Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Palace Politics: Zenana Life in the Late Colonial Princely State, c. 1890–1947
- 2 Reading the Role of Women in Succession Disputes: Kenneth Fitze's A Review of Modern Practice in Regard to Successions in Indian States
- 3 A Discourse on Desire: The Politics of Marriage Alliance in the Hindu Zenana
- 4 Breaking (Male) Hearts: The Role of Love, Colonial Law and Maternal Authority in Two Disputed Royal Marriages in Early Twentieth-Century Kathiawar
- 5 Troubles in Indore, the Maharaja's Women: Loving Dangerously
- 6 From ‘Pardah to Parliament’: Dynastic Politics and the Role of Royal Women in Postcolonial India
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - A Discourse on Desire: The Politics of Marriage Alliance in the Hindu Zenana
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Palace Politics: Zenana Life in the Late Colonial Princely State, c. 1890–1947
- 2 Reading the Role of Women in Succession Disputes: Kenneth Fitze's A Review of Modern Practice in Regard to Successions in Indian States
- 3 A Discourse on Desire: The Politics of Marriage Alliance in the Hindu Zenana
- 4 Breaking (Male) Hearts: The Role of Love, Colonial Law and Maternal Authority in Two Disputed Royal Marriages in Early Twentieth-Century Kathiawar
- 5 Troubles in Indore, the Maharaja's Women: Loving Dangerously
- 6 From ‘Pardah to Parliament’: Dynastic Politics and the Role of Royal Women in Postcolonial India
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Then I was taken to the drawing-room, where Mr. Dalton and the Bengali officials awaited me. Mr. Dalton looked kind but critical.
‘Won't you play for me?’ He asked.
I obediently sat myself at the piano and played a simple piece of music. Dalton scrutinized me as I went up to the piano and back to my seat and as I talked to him; and wrote a descriptive letter to the Maharajah afterwards.
‘Very nice’, he said, in such a charming way that I did not think he was examining me. He seemed favourably impressed, and so it proved, for in one of his letters to my father he wrote: ‘I thought your daughter a very charming young lady, and in every way a suitable bride for the Maharajah’.
Thus Maharani Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar recollected meeting her husband's British advisor for the first time in a Calcutta sitting room. This favourable interview would serve as the prelude to her initial meeting, eventual engagement and later marriage to the Maharaja in 1878. The encounter, however brief, reveals the growing presence of colonial officials in arranging the political marriages of courtly Indian families during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a larger expansionist project of ‘civilizing’, reforming and ‘anglicizing’ Indian princes. In such a manner, late Victorian, imperial attitudes redefined ideals of conjugality, love and sexuality within the colonial zenana. Sunity Devi's marriage was heralded as a novel alliance between two dynastic elites connected for the first time under the unifying chatri (umbrella) of the Crown Raj: an eastern Hindu prince of the indirectly-governed ‘native states’ and a leading family of the Calcutta intelligentsia situated within the culturally cosmopolitan and politically ascendant British India. Theirs was certainly a marriage which would not have taken place earlier without the intervention of the British.
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- Information
- Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India , pp. 77 - 108Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014