls as they interact with each other at Loreto, Darjeeling, and the display of intimacy in medical treatment of a Loreto woman religious (nun) at Morapai, as shown in the last two images of the book, also tell a richer story beyond mere words of text. As well, photography and publishing requirements produce other selectivity. There exist other images of Indian girls outside school and dispensary that I would very much liked to have included. Yet the very poor quality and blurred photography of these impoverished settings, usually just as groups of girls without displays of their learning, meant that it was not possible to include them in this book.

      I am thankful for the permission Leprosy Mission International gave me to reproduce an image of Rosalie Harvey (an organisation that sadly still has work to do in the modern world); the British Library for permission to reproduce two images in its collection; the United Society and the Bodleian Library, Oxford for their permission to reproduce the three lantern slides of SPG women in chapters five and six; and for the permission of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM), Loreto and the Institute and the Irish Province Archives, Dublin to reproduce the final two images in the book.

      Gaining access to archives has required much more exacting negotiation and for this I am deeply grateful to my friend Joseph Bara at JNU in Delhi and to the Brothers of the Cambridge Mission, also in Delhi. The Principals of Aitchison College and Government College in Lahore, Pakistan broke the stalemate of waiting for some days outside archives while my passport was meticulously translated into Persian Urdu. And Sister Cyril in Kolkata, Sister Kathleen and Judith Harford in Dublin, Robin Scott at Loreto in Ballarat, Lucy McCann at Rhodes House in Oxford and Rajesh Kochhar, Chandigarh University, India, did much to facilitate my access to key archives and interesting historical sites in those respective countries. My far too many calls on the time of archivists were always helpfully answered, particularly at the India Office Library at the British Library (BL) in London; SOAS, University of London; the Main Library, Birmingham University; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; the National Archives of India and at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.

      I am grateful to Meera Kosambi, Ruth Watts, Elizabeth Smyth, Carey Watt and Jim Masselos who were kind enough to read parts of the book manuscript as it took shape, which also benefitted from more informal discussions with Professor Krishna Kumar, Kama McLean, Tamson Pietsch, Sanjay Seth, Jyoti Atwal, Peter Freebody, Devleena Ghosh and Nayantara Pothen. I am especially thankful to my anonymous readers whose timely and clever academic intervention showed me a degree of professional generosity, concerning the minute detail of my manuscript, that I have not experienced before. And also to Emma Brennan, my commissioning editor at Manchester University Press, for her patience as this book took better shape.

      The writing of this book has been greatly assisted by the financial support of several small grants. I have needed to spend many hours in archives in expensive cities to build a story drawn from primary sources and this could not have been achieved without the generous hospitality of my friends Clive Hedderly and Michael Andreatta while I was researching in London. There was also the wonderful academic company provided by Piyush Mathur and Alex George that kept me reasonably sane, or at least relatively so, after periods of solitude immersed in my thoughts about how best to write the book.

      I only wonder at my friends being still interested in this dilettantish author labouring rather like George Eliot’s character Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch, never seeming to near the end of ‘the project’. I am grateful for their ongoing and precious companionship. Most especially, I owe much to my parents and to my sisters for their unqualified love and support without which this book could not have been written; and for Daniel, Toby, Thomas, Nicholas, Julian, Oliver, Liam and Ashton who are the new generation in my life.

      ABBREVIATIONS

      GLOSSARY

      The spelling of place names conforms to those adopted in the last years of the raj as used by the ‘Atlas and Gazetteer Index’, Modern World Encyclopaedia, vol. ix (London: Home Entertainment Library, 1935).

      £1 approximates to Rs.10.12 in 1880.

      Map  British India, 1915.

