Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (review)

Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze, by Indira Ghose; pp. 196. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, $29.50.

Indira Ghose's Women Travellers in Colonial India offers a focused study of British travel writing during the colonial era. The author's choice of a kind of topical subtitle, "Women Travellers in Colonial India," as the main title of her work points to a desire to ground her theory of the encounter between British travelers and Indians. Indeed, the book is the product of a new generation of postcolonial critics who have moved from generalizations about imperialism to a more specific analysis of colonial literature as the cultural product of a particular historical era. As the title of the book suggests, Women Travellers is organized around four specificities: gender, race, location, and time. Furthermore, as the subtitle indicates, its thematic focus is the female gaze and its power.

In a broad theoretical Introduction, Ghose outlines the implications of the female gaze in the context of colonial power. She focuses on travel writings by British women in nineteenth-century India, arguing that these women travelers--for example, Maria Graham, Anne Katherine Elwood, Marianne Postans, Fanny Parks, Emily Eden, and Mary Carpenter--were unique in that they were "filled with curiosity about the country they visited" (1), unlike the average "memsahib" whose imperialist attitude made her uninterested in observing, let alone studying, her colonial home. Curiosity should be understood here as a sort of desire for adventure and for the difference associated with the other, a desire that, I would argue, implicates women's travelogues in colonial relations of power as the writers attempted to transcend the social limitations of their gender.

Ghose is initially modest about the aim of her critical study: it is "to help displace the stereotype of the memsahib" and "to draw attention to the contribution these women travellers have made to the genre of travel writing" (1). But what becomes evident as she develops her argument is a desire to make a theoretically broader claim: that the "plurality of female gazes" sheds light on the ambivalent web of colonial power relations. Ghose, as a "post-Bhabhaian" postcolonial critic, takes for granted that "colonialism was at all times an ambivalent and not a monolithic project" (10). This observation brings to the surface the author's own critical ambivalence: the desire to be specific versus the temptation to generalize. On the one hand, Ghose details the particularities of women travelers' texts and draws attention to their plurality; on the other hand, she generalizes their split reactions to India as an expression of colonialism's own ambivalence as well as their contradictory inscription within both power and opposition.

In other words, ambivalence is the key to Ghose's text both on a thematic level and a textual level. Thematically, the travel writings of British women in nineteenth-century India point to an ambivalent relation of power between the traveler and the "native." These women, Ghose argues, are "colonized by gender, but colonizers by race" (5). Textually, this split identity makes their writings ambivalent exercises of power. To put it more theoretically, traveling in and writing about the colony are at once a way of transgressing "gender norms that relegated them to the home" (12) and "a form of epistemic power" that ultimately "served to further the ends of colonial power" (13). Women, therefore, were both agents of colonization and figures of opposition. Their writings consequently "reflect the bourgeois/humanist ideology of identity and disrupt it--by resisting the dominant constructions of gender" (8). Their gazes too are "absent from the site of observation while simultaneously serving the function of surveillance over the other" (9).

Ghose describes the split condition of women travelers and their ambivalent writings in historical terms: the reason women's writings about India were different from those by male travelers, she points out, was not due to...