Imperial Alliances:: Women, Power, and Precarity in Colonial South Asia and New Zealand

This issue showcases the work of four young scholars of empire. Articles by Rochisha Narayan, Satyasikha Chakraborty, Caitlin Cunningham, and Archana Venkatesh explore the strategic alliances and tacit bargains forged in colonial South Asia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. While imperial ideology primarily served the interests of white European rule, it developed in a matrix nourished by liberal and patriarchal ideals, along with family metaphors of domination. This facilitated collusions of class, caste, and gender in a world structured by racial hierarchy. For example, some "imperial alliances" benefited upper-caste women and men to the detriment of their lower-caste compatriots. Others promoted male privilege broadly speaking, at the expense of both indigenous and European women. In addition, the family metaphors prevalent in colonial and anti-colonial discourse sanctioned the hierarchical relationship of mothers to daughters and foregrounded motherhood as a site of competing aspirations. The most precarious women of all—lower-caste, "outcaste," and indigenous Māori women—received the least protection from the colonial state.

We begin in the north Indian principality of Banaras in the late eighteenth century, where the British East India Company publicly acknowledged the authority of Princess Qutlugh Sultan Begam over her household and its Mughal princes. Rochisha Narayan, in "A Mughal Matriarch and the Politics of Motherhood," argues that this "fragile Anglo-Mughal alliance" was expedient for both parties. On the one hand, Qutlugh Begam hoped to create a Mughal seat of power in Banaras and eventually place her son on the throne in Delhi. The East India Company, on the other hand, supported her ascendancy in order to disempower princes and patriarchs who might threaten Company rule. Thus in 1791, when the Begam's son imprisoned his mother in the palace complex and declared himself the head of the Mughal household, a Company official swiftly intervened, persuading the son to swear "obedience to her maternal authority and submit himself to her will and rule in all things." In other cases, however, the Company relied on colonial representations of the zenana, or women's quarters, to undermine the influence of ruling mothers, suggesting that cloistered lives made them unfit to participate in matters of state. Narayan emphasizes that motherhood was a "sociopolitical status in the eighteenth-century polities of the Indian subcontinent," allowing women of rank to maintain ties between household and public authority. From her seat of power in the household, Qutlugh Begam extended her influence outward to include the palace in Delhi and eventually even the emperor. She cultivated kinship ties that ensured the reproduction of the lineage, invested in relationships of service that tied dependents to the household, and "attempted to bind key rulers of post-Mughal successor states to herself and her son." In the "politically fractured landscape of eighteenth-century India," however, motherhood had many meanings; ultimately, the Company's position was contingent on its political and economic needs.

In the next article, "Nurses of Our Ocean Highways," Satyasikha Chakraborty examines several cases of South Asian ayahs, or nursemaids, who traveled to Britain to work for European and upper-class Indian families during the colonial period. Sentimentalized accounts of ayahs and ostensibly empowering narratives of their travel abound. Chakraborty focuses instead on the precarity of colonial maidservants who were denied wages, stranded in Britain without return passage, and subject to "caste death" for defying the Hindu proscription of traveling across the sea and thereby losing social respectability. She makes the fascinating point that with the transition from East India Company to Crown rule in the mid-nineteenth century, the ayah's position deteriorated remarkably. Under the Company, British employers often compensated ayahs financially for caste death and could be forced to pay the return passage of abandoned maidservants. The British liberal state, in contrast, emphasized nonregulation, characterizing employee-servant relationships as private matters. "Instead of protective regulation or penalization of employers, the liberal imperial state handed over destitute ayahs to poor law authorities and private charities." Chakraborty notes the irony of relinquishing responsibility for impecunious South Asian women when colonial humanism...