State rhetoric and the social formation of colonial women in India, 1790-1947

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09/09/2015

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Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences a Lecture State rhetoric and the social formation of colonial women in India, 1790-1947 Tim Allender University of Sydney 9th September 2015 This paper concerns a new academic approach to better understand knowledge transfer modalities across national and colonial boundaries. Its focus is constructions of femininity and feminism in colonial India over a relatively long time period of approximately 157 years. The paper looks at the variable and changing receptivity in a colonial setting to mostly Western fabricated mentalities and identity stereotypes regarding females. 'Learning femininity' in colonial India is one of the simplest and least aggressive phrases that might be used to describe any part of the imperial project. What 'female education' evoked via the official rhetorical repertoire was intentionally externalised by the raj to the metropole as a soft and consistent moral purpose that could only improve the 'condition' of women in India. Yet, as this paper demonstrates, the reality was something very different in terms of a fierce race and class deployment where official gender articulation also became a complex but strong conduit for attempted enculturation from the West. This complexity makes sense of a much more interesting story of how women educators and learners in India came to their classrooms and hospitals in different ways during this 157-year period, and the official mentalities that beckoned them there. In the early nineteenth century colonial female education concerned mostly only a few mission schools seeking to assert Judeo-Christian hegemony in surrounding communities. However, by the early twentieth century, female education had become more of a polemic, culminating in an unsuccessful attempt to shore up official legitimacy using the uncertain relevance to India of Western feminist modernity. During the British colonial interregnum, the raj variously deployed Indian, Eurasian and even European females in the artificially constructed Western settings of female professionalism, where Western gender codes of femininity and medical care mediated the state's own race and Western class agendas. 'Eurasian ladies' were the official outcome preference by the later nineteenth century, where British colonial learning settings aimed to produce a feminine prototype in India. This educated feminine prototype was to be brown, but not too brown; that is, mostly a Western oriented Eurasian beneficiary; and a 'lady' not a 'woman'; that is, an accomplished female of English middle class feminine sensibility and bearing. These strong race constructions also had implications for the development of eugenic theorisation at the metropole. Additionally, the role of white women, at home, in Britain, when looking to 'help' colonial brown women 'abroad' was usually a self-absorbing philanthropy rarely reaching Indian women in India.[1] However, for those white women actually living in India, their engagement terrain with Eurasian and Indian women in the classroom, and in the medical dispensary, was not of Western feminist making. Rather, it was negotiated through the paradigm of femininity and the preservation of the female body according to prevailing Western moral norms that were mostly amplified by state rhetoric. This paper is based on my forthcoming book: T. Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820-1932 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016)