Researching a Rare Family Collection

Research Reflection by an Undergraduate Research Assistant for Summer 2021

My research under the “Unstable Archives” project aims to build a born-digital archive of a rare family collection containing the personal artefacts of Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa, a native Indian woman who married a European man and moved with him to Britain. This project considers the question, why is it important to research the lives of native women who cohabited with European men during the colonial period?” Studying these relationships is essential to understand colonialism in India in its fullest context, including the lives and statuses of its most silenced inhabitants — native women. Not only do interracial relationships provide examples of cultural mixing, in which native women engaged in both European practices and Indian traditions, but Western anxieties surrounding racial hybridity and the policies that arose to regulate it greatly influenced the development of colonial India itself.

For the first part of my research, I studied academic literature concerning native women in colonial India. The first book I read was Sex and the Family in Colonial India by Durba Ghosh. Here, Ghosh compiles her archival research about the dynamics of relationships between European men and Indian women. She argues that, despite a different definition of race in the 18th century, European concerns about racial and cultural mixing persisted, later forming the basis for scientific racism and other interracial dynamics (Ghosh 2006, 15). Interracial relationships were common in early colonial India, in part due to the lack of European women (Ghosh 2006, 36). However, even the most cosmopolitan European men expressed insecurities about their relationships with Indian women, including fears for the future of mixed-race children born from such affairs (Ghosh 2006, 11). Adjacently, the East India Company and other colonial officials viewed these relationships as corrosive to the moral and societal order; as such, they suppressed mentions of native women in archival records and public life (Ghosh 2006, 93). The anxieties surrounding interracial relationships with Indian women were thus integral in shaping the administrative policies of the East India Company and, later, British colonial rule in India itself.

The second book I read was Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India by Indrani Chatterjee. While Ghosh’s book focuses on the nuances of interracial relationships, Chatterjee explores the definition of slavery in colonial India, particularly for children and female domestic slaves. Chatterjee defines different forms of slave labor, including the labor of sexual reproduction; thus, she argues that slavery in colonial India must be considered with slave-concubines and other women in mind (1999, 239). However, as does Ghosh, Chatterjee acknowledges and investigates colonial officials’ attempts to suppress mentions of domestic slavery or to reframe them in a manner conforming to their ideals of marriage (1999, 226). She examines the laws and legal justifications used by colonial administrators to claim that, through suppression by colonial officials and the biased interpretations of prior historians, the existence of domestic slavery was concealed, though it remained alive in practice (Chatterjee 1999, 232). Like Ghosh, Chatterjee discusses conjugal relationships between native Indian women and their colonizers. However, while Ghosh summarizes multiple different cases of interracial relationships in which women held small but varying amounts of agency, Chatterjee focuses on the interpretations of domestic slavery where the women held very little power at all.

The next part of my research included digitally transcribing artefacts from Sharaf un-Nisa’s collection, including the penmanship notebook she used to practice writing in English. I found this task fascinating, as such a personal item, with its spelling errors and messy handwriting, humanized a historical figure in a way that no amount of reading could. I was also interested in learning the nuances of the transcription process, which we encoded in Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-compliant XML format. Overall, I enjoyed working on this project so far, as my interest lies in the intersection between computer science and the humanities. With “Unstable Archives,” I can use digitization to preserve the evidence of Sharaf un-Nisa’s life as she lived it — a rarity when records of the native Indian companions to European men are few and far between.

For further reading:

Chatterjee, Indrani. Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 

Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Searching for Women in Between the Lines

Research Reflection by an Undergraduate Research Assistant for Summer 2021

“[N]o lady, native of India, even though her father should have been of the highest rank in the King’s or Company’s service…is ever invited to those assemblies given by the governor on public occasions.” 

Capt. Thomas Williamson, East India Vade Mecum₁

As the East India Company expanded its influence over the Asian subcontinent, the disparity of the demand for female companionship compared to the availability of eligible Englishwomen led to men depending upon the sexual labor of young local girls. This kind of cohabitation was both common and risky, since some men who became embedded in local familial systems were described derogatorily as “going native.”₂ In many situations, these British men developed significant affection for their native lovers, even dedicating sizeable portions of their estates to these women. However, the acknowledgement of interracial relationships during this colonial period often rests solely in wills published following the deaths of these men, reflecting a culture of shame around intimacy with native women.₃

Norms of the time promoted the idea of a proper English family, which Indian concubines threatened to damage. On one hand, getting involved with local women opened potential cooperation with leading Indian merchants and families crucial to the establishment of the E.I.C.’s business in the region, as well as fostering a sense of belonging for those far from home.₄ The Company, though, ensured via policies and protocol that there was little public awareness of these practices to avoid scandal.

