Iconographies of Anglo-Indian Women: Gender Constructs and Contrasts in a Changing Society

Abstract

Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions of women in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how European women were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting the comparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especially males) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenth century. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) of racial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century, European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating) social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distance between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped as frivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot 1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been described so negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attention to these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, in mitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official British attitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjects of a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5; Bharucha 1994: 88–9).