Devoted Wife/Sensuous Bibi: Colonial Constructions of the Indian Woman, 1860-1900

Current research has rather tended to neglect the print culture of 19th-century British India and its contribution towards the formation of gender ideologies. This article attempts to scrutinise the clamorous voices of the print culture: the newspapers, popular periodicals as well as copious published works, and to unravel the complex and sometimes contradictory web of constructions that ihese built around the gendered colonised. The second half of the century witnessed a definite cultural focus on the Indian woman. Among other things, this interest took the form of a constant engagement with the subject of the 'native' female in the print culture of the British community resident in India. The article explores the multifaceted and pluralistic representation of the Indian woman, ranging from prurient accounts of native female sensuality and discussion of social reform issues to laudatory inscriptions of wifely devotion and the sati. In other words, the image of the Indian woman was constantly being reconstituted and proscriptions of her sensuousness were interwoven with prescriptions of passive feminine behaviour. Admired models of perceived Eastern female docility were often selectively drawn upon, in a process constituting an 'Indianisation' of the Anglo-Indian female paradigm. While it is well recognised that representations of Indian women were strategically linked to the agenda of empire, what this article also tries to show is that, due to the complex interconnections between the ideologies of gender and empire, these gender representations also served to contain disturb ing issues raised by the contemporary women's movement in England.