ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Phebe Gibbes’s novel Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) that inaugurated the tradition of writing novels about India from female point of view. The epistolary framework is used to narrate the cultural encounter between India and Britain. Gibbes’s representation of Hinduism, the theme of miscegenation, reference to the Black Hole Incident, responses to the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the description of the rape of an Indian woman foreground her complex engagement with the colonial project. Her novel draws our attention to the dialogic interplay between the ‘centripetal’ colonial discourses through the reiteration of colonial stereotypes and the colonial reality of unhappy female consciousness, largely ‘centrifugal’ in nature. Gibbes’s representation of India does not whitewash the brutal deceptions of imperial enterprise and exposes the implacable danger of masculine authority latent within the colonial discourse.
