Pruebas

Western women were engaged throughout the Victorian era in a variety of Orientalising projects: they wrote novels, travelogues and memoirs of their time travelling and living in the „East.‟ Antoinette Burton, provocatively paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling, has argued that Victorian feminists saw their role in the Orient as „the white woman‟s burden,‟ a natural obligation and duty that was derivative of the imperial project itself. She has argued that „their concern for Indian women was part of a complex of cultural assumptions which, shaped ... by an emerging middle class feminist perspective ... dictated a “white woman‟s burden” that was as natural to them as empire itself appeared to be.‟ (Burton, „The White Woman‟s Burden,‟ 152) Nineteenth century British feminism was thus engendered as much by imperialism as by domestic reforms, where feminists „sought empowerment by a variety of means – education, the vote, welfare legislation not the least of which was by allying their cause with British imperial rule.‟ (Burton, „The White Woman‟s Burden,‟ 152) The natural extension of such discourses being intertwined with the colonial project was the movement of female British teachers, administrators, political activists and writers to the Indian subcontinent. Autobiography and the travelogue were again the most prevalent forms by which the Orient was placed under the female imperial gaze. Writers such as Fanny Parkes, Flora Annie Steel and Annie Besant all engaged in a process that sought to write the Orient from their own British feminist perspectives. This is not to say that they form a monolithic branch of female Orientalists; there were contrasts and correlatives in the way they represented India to their readerships. Some were sympathetic to local Indian patriarchal customs and others were scathing in their appraisal of them, however, all sought to „en-gender‟

within India a narrative of progress, modernity and social expansion that included women at the heart of these colonial discourses.

Fanny Parkes‟s Wanderings of a Pilgrim first published in 1850 encompasses two volumes and was a typical picturesque travelogue that placed India and most specifically Indian women under the analytical gaze of Orientalism. Parkes was born in 1794 and went to India in 1822, where she spent the next twenty fours years living and travelling throughout the subcontinent. She was the daughter of a colonial civil servant (Captain William Archer) and married one herself (Charles Crawford Parkes), subsequently being stationed in Allahabad. This enabled her to reside in India for an extended period of time. As opposed to the influx of memsahibs of the later Victorian period (English women sent to India to be with their husbands), she has been historically viewed as sympathetic to Indian customs and culture and there is no denying that she did indulge in particular Indian cultural practices, such as her appreciation for Indian dress, playing the sitar and learning the indigenous languages (she learnt Urdu).133 Parkes also demonstrated an agency and subversive attitude towards colonial policies that she deemed to be too oppressive or inapplicable within an Indian setting, especially the missionary zeal of administrators such as Charles Grant and the wider evangelical movement. However, her status as an Indophile does not place her outside of the Orientalist paradigm, as William Dalrymple has attempted to argue in his introduction to his edition of the text.134 She was married into the Indian civil service and thus was complicit in the functioning of the Empire and its cultural and political hegemony. This cultural hegemony functions as an undercurrent in her travelogue and its representation of India and its many peoples.

In her personal account, Parkes employs typical Orientalist tropes in her framing of the Indian people; she almost immediately in her travels writes of her encounter with an alien landscape: „little did I think it would ever be my fate to visit such an uncivilized island,‟135

where the women were „very idle; in fact, there appear[ed] no necessity for exertion.‟ (Parkes, Wanderings..., 16) The „native‟

woman is also sexualised within the lexicon of exotica. On visiting the palace of Shah Jahan and Noor-Jahan, Parkes states that: „I was now in the deserted zenana of the most beautiful woman recorded in history; and one whose talents and whose power over the sovereign, made her, in fact, the actual sovereign.‟ (Parkes,

Wanderings of a Pilgrim, 365) One is left in no doubt what type of power and influence Parkes is alluding to; she offers an opaque allusion to the power of Oriental sexuality. Conversely, Indian women are also framed as victims, where they are portrayed as being the exploited figures of a backward social system. Polygamy and the zenana figure as two particular tropes that are consistently placed under the analytical microscope of feminist discourse. Parkes muses on the discontent festering in the hearts of Muslim women in regards to polygamy: „the ladies all look upon me as pattern: they do not admire a system of having three or four rivals, however well pleased the gentlemen may be with the custom.‟ (Parkes, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, 231) Thus, Parkes lays the grounds for the overall colonial project, to change the native system for the benefit of the natives, a discourse designed to reconsolidate the Orientalists‟ position of converting the Orient into what it should be and not what it is.

