Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T17:44:38.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Good Sports and Right Sorts: Guns, Gender, and Imperialism in British India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Mary A. Procida
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the early 1920s, a young British woman visiting India met the man she would subsequently marry. As the woman's daughter later revealed, she and her companions “were just sitting down to dinner when he came in through the door and one of the bearers came forward to take his gun and clean it, but my father would have none of that. He always cleaned his own gun before he did anything else. This impressed my mother.” If the narrative halted here, the contemporary reader might construe the story as yet another example of traditional gender dynamics. The love-struck young woman admiringly observes the male imperialist's competent, professional handling of his firearm, symbol both of his mastery over the colonized Indian landscape and its people and of his masculine sexual prowess. In this instance, however, the young woman was no passively adoring female quivering before this symbolic display of male power and sexuality. She herself, as her daughter revealed, had been “brought up with guns” and was a “crack shot.” Her admiration for the man who would become her husband stemmed not from feelings of awe or feminine inadequacy but rather from her cool assessment that here was someone who was her equal—and could be her partner—in hunting, shooting, and handling of firearms. Indeed as their daughter recalled, the successful marriage between these two gun aficionados was based in part on the wife's participation in her husband's hunting duties as an officer in the Indian Forest Service.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 4: At Home in the Empire , October 2001 , pp. 454 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Ledzion, Mary McDonald, Forest Families (London, 1991), p. 19Google Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 I use the term “Anglo Indian” as the British in India did—to refer to themselves, not to indicate persons of European and Asian heritage. For one example of a novelistic gun-toting heroine, see Savi, Ethel, The Devil's Carpet: An Anglo-Indian Romance (London, 1954)Google Scholar.

4 Gouda, Frances and Clancy-Smith, Julia, “Introduction,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Clancy-Smith, Julia and Gouda, Frances (Charlottesville, Va., and London, 1998), p. 1Google Scholar.

5 Dane Kennedy, e.g., argues that outside the hill stations of India “the raj left little room for women, for families.” Kennedy, Dane, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 226–27Google Scholar. “British women were not only excluded from these tales of heroes and adventure [set forth in imperial “popular travel literature and fiction and in the journals of scientific explorations”], they also seemed to be physically excluded from West Africa.” McEwan, Cheryl, “Encounters with West African Women: Textual Representations of Difference by White Women Abroad,” in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Blunt, Alison and Rose, Gillian (New York, 1994), p. 74Google Scholar. Nancy L. Paxton argues that autobiographies of British women in India represent a limited attempt to introduce female voices into the public spaces of the empire from which they had been excluded. Paxton, Nancy L., “Disembodied Subjects: English Women's Autobiography under the Raj,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 387–409Google Scholar.

6 Hyam, Ronald, Britain's Imperial Century: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London, 1976), p. 141Google Scholar.

7 Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly” Englishman and the “Effeminate” Bengali (Manchester and New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Dawson, Graham, “The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English-British Masculinity,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Roper, Michael and Tosh, John (London and New York, 1991), p. 119Google Scholar.

8 J. A. Mangan argues that the games ethic characteristic of nineteenth-century public schools instilled “the basic tools of imperial command: courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control.” Mangan, J. A., The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (New York, 1986), p. 18Google Scholar.

9 Hyam, Ronald, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990)Google Scholar.

10 Tosh, John, “Imperial Masculinity and the Flight from Domesticity in Britain 1880–1914,” in Gender and Colonialism, ed. Foley, Timothy P., Pilkington, Lionel, Ryder, Sean, and Tilley, Elizabeth (Dublin, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Dawson, Graham, “The Imperial Adventure Hero and British Masculinity: The Imagining of Sir Henry Havelock,” in Foley, et al., eds., Gender and ColonialismGoogle Scholar; Tosh, John, “Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson,” in Roper, and Tosh, , eds., Manful Assertions, p. 67Google Scholar.

