ABSTRACT
The chapter reviews representations of the zenana in the writings of British women travellers in the late 17th and 18th century. Interest in the life of the upper-class women in India was noticeable in most travel writings in this period, as is evident in the writings of travellers like Jemima Kindersley, Fanny Parkes, Emily Eden, Maria Graham, Lady Nugent and Helen Mackenzie. The lives of Indian women and their living quarters became the subject of the memsahibs fascination, as their diaries, memoirs and letters articulated a very complex discourse which tried to frame a picture of India in order to present a more comprehensible image of India to the general public in Britain. The memsahibs’ ‘gaze’ provides a useful framework for theorising the implications of a stereotyped generic ‘Indian’ femininity, and its impression on ways in which womanhood has been redefined and refashioned in colonial India. The chapter aims to bring to light the complex relationship between the subject/object and self/other, as the zenana is seen as a metaphoric space for the land itself that needed to be ‘penetrated’, ‘comprehended’ and ‘civilised’.