Rarely did Company men officially marry into the surrounding culture, but many did engage in decades-long monogamous relationships with native women.₅ It was also common for British men to father children with native women; however, businessmen with mixed-race families were expected to espouse European values and raise children as thoroughly British. With little regard to their Indian heritage, children were routinely sent back alone to England by parents to receive an education and experience a typical English lifestyle.₆ Those few mothers who were acknowledged by their white partners assumed similar expectations and embraced the culture and religion of her male counterpart.

The life of the woman known as Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa presents a rare case study of a native woman successfully assimilating into British society. Presumably having followed her children to Europe to maintain her status as a mother, her transition into Mrs. Elizabeth Ducarel, lady of the house allowed her visibility despite her background and heritage. She was an outlier, since most women in India who entered partnerships with Europeans never surpassed their position as concubine. Speaking of her assimilation as a “success,” on the other hand, does not reflect the immense struggles she must have faced to obtain such a placement. Mobility of this sort certainly entailed Elizabeth’s willingness to let go of her native culture and disposition in favor of adapting to the world of her husband, even following his death in the early 19^th century. This project’s focus on the archives of Sharaf-un-Nisa showcases an important perspective often overlooked in the study of imperialism in South Asia, and only encourages further inquiry into the intersection of feminism, migration, and identity in the British colonial context.

As someone deeply interested in both the history of imperialism in South Asia and archival research, I am looking forward to gathering more information about Sharaf-un-Nisa and examining all records and photographs on file. I have already been enjoying the work with metadata and transcribing items such as her penmanship book, which provide such an interesting perspective into her adoption of the English language and social customs. Having little prior experience working with any archives, this has been an incredible learning experience so far as someone studying History and wanting to dig more into colonial records. All I can say is thanks to PURM and Professor Robb for what should be a great summer!

Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characters of Hindustan: with sketches of Anglo Indian Society (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1835).

Thomas Williamson, East India Vade Mecum or complete guide to gentlemen intended for the civil, military, or naval service of the Honourable East India Company (London: Black, Parry and Kingsbury, 1810).

William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002).

Capturing Imperial Women in the Digital Archive

Dorothy de la Hey established one of the first women’s college in India in the early 20th century and left with her family a large correspondence between England and India. In her later letters, Dorothy is in her early 90s. She lives in Cirencester, England, after devoting the majority of her life to directing an all-female college in Madras. In these letters, she advises the treasurer of the Diocese of Madras to pay for the pensions of her two former employees –her motor driver Mayimidoss, and her butler Munuswamy. Dorothy requests that the Diocese continue paying the pension to their wives, Alamelu and Jayamary, if they were to survive their husbands, for their lifetime, even after Dorothy’s death.

While I am reading, transcribing, and creating the metadata for the text of these letters as part of the digitization process in the Unstable Archives project, some questions arise: how can we capture the complexities of imperial women, like Dorothy, in the digital record? how can we avoid building on, and replicating, the tradition of knowledge production in the humanities that is informed by colonialism and imperialism, in the digital record?

Prior to receiving these letters, about the only traces of Dorothy were a short two-page biographical sketch of her life from the book Queen Mary’s College: The First Two Decades, published by the Old Students’ Association. This sketch starts with her studies in Oxford, goes on with her work for Queen Mary’s College in India, and ends with her life back in England.

Women living and working in colonial settings such as de la Hey may be described as either “heroic opponents of imperialism or complicit agents” in historical accounts of Empire. Earlier works on the place of imperial women have treated them as an addition to the historical record, as a way of uncovering lost voices, or as secondary to a more significant set of considerations. These approaches have not only provided one-dimensional depictions of imperial women, disconnecting them from colonialism, but has also obscured the place of subalterns in Empire, like that of Mayimidoss, Munuswamy, Alamelu, and Jayamary.

Postcolonial critique has created new ways of studying imperial actors and their experiences in the colonies, opening diverse avenues to study the interrelations between various forms of oppression, and providing a valuable analytical tool for scholars of gender and Empire. As the archive is a site of knowledge production, not just of knowledge retrieval, a postcolonial intervention in the digital archive can give us the ability to change the existing social formations that traditional archives (national or colonial) promote.

For instance, digitization helps us connect the different actors involved across imperial borders and their actions. Dorothy received an aerogramme by Elumalai, Munuswamy’s son, which informed her about his father falling ill and asked her to authorize his mother, Alamelu, to receive his father’s pension. And when Munuswamy dies, Elumalai asks Dorothy to cover the expenses for his father’s last rites. It was afterwards that Dorothy sent letters to the Diocese of Madras asking for the pensions of Munuswamy and Mayimidoss to continue with their wives, after their death.

