In Their Own Words: British Women Writers and India 1740–1857 (review)

Rosemary Raza, formerly a member of the British Diplomatic Service and now an independent scholar, intends In Their Own Words: British Women Writers and India 1740–1857 as an antidote to the various misconceptions surrounding the British women of the Raj. The unenviable reputation of British women as "spoilers of the Raj" (xi), Raza avers, is both a vilification and an oversimplification of a heterogeneous grouping of women in India who made significant cultural and social contributions to the colonial and metropolitan landscapes. Raza contends that both prior scholarship and the popular imagination have focused on texts written by middle- and upper-middle-class "memsahibs" in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. To rectify this error, Raza zeroes in on writings in the period 1740–1857 and includes women writers who fall outside the stereotype of the spoiled domestic memsahib or the traveling memsahib. Raza's study includes British women missionaries, women who acted as mediators between Indian and British social circles, and working-class women such as soldiers' wives and nurses.

Raza conducted extensive archival research in the deep coffers of the Oriental and India Office Collections in the British Library, the Center of South Asian studies in Cambridge, and other strongholds of such material. During the course of her investigation, she limited herself to the published fictional and non-fictional writings of such women rather than those written for private circulation and consumption, asserting that the published writings had a larger impact on both British and Indian cultures. Raza also keeps her distance from the theoretical lenses offered by colonial, literary, or feminist theory, assuming instead "the traditional approach of the historian" (xiv).

Raza's book is arranged thematically. Chapter 1 documents the spurt in British women's writing in and on India in the period under consideration and the circumstances in India that favoured and shaped it. In chapter 2 she examines the domestic life of such British women and how it both responded to and consolidated British involvement in India. Through a discussion of courtship rituals, marriage and child rearing practices, and educational modalities Raza describes their mixed impulses to recreate Britain in India and to accommodate the realities of India. In chapters 4 and 5, Raza's book moves from description to analysis of the impact these women and their practices had on domestic and social life, considering how they "reinforced the structures of society, established its cultural and social tone, monitored its standards, and patrolled its boundaries" (70). Focusing on their ideological contributions as well as on material practices like cooking, home decoration, and dress, Raza sheds light on these shadowy corners of colonial women's history. Next, Raza examines the occupations of these women including missionary work, nursing, reform, and education. In her final and richest chapter Raza examines these women's everyday border-crossings into exclusively Indian zones like the zenana and their interactions with Indian men and Indian culture at large.

Raza insists on the heterogeneity of these keenly intelligent women and their writings: to impose a single purpose or trajectory on them would reduce their roles and contributions. "Many voices told many stories," she reiterates, urging her readers to see these women as shaping and shaped by the circumstances of Indo-British colonial relations (xv).

Raza's work makes an important intervention in the fields of women's history and women's writing. Through her meticulous research, she both draws upon and expands the genres and implications of "memsahib" writing and women's travel writing. In doing so, however, Raza tends to soft-peddle the distinctly imperialistic and racist import of such women's cultural work. Is this a necessary revision of history through which we must learn to see colonizers in a softer glow or is this a problematic, almost romanticized, re-reading of these women? These questions and others may have been better theorized and addressed by a...