      Introduction: learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

      In 1888 Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner published The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook.¹ This book, offering advice to European women on how to supervise their households in colonial India, proved very popular and ran to many editions. It contained the following guidance regarding the employment of Indian women to nurse European babies:

      As wet-nurses, none are better than the Cashmiri woman at Amritsar, although at Agra dhaees [midwives] have got a great name. The former are very amiable, get very fond of their charges, are simple in their ideas and unsophisticated, and not so grasping in their expectations. It is a great mistake to change the dhaee’s habits beyond insisting on personal cleanliness and frequent change of clothes. The simpler and more familiar the food she gets, the better she will digest it, and the better will be her nourishment for the child.²

      The modern reader is struck by the manner and content of Steel’s counsel. It is expressed in emotionally remote and racially separate terms, suggesting considerable personal distance from the Indian women she employed. However, Steel was no mere European hostess. Four years earlier, in 1884, she had been appointed inspectress of girls’ schools in the Punjab, in north India. In this role, she combined genuine interest in the lives of Indian women and their culture with strong support for British India.³ Yet, the difference in her approach towards Indian women once they crossed the threshold of a European household is striking, both in terms of her detachment towards them within this domestic domain, and her perception that their biology was differentiated by their race.

      Outside the European household, Steel’s professional life required her to engage with the women and girls whom she administered. The colonial state’s macro agendas around the education of females in India formed an indispensable part of its public rhetoric about its civilising mission. Steel’s professional duties were part of this different landscape of female interaction in the colonial sphere – a scene that had a long history behind it. Unlike in the European household, the colonial classroom and, later, the colonial hospital and dispensary, were places in which the role of participating women of all races was subject to changing forms of scrutiny, driven by the strong organising agency of the colonial state. The state also responded to female professionals working on the spot in India, such as Flora Annie Steel herself, and to the women and girls whom she taught.

      The official focus on female education in India is not significant so much in terms of specific educational outcomes, of which there were relatively few, particularly for Indian women. Rather this focus is significant as a way to better understand how female education initiatives indicated broader attitudes towards women of all races in India, attitudes held first by the East India Company and later by the raj. As in other colonial domains, these education initiatives were built upon contested pedagogical, institutional, politico-cultural and sociological perspectives. However, in addition, in colonial India, there were also idiomatic race, class, caste, religious and gender barriers that reflected distinctive and traditional cultural spaces on the subcontinent, which were only partially engaged by the interaction between official policymaking and females participating in the colonial sphere.

      The story of how women and girls were constructed in colonial India is an important one – especially regarding the forces that drove changes in the educational contexts in which these females interacted. This interaction also had ramifications for other settler societies in the colonial era. In the early nineteenth century, colonial female education in India mostly concerned a few mission schools seeking to assert a Judeo-Christian hegemony in surrounding communities. By the early twentieth century, female education had become more politicised, culminating in unsuccessful inferences by the raj to be supporting Western feminist modernity, with all its uncertain relevance for an emerging India.

      My book has an ambitious scope: it studies state-sponsored education for women and girls in colonial India over a 112-year period from 1820 to 1932, when the story was at its richest. Some earlier context is also provided. In particular, the book looks in detail at the changing influences and networks that operated around the female education dynamic in India, including those that applied to medical training. The book begins by building important context about how colonial narratives created official mentalities concerning the female body in India in the rich early orientalist period of the 1820s.⁴ It ends in 1932, by which time the activism of women, including that of Loreto women religious (nuns), had built limited, but much more individualist, education enterprises in the context of a failing colonial state. Some additional survey commentary on the post-1932 period is also provided in the conclusion of the book.

      The precursors of colonial education for girls were different from those for boys. Through this book I argue that the interaction between state and schoolgirl created a powerful and distinctive symbiosis that evolved over time. To trace this evolution, I have identified key periods, each with its own characteristics and imperatives. These periods are solidified by the aggregation of different interactive connections and networks; networks that drove education mentalities in India, not all of which were coterminous with empire. By examining these periods, this book offers context for other studies on women and India, by identifying the changes at work concerning women, even within the restricted colonial project. An understanding of these changes also better contextualises those studies on India and women that have concentrated on the later colonial period. Through this book I demonstrate that the colonial project remained capable of evolution, producing broader outcomes that both accentuated and reconfigured race and class and gender boundaries as they related to women and girls in India.

