For the Record: An Educational Memoir in Late Colonial India

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.20.2018.02.04

Keywords:

Empire, memoir, self writing, education, Mary Bhore

Abstract

For the Record: An Educational Memoir in Late Colonial India

Mary Bhore’s Some Impressions of England (Bhore 1900) forms a record of her travel to England and the basis of her argument for women’s education in India. While Bhore does not openly criticise the empire, her account of her experiences as well as her very presence in England invert the logic of imperial relations by turning the colonial subject into the ethnographic observer. Her memoir is not unlike the writing of the “England-returned” men and women in late-colonial India, but it shows a curious absence of the personal. Drawing on Foucault’s “Self Writing”, I will argue that Bhore’s text is as much “a narrative of the self” as it is about a shaping of the other; in other words, it is an attempt to turn her own experience into a kind of guide for her readers.

PlumX Metrics of this article

References

Allen, A.T. 2017. The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190274412.001.0001.

Allender, T. 2016. Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932. Manchester: Manchester University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2016.1262910.

Ambai 1993. Anil (The Squirrel). In: S. Tharu and K. Lalita (eds.). Women Writing in India, vol 2: The 20th Century. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY.

Anagol, P. 2005. The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920. Aldershot: Ashgate.

American Marathi Mission. 1882. Memorial Papers of the American Marathi Mission, 1813–1881. Bombay: Education Society Press.

Arondekar, A. 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bagchi, B. 2014. Connected and Entangled Histories: Writing Histories of Education in the Indian Context. In: Paedagogica Historica, 50(6): 813–821. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2014.948013.

Banerjee, S. 2010. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bhore, M. 1900. Some Impressions of England. Poona: Bhau Govind Sapkar.

Burton, A. 1994. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill, N.C.–London: University of North Carolina Press.

Burton, A. 1998. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chakrabarty, D. 1992. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian Pasts?”. In: Representations, 37: 1–26, https://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2928652.

Conway, J.K. 1998. When Memory Speaks: Exploring the Art of Autobiography. New York: Vintage.

Crane, R. and R. Mohan. 2013. Imperialism as Diaspora: Race, Sexuality, and History in Anglo-India. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Forbes, G. 1982. Caged Tigers: “First Wave” Feminists in India. In: Women’s Studies Int. Forum, 5(6): 525–536, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0277-5395(82)90094-2.

Forbes, G. 1996. Women in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, M. 1997. Self Writing. In: P. Rabinow (ed.), R. Hurley and others (trans.). Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. (Trans. by R. Hurley and others). London: Penguin.

Gandhi, L. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press.

Indian Ladies’ Magazine [ILM]. 1901a. K. Satthianadhan (ed.). Vol. 1, No. 1, Jul. 1901.

Indian Ladies’ Magazine [ILM]. 1901b. K. Satthianadhan (ed.). Vol. 1, No. 5, Nov. 1901.

International Council of Women: Report of Transactions of the Second Quinquennial Meeting Held in London, July 1899 (1900). Introduction by the Countess of Aberdeen (Ishbel Aberdeen). London: T. Fisher Unwin.

Kosambi, M. 2002. Returning the American Gaze: Pandita Ramabai’s The Peoples of the United States, 1889. In: Meridians, 2(2): 188–212. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mer.2002.0033.

Lahiri, S. 2000. Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity. London: Frank Cass.

Lethbridge, R. 1893. The Golden Book of India: A Genealogical and Biographical Dictionary of the Ruling Princes, Chiefs, Nobles, and Other Personages, Titled or Decorated, of the Indian Empire. London: Macmillan.

Macaulay, T. B. 1920. Minute by the Hon’ble T.B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835. In: H. Sharp (ed.). Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839). Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing: 107–117.

Malhotra, A. and S. Lambert-Hurley (eds.). 2017. Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia. Delhi: Zubaan.

Mukherjee, S. 2010. Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned. London–New York: Routledge. https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203092187.

Nijhawan, S. 2013. Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial Northern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198074076.001.0001.

Puri, T. 2019. Women’s Magazines and the Making of the New Indian Woman, 1860–1930. In: A. Bonea and M. Mann (eds.). Print Journalism in India: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Developments. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Ramabai, P. 2003 Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States (1889). Translated and edited by Meera Kosambi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.

Sarkar, T. 2001. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Satthianadhan, K. 1998. Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman (1892). (ed. by C. Lokugé). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Steedman, C. 2001. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Visram, R. 1986. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press.

Downloads

Published

2018-12-31

How to Cite

Puri, Tara. 2018. “For the Record: An Educational Memoir in Late Colonial India”. Cracow Indological Studies 20 (2):47-70. https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.20.2018.02.04.