Abstract
This thesis critiques the literary representation of British and Indian women’s dressed bodies in nineteenth-century travelogues, fiction, and periodicals written by women. I survey British and Indian women’s colonial encounters and relations through a close scrutiny of their dress practices. In making a case for reading colonial historiography and literary narratives through the lens of embodiment and clothing, I explore women’s cross-racial relationships through their cultural dress and racialised bodies, assessing how clothing defined and shaped women’s interactions over the decades. Through five chapters that focus on writings from 1838 to 1905, I draw out women’s varied perceptions of each other’s clothing, their experiments with the dress of the racial other, and how imperial and nationalist discourse inflected their dress choices.The thesis regards both British and Indian women’s voices in assessing the depictions of their dressed bodies. With an aim to recover Indian women’s voices from the colonial archive, I analyse a Marathi women’s periodical alongside their Anglophone writing. In engaging in an extensive yet nuanced comprehension of women’s cross-cultural relationships, I discuss a range of topics from colonial India that become integral when studying dress and gender in the colony – women’s encounters in the zenana, the Rebellion, the ‘nautch’ girls of Victorian India, and the end-of-the-century purdah parties. Dress has a visible and aesthetic role, and with its connection to the body, it functions as a prism to shed light on women’s bodily and social existence. Focusing on dress allows the thesis to attend to the cultural and aesthetic implications of the dressed female body – which is racialised, classed, and often sexualised – in nineteenth and early twentieth century India.
| Date of Award | 10 Dec 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Tara K Puri (Supervisor) & Samantha Matthews (Supervisor) |
Cite this
- Standard