Cuestionario

The blurring of the lines between Indian women and British women in Leslie’s poetry can be seen again in the larger corpus of novels written in the years following the Mutiny. Recent scholarship has begun to uncover some of the complexities of this body of representations, pointing to the tendency of Mutiny romance novels to depart from earlier stereotypi- cal images of Indian female victims and British male rescuers, so that the ‘Indian helpmeet’ intervenes to protect the Anglo- Indian hero, and becomes in doing so also ‘a symbolic rival to Anglo- Indian women’.18

This trend is apparent in Seeta, where Taylor sets at the climax of the narrative the eponymous heroine’s action of placing her body between the British protagonist Cyril Brandon and a mutineer’s spear.19

As Indian masculinity becomes further criminalised in the ways discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the focus of the sympathetic female character of Seeta herself moves away from Indian men, and towards her rescuer, Cyril Brandon. The progress of the novel involves her character undergoing a series of transformations, first becoming anglicised, and then being written out of the action altogether, as she is finally replaced by the British woman on whom she had tried to model herself. This is achieved first through Cyril’s vision of her, as he imagines her as bridging the gap between European and Indian. As soon as he first has sight of her, his impulse is to recuperate her, rescue her from the category of Indian /other and bring her closer to the European self.

For a native woman, Cyril Brandon had never seen any one so fair or of so tender a tone of colour. Such, he remembered, were many of the lovely women of Titian’s pictures – a rich golden olive, with a bright carnation tint rising under the skin – and Seeta’s was like them. One in particular came to his memory like a flash – the wife of the Duc d’Avalos, in the Louvre picture; or Titian’s Daughter, carrying fruits and flowers, at Berlin. (61)

Demonstrating his familiarity with and mastery of the culture and aes- thetics of Europe, he claims implicitly the right to accord Seeta a place in this category: having named her first a ‘native woman’, the rest of the meditation is directed at removing that label from her. Their marriage follows, recalling Taylor’s own marriage to a woman of partly Indian heritage.20

Representations of India

pictorial imagination of Seeta is reflected in the development of her character throughout the novel. She is consistently described as child- like: she is Cyril Brandon’s ‘pupil’ (184), Aunt Ella’s ‘child’ (224), and, dismissively, ‘that child’ to Mr and Mrs Mostyn (198). Like a child, her role is to be protected and cared for by all around her, as in the scene where she is welcomed by Narendra’s household with embraces, music and rituals (228). She learns English, then turns to Christianity in gratitude at Cyril’s safe return, when she declares that she will ‘go to [God] as a little child’; and afterwards finds Hinduism ‘cold and com- fortless’ (359).21 _{She takes as her exemplar Grace Mostyn, who teaches}

her music and needlework as well as English, and who is described as having ‘taken this strange girl to her heart’ and ‘making her more and more like herself’ (319–21). On Seeta’s deathbed, however, she remains a liminal character, hovering between Christianity and Hinduism. She explains that ‘the Lord is calling me, and I cannot stay’; but as she dies she recites the ‘Vedantic invocation to the sun’, and ‘strange snatches of her Sanscrit prayers were mingled with lines of simple Christian hymns she had learned’ (381–3). At this point, she is replaced as heroine, and replaced in Cyril’s affections, by Grace, the woman on whom Seeta has modelled her efforts at self- improvement. Cyril marries Grace, and takes over as head of his family on his brother’s death; as Pablo Mukherjee observes, this ‘restoration of the “pure English” in the romance plot, accompanies that of the pure type of British governance in the political plot’.22 _{As Seeta is eventually replaced by a British woman, so India is}

brought back into the orbit of British rule.

The end of the romance plot, or of Seeta’s part of it, is testimony to the limits of the project of anglicising India. As Seeta, the racial ‘other’, becomes more like Grace, her presence troubles the division and differ- ence between coloniser and colonised. The narrative solution is for her to die, and for Grace to step into her place. In a later work, Jenetha’s

Venture (1899), a different solution is apparent: the narrative forms

evolved to describe the heroically self- sacrificing Rajput woman are transferred onto British women. Jenetha’s Venture is part of the late surge of Mutiny novels in the 1890s, a response to the Ilbert Bill contro- versy (see below) which raised the spectre of Indians sitting in judgement on British people, as well as a response to the events of the Mutiny.23

In keeping with the emphasis on ‘saving’ British women from putative mistreatment by Indian judges during the campaign against the Bill, the novel revisits the narratives of female oppression developed during and after the Mutiny, revising them to replace images of female victimisation with accounts of successful female agency. Like Seeta, the heroine of

Transformations of India after the Indian Mutiny

her, she succeeds in defeating him while preserving her own life and her future with the male romantic lead.

Jenetha Wentworth is an English woman, but she also occupies in several ways the narrative space of Rajput women in Rajasthan and its later derivatives. She starts the novel in the service of a ‘Maharajah’, thus being associated with the Rajputs, as her father had been before her.24 _{Her first action is an expression of self- will, as she insists on riding}

with the British hero Ashby and his cohorts. On the road, she falls in love with him, and also realises ‘how foolish she had been in undertak- ing this terrible journey, and what an immense anxiety and trouble she was to those who formed her escort’ (77). She leaves, ‘risking her life and her very honour’, and writes a note for him: ‘I will no longer be a burden to you. Go and fight for England. Good- bye’ (83). This decision, described as an act of ‘heroic self- sacrifice’ (94), signals her alignment with the Rajput women of legend, a theme which is immediately taken further when she assumes the persona of the Indian woman Rohni, with the aid of ‘a native dress’ and ‘a bottle of some sort of dye’ (109), and travels with her two Rajput attendants who protect her honour fiercely.

Jenetha’s association with Rajput womanhood is further recalled with the appearance of the main villain of the novel, the mutineer Alaoodin – his name clearly signalling his identity with the Muslim invader Alauddin, whose pursuit of the Rajput princess Padmini initiates one of the most striking and often- adapted episodes of Rajasthan (see previous chapter). The novel remakes him as a low- status rather than an elite figure, ‘a fair sample of the low- class Mahommedan who was brought to the surface in the days of the Mutiny’ (72); and transfers his interest from the Rajput princess to Jenetha Wentworth, as he becomes ‘determined to secure her for himself’ (74). When, later in the novel, Alaoodin abducts Jenetha, her response underlines her alignment with Tod’s Padmini, as she takes her revolver and resolves that ‘alive she would never fall into the hands of the ruffianly crew’, but would ‘put an end to herself’ (255). In the end she saves herself instead, using the butt of the revolver to find a weak spot in the wall and attract the attention of her rescuers. Here the difference between the female agency attributed to the British woman and the Rajput woman becomes clear: the Rajput can only sacrifice herself, while Jenetha can act outside the parameters of Rajput female identity, and save herself, as well as others.

In the sequence of events which brings the novel to a close, Jenetha unites in one character the attributes of both the self- sacrificing Rajput woman and the British woman whose mission it is to save Indian women from predatory Indian masculinity. As the party are about to leave Delhi, she pays a parting visit to a sympathetic Indian princess, and finds

Representations of India

herself in a confrontation with her rebel husband, Gholam Khadir, who intrudes upon their conversation and attempts to extort money from his wife. Jenetha promises her, ‘I will shoot him if he lays a hand on you’ (307), adopting the role of protector of Indian women. After her depar- ture, with the princess’s treasure given to her as a gift, Gholam Khadir returns and murders his wife, pursues Jenetha and takes her prisoner. He attacks her, and she resists, telling him ‘I am no Hindu woman, but an English girl’ (312). Then, in what the text describes as ‘the supreme moment’, she fires at him, and with ‘a great flash of light’ he falls dead to the ground (314). Delhi in turn falls to the British, and Ashby sees in the distance the house where Gholam Khadir died, and ‘the figure of a girl in English dress clinging to the mast as she ran the Union Jack to the top!’ (327). As they draw nearer together, she throws herself in front of him, ‘in the desperate hope of saving him from what seemed certain death’ from a sniper’s bullet (329). Fortunately, both survive the episode.

The trajectory of these texts suggests, then, a process of gradual erasure of the Indian female protagonist. While Leslie’s British women take on aspects of Rajput heroines, Seeta demonstrates the transforma- tion and then replacement of the Indian heroine by a British woman, and

Jenetha’s Venture finally depicts a British woman who fills the role of

Rajput heroine and incorporates her attributes of agency and willingness to sacrifice. These two novels also demonstrate their writers’ growing unease with the concept of female agency, whether Indian or British: Indrani Sen points out, for instance, that by the end of Seeta, the British woman Grace is faced with ‘a prescriptive, exalted model of “Indian” wifely self abnegation’.25 _{Sen’s broad survey of the fiction of this period}

identifies ‘white female sexuality’ as the primary threat to order in British society; and describes this as a response to the gender imbalance of the British population in India, where the relatively small numbers of women give rise to ‘a virtual inversion of gender power- relations and an unaccustomed degree of female sexual power’.26 _{It is in this context that}

we might view the trajectory of Jenetha’s Venture. The text presents her as a figure of power in several respects. As well as wielding sexual power over the male protagonist Ashby – who is relegated to a secondary role for much of the plot – she is also a figure of desire for Indian men, and unlike her predecessors in Mutiny literature, this trait leads not to her death, but to the death of those whose desire for her is a transgression of the racial barrier between them.27 _{Her ability to disguise herself –}

common among male characters of this body of literature, but less so among women – involves the ability to cross gender as well as racial lines, when she successfully adopts the dress of a sepoy (293), and when

Transformations of India after the Indian Mutiny

she confronts Indian men and saves Indian women. Once she has saved Ashby’s life, however, she is relegated from romantic hero /heroine to the role of his nurse, and finally leaves India with him. While the novel cel- ebrates her success, it does so uneasily: the agency attributed to British women cannot be historicised or made part of legend as the Rajasthan tradition does with Indian female roles, but it is also incompatible with the good order of the British community in India. Though the story of

Jenetha’s Venture is clearly a triumph for the heroine, it also suggests

that there is no place in British India for her.