      There are, naturally, some artificialities involved in this approach, particularly in the time frames that I have identified as marking elemental shifts in policymaking. There are also, within the vast educational vista of India, exceptions to the phenomena I identify. Powerful emerging scholarship offers deeper case-study analysis of specific locations and educational stratums, including detailed micro and regional studies concerning aspects of the female experience in colonial India. For example: Siobhan Lambert-Hurley examines efforts to reform women’s health in Bhopal State in the early twentieth century; Nita Verma Prasad’s work dissects the complex legal terrain of widow inheritance disputes in north India in the latter part of the nineteenth century;⁵ and Jyoti Atwal explores the uncomfortable location of indigenous feminist practice within anti-colonial programmes in the North Western Provinces (NWP) in the early twentieth century.⁶ These are just a sample of the regional and time-specific studies that relate to the diffuse and specific ways that mentalities about females can be seen in the colonial period.

      However, the approach I have taken here is to attempt to understand different periods of colonial interaction within a broader view, and to seek to explore how these periods relate to each other. This approach develops my earlier work identifying key phases of educational change in colonial India.⁷ While it is true that the history of the subcontinent from the perspectives of Indians does not lend itself to grand narratives permitting longitudinal analysis, it is the case that the superficial imperatives that drove European-predicated education were simpler and more unified across the subcontinent. They are, therefore, more capable of study across each period. Looking at these colonial imperatives, the state is usually paradigmatic, while women occupied many peripheries in the British colonial era.

      The imposition in India of emerging Western conceptions of schooling and medical professionalism, as far as both related to women and girls, might naturally identify feminism as a key underlying feature. Yet here the picture is complicated and scholars have different perspectives. Kumari Jayawardena confronts the contentious issue of assigning ‘feminism’ to the subcontinent by seeing the term as best loosely applied to those women ‘involved in projects to change the lives of women’, including Western missionaries and social reformers who felt they had a ‘moral duty to uplift, sanitize and modernize traditional societies’.⁸ From the Indian side of the story, Padma Anagol identifies a second generation of Indian converts in the late nineteenth century who were feminists who used their ideology to critique Hinduism and its role, as they saw it, in the oppression and vilification of Indian women.⁹ Their regional activism was variable, and was likely to have ranged from communities of activists in Bengal (east India) to more individually based effort in Maharashtra (west India). On the other hand, Geraldine Forbes suggests Indian feminism did emerge from behind the purdah (traditional seclusion), but not as a carbon copy of Western feminism in either ideology or goals, as the Indian social system bore little resemblance to European countries.¹⁰ The complex issue of assigning feminism to the subcontinent in educational contexts is examined later in this book. It is certainly the case that, at least by the First World War, there was a strong feminist consciousness among the female Indian literati in the Hindu provinces.¹¹

      My approach in this book is primarily concerned with Western perspectives about femininity (rather than feminism) in tracing the agency of Western women and Westernised women in colonial India. This is because I explore the nature of mostly British-inspired female agency, where considerations of femininity, even at the level of state directives, remained at the centre of official rhetoric and racialised policies based on gender. Additionally, the international networks that fed into the activism of most Western-influenced nurses and women teachers (particularly for ‘accomplishments’, to be explained below) involved principally feminine, rather than feminist, constructs. As such, I have found narratives concerning femininity more productive in analysing the thought and actions of European and Eurasian women in India, and the Indian women with whom they interacted. This is particularly apparent as the book mostly interprets changing Western perceptions, which were both generated by and imposed upon these women in their often-isolated colonial workplaces. Additionally, Western scholars such as Sonya Adnermahr, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz, drawing on the earlier work of Toril Moi, suggest there is also a direct academic tension between ‘femininity’ and ‘feminism’ that, in part, goes to the definition of both terms:

      feminine designates the set of cultural attributes assigned to the female sex, which the political discourses of feminism seek to critique … [and that] theories of the feminine tend to present in one of two ways: something basically imposed on women from the outside either through direct or indirect means … or as a psychosexual process involving the female unconscious.¹²

      Although this tension is less visible in colonial India, and in the context of postcolonial research concerning colonial India, evidence of it does emerge – particularly in the context of medical care as practised by female missionaries and the competing later contributions of secular women physicians, as shown in chapters five and six of this book.

