Colonial liaisons

THIRTY years down the line, the title of Lawrence Stones path-breaking book The Family Sex and Marriage in England 15001800 finds an echo in the book under review. This book, which omits the crucial word marriage, is a different study altogether. It tries to retrieve from the interstices of the existing records the visibility of a group of women who were either native born or products of mixed-race marriage. These were the women who kept the British functionaries of the East India Company or the male members of the British army, in a situation of sexual or familial comfort through the early period of colonialism of Company Rule, right through the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The author, herself of Indian origin, living and working in North America, tries to focus on this crucial problem of hybridity from the perspective of the British in India in the early stages of colonialism. The book also happens to be a highly gendered one. Its avowed aim is to try and restore the agency of these innumerable women who contributed to the sexual needs and well-being of the British males who were actively colonising Indian society and who, according to the book in question, were contributing to the making of the British Empire.

The book has not been able to live up to the grandiose claim made in the title. As Indrani Chatterjee had said in her earlier book on Gender Slavery and Law in Colonial India (1999), these stories of agency have to be prized open from the interstices of social and economic history. A complex process of colonial state building lies submerged in these narrations of indigenous women who formed relationships of various degrees of intimacy and domesticity with the white male officials of the East India Company and British military personnel.

At the beginning of the book, the author claims that she is out to retrieve the name and identity of women born in the Indian subcontinent with whom the British had formed familial or quasi-familial relationships. These relationships not only helped the companys servants and soldiers to form the right kind of networks both emotionally and sexually but help the multilayered public negotiation they had to undertake in order to entrench Company Rule on the subcontinent.

On the whole, the grey zones through which the establishment and entrenchment of the British Empire on the subcontinent proceeded have been exposed more in the areas of public aspects of political economy. The more private and intimate areas of sex, marriage and family have been, by and large, neglected in the history of the subcontinent, though quite a number of parallel studies focus on other parts of the empire-building process across the globe. Therefore, the book does fill a lacuna in the area of our understanding of the complex process of colonial state formation, especially in its gendered aspect.

Despite its over-ambitious title, the book really tries to bring to light the process of local or native women in the lives of the British officers and soldiers of the East India Company, mostly in the 18th century.

In moves reminiscent of Kumari Jayawardenas classic formulation Erasure of the Eurasians, these women, who had once played such a dynamic role in the lives of these white men, have been erased from the narrations of the history of the British Empire in India. In order to reflect the cleanliness of the Empire that was straight and white, the suppression of the grey areas of hybridity, on which such a process inevitably rested, was almost mandatory. Hence one cannot but welcome the book in hand for bringing to light the lives of these women from behind the naturalised white purdah of the Empire.

Inevitably, these women, as if following the logic of the honour, are not visible in the historical archives. In this area the author could draw upon the paintings left by some of the white artists, such as Zoffany and Renaldi. Within these highly stylised photographs, these women have a presence which is dignified to match the ambience of these courtly gatherings. But for getting their more mundane presence (voices or agency, I still think, are too strong words) she has had to look into court records, wills and other documents in which the white male partners have formulated their responsibility towards these unorthodox unions and the future progeny born through such unions. These are the ways in which Ghosh has tried to prize open the active presence of these women in the history of British colonialism in India.

Hidden from history, the original feminist description of womens relative absence in the so-called public field of historical enquiry, is given a new extension by Durba Ghosh in these stories of native women in the 18th century. She has overtly tried to resist the Scylla of the passivity of these oriental women in the male orientalist gaze and the Charybdis of linking them up with the agency of white men saving the brown women from the brown men (Spivak). Very clearly, she has suggested that she would like to retrieve the agency of these women, their subjectivity in the mapping out of an alternative domestic terrain that went into the making of the peculiar colonial formation, the family, as the handmaiden of the state.

Emerging from the interstices are these women, no doubt, and the stories of these liaisons and relationships are extremely readable. But the absence of an adequate awareness of the colonial compulsions cannot transform these stories into analytical accounts of how sex and family were being harnessed to the colonial state formation through stereotyping in the eyes of law, revenue collection and other areas of governance.

The book claims to go beyond the conventional narrative about the progressive racialisation of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent. This claim is difficult to accept. The necessity for a narrative of the progressive racialisation of the British colonialism is not a conventional one because it is a process fraught with challenges for the gendered history, both of the colonial onslaught and of the growing resistance against colonialism. If fear of miscegenation and deep anxiety about a hybrid creole population played up among the colonial masters, similarly, a need to keep the indigenous women chaste and uncontaminated was also hyped up. The transition from the one to the other still needs to be mapped adequately, looking at the existing scholarship, particularly among feminist historians. I feel the gaps in the jigsaw puzzle are still quite glaring. Despite the professed aim of the book not to be part of this, the stories of native women whom she tries to retrieve will certainly contribute to this general understanding of the transition.

The author is a good narrator, whatever may be her shortcomings as theoretician of gender.

In the Introduction to the volume, Durba Ghosh has tried to take a position that tries to steer clear of William Dalrymples position that the relationship between the white rulers and the coloured women, who come from among the ruled, was really open in the 18 and early 19 centuries and Indrani Chatterjees linking of the family and slavery in these early stages.

Durba Ghosh seems to think that she has to avoid either in order to open out the question of the agency of the women with whom the British officials and soldiers cohabited and raised families. Without placing too much emphasis on the question of agency, one can testify that the book has succeeded in narrating the different aspects of the lives, expectations and aspirations that these women may have experienced, but whether it still qualifies as their agency or not is something that has not been convincingly established.

The thick description of the Nizamat in Murshidabad that Indrani Chatterjee has given in her book tends to give us a better understanding of the ways in which sex and family were perceived and manipulated by the colonial authority. What the white rulers did when forced with their own familial and sexual compulsions, which is what the present book narrates, will then have to be matched to see how the women in the white households of the Nabobs shaped their agency compared to those in the courtly and other households of the local Nawabs and Nazims.

Through a clear progression of narration, Chapter I, which deals with the cultural representation of the female companions of the British officers and uses most of the photographic representations of these households, gives way to the anxieties of cohabitation of the white male who had gone native, through the wills and other documents that try to map out the patriarchal authority as exemplified in the paternal responsibility in the field of inter-racial spectrum of marriage slavery and other forms of owning and disowning and finally the bureaucratic and institutional practices associated with colonial governance both among the civilians and the army. Particularly in Chapter 6, which deals with the women in the military barracks, one misses the reference to works on prostitution by scholars such as Professor Ratnabali Chatterjee. Chatterjees work has touched on the effects of Contagious Diseases Act and the Lockgate Hospitals on indigenous women.

One has to be grateful for what the book has achieved. But there are other dimensions of Colonial Rule political, as well as moral economy that may invoke too much of a macro perspective that may threaten to gobble up the micro-level perspective in which gender appears to nestle. Agency could, and should, be adequately contextualised in the larger perspective in order to avoid any possible charge of essentialisation.

Jasodhara Bagchi is retired Professor of English and Founder-Director, School of Womens Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.