11 Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. For an interesting assessment of the nationalist reaction to this effeminization of the indigenous male, see Gouda, Frances, “Gender and ‘Hyper-Masculinity’ as Post-Colonial Modernity during Indonesia's Struggle for Independence, 1945–1949,” in Unfinished Business: Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, ed. Burton, Antoinette (London, 1999), pp. 161–74Google Scholar.

12 Midgley, Clare, “Gender and Imperialism: Mapping the Connections,” in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Midgley, Clare (Manchester and New York, 1998), p. 1Google Scholar.

13 Midgley, , “Gender and Imperialism,” p. 7Google Scholar. For recent explorations of women's varied roles in the European empires, see (in addition to Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism) Clancy-Smith and Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire; Strobel, Margaret, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, Ind., 1991)Google Scholar, “Gender, Sex, and Empire,” in Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Adas, Michael (Philadelphia, 1993)Google Scholar; Chaudhuri, Nupur and Strobel, Margaret, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, Ind., 1992)Google Scholar. Overviews of recent work in this area are provided in Formes, Malia B., “Beyond Complicity versus Resistance: Recent Work on Gender and European Imperialism,” Journal of Social History 28 (March 1995): 629–41Google Scholar; and Buzard, James, “Victorian Women and the Implications of Empire,” Victorian Studies 36 (June 1993): 443–53Google Scholar.

14 Metcalf, Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, Ind., 1994), pp. 93–94Google Scholar. As Sara Mills points out, however, expectation and reality did not inevitably mesh: “The imperial context is one where gender roles are polarized in ways in which perhaps they are not to the same extent in the home country …[T]he empire was coded as a place where extreme forms of masculine behavious [sic] were expected even if that is not what happened in reality.” Mills, Sara, “Knowledge, Gender and Empire,” in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Blunt, Alison and Rose, Gillian (New York, 1994), pp. 36–37Google Scholar.

15 On the Dutch, see Gouda, Frances, Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 80Google Scholar. On the French, see Conklin, Alice, “Redefining ‘Frenchness’: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa, 1914–40,” in Clancy-Smith, and Gouda, , eds., Domesticating the Empire, p. 76Google Scholar; Edwards, Penny, “Womanizing Indochina: Fiction, Nation, and Cohabitation in Colonial Cambodia, 1890–1930,” in Clancy-Smith, and Gouda, , eds., Domesticating the Empire, p. 113Google Scholar. For discussions of imperial domesticity from the perspective of the colonized woman in India, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990)Google Scholar.

16 For example, Kumari Jayawardena examines the lives of nationalist leader Annie Besant and women's rights activist Margaret Cousins, among other Europeans, in her study of a diverse group of women who all “crossed boundaries of accepted race, gender and class positions … problematizing many issues of feminism and nationalism.” Jayawardena, Kumari, The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Colonial Rule (New York and London, 1995), p. 1Google Scholar. The literature on Western women travelers in the European empires is vast. For particularly perceptive readings, see Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Melman, Billie, Women's Orients, English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992)Google Scholar; Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, N.C., 1996)Google Scholar. Antoinette Burton discusses British feminists' engagement with empire in Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994)Google Scholar.

17 The historical and conceptual difficulties of separate spheres analysis in metropolitan British history are convincingly laid out by Vickery, Amanda in “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vickery's article does not address the imperial literature, however.

18 Discussing the experiences of the Dutch in Indonesia, Frances Gouda posits the existence of “a gendered, if permeable separation” between public and private in both Europe and the colonies; however, she also argues that “housewives in the Netherlands itself possessed more leeway in endowing their ordinary routines with a satisfying content. If they wanted to do so, middle-class wives in Holland could engage in charitable activities or take part in church circles or book clubs. Middle-class women could attend an array of conceits and visit museums and the theater or, if they lived in large cities and were bold enough, might participate in suffragist politics.” Gouda, , Colonial Practice, p. 158Google Scholar.

