What prompted you to write Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India?
My literary agent suggested the idea after I published an article on memsahibs’ travels within India. I had read their writings extensively during my doctoral research, and realised that there indeed was scope for further feminist interjections, despite the current body of scholarly work on the subject. These women had built a vast body of literature about their experiences in India, in the form of published accounts or private diaries, providing variegated insights into Raj-life in India.
Yet their works remain obscure, allowing debilitating stereotypes about them to persist in popular perception. Given the obvious historical misreadings that caused inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the image of these women, it appeared to me that they required some level of ‘rescuing’ from obfuscation, misrepresentation and caricaturing.
How do you think the writings of the memsahibs are relevant for contemporary reading?
Their writings are crucial in feminist historiographical studies on the Empire. The risk of neglecting them entails glossing over women’s literature from a time period wherein such writing was not just unique, but also limited. It would also mean overlooking (yet again), women’s self-expressions.
Their identity was mostly that of the ‘trailing spouses’ of the sahibs, who were the actual agents of the Empire, but by churning out copious amounts of writing, these women became chroniclers of female subjectivities, manufacturing a rich body of archives on the cultural histories of the Raj.
How did you choose the stories of the various memsahibs to tell or not tell?
My sources were a range of memsahibs’ writings, majorly dating between the 19th and mid-20th centuries. The idea was to resuscitate those voices that displayed some level of counter-hegemonic tendencies. I specifically wanted to focus on stories that offered unique and intimate portrayals of life in India, for which there were limited or no other sources.
I also wanted to focus on women whose endeavours in India dispelled the typical image of the memsahib as indolent, spoilt or promiscuous, although I did strive to bring out their racism and flawed perspectives wherever present. The idea was not to redeem the memsahib, but to challenge gender-based stereotypes.
How does your book fit in the corpus of recent writing on Colonial India?
I constructed the book in a way that it would contain passages from the memsahibs’ original works, before I began my narration. I wanted readers to get a flavour of their writing before reading my analyses. In this way, my book, I hope, was rehabilitative, and fits somewhere in the corpus of the available literature on Colonialism in India.
As a short story writer and now a non-fiction writer, how different is your writing process for each genre? Do you find one more challenging than the other?
While writing fiction, I could not fix a pace or set specific targets, something I could do for non-fiction. The mind can be arbitrary, and it seems that the heavy reliance on imagination while writing fiction makes the process slightly erratic and inconsistent. Writing non-fiction, on the other hand, was straightforward enough. I had already done substantial research on the subject and had my archives handy, so I was able to form a robust and detailed outline before starting the book. Since it is more like re-telling a story, writing non-fiction, so far, appears less daunting.
What are you working on next?
Currently, I am working on a book on the wives of Viceroys of India, which is expected to be out in 2024.
Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India
By: Ipshita Nath
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 368
Price: Rs 699