Abstract
The article examines a few short stories of Flora Annie Steel, a Scottish memsahib who spent a number of decades in the late nineteenth century in India with her husband, a British colonial official. Steel's short stories are interesting because they were produced at a time when most Anglo-Indian fictions (especially those authored by memsahibs) focused exclusively on station romances, and they explore with some seriousness and sense of complexity, issues related to the impact of Imperial reformatory intervention in the lives of Indian women. Her female contemporaries wrote fictions that more often than not completely ignored the existence of Indians, and even famous male writers like Kipling stereotypically reduced Indian women either to sexually licentious or completely passive, voiceless entities. Steel, in her stories, examines questions of gender, sexuality and reform in the context of Indian women's lives in ways that often seem to go beyond such racial stereotypes. The stories have been examined within the context of the different political and social formations of the specific regions – Punjab or Bengal – in which they are based, since women's reform had very different trajectories in these regions. The remarkableness of Steel's stories, however, lies in their attempting to look at the reform question from the Indian women's perspectives. What cannot be ignored are the ways in which these stories attempt to go beyond the prevalent Anglo-Indian modes of stereotyping or completely erasing Indian women and register their voices in examining questions related to their reform. This is not to say that racial and Imperial hierarchies are entirely abandoned in her writings. In fact the omniscient narrator in these fictions often narrates in ways that sustain and strengthen such hierarchies. However, there are moments when the diegetic narrative mode gives way to an ironically nuanced narrative voice and to ambivalences that seem to gesture at complex questioning of the bases of Imperial authority and its ostensibly benevolent intervention in the lives of Indian women. It is these moments that make the stories worth exploring.
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Notes
From the 1860s in fact began a period of what Antoinette Burton calls ‘Imperial feminism’ whereby English feminists’ concern for their Indian sisters and their urging of English women to help in their reform became a regular feature of the feminist agenda (Burton, 1998a).
Some also wrote home-management guides, about English women's home-making experiences within a hostile environment and reinvented feminine labour within the colonial English home as Imperial mission. Even though racial alterity is not always directly addressed in these writings, it is the frame of reference within which the anxiety to create and sustain an English home is felt and the superiority of English domestic virtues are championed. Steel herself co-authored the immensely popular The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook which espoused such values.
In her study of colonial Punjab Anshu Malhotra argues that ‘high caste reformers of various hues in Punjab tried to protect their high born status and social privilege by controlling women's sexuality’ (Malhotra, 2002).
The bangla word bhadralok which can be translated roughly as ‘genteel folk’, has come to be widely used in South Asian historiography to denote a social group characterised in colonial times by high-caste (Brahman, Kayastha or Vaidya) status, education, and usually some connection with the land in the form of middling or petty rentier incomes. The women of this class were referred to as bhadramahilas.
The cautionary position of the Imperial state was very clearly evinced, for instance in the position it took on the Age of Consent debate that rocked parts of India in the early 1890s. After introducing a Bill in January 1891 which suggested raising the age of consent for Indian girls from 10 to 12 years – itself a compromise with indigenous upper-caste patriarchal norms and practices – the government quickly backtracked when there was a storm of protest from the conservative sections of the elite, and on the initiative of the Lt. Governor of Bengal, an executive order was passed that made it nearly impossible to bring cases of premature consummation of child-marriage for trial under the Consent Act. So great in fact was the impact of the agitation against the Bill that the government did not again initiate any major social reform legislation in India until the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929.
There had been resistance in the 1880s among conservative upper class Muslim men to the missionary teachers visiting zenanas in Amritsar, Punjab. In a tract directed at Muslim families, that circulated in the city in 1885 while the need for girls’ education was stressed, a boycott of missionary visitations was also urged. However, a number of Muslim families resisted the boycott and continued to invite missionary women to their houses. In fact by 1900, women in Amritsar were even defying men and going to schools (Webster, 2005).
In her book Daughters of the King, Miss Hewlett, who belonged to The Church of England Zenana Missionary Society which was formed in 1880 and which ran several schools for girls in Amritsar writes, ‘If we were asked what it is which more than anything else acts as a dead weight upon progress and civilization in India, we would have to reply, the position of the women. They are socially degraded, treated as animals of a lower order than man, excluded from society and kept in grossest ignorance’ (Hewlett, 1886).
Single missionary ladies in the colonies were results of what Jane Haggis calls ‘the feminisation of the missionary endeavour which paralleled the trajectory of English middle-class women's entry into formal education and paid employment – a trajectory intimately caught in the emergence of Victorian feminism’ (see Haggis, 1998).
In one such report, for instance, on female education in the area of Rawalpindi in 1884, Mr Thompson compares the local indigenous school to the missionary women's work in the following manner:‘I consider that every entry made into a native house by one of the Mission ladies is a greater stride in female education than the establishment of a female school’ (Report on Popular Education in the Punjab and its Dependencies for the year 1883, 6: 93).
