ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the explorations of the representations of India foreground the fact that women’s engagement with the Enlightenment discourses about India cannot be uniformly clubbed, thereby highlighting the fact that all Enlightenment texts cannot be reduced to homogeneous definition of Orientalism. The British women writers developed a sense of sympathy for the natives detecting how women were oppressed under the tyrannical yoke of patriarchy. Though gender was an important factor behind putting forward a critique of the colonial policies, the hegemonic structure of British politics and culture made the writers of Scottish and Irish background critical of the British tendency to dominate and rule. The proliferation of a gamut of women’s writing on India challenged the masculine control of discourse, power and knowledge and questioned the culturally defined normative notion of what constitutes the masculine and the feminine. The rediscovery of the early women novelists and travellers has brought to the limelight the fissures, the gaps and the silences within the colonial discourse, and the female centred aesthetics led to an inclusive understanding of the Enlightenment.
