Women Travel Writers in Colonial India: Gendered Contradictions of the Colonial Gaze

Author(s): Astha Negi

Abstract:

This paper examines six British women travel writers who documented their experiences of colonial India between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries: Eliza Fay, Maria Graham (Lady Callcott), Honoria Lawrence, Fanny Parkes, Emma Roberts, and Emily Eden. Their letters, journals, and travel accounts emerged from within British imperial structures, yet their gendered positions- often as dependents of East India Company officials- produced a distinctive way of encountering India. Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Sara Mills’s analysis of women’s travel writing, and Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone,” this paper argues that these writers generated a complex, contradictory colonial gaze. Their privileged access to domestic and semi-private Indian spaces enabled them to record women’s lives, religious rituals, and scenes rarely visible in male-authored accounts. Yet their narratives repeatedly reinscribe assumptions of British cultural superiority and racial hierarchy.

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Pages: 59-62     |    7 View     |    2 Download