Welcome to our Research Spotlight series, where we invite postgraduate researchers and early career researchers to submit short-form articles that sheds light on their research to highlight fresh scholarship specifically on underrepresented research areas in an effort to stay abreast with new voices in the humanities. In this article, Tarini Bhamburkar illustrates how periodicals are excellent media for disseminating discourses and ideologies, as well as a rich archival source for her research in women’s writings and their transnational, cross-racial feminist dialogue and networks in the late colonial period.
‘Our Indian Sisters’, ‘Our English Sisters’
The British Raj in India was definitely a masculine endeavour, but it was not an exclusively masculine space. When trawling through the colonial archive, one comes across instances of both British and Indian women’s voices, writings, their agential moments, even those of humour, buried under the weight of the patriarchal and imperial discourses that surrounded them. Finding women in the colonial archive was one of my core objectives when I started my doctoral project. I wanted to take it a step forward to think of women’s cross-racial relationships in colonial India, how British and Indian women interacted, and I thought their dress practices a useful medium for this investigation.
Dress was paramount in the Victorian age, especially in the 1860s, when British women started coming out in large numbers to India. What Mary Louise Pratt calls the ‘contact zone’ can be formed in any space that witnesses an encounter with difference, in the context of imperial hierarchies; in the cross-cultural interaction of British and Indian women, these ‘contact zones’ were often formed out of female-coded spaces and gave rise to readable interactions which manifested through their varying cultural dress practices.
Colonial archives are repositories of historical documents that contain various stories from the imperial past, but they go beyond this aspect of being preserved paper in libraries. They become sources for the historical mediations scholars make. They enable us to visualise moments from history and to foreground literature that has remained undiscussed. I started working on British women’s early nineteenth century travelogues, in which they wrote ornate descriptions of the dress of the Indian women they met in the zenanas. But the idea of the returned gaze of the colonial subject has also been a fascinating new point of enquiry in colonial studies. When Fanny Parks, in her 1850 travelogue, recorded how she went horse-riding with the deposed queen of Gwalior, Baiza Bai, the queen and her fellow horsewomen cast a critical gaze upon Parks’ riding habit and the side-saddle, telling her to ‘put on proper attire’ like a Maratha.[i] Through similar readings of British women’s travelogues, I discerned a returned Indian female gaze, revealing instances in which the Indian women momentarily seized control and dismantled the British woman’s idea of herself as the norm. Ultimately, though, these voices and depictions came from western texts and were in some ways limiting in the way of interpretation and analysis.
My interest in women’s periodicals has been on the rise since then, as I realised periodicals would be an excellent medium to survey British women’s articulation of their thoughts and perceptions, especially after the turn of the century when their contact with Indian women grew, and the women’s movement was beginning to firmly take shape. After all, two Indian women had featured in front-page interviews in British feminist periodicals Women’s Penny Paper and The Woman’s Signal in 1889 and 1895, respectively. Indian women’s writing, whether in English or in regional languages, too, had flourished with the advent of the twentieth century, marking their visible entry into print culture. This writing shaped the cultural and literary history of women in India. Assessing their writings presents a chance to understand how they debated their place in the colonial hierarchy, how they responded to the nationalist and patriarchal institutions, bourgeois domesticity, and also British feminism.
My current research seeks to trace women’s newly forming colonial identities, their transnational feminist networks, and how they became a part of the developing global women’s movement in the early twentieth century, through their periodicals. The periodical as a medium became integral to their expression, and with the regularity of print magazines, we find in them a consistent documentation of their writings, whether fictional or non-fictional. I am specifically interested in British and Indian women’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century English-language periodicals, but am also keen to study women’s regional language periodicals from the Bombay Presidency in British India, written in Marathi.[ii] Women used the language of sisterhood, like in the title ‘Our Indian sisters’, ‘Our English sisters’ in the periodicals, to build a transnational discourse of feminism, and to keep their readers informed about the budding women’s movement.
I hope that this research will add to our knowledge of the periodicals’ women editors and contributors who formalised their own individuality in a politically fraught literary milieu across the imperial centre and the colonial landscape, suggesting a unique space to search for the political and literary identities of women in history. In unravelling women’s experiences from the colonial archive, examining texts that lie ‘beyond the pale of metropolitan recognition’ helps broaden our linguistic and cultural sources to investigate works that were just as much a part of the expansive British empire’s literary marketplace as the writings from the metropole.[iii] This is also the reason behind my effort in assessing Indian women’s Marathi magazines along with their English-language ones to study their transnational connections with British women’s magazines. The regional language periodicals, like Maharashtra Mahila (Maharashtrian Woman) were just as driven as the English-language Indian Ladies’ Magazine or British ones like The Woman’s Signal, and have clear feminist inclinations and an interest in the international women’s movement.
I remember conversing with an archivist at a Mumbai archive, who was helping me with the catalogue, and her evident surprise at my interest in periodicals when, as she said, the library housed the most prolific of colonial Marathi novels, poetry, and other texts written by women. She referred to Rosalind O’ Hanlon’s seminal work on Tarabai Shinde’s pioneering feminist text Stri Purush Tulana, mentioning the time O’ Hanlon spent at that very archive in the 1980s, translating it.[iv] The archivist clearly underestimated periodicals as worthy source material but indeed periodicals are excellent media for disseminating discourses and ideologies. They are also a rich archival source for researching women’s writings and their transnational, cross-racial feminist dialogue and networks in the late colonial period.
[i] The Marathas were a royal warrior clan from western India.
[ii] Marathi is a language spoken in western India.
[iii] Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D Fong and Helen Michie, ‘Introduction: Widening the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 49.1 (2021), pp. 1–26 (p. 3).
[iv] Rosalind O’ Hanlon, A Comparison Between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1994). This archive is called the Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya (Mumbai Marathi Book Archives).
Tarini Bhamburkar is a teaching associate at the University of Bristol, UK. Her doctoral project looked at literary representations of British and Indian women’s cross-cultural sartorial encounters in women’s writings from the nineteenth century. She was the recipient of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’ “Expanding the Field” prize in 2023. She is currently working on British and Indian women’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century periodicals to explore how women built transnational feminist networks and associations through their periodical press in the late colonial period. Her work will soon be appearing in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Victorian Periodicals Review.
If you’d like to contribute to the Research Spotlight series, please write to Aanchal Vij (Aanchal.vij [at] bloomsbury [dot] com) or Paige Domantey (paige.domantey [at] bloomsbury [dot] com) with your idea.