      There is, of course, a much longer-standing story of Indian women who were not within the ambit of the raj. In the nineteenth century these women were undergoing other changes in identity formation, particularly within the Hindu polity and under reforming agencies such as Dayananda Saraswati’s (1824–83) Arya Samaj in north India and Swami Vivekananda’s (1863–1902) philosophy of Vedanta (new life based on individual freedom and opportunity).¹³ However, it would be near impossible to systematise in some way the highly variable, and culturally different, receptivity and resistance of Indian women over the long time period of this book, using even a notional Indian perception or perceptions of favoured femininity in the colonial era as they might relate to female education.

      The book’s female subjects

      To study this topic effectively, my book confines itself to the constrained ambit of British India and some other spheres of European interaction. It offers thick descriptions of the work of key women and their contexts to illustrate broader theoretical issues. In understanding the fascinating intersections created by the vicissitudes of female education, the book examines some of the many women educators and schoolgirls (a professional divide easily blurred within this story) who actually worked in colonial India. This research is therefore distinct from other works that have looked at those middle-class women who wrote about female education, philanthropy and the empire from the distant vantage point of the metropole. This book also differs from research into Indian activists such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, whose more abstract commentary on female education was part of their broader alignment to the rising national movement.¹⁴ My work takes an intimate look at the labours of women educators and female learners operating in local school and medical domains in colonial India. Their voices inform the discussion in a more specific way than would be possible by relying on broad theorisation without mention of individual experiences. This book systematises and gives context to the work of these women by referring to the organising hand of broad raj policymaking, as well as to imported ideas from the West and other agencies both inside and outside India.

      By the end of the nineteenth century, depending on province, the raj claimed coverage of only between 1 and 2 per cent of school-age girls in its schools, which nominally amounted to some 780,000 individuals. In 1892, more reliable government reviews estimated that only 0.4 per cent of these girls were in secondary schools, with only half of this tiny percentage being Indian girls, and with twenty-five times as many boys being in this category.¹⁵ Unlike colonial boys’ education, those who focused on colonial education for girls did not have pretensions to be overriding stronger pre-colonial educational traditions on the subcontinent. Proportionately speaking, very few Indian girls ever secured careers as a result of their education under the raj, despite an ongoing official discourse throughout the colonial period about the professional trajectories created by female education. Instead, the usual colonial image regarding girls’ education was highly gendered and saw female education as important in diagnosing the cultural ‘deficits’ of Indians. The British in India were particularly energised when displaying Western stereotypes of child marriage, caste and widow customs as part of what they claimed to be a ‘degenerate’ Hindu polity. By the end of the nineteenth century, official female education policy was highly sensitised by race considerations to protect the moral body of a small group of mostly Eurasian women, and an even smaller group of Indian women whose families were closely connected to Western commerce.

      The book’s theoretical framework

      This book’s theorisation responds to recent powerful academic developments that provide potential for a deeper exploration of these issues. Since the publication of Vron Ware’s Beyond the Pale in 1992, little cross-generational work concerning women educators in India, and their female recipients, has attempted to trace change over almost the entire British colonial period. Ware suggested that an analysis of race, class and gender configurations remained relatively unchartered territory for those studying Victorian imperialism.¹⁶ Anne McClintock is one of a very small number of scholars who have elaborated on the relational aspects of these configurations: asserting that race, class and gender were not, in fact, distinct realms of experience, but came into existence in and through relation to each other in colonial contexts.¹⁷

      This neglect by researchers can be explained by the almost insurmountable complexity and scope of such study, at least before the development of new models of analysis to refine and distil such configurations. Developing adequate theorisation has turned out to be a demanding task. Cecily Jones’ Engendering Whiteness contributed by building new ways to interrogate largely colonial contexts where gender subordination, but class privilege, created conflicted domestic spaces for white women in Barbados and North Carolina.¹⁸ Meanwhile, as far as colonial India is concerned, new research possibilities are now brought into play by the use of three traditions of scholarship that have been largely unconnected in the past fifteen years. These are elaborated upon in each of the three following sections.