19 Steel, Flora Annie, The Garden of Fidelity (London, 1929), pp. 160–61Google Scholar. The Islington Commission noted that in 1913–14 there were forty-eight “Women's Appointments” in the Education Department out of a total of 633 positions. Royal Commission on the Public Services, Report of the Commissioners (London, 1917), p. 8Google Scholar.

20 Joan Allen, “Plain Tales from the Raj,” interview, tape recording, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.

21 These issues are more fully explored in Procida, Mary A., “Married to the Empire: British Wives and British Imperialism in India, 1883–1947” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997)Google Scholar.

22 Mary Ann Lind has analyzed a very limited sample of fifteen Anglo-Indian women who “took an active role in social reform and in welfare activities” by, for example, bringing medicine to Indian villagers or interacting with Indian women while on tour with their husbands. While Lind sees these activities as demonstrating Anglo-Indian women's devotion and compassion, they fall far short of the level of commitment demonstrated by many women in Britain at this time who were actively engaged in social welfare, as either professionals or volunteers. Lind, Mary Ann, The Compassionate Memsahibs: Welfare Activities of British Women in India, 1900–1947 (New York, 1988), p. 2Google Scholar. Antoinette Burton's discussion in Burdens of History of feminists' uses of the “civilizing” discourses of imperialism centers on British women, not Anglo-Indians.

23 Bayley, Viola, “One Woman's Raj,” Bayley Papers, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, p. 30Google Scholar.

24 See, e.g., Katherine Smith-Pearse, interview, tape recording, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, Mss Eur R202.

25 Women's ability successfully to enact this transformation is predicated on the difference between biological notions of sex and mutable social constructions of gender that, according to Joan Scott, lie at the heart of gender history. Scott, Joan Wallach, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 29Google Scholar. In his essay on Lawrence of Arabia, Graham Dawson similarly discusses a converse example of gender transformation, noting that “Lawrence himself is often presented in a distinctly feminine light.” Dawson, , “The Blond Bedouin,” p. 137Google Scholar.

26 British women in West Africa “often became ‘honorary men,’ were treated no differently by the Africans than were British men and were often referred to as ‘Sir.’” McEwan, , “Encounters with West African Women,” p. 88Google Scholar.

27 Boisseau, T. J., “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana’: A Critical Cultural Study of an Imperial Feminist,” Signs 21 (Autumn 1995): 116–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Greenberger, Allen, The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960 (London, 1969), p. 29Google Scholar. Mrinalini Sinha has argued that the construction of the categories of effeminate Bengali and manly Englishman similarly solidified imperial power in the hands of the British. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.

29 Plumwood, Val, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York, 1993), p. 5Google Scholar.

30 In 1881, when the British undertook the first all-India census, the British-born population consisted of 77,178 men and 12,610 women. Census of India, 1881, vol. 4, Statistics of British-born Subjects (Calcutta, 1881–1884)Google Scholar, Form I. In 1931, the year of the last complete census under British auspices, there were 110,137 male British citizens and 45,418 females. Census of India, 1931 (Delhi, 1932)Google Scholar, Table 19. The representation of men in the resident Anglo-Indian community is overstated in these figures, since the British army maintained a large, if transient, presence in India. In some areas of the Indian empire such as the hill stations, the numbers of British women equaled or exceeded the number of British men. Kennedy, , Magic Mountains, p. 7Google Scholar.

31 Hyam, , Empire and Sexuality, p. 62Google Scholar.

32 SirJeffries, Charles, Partners in Progress (London, 1949), p. 156Google Scholar. See also Conklin, , “Redefining ‘Frenchness,’” p. 80Google Scholar.