Digitization helps us go beyond the textual medium and make these letters hypertextual: they are searchable, transferable, and comparable with other digital text. But in addition to making it accessible in digital form, we are able to retrieve the histories of individuals that are usually undermined or overlooked in the traditional archive. It enables us to place them as participants in the worlds around them and tell other, more complete stories about them.

In the case of Dorothy and her correspondence with the Diocese of Madras, this can mean placing her within the setting of British colonial rule in India and ensuring that the subaltern voices in these letters are brought to the fore. By looking at the relations between individuals and larger structures, we can see them as part of colonialism as a whole, not simply as individual travelers.

If we were to translate this to the digital record, it can mean that the information about these individuals is not only preserved and searchable for researchers internationally through the transcription of letters that we create, but we also have unparalleled access to the engagement and the relationship between imperial and subaltern actors. This access to the interactions among the Diocese, Dorothy, Mayimidoss, Munuswamy, Alamelu, Jayamary, and Elumalai between Madras and England opens up the possibility of conducting diverse analyses of their lives and helps us visualize the world within which they existed. This can not only complicate the lives of imperial women like Dorothy, but also interrogate the influences of Empire.

References

Camiscioli, Elisa. “Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 25 no. 4, 2013, p. 138-148.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science, 2002, p. 87-109.

Studying Gender Beyond the Archive

Dorothy de la Hey travelled from Oxfordshire to Madras to establish Queen Mary’s College in 1914, the first women’s college in Madras. Sharaf-un-Nisa Begum, the wife of a member of the British aristocracy in the early years of East India Company rule, travelled from Kolkata to Devon in the 1770s. If we were to rely on the archives, we would have mere snippets and uncontextualized illustrations of their lives. Official sources would limit our understanding of both women and we will be unable to insert them in larger discourses on gender and Empire.

Historians have traditionally relied on the written and documented record, which comes in the form of archives and material artifacts. Pierre Nora understood modern memory to rely “entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.” Archives and museums were considered privileged sites of the past. They were not simply repositories but, as Foucault indicates, the “law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” demonstrating its connection to power. This record, usually produced by those who were literate and powerful, privilege dominant (male) voices, while marginalizing non-dominant groups such as women.

It leads us to ask, if non-dominant groups become peripheral subjects in the historical record, how are we able to understand their lives today?

Efforts to examine and re-center women in history have led the profession to re-examine its traditional narratives and adopt new approaches relying on ‘non-official’ source materials. Everyday materials such as photographs, family letters, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera provide insight into individual lives that official records do not. Reading official sources ‘against the grain’ is another method that helps to reveal a more complex understanding of non-dominant groups, through contextualization and interweavement of multiple sources.

Other methods, commonly utilized by oral historians and anthropologists, include ethnographic research, oral history methods, and life writing, which allow us to better understand the ways in which subjective experiences of the past can be articulated from the prism of the present.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay, ‘Rani of Sirmur’, asks if marginalized and subaltern women specifically can articulate their subjectivity. Rani of Sirmur, the wife of the King of Sirmur, appears in the colonial archives only “when she is needed in the space of imperial production.” These archives themselves were a product of the commercial and territorial interests of the East India Company. Rani herself is not there to tell her own story and cannot be found as there are dominant power configurations that represent her. Spivak further expounds this in her essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to ask whether there is a possibility of recovering female subaltern subjectivities. This helps us to reflect on the complexities of the conflicts and contradictions of historical subjects such as Dorothy de la Hey and Sharaf-un-Nisa Begum.

A women-centered approach in research methods can give women space to speak on their own terms, which can give equal weight to women’s experiences and women’s interpretation of those experiences. Adopting diverse methods in historical research to examine the lives of women can assist in better understanding their lives in broader terms, as they become participants and agents of historical processes. This showcases the transnational characteristics of women’s mobility in imperial networks. Foregrounding mobility is at odds with traditional historiography supported by archives grounded in a rigid and bounded space.

Diverse and ‘non-traditional’ methods are especially useful in both the construction of a postcolonial archive and when examining marginalized groups who do not have access to traditional forms of power. This makes ‘non-official’ source material ever more important.

References

de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Columbia University Press, New York, 1988.

Foucault, Michel, Alan Sheridan, and Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”. Representations. University of California Press, 1989, pp. 7–25.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak?. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”. History and Theory. Wesleyan University, 1985, pp. 247-272.