ABSTRACT
It is difficult to overstate the importance of British representations of suttee and of female infanticide in the Rajput and the campaigns against the practices to emergent definitions of British civility and constructions of Hindu ‘depravity’. The theatrical productions discussed in this essay – Mariana Starke’s The Widow of Malabar (1791) and William Thomas Moncrieff’s The Cataract of the Ganges! Or, The Rajah’s Daughter (1823) – are particularly rich sites not only for establishing the function of these practices in the imperial imaginary, but also for indicating key transitions in British colonial relations over the thirty-year period following Cornwallis’s accession to the post of Governor-General of Bengal. Shifts in British governmental strategy have eerie counterparts in the dramaturgical practices of the London theatres at this historical juncture. The demonstration of such a relationship implies that British imperial policy and British cultural production are suffused by similar self-consolidating fantasies of rule. The language of fantasy is crucial to this essay because I suggest that the attribution and subsequent governmental ‘extirpation’ of ostensible Hindu superstition is accompanied by the generation and dissemination of rather different forms of British superstition in the theatre of metropolitan life.