33 Hervey, H. J. A., The European in India (London, 1913), p. 201Google Scholar (emphasis added).

34 On women's incorporation into husbands' work, see Callan, Hillary, “The Premiss of Dedication: Notes Towards an Ethnography of Diplomats' Wives,” in Perceiving Women, ed. Ardener, S. (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Callan, Hillary and Ardener, Shirley, eds., The Incorporated Wife (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Finch, Janet, Married to the Job (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

35 “There was never any question of a married Memsahib doing a job.” Mrs. K. Mullan, interview, transcript, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, MT8, MT9.

36 Ibid.

37 Chitty's husband instructed her in riding and also taught her to school horses for polo. Chitty, Anna, Musings of a Memsahib (Lymington, 1988), p. 3Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in Ledzion, , Forest Families, p. 111Google Scholar.

39 Birdwood, Lady Vere, “Plain Tales from the Raj,” interview, tape recording, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.Google Scholar

40 Kennedy, Dane, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, N.C., 1987), pp. 135–37Google Scholar.

41 MacKenzie, John M., The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), p. 168Google Scholar.

42 Blunt, Edward, The I.C.S.: The Indian Civil Service (London, 1937), p. 225Google Scholar.

43 Chitty, , Musings, p. 3Google Scholar; Mrs.Portal, Iris, “Memoir,” Portal Papers, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, p. 46Google Scholar.

44 Chitty, , Musings, p. 87Google Scholar.

45 SirBirley, Derek, Land of Sport and Glory (Manchester, 1995), p. 123Google Scholar. John M. MacKenzie states that by the 1850s, women were engaged in foxhunting. MacKenzie, , Empire of Nature, p. 21Google Scholar.

46 Although Eden did not herself shoot a tiger she was well aware of her extraordinary status as a woman on a big-game hunting trip. She wrote, “Certainly this expedition has quite answered to me in point of pleasure. Then I am rather proud of having seen a tiger killed, because, except for Mrs. Cockerelly, there is not another woman in India who has, I believe.” Quoted in Dunbar, Janet, Golden Interlude: The Edens in India, 1836–1842 (Boston, 1956), p. 81Google Scholar. Savory, Isabel, A Sportswoman in India: Personal Adventures and Experiences of Travel in Known and Unknown India (London, 1900)Google Scholar; Mrs.Tyacke, Richard, How I Shot My Bears, or Two Years' Tent Life in Kalluf Lahoul (London, 1893)Google Scholar.

47 Hargreaves, Jennifer, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women's Sports (London and New York, 1994), p. 43Google Scholar.

48 Birley, , Land of Sport and Glory, p. 123Google Scholar.

49 Hargreaves, , Sporting Females, p. 36Google Scholar; McCrone, Kathleen E., Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870–1914 (London, 1988), p. 271Google Scholar.

50 McCrone, , Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, p. 284Google Scholar

51 Savory, , Sportswoman in India, p. 343Google Scholar.

52 Ledzion, , Forest Families, p. 110Google Scholar.

53 Savory, , Sportswoman in India, pp. 282–83Google Scholar.

54 Tyacke, , How I Shot My Bears, pp. 43, 45Google Scholar (emphasis added); Savory, , Sportswoman in India, pp. 152, 255–56Google Scholar.

55 Scott, Beatrix, “Indian Panorama,” Scott Papers, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, p. 62Google Scholar.

56 Mrs.Mills, J. P., “Memoir,” p. 10Google Scholar, Mills Papers, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies. Grace Seton similarly wore “Jodpur [sic] breeches, heavy boots, a Viyella shirt, a double terai (felt hat) a spine pad” as her normal hunting attire. Seton, Grace Thompson, “Yes, Lady Saheb” (New York and London, 1925), p. 132Google Scholar.

57 Birdwood, “Plain Tales from the Raj.”

58 Chitty, , Musings, pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

59 McCrone, , Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, p. 287Google Scholar; MacKenzie, John M., “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times,” in Manliness and Morality, ed. Mangan, J. A. and Walvin, James (Manchester, 1987), pp. 178, 188Google Scholar.

