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Colonial discourses about Indian women

This five-volume collection of primary source material, edited by Pramod K. Nayar and co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, reproduces a total of 177 original documents relating to women in colonial India, covering the whole period from the beginning of British rule under the auspices of the East India Company in the 1760s through to Independence in 1947. The “women in colonial India” referred to in the collection’s title are Indian not British women, and the documents – all English-language sources produced almost exclusively by British authors, published in either Britain or India – are selected in order to throw light on colonial discourses about Indian women, rather than the lives, experience and writings of Indian women themselves. As such, the volumes complement Susie Thura and K. Lalita’s (1991) two-volume collection of Indian women’s writings and Indira Ghosh’s (1998) anthology of the writings of British women about their own experiences in colonial India. Nayar’s collection will be of great value to scholars and students as it brings together an extensive range of sources illuminating British colonial engagement with questions concerning the social, cultural and legal positions of Indian women. Previous collections have had a much narrower focus – they include Andrea Major (2007) on Sati and Penelope Tuson (1995) on Victorian Feminist Writings on India. In addition, some relevant documents have previously appeared within more general collections of sources on Britain and its empire (for example, Burton 2001), while several useful documents giving Indian perspectives comprise part 2 of Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar’s Women and Social Reform in Modern India. A Reader (2008). The collection begins with a useful 18-page general introduction, which discusses the documents as parts of a diverse colonial archive. In the opening section, Nayar draws on Said’s Orientalism to position the texts in terms of their role in the shaping of colonial discourses, stressing the relationship between the construction of colonial knowledge and the exercise of imperial power. He then highlights the range of genres of texts which make up the archive, though here it would have been very useful to indicate the number of the document referred to according to its listing in these volumes. The second section of the introduction draws attention to some of the complications of colonial discourse, while the final section outlines the key areas of interest and