      The subaltern legacy and women in India

      The highly influential Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) appeared in the 1980s under the leadership of Ranajit Guha.¹⁹ It was rightly dismissive of earlier writing on India as being elitist and mechanical. By the early 1990s, these scholars had moved the raj out of the picture almost entirely, preferring, instead, an analysis of subaltern groupings themselves and of the input of Indian elites. Subaltern contributors came together to recover experiences, cultures, traditions and identities that had been lost or hidden by the action of a historiography that related mostly to elites.²⁰ However, despite their theoretical brilliance, at the time of Ware’s writing subaltern approaches had become, uncomfortably, hegemonic. There was a reluctance, indeed an avoidance on the part of some scholars, to talk of the European in India. This led to a delay in works on European women operating in India – unlike research into other parts of the British empire. Subsequent revisionism concerning the subaltern tradition is particularly important for the purposes of this book. For example, Chris Bayly re-established the obvious importance of the European interaction, recasting it mostly in terms of gossip runners and information gatherers in the earlier nineteenth century.²¹ Sumit Sarkar has written about the influence of the British in another way: as bringing with it clocks and the notion of linear time, as well as the ancient/medieval and modern schema established in a post-Renaissance West.²²

      The subaltern approach has influenced this book in terms of my interest in the consequences of policymaking and an emphasis on ‘learning’ rather than ‘teaching’, as indicated by the book’s title. However, in the last decade, the decentring of subaltern scholarship itself also offers other realignments that I have found useful when researching the colonial period, especially when it comes to the issue of gender. As Jim Masselos suggests of more recent scholarship directions:

      Subaltern subjects have been lost in the theoretical and methodological structures erected over them and the academic agendas created around them.²³

      This very methodological ambivalence offers new theoretical possibilities. For example, new work on Indian feminism questions and appropriates subaltern historiography and its close use of Spivak’s Marxist approach of rigid ‘elite’ and ‘oppressed’ categories.²⁴ Anagol’s The Emergence of Feminism has placed subaltern approaches under examination in this way, particularly their earlier neglect of gender and the differentiated roles of women on the subcontinent, and how one group of women might, in fact, oppress other groups of women.²⁵ It is worth noting here, too, that Indian women fighting anti-caste crusades, and crusades against child marriage, embarked on truly radical activism within their own communities in a way not yet adequately acknowledged by Western scholarship. On the key question of education, current theoretical revisionism offers new possibilities for building a more differentiated schema of women of different social classes and races, particularly as they interacted with each other and with the state.

      Writing this book has proved to be an uneven methodological enterprise, given what has gone before. For example, it is beyond the scope of a book of this kind to fully engage with the multiple narratives of feminist critique of the imperial interlude. Powerful subaltern analysis has, in a sense, overrun some gender narratives, such as contested notions of ‘femininity’ characterised here, even before these narratives could be established in postcolonial scholarship. However, new work, such as that of Roland Colomba writing about the gender colonial experience in the Philippines in the early 1900s, does reconfigure Spivakian framing of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ to analyse ‘white women … saving white men and brown women from each other’.²⁶ For much of the colonial experience in India, this framing reveals a more intricate entanglement of these groupings, particularly the groupings directed by white women.

      Further, feminist critiques by Indian scholars have been concerned with the actions of groups of mostly unidentified women, whose learning and domestic space is defined mostly through the formulation of theories about their oppression, their cultural identity and their poverty. That is, the rendering of colonial-era feminism by Indian scholars mostly focuses on groups of women, and their social, political and household interactions, especially regarding social reform, rather than on the study of individual feminists per se.²⁷ This contrasts with Western scholarship, which, with mostly pan-imperial vistas in view, has been less productive in attempting to identify feminists, white or non-white, living in colonial India during the same period. Additionally, as Rosalind O’Hanlon suggests, conventional histories of women and gender relations have obscured the local activism of women in other ways: by assigning them to more limited domains of family organisation, reproduction and sexuality, rather than seeing this activism as part of larger political processes concerning the nation state and related social, secular and religious processes.²⁸