60 Allen, “Plain Tales from the Raj.”

61 MacKenzie, , “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter,” p. 179Google Scholar.

62 Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989)Google Scholar.

63 The one exception was in the North-West Frontier Province where the British were continuously embroiled in conflict with tribes along the borders of the empire. The British believed it imperative to keep guns out of enemy hands; weapons and ammunition were carefully accounted for and soldiers placed under strict orders to retrieve all lost weapons from the battlefield.

64 Other types of hunting that did not require the use of guns were also popular. Emulating the British squirearchy, Anglo-Indians rode to the hounds, although their quarry was the indigenous jackal rather than the fox. Pig-sticking, a dangerous sport involving the spearing of a wild boar with a seven- to nine-foot long weapon (shooting the “pig” was considered unsporting) was also popular, particularly among army officers. Anglo-Indian women participated in both sports.

65 Bennett, Scott, “Shikar and the Raj,” South Asia 7 (1984): 76Google Scholar. See also Pandian, M. S. S., “Gender Negotiations: Hunting and Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century Nilgiris,” in Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, ed. Uberoi, Patricia (New Delhi, 1996), p. 243Google Scholar.

66 Fitzroy, Yvonne, Courts and Camps in India: Impressions of Viceregal Tours, 1921–1924 (London, 1926), pp. 103–4Google Scholar.

67 MacKenzie, , Empire of Nature, p. 171Google Scholar.

68 See Pandian, “Gender Negotiations” for a detailed analysis of this method of hunting.

69 See Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the social and cultural dynamics of eighteenth-century legislation against poaching in Britain. For a summary of the various laws regulating hunting in England, see Whitehead, Kenneth G., Hunting and Stalking Deer in Britain through the Ages (Pomfret, Vt., 1980), pp. 161–85Google Scholar.

70 MacKenzie, , Empire of Nature, p. 283Google Scholar.

71 Pandian, “Gendered Negotiations.”

72 Birley, , Land of Sport and Glory, p. 2Google Scholar; Hargreaves, , Sporting Females, p. 42Google Scholar.

73 Bourne, Hilda, “It Was Like This,” Bourne Collection, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, p. 27Google Scholar.

74 Mrs. M. Ravenscroft, interview, transcript, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, MT34. She also recalled that her father was “so ashamed” when she and her mother “constantly won all the prizes.”

75 McCrone, , Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, p. 86Google Scholar.

76 Hargreaves, , Sporting Females, p. 119Google Scholar.

77 Mary, , Countess of Minto, India, Minto and Morley, 1905–1910 (London, 1934), pp. 198, 318Google Scholar. Of the twentieth-century viceroys only two, Lord Reading and General Wavell, were from middle-class, professional backgrounds. Tinker, Hugh, Viceroy: Curzon to Mountbatten (Karachi, 1997), p. 4Google Scholar.

78 R. Pearson speculates that the East India Company, which governed India until 1858, preferred middle-class men because they would accept the self-discipline necessary to imperial service. Pearson, R., Eastern Interlude: A Social History of the European Community in Calcutta (Calcutta, 1954), p. 9Google Scholar.

79 O'Malley, L. S. S., The Indian Civil Service, 1601–1930 (London, 1965), pp. 147–49Google Scholar; Blunt, , The I.C.S., p. 200Google Scholar.

80 Martyn, Margaret, Married to the Raj (London, 1992), p. 1Google Scholar.

81 The one significant exception to this was the children of Anglo-Indians who, although often schooled in Britain, had exposure to the sporting atmosphere of India from a young age.

82 MacKenzie, , Empire of Nature, p. 194Google Scholar.

83 Minto, , India, Minto and Morley, p. 67Google Scholar.

84 Inderpal Grewal discusses how Indian nationalists stood this symbolism on its head by associating the zenana and its female inhabitants with the Victorian virtues of home and hearth. Grewal, , Home and the Harem, p. 25Google Scholar.