However, the voices of the Indian women are never given depth or texture, they figure as silhouettes in the narrative designs of the female imperialist. In these „narratives the voices of Indian women appear only erratically and when … quoted it

is rarely mentioned whether the woman in question spoke to the interviewer in English or through an interpreter.‟ (Burton, „The White Woman‟s Burden,‟ 152) As a consequence, the female Orientalist assumed the voice of the native woman; their hopes and fears were projected through British feminist sensibilities. In one passage, the native woman is cast as temptress:

[Her] name is Gosseina; she is not pretty, but possesses great influence over her lover. This girl, some fourteen months ago, was dancing at the residency for twenty-five rupees a night: and a woman of such a low caste not even a sa‟is would have married her. (Parkes, Wanderingsof a Pilgrim, 194)

Kabbani has stressed that this erotic motif employed by Parkes served as a consistent strain within Orientalist representations of Eastern women and was typical of Victorian prejudices towards the Orient, she states that the Eastern temptress‟s „learning serves only to please and placate a man – it has no … [other] function at all.‟ (Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 51) This passage highlights how Victorian women also framed the native woman upon a sexual terrain; however, I would contest that when analysed in depth the passage also betrays the sexual fears that were so rigorously regulated during the Victorian era.

Nancy Paxton, in her appraisal of Flora Annie Steel and Annie Besant, two later Victorian feminists, has argued that British female Orientalists wrote about Indian sexuality and its lack of restraint as a surrogate for their own regulations and the sexual technologies that governed their own behaviour. Female Orientalism then was far more about constructing and ordering themselves within the imperial and civilising project than transmitting freedoms to their Indian „sisters:‟

[These] autobiographical writings about India demonstrates ultimately, then, how the politics of empire worked to circumscribe, not only the rhetoric of feminism but also their discourse about love and sexuality. Both Besant and Steel came to regard their resistance to sexual desire as a sign of spiritual enlightenment or racial superiority, and their example suggest the central role

British imperialism played in defining and imposing an ideology of sexual as well as racial identity.136

This sexual discourse was manipulated to frame the Western woman as civilised, strong, moral and chaste, all qualities that were posed against the native but also figured as the very characteristics that engendered the Victorian male and archetypal colonialist. Although Foucault‟s corpus on sexuality neglects the colonial world to a large degree I would argue that the aforementioned texts were consonant with Victorian sexual discourses that sought to engender rigorous social control through the regularisation of sexuality in all its variances within the Foucauldian model.137

The figure of the memsahib can be viewed as an important interlocutor between the discourses of colonialism and feminism. Originally the motivation for the mass influx of white Englishwomen into India had been designed to ensure that sexual as well as loving liaisons between British men and native women were avoided at all costs. As such sexual liaisons were deemed as threatening to the Manichean composition of them and us, which constituted the very heart of the civilising project and its need to civilise. Ronald Hyam, in his seminal text on

Empire and Sexuality (1990), has theorised that the presence of Western women in the colony was designed to precipitate the self-containment of English men within their own social strata:

The memsahib‟s function was political: to maintain “civilised standards”, especially sexual standards, and to contain the temptations of the male. “Social distance” between ruler and ruled was the policy, especially after the mutiny, and the memsahibs were its instruments. (Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, 119)

The very presence of female writers such as Fanny Parkes and Flora Annie Steel was predicated on this dynamic; their accounts of colonial relations were circumscribed and underpinned by this social stratification. Thus, writers such as Steel were writing

out of a context that required their need, on a textual level at least, to be complicit with these Orientalist constructions that placed them into the colonial setting and were seen as intrinsic to the social control and ultimate success of the colonial project.

