The Curious Case Of The Indian Memsahib

I have always been intrigued by the role of the Memsahib in India's colonial history, especially given the fact that quite a few of them, to use the anthropological jargon, actually 'went native', and acted as a counter-hegemonic column against the Empire. Think, for example, of Madeleine Slade, daughter of an English Admiral, who became Gandhi's follower; the Irish lady Margaret Noble who became a devoted disciple of Swami Vivekananda; and Annie Besant who even became president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. The British Memsahib was in a highly ambivalent position, for she was both empowered from one perspective and disempowered from another. With respect to the natives, she enjoyed a superior position in her status as an European, but in relation to her husband she was still within a patriarchal Victorian system and was consequently in an inferior social rank within inner British circles. Thus the Memsahib lived at the intersection of two very different forces threatening to pull her apart in two opposite directions : in her private life, she had to submit to her patriarchal husband, but in the public sphere, she exercised power over the colonised natives. Hence the efforts of the Indian Sahib to police the Memsahib's activities in order to ensure that she would not actually fraternise with the enemy, thereby colluding with the dark and sinister 'Oriental' forces that were embodied in the native.

(It is interesting to note that these ambiguities are reproduced in post-Independence India in the ominous figure of the mother-in-law who has replaced the Memsahib : with respect to her daughter-in-law she wields a great degree of authority, but her own sinister powers are circumscribed by the yet higher authority of her husband.)