85 Savory, , Sportswoman in India, pp. 271–72Google Scholar.

86 In the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, tigers killed 1,600 people per year. A single tiger was capable of destroying cattle worth £600–£700. The British government in India offered rewards for killing tigers of fifty to 200 rupees per animal, as well as lesser amounts for the killing of panthers and leopards. MacKenzie, , Empire of Nature, pp. 180, 182Google Scholar.

87 Burke, Norah, Jungle Child (New York, 1955), p. 77Google Scholar (emphasis added).

88 Martin, Monica, Out in the Mid-day Sun (Boston, 1950), p. 140Google Scholar.

89 Bourne, , It Was Like This, p. 27Google Scholar.

90 Ibid., 115. Women were apparently often called upon to shoot dangerous animals that wandered into the compound, particularly mad dogs. See, e.g., Smith-Pearse, interview; Queenie Mansfield, letter of 1 July 1923, Mansfield Papers, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies. One woman even had to shoot her own dog after it had been bitten by a rabid animal and her husband proved too squeamish to undertake the task. Martin, , Out in the Mid-day Sun, p. 172Google Scholar.

91 Bourne, , It Was Like This, p. 115Google Scholar.

92 This feeling of security endured despite the protests, including some terrorist acts, associated with the 1905 partition of Bengal.

93 Hale, H. W., Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad, 1974), p. 1Google Scholar; Ghosh, Kali Charan, The Roll of Honour, Anecdotes of Indian Martyrs (Calcutta, 1965), p. 231Google Scholar.

94 John MacKenzie similarly points out the connection made by Baden-Powell and the Boy Scout movement between training hunters and creating soldiers. MacKenzie, , “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter,” pp. 176–98Google Scholar.

95 The most significant instance of this increasingly violent imperialism was the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which British-led Indian troops opened fire on unarmed Indian civilians. For an assessment of Anglo-Indian support of General Dyer, commander of the troops at Amritsar, see Sayer, Derek, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920,” Past and Present, no. 131 (May 1991): 159Google Scholar. Mildred and William Archer, Socialists who supported Indian nationalist aspirations, described their alienation from the rest of the Anglo-Indian community in Mildred Archer, “Memories of the British in India,” interview, tape recording, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, and in William, and Archer, Mildred, India Served and Observed (London, 1994), p. 6Google Scholar.

96 See, e.g., the recollections of Nancy Archer-Shee, “Memsahibs' Questionnaire,” University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies. Although at least one Anglo-Indian woman, Mildred Archer, asserted that few Europeans carried guns (neither she nor her husband was ever armed, although her husband, a civil service officer, did have a police bodyguard during the Quit India disturbances of 1942), my research reveals numerous instances of gun-toting wives during the interwar period. Mildred Archer, “Memories of the British in India.”

97 While particular districts such as Midnapore, where three I.C.S. officers were assassinated by terrorists (one in the midst of a football match) or Calcutta, where terrorists successfully raided a government office building killing several officials, might have been particularly dangerous, it appears that nationalist violence was more apparent than real in most regions of India. The British version of nationalist terrorist activities is presented in Hale, Political Trouble in India; the Indian perspective is set forth in Ghosh, The Roll of Honour. See also Sarkar, Tanika, Bengal, 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi, 1987)Google Scholar.

98 Hale, , Political Trouble in India, p. 30Google Scholar.

99 “Had we been in France or Italy I think I should have feared to trust myself alone on a strange country road towards sundown with a crowd of unknown men, for none of my servants were with me; but in Kashmir one so quickly realises what an arrant coward the Kashmiri is at heart, in spite of his physique, that I never once during my stay felt any of that bodily fear which a woman alone is apt to feel in most so-called civilised countries.” Morison, Margaret Cotter, A Lonely Summer in Kashmir (London, 1904), pp. 70–71Google Scholar.