A further consequence of this social engineering was the subsequent need to then prevent the miscegenation of Western female sexuality from the threat of the sexually libidinous native; a fear that punctuated the Orientalist textbook. In a variety of female accounts of India in the post mutiny era, the chastity of the Western woman figures as a consistent motif. The purity of the Englishwoman had to be upheld as it was symbolic of the imperial project itself. Indira Ghose in her text on

Women Travellers in Colonial India (1998) has argued that the threat of miscegenation is consistently processed through the native male and female and not the Western female who was viewed as sexually and morally submissive to Victorian standards of propriety. The „purity of the English woman was to be upheld above all because she was the repository of the purity of the race. Her own sexual agency was never at issue … she was not granted sexual agency anyway.‟138 Steel reinforces this paradigm by never questioning her own Western female sexual desire; it is always the threat of the native male and the rape of the British woman or the sexual desire of the Indian woman who preferred sati to a life of chastity.139

Flora Annie Steel was born in Harrow England on April 2nd 1847 and again was married to a member of the Indian civil service (ICS), Henry Steel, who had met her after childhood while he was studying at Cambridge for service in India. She got married to Henry Steel in December 1867 and consequently moved to India with him and continued to reside there from 1868 to 1889. Throughout that time she spent

most of her time in the Punjab region of Northern India where her husband was stationed as part of his duty. Steel was active in Indian governance and social reform, with women‟s education and welfare a particular areas of focus. In her role as „maternal imperialist,‟ she dispensed Western medicines to rural women, opened a girls‟ school in Kasur and became the local education inspector for the girls‟ schools in Lahore. (Indrani Sen, Woman and Empire, 133) Her missionary and feminist zeal however, existed in tension with her class and racial sympathies. Although she was a critic of many government policies in British India towards the „native peoples‟ (especially women), her racial affiliation with the benign aspects of the imperial project meant that she consistently valorised Western values over the threat of miscegenation from Indian culture. Steel viewed the „white woman‟ as symbolic of both British superiority and prestige but also as a moral metaphor for the imperial project and thus this sanctity could not be tainted in the eyes of the natives. (Indrani Sen, Woman and Empire, 135)

Her initial success as a writer came in 1893 with the publication of a collection of short stories, From the Five Rivers and a year later another collection entitled Tales of the Punjab (1894). Her most overtly politicised text however, was to come in 1896 with the publication of On the Face of the Waters which dealt with the traumatic events of the Indian mutiny of 1857.140 Throughout these texts, Steel exhibits a certain sympathy for Indian customs, character and rituals; however, she consistently reverts back to Orientalist constructions of the uncivilised native when that figure is perceived to threaten the status quo of colonial power relations. In On the Face of the Waters she both feminises and infantilises the intentions of the potentially insubordinate native. In one passage, the natives are referred to as children: „these really are children – simple, ignorant, obstinate.‟141

valour of the British officers (framed as the men throughout the text) are counter- posed to the „„scented effeminate‟ rebel leaders (referred to as the murderers) where the colonised/coloniser dialectic also assumes that of the master/slave and masculine/feminine polarity.‟ (Indrani Sen, Woman and Empire, 152) The threat to

colonial hegemony is refuted with disdain, in one exchange between Major Erlton and Jim Douglas, two British officers. Erlton exclaims: „idiots! As if they stood a chance‟ to which Douglas replies „they have none. That‟s the pity of it.‟ (Steel, On the Face of the Waters, 161) Steel‟s text as a whole, assumes this sense of inevitability about the civilising and moral effects of the colonial project. An Orientalist‟s sense of superiority is an undercurrent that infuses the narrative because the native‟s rebellion has to lose for their own benefit. Steel vividly expresses this imperial zeal in her autobiography in 1929: „I cannot see how India now can possibly speak for herself. She has many very vocal sons, but she has an extremely imperfect electorate.‟142