David Lodge in his essay ‘Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction’ talks about Volosinov's description of the ‘pictorial style’ of reporting in the nineteenth-century realist novels in which the individuality of the reported speech is retained even as the author's speech permeates the reported speech with its own intentions – humour, irony, enthusiasm or scorn (Lodge, 1996).
There are some stray references to her writings in recent post-colonial critical writings but none of these contain any substantial analysis of her short fictions. The only exception to this is Rosemary Hennesy and Rajeshwari Mohan's essay on Mussammat Kirpo's Doll (see Hennessey and Mohan, 1989).
Such horticultural metaphors used to describe the educational reform scenario seem to have been commonly deployed in English women's reform rhetoric.
In their reading of this story, Hennessey and Mohan say that ‘the tropes of alterity functioning in Steel's story are exemplary of the discursive strategies used to justify colonial control’ (see Hennessey and Mohan, 1989: 338).
In her autobiography Steel talks of the spectacle of ‘a pretty young girl of sixteen nursing her first baby and puzzling her brains over fractions in an upper class’ at the Victoria School in Lahore, leading to her having qualms ‘especially when I found out that she was married to an absolutely ignorant man. But, of course, the six rupees a month for her scholarship was an efficient aid to family finance’ (p. 167).
Hoshiaribi, as pointed out, covets the scholarship because ‘she quite understood that learning meant livelihood’ and as she tells the Bengali girl in her class with petulant determination, ‘My fathers were not scriveners and quill drivers since creation, like yours. My people are poor. If I go home I must spin and grind corn. I will not. I tell you I will not’. The scholarship also enables the arrangement with her husband Peru by which she can choose not to have sexual relations with him – ‘set her duty to him aside without reproach – an arrangement with which he was quite content’ (p. 161).
‘What was this wisdom which inspired so many well-turned periods in the Mir's somewhat prosy letters? Beauty was beyond her but women even of her race had been wise; passionate Noorjehan, and even pious Fatima – God forgive her for evening her chances with that saintly woman's’ (Steel: 425).
‘In many respects “being Indian” was something to be learned by travel to Britain – a performance to be tested, a habitus to be tried out and reinvented on a regular basis’ (Burton, 1998b).
Her contempt for the English-educated Bengali bourgeoisie is evident in a statement like the following one, drawn from her autobiography: The craze for reports and schedules had begun to rage, and the Bengalis were, of course much better clerks than the Punjabis … Not but the Bengalis are excellent folk, but they are born agitators. It was only two years before that the indigo question had roused Bengal to fever heat (Steel, 1993: 189).
For an analysis of the ways in which the colonial government frequently stereotyped Bengali men, see Sinha (1995).
The years 1903–1908 also mark the era of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, triggered by the proposed partition of the province of Bengal, a scheme that was executed despite widespread protests. This blatant display of colonial aggression fired the patriotic consciousness of the Bengali middle-class. Swadeshi went from a campaign for constructive self-development to militant activism in its final phases which attracted a lot of Bengali youths.
‘It brought back to him, as if it were yesterday, when half-frightened, half-important, he had heard it whispered in his ear for the first time. When for the first time also he had felt the encircling thread of the twice born castes on his soft, young body. That thread which girded him from the common herd … despite logarithms, despite pure morality, something thrilled in him, half in exultation, half in fear. It was unforgettable and yet in a way, he had forgotten! – Forgotten what? The question was troublesome, so he gave it the go by quickly…’ (p. 145).
The figure of Kali as a sign of grotesque violence and her worship symbolic of a barbaric culture had been part of English writings on India since the eighteenth century. The horror of Kali worship had been further aggravated in the early decades of the nineteenth century when the brutal practice Thuggee was represented as closely associated with this cult.
See Ramabai (1888), pub by Pandita Ramabai. Also Chakravarti (1998).
References
primary sources
Cowasjee, S. (1995) editor, The Best Short Stories of Flora Annie Steel, Delhi: Harper Collins.
Hewlett, S.S. (1886) Daughters of the King, London: Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, 65.
Steel, F.A. (1893) ‘At a girls’ school’ in From the Five Rivers, London: William Heinemann, 144–145.
Steel, F.A. (1894) ‘Feroza’ in The Flower of Forgiveness, Vol. 1, London: Macmillan and Co, rpt. in Mabel W. (1934) introd., Indian Scene: Collected Short Stories of Flora Annie Steel, New York: Longman's Green and Co.
Steel, F.A. (1897) ‘On the second story’ in In the Permanent Way and other Stories, rpt. in Cowasjee, 141.
Steel, F.A. (1993) The Garden of Fidelity: The Autobiography of Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929), Gurgaon: Vintage Books.
Steel, F.A. (1995) ‘Mussammat Kirpo's doll’ in The Best Short Stories of Flora Annie Steel, selected and introduced, Saros Cowasjee, Delhi: Harper Collins, 32.
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