100 Lawrence, Lady Rosamond, Indian Embers (Palo Alto, 1991), p. 385Google Scholar.

101 SirTegart, Charles, Terrorism in India (Calcutta, 1983), p. 6Google Scholar.

102 Hale, , Political Trouble in India, pp. 27, 32, 35–36, 33Google Scholar.

103 “The Memsahib's Point of View,” Cornhill Magazine 48 (May 1920): 598–99Google ScholarPubMed.

104 Tegart, Kathleen, “Memsahibs' Questionnaire,” University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian StudiesGoogle Scholar.

105 Coralie Taylor, “Memories of the British in India,” interview, tape recording, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, Mss Eur R145.

106 Hale, , Political Trouble in India, p. 24Google Scholar.

107 Ibid., pp. 33, 35. The extent of women's involvement in violent nationalist activities, however, is tiny compared with the massive female participation in Gandhi's campaign of nonviolence.

108 Bose, Purnima, “Engendering the Armed Struggle: Women, Writing, and the Bengali ‘Terrorist’ Movement,” in Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, ed. Foster, Thomas, Siegel, Carol, and Berry, Ellen E. (New York, 1996), p. 159Google Scholar.

109 Tegart, K. F., “Charles Tegart: Memoir of an Indian Police Officer,” British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, Mss Eur C235, pp. 252–53Google Scholar.

110 Curtis, Decima, “The Last Twelve Years of the British Raj Recollected by the Wife of a British District Officer,” British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, Mss Eur C462, pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

111 Hamilton, Olivia, “Memsahibs' Questionnaire,” University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian StudiesGoogle Scholar; see also Lawrence, , Indian Embers, p. 384Google Scholar.

112 Lawrence, , Indian Embers, p. 384Google Scholar.

113 Griffiths, Lady, “Plain Tales from the Raj,” interview, tape recording, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.Google Scholar

114 Hale, , Political Trouble in India, p. 115Google Scholar.

115 Hinkson, Pamela, Indian Harvest (London, 1941), p. 31Google Scholar.

116 However, Grace Seton, an American traveling on her own in India in the 1920s, remarked, “I think that nowhere in the world can a woman alone (attended by a good native servant, of course) travel more comfortably and safely, than in First-Class Reserved Ladies Compartment on Indian Railroads, except in those parts where seditious, anti-British propaganda has inflamed the masses.” This despite the fact that Seton had herself fended off a threatened break-in while on an Indian train! Seton, , “Yes, Lady Saheb,” pp. 63, 60–61Google Scholar.

117 Chitty, , Musings, p. 27Google Scholar.

118 Macdonald, B., India: Sunshine and Shadow (London, 1988), p. 115Google Scholar.

119 Ibid.; Seton, , “Yes, Lady Saheb,” p. 61Google Scholar.

120 Crofton, Lady Olive, “They Also Serve,” p. 102Google Scholar, Crofton Papers, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies.

121 Mitchell, Sheila, “Memsahibs' Questionnaire,” University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian StudiesGoogle ScholarPubMed.

122 Margaret Ramsay-Brown, “Memories of the British in India,” interview, tape recording, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, Mss Eur R152.

123 Chitty, , Musings, p. 26Google Scholar.

124 Burke, , Jungle Child, p. 192Google Scholar.

125 Ibid., p. 78.

126 Ibid.

127 Anne McClintock points out the inherent hazards for postcolonial feminisms in misconstruing the lives of Anglo-Indian and other imperial women as feminist: “Films like Out of Africa, clothing chains like Banana Republic and perfumes like ‘safari’ all peddle neo-colonial nostalgia for an era when European women in brisk white shirts and safari green supposedly found freedom in empire: running coffee plantations, killing lions and zipping about the colonial skies in airplanes—an entirely misbegotten commercialization of white women's ‘liberation.’” McClintock, Anne, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura (New York, 1994), p. 299Google Scholar.