A Study on Indian Women’s Colonial Travel Narratives from 1858 to 1936

Abstract

The figure of the colonial woman is often incarcerated in images of passivity and immobility in studies of Indian colonial archives. However, travels by Indian women to England during the high colonial period unsettle such views and suggest that women’s colonial experiences were complex and layered. This dissertation aims to address such gaps in current scholarship by recovering the voices of the Indian female travellers of the colonial period to form an epistemology of gendered colonial experiences. Using the lens of Judith Butler’s gender theory of performativity, along with postcolonial discourse analysis, I examined the travel narratives of eleven female colonial travellers to gain insights into female colonial subject formation. A close reading of the selected texts shows that women had to negotiate with the demands of discourses of gender, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism as they self-fashioned their identities. Consequently, they enacted multiple roles of feminine, modern, mobile, nationalist, cosmopolitan and sociable selves as part of their strategy to mitigate the transgressions inherent in travel and to conform to normative gender conventions and secure social approval. The travellers’ presentations of these themes are presented in separate chapters. Additionally, the analysis of these travel narratives produces a mapping of the emotional contours and cosmopolitan dimensions of Indian female travels. By drawing on recent theoretical work on travel writing, postcolonialism and gender studies as well as analysis of recent female travel writing, my study offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Indian colonial women’s travel narratives that will hopefully widen the scope of postcolonial studies and women’s travel writing as well as contribute to women’s writing from the colonial period.