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
Introduction
- 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
One day long ago a young Maharani sat at a latticed window in a palace of white marble and looked out over the silver lake and beyond to the low hills whose slopes the ray of the late afternoon sun had transmuted into purple and gold. But the eyes of the Maharani were not drinking in the glories of the sunset: they were fixed on a crowd on the opposite shores of the water where the lake narrowed to a valley in the hