ABSTRACT
While the British women novelists wrote about India through the aid of secondary resources, the travellers saw ‘real India’ and recorded their experiences in their travelogues. This chapter focuses on two women travellers – Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay. The positionalities of these travellers differ, and therefore, the nature of their gaze does not always remain the same. Being the wife of a Bengal Artillery officer, Kindersley had a close association with the British military setup of the East India Company. Eliza Fay, who came fifteen years after Kindersley, did not have a privileged class position and her husband lost social status instead of making a ‘career’ in India. The travelogues of Kindersley and Fay provide us glimpses of India from two different perspectives. Kindersley is safely ensconced in a reinstalled home in India where her husband had a commanding position. She shares an Orientalist position as she attempts to excavate the golden past of India, thereby rescuing a degenerated land from further degeneration. Eliza Fay speaks nothing of the Indian golden past waiting for a resurrection through the British intervention. Every women traveller and travel writer was not proto-feminist. While Kindersley shows her complicity with the British administration by highlighting the barbarism associated with sati, Fay draws an analogy between the institution of marriage in eighteenth-century England and the practice of sati in eighteenth-century India that underlines a universal hegemonic structure of patriarchy. While Fay has expressed overtly feminist positions, Kindersley has dissociated herself from the ongoing debate on the rights and autonomy of women. But both of them identify with the suffering Indians beyond the official discourse of colonialism.
