ABSTRACT
A structure belonging to modern Western culture can doubtless be seen in its historiography: intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves by changing what it makes of its ‘other’ – the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World. The fashioning of Western women as enlightened agents who took on the mission of relieving the patriarchal plight of women in the colonies was pivotal to the yielding of political rights and agency by Western women. They could use charitable postures to assert themselves as agents against the exclusionary political agendas of white masculinity in the face of conceptions of the liberal political ‘individual’ that did not include women. Images of downtrodden sensuous women full of eastern promise who need to be freed from the captivity of backward cultures by Western discourses run riot in the Western imagination.