Steel concludes that „in time India will govern herself, but only in time.‟ (Steel, The Garden Of Fidelity, 253)

Flora Annie Steel personified the Victorian Anglicism that had gained the upper hand in the administration of India and was a fervent believer in the civilising effect of imperialism. The zenana is portrayed as both sanctuary and prison by Steel in her novel From the Five Rivers which was originally published in 1893. In one passage, Veru the sonless wife of Gunesh Chand, „would creep away into one of the dark, windowless rooms opening off the central court-yard ... there, safe from observation, she would weep salt tears over its unconscious face.‟143

The face she talks of is that of her baby daughter whose future is to reside in seclusion in the zenana, a fate that she decries to such an extent that she questions „after all her prayers and alms, why had not fate given her a son?‟ (Steel, From the Five Rivers,

14) Throughout this passage there is the implicit suggestion that the rigidly domesticated Oriental female is fundamentally disempowered and requires reform. To do this, Steel argues that the Indian woman needs to look to Europe and Western education in order to slough of the burdens of patriarchy, seclusion and superstition. Steel observes that Indian women are fundamentally inert in regards to their inequality and blames this female credulity on traditional belief systems and ignorance. The system of forced marriage is explicitly criticised by Steel who states that „marriage in Fatima‟s world meant coercion. She had seen most of her contemporaries handed over to a husband without even a pretence of consulting their wishes.‟ (Steel, From the Five Rivers, 177) Consistently throughout the text the Indian female is portrayed as voiceless; enunciation is provided by her Western „sister.‟ However, deep within the narrative is the relief at the distance between the native woman and Steel‟s own position within the colonial order of things.

Sara Mills in her study on female travel writing, Discourses of Difference

(1991), has argued that female travel writing of the Orient should not be subsumed within patriarchal conventions, because patriarchy as a discourse itself was inherently turbulent: „it is possible to see patriarchy as a system without intentions as a whole. [A system] which is supported by, resisted, given into or passively gone along with by both males and females.‟ (Mills, Discourses of Difference, 18) This assertion allowed the female writers a degree of agency in the way they both represented themselves and the native female that was formed as their subject. Mills has praised female travel accounts for the way they foster a personal engagement with the objects of their study: „that elements of women‟s travel writing are more heterogeneous and ... act as a critique of the colonialist enterprise since there is a stress on personal involvement and investment on the part of the narrator.‟ (Mills,

Discourses of Difference, 106) Although she underplays the extent of Western women as active Orientalists, I would move Mills‟s argument further forward and stress the ability of Oriental women to also formulate alternative responses to both the discourses of patriarchy and Orientalism, using material that encompassed the personal and private. These reverse accounts also vary slightly from male accounts as they focus on the interior, concentrating variously on personal narratives and familial relationships, where they can also be viewed as active contestants in the overlapping discourses of patriarchy, feminism and Orientalism within the heart of the colonial world.

The harem, the zenana, sati and polygamy all figured as tropes in which to gauge the progress of Western women as well as the degradation of native females. Thus the discursive site on which much of the Orientalist representation was built was dialogical by its very nature. Writers such as Pothum Ragaviah, Cornelia Sorabji and Janaki Majumdar figured themselves and their female heroines within this dialogical framework, thus their employment and appropriation of such discourses was made possible by the malleable nature of this discursive space in the first place. The nexus of power/knowledge could be appropriated and reversed back onto the imperial subject, by constructing narratives that placed the native woman at the centre and then counterposing Western femininity as its surrogate double. Critics such as Sara Mills and their work on female travel writing have provided valuable insights into the importance and validity of female travel accounts within the rubric