      It is also necessary to consider the critical issue of race and the colonial state, which hindered later Western feminist engagement with India in the colonial era. Before the 1790s, in the remote and manly world of colonial India, the East India Company encouraged racial intermixture between Indian women and Company officials, which was commonplace. When white relations with Eurasians occurred in the 1820s, this was again driven by Company macro policymaking, and not by the intervention of white women. Later in the nineteenth century, the writing and actions of white women at home in Britain often amounted to little more than a Western-oriented philanthropy that was rarely used to attempt to actually change the lives of Indian women in India. However, for those white women actually living in India, the terrain of their engagement with Indian women – the classroom and the dispensary – was not feminist inspired, but was mostly negotiated through the paradigm of femininity and the preservation of the female body according to prevailing Western moral norms; norms amplified by the rhetoric of the colonial state itself.

      The attainment of these moral norms in the classroom and in the dispensary was also indicated by due displays of Western-conceived female professionalism. Key women figures in India, such as Annie Besant in the early twentieth century, subsequently rejected these brands of Western professionalism for the subcontinent because of the internal Western femininity values that mostly drove such Western professional mentalities as they related to women in India.²⁹ Furthermore, in the early twentieth century, the activism of white women was closely bounded and controlled by a superficial, but powerful, raj state authority; an official boundary that only really began to break down during the First World War. Before that time, these white women rarely acknowledged the discrimination inherent in decisions by the colonial state, based on race, that allowed only some women living in India to be the recipients of the Western civilising mission. This complicity was usually because the white women preferred a smaller group of more European-like Eurasians, whom they felt could more ‘realistically’ benefit from Western cultural ‘redemption’, as compared to their Indian sisters.

      Gender, education and the ‘white’ empire

      Scholarship on gender and empire, now well established, comes from a different tradition. This scholarship has made an important contribution to understanding the colonial world. It mostly concerns the experience of European women who were generally not part of power elites, but who were subject to distinctive oppression – operating under different social constraints, and experiencing empire differently from white men.

      In the 1990s, writing about the empire gave greater attention to women: mostly those of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History asserts that feminist writers, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, created images of ‘needy’ Indian women merely to encourage British women living in England to think of themselves as committed to a ‘racial mother-hood’ and part of an imperial civilising mission.³⁰ Claire Midgley, looking to other parts of non-white empire, sees the input of European women into the anti-slavery campaigns as part of the British feminist discourse ‘in an imperial context’. Midgley argues that these women did not simply draw on imperial ideologies, but were active in gendering them.³¹ These views regarding female activism, mostly about women resident in Britain, built on the perspective of Margaret Stroebel and others who examined how women functioned within the framework of ‘masculine’ imperialism, considering whether European women in India were, as Barbara Ramusack has posited, ‘cultural missionaries’, ‘maternal imperialists’ or ‘feminist allies’ of the Indian women they sought to help.³²

      Also significant is the work of scholars of the history of women’s education. Their work has recast the way academics consider the European view of women’s education in the nineteenth century, throughout the British empire. Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin show how leading feminist educators resisted gender roles and combined their public lives with private commitments.³³ Ruth Watts has interpreted the colonial divide concerning women travelling to India by studying the work of Mary Carpenter and her context of the 1860s and 1870s, both in England and in India.³⁴ These works add to Burton’s view of the changing perceptions of British feminists, who, arguably, imagined that the Western women’s movement, concerning empire, was one of imparting the products of a superior civilisation, almost as a commodity.³⁵

      Acknowledging this scholarship, I have endeavoured to be sensitive to the need to avoid taking stereotyped language from colonial writers and unselectively applying it to current theorisation about females. Looking at the economic and social condition of most Indian women today, earning a tiny fraction of global income and owning little if any property, McClintock argues that, for most of them, postcolonialism has in fact merely been a history of ‘hopes postponed’.³⁶ Meanwhile, Raewyn Connell views femininity and masculinity in current and past contexts in highly relational sociological terms.³⁷ These views strongly suggest that scholars of colonial India need to engage more with the etymology of gender terms in the subcontinental context.

      Colonial language also creates some inescapable ambiguities. ‘Female education’ is a phrase used unavoidably throughout this book, as in other works, and it relays, to some degree, the language of empire. Its use is necessary when referring to the mid-decades of the nineteenth century

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