Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule (review)

Those who study colonial Indian history are accustomed to reading, thinking, and writing about the colonized subject’s ability (or lack thereof) to speak. The search for the subaltern voice is nothing new. Too many works in too many fields have appeared, though, that do little more than add one or two colonial voices to the well-trod colonial narrative, as if as a postcolonial afterthought. Shuchi Kapila’s Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule escapes this trap. Rather than introducing colonized voices as merely marginal figures, Kapila focuses on historical and literary interracial relationships –between British men and South Asian women—to understand the ways that class, gender, and racial ideologies functioned within the colonial encounter. As a result, Indian women emerge as central figures in what Kapila styles an “Anglo-Indian family romance.”

The domestic Indian woman was, Kapila suggests, uniquely positioned to be a valuable colonial subject. When properly docile, subservient, and educated, Indian women stood as symbols of the paternal, masculine, and protective power of British imperialism, thus justifying “colonial rule as positive, educative, and benevolent.” (2) That Anglo-Indian romances and interracial love more broadly has received so little attention highlights the fact that Indian women also had the potential to undermine the properly paternalistic order of things. The same woman who, as a domesticated Indian wife or mistress, stood in for the properly subservient colonial subject could, if she assumed household or political power, become a threat to the structures of colonial authority. As Kapila notes, the Anglo-Indian family romance, was “a failed romance—one that does not reach its desired culmination.” (3)

Educating Seeta is divided into two parts. Part One investigates the period of Company rule in India, focusing on well-known characters like bibis and begums. Part Two moves into less familiar worlds, studying instances where the family romance of colonial power extended into non-British parts of the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, one of the great contributions this book makes is its nuanced appreciation of the differences between colonial relationships in British India and in those parts of the subcontinent under indirect rule. In each section, Kapila, having noted that she is persuaded by Hayden White’s suggestion that literary and historical narratives “draw on similar narratives, techniques of empowerment, and cultural fantasies,” looks at an historical romance and a literary romance. (18) The decision to move fluidly across disciplinary boundaries is not without positive and negative consequences.

On the one hand, Kapila’s interdisciplinary approach allows her to generate a complicated set of contexts into which she situates the Anglo-Indian family romance. True, Kapila highlights romances in the high Orientalist mode—ones in which there is hardly any Indian voice to speak of. But, she also finds romances in which the British male—men like William Linnaeus Gardner—is all but absorbed into the landscape of his wife’s South Asian culture. As have others, Kapila narrates other Anglo-Indian romances in which the British male is implicated in a public scandal about his interracial relationship. Most interestingly, she also shines light on a fourth family romance (one set in the context of indirect rule) in which Indian women twisted the image of the supplicant subject/wife into a model in which supplication became a demand against the colonial state/master/husband. In cases where such supplications were not met, the benevolent raison d’être behind imperialism faltered, sometimes giving way to rebellion against British authority—most notably in the case of the Rani of Jhansi.

That said, Kapila’s interdisciplinary use of historical texts and literary ones is not without its problems. It is, perhaps, not terribly shocking that this reviewer (an historian) found the chapters focused on historical texts to be convincing. It is more of a surprise that Kapila, a professor English, should stumble slightly at several levels in the chapters dealing with literary texts. First, there is...