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The travels of Indians into the heart of the colonial power was by no means a purely patriarchal act, the journeys of ayahs, students and royalty also demonstrated that the dialogical flow of colonialism encompassed women as well as men. Colonialism has been viewed as patriarchal violence inflicted upon the feminine Orient, however, such a gendered construction cannot account for the roles of Western women in the functioning and facilitation of the imperial project and their ability to be both producers as well as consumers of the colonial production of knowledge. Reina Lewis in her book Gendering Orientalism has criticised Edward Said for overlooking women as potent colonialists:

In Orientalism gender only occurs as a metaphor for the negative characterization of the Orientalized other as „feminine‟ or in a single reference to a woman writer. Said never questions women‟s apparent absence as producers of Orientalist discourse or as agents within colonial power. (Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, 4)

This assertion stresses the need for colonial histories to include women as writers, explorers, ethnographers and most of all as Orientalists. When analysing the effect women had in the production and functionality of Oriental discourse one has to look at its variations. How were women intrinsic to the formulation of dominant patriarchal knowledges? Was their output as virulent and hegemonic as male discourse? Is it possible to think of a feminine Orientalist gaze?

The presence of female travellers to India in particular produced a litany of travelogues, memoirs and novels that were framed along the lines of dominant modes of Orientalist production. Rana Kabbani has argued that Victorian women

were placed outside the power dynamics of Victorian travel writing where the travelogue remained „an intrinsic part of patriarchal discourse, for it fed on and ultimately served the hierarchies of power, … they remained token travellers only, who were forced by various pressures to articulate the values of patriarchy.‟ (Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 7) However, I would contest Kabbani‟s passive conception, by stressing that novelists such as Emily Eden and Fanny Parkes as well as travellers such as Annie Besant and Flora Annie Steel were all contributors to a female Orientalism that travelled, displaying agency that was at times both sympathetic to and critical of its subject. Allied to the Romanticists and Anglicists, this production of knowledge analogously consolidated India along patriarchal lines as a forgotten realm, a feminine terrain that was frozen in history. In this regard, their writings share many of the dominant tropes of male Orientalism. However, to submerge these works within the dominant strains of patriarchal Orientalism would be to assume that Orientalism was a unified structure, and to do so would overlook its very strength and adaptability as a discourse. Sara Mills has argued that „certain discursive elements are shared by both male- and female-authored texts, but they are nevertheless received and commented upon and marketed differently … [where] there may be negotiations in women‟s texts which result in differences which seem due to gender.‟ (Mills, Discourses of Difference, 6) A production line of knowledges that facilitated the power of colonialism for over two hundred years was multivalent by its very nature, and feminism and femininity were discourses that fed into and out of the cultural hegemony of Orientalism. Feminist scholars such as Antoinette Burton have argued that the Orient figured as a fertile ground for the shaping of western feminism, where „empire provided opportunities to maternal imperialists, feminist allies and activists to test their independence from the constraints of

patriarchal society.‟130

Thus, by implication colonised women became the terrain on which Western women sought to validate and shape their own social freedoms.

Burton has argued that the Victorian period was the backdrop to Western feminism‟s rigorous attempts to insert itself at the heart of colonial modernity. She proposes that „by imagining the women of India as helpless colonial subjects, British feminists constructed “the Indian woman” as a foil against which to gauge their own progress.‟131

The colonised woman then figured as a barometer for the female coloniser and was not constructed as a substantial figure within the narrative of colonialism. They were encased within a framework that encompassed the Orient as a whole; labelled as backward, idle, hypersexual, willing victims who needed to be reintroduced into history. Ideas of global sisterhood were fashioned to engender this „invocation of Indian women as enslaved, degraded, and in need of salvation by their British feminist “sisters.”‟ (Burton, „The White Woman‟s Burden,‟ 145) To do this they also utilised a classic Orientalist technique, which was to universalise the figure of the Oriental woman, a process Gayatri Spivak has lucidly described as „worlding‟ in which the third world woman was actualised within the political reality of Western hegemony. Spivak bases her criticism at the level of literature:

To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire.132

Burton, adopting an historical approach, proclaims that „British feminists of the period posited “women” the world over as one class, one race, one nation- a static

type that, in “less civilised” societies than Britain, ... [were] corrupted by heathen cultures and religions.‟ (Burton, „The White Woman‟s Burden,‟ 145) Female constructions of the Orient were thus delineated along the coordinates of classic

Orientalism, there were variations, but Victorian feminists adopted the dominant tropes propagated during the high period of colonialism. This dynamic allowed them to co-opt themselves into the Orientalist project; and by implication they positioned themselves away from being the Other within the imperial body.

This productive tension between the discourses of feminism and Orientalism presented Western female travellers and writers with a problem; they needed to reconcile their dominant position as colonialists against the Orient with the subservient position they held as women within their own patriarchal societies. Thus, it must be stated that their involvement in the production of Oriental knowledge indicates the hierarchy of power that existed within the strata of the colonial world. There was not a monolithic strand of power that flew through the discourse of Orientalism; it had different levels, effects and motivations. Women Orientalists need to be placed into a context that views them as „agents whose mixture of observation and fantasy about the East is specifically gendered because of the social and psychological restraints on their experience and representation of the Orient.‟ (Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, 184) Lewis argues for a gendered Orientalism that accounts for the multiplicity of female positions on both sides of the colonial divide: „it is with this cluster of dominant and alternative Orientalist discourse, then that women‟s accounts need to be read, in order to allow for the variety of oppositional and collaborative positionalities assumed by both Occidental and Oriental women cultural agents.‟ (Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, 159) Furthermore, Lewis moves this cocktail of Orientalism and feminism one step further by calling for an awareness of female Orientalisms that highlight the dialogical flows of knowledge that both counter-posed and linked the female coloniser with the subaltern „woman.‟

Any conception of Indian women as reverse Orientalists would first need to be located within this space that accounts for the power/knowledge of female colonial production. The Indian woman, positioned as a subaltern in this context, is a figure who has been culturally, socio-politically and discursively dispossessed, both in Britain (Orientalism) and India (nationalism). Spivak states: „both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant.‟ (Spivak, „Can the Subaltern Speak?‟ 28) Rana Kabbani has also emphasised that Oriental women were placed into an invidious position during the high colonial period; they were „doubly demeaned as women, and as “Orientals” ... [where for the West] they offered a prototype of the sexual in a repressive age, and were coveted as the permissible expression of a taboo topic.‟ (Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 7) Indian women figured most prominently in male Orientalist discourse as sexualised figures who both fulfilled Oriental exotic fantasies but also figured as the next frontier for the Victorian reforming zeal to conquer and civilise. Victorian feminists were also conscious imbibers of this discourse and psychologically constructed spatial tropes such as the „harem‟ and the „zenana‟ as sites that were teeming with idleness, intrigue, ignorance and sexuality. The following section will analyse the writings of Victorian feminists, how they placed themselves within the varying discourses that permeated the colonial enterprise, in forms such as travelogues, social documents and histories; texts that constitute a female Orientalism in its own right.