Home, Sweet Home: Women and the “Other Space” of Domesticity in Colonial Indian Postcards, ca. 1880–1920

Abstract

This article explores colonial Indian postcards from the 1880s to the 1920s through the idiom of “imagined geographies,” as expressions of the relationship between the Othering of people and the Othering of spaces. Specifically the article focuses on representations of domestic space as a means by which those located within such spaces could be situated within a hierarchical, colonial relationship. I propose that colonial Indian postcards not only worked to disseminate macro, imperial ideology and the male colonizers’ fantasy of possession, but also expressed the microcosm of imperialism at work in the domestic, feminine sphere.

Notes

The wives of colonial officers [Jagpal 2009: 252]; from English ma'am and Hindi sahib.

I use the word feminized as opposed to feminine to indicate the constructedness of the domestic space as being solely the precinct of females.

Woody [1998: 14–15] proposes that there are seven postcard eras, beginning with a pioneer era prior to 1898, and ending with the “modern chrome style” era of 1946 and later.

Other photographic processes were developed simultaneously across Europe, yet it is the daguerreotype method that is most recognized [Falconer 2002: 57].

Indexicality refers to the physical process by which a photograph is produced. The term relates to C.S. Peirce who proposed three types of sign; symbol, icon and index. The index has a natural relationship of contiguity with its referent [Pinney 1997: 20].

Pinney here refers to Foucault's theory of the bio-political state, in which surveillance is the principle technology of power [Shilling 2003].

Indeed classification has been shown to be a means of fixing identities and thus controlling subalterns throughout the colonial era in India. Clare Anderson [2004] has explored the classification of “Criminal Tribes” in Imperial India, revealing in a Foucauldian manner how the physical body was used as a justification for naming and the reification of difference.

Contextual differences between the work of Alloula, relating to French Algeria, and Mathur (and indeed this article), relating to British India, must nonetheless be acknowledged.

The number of British women in India rose dramatically from ca. 250 in 1810 to ca. 5,000 in 1872, and then ca. 42,000 in 1901 [Blunt 1999: 426].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Rose Stevenson

EMILY ROSE STEVENSON is a graduate student in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research is in South Asia broadly, and explores the region's colonial past and its visual media. E-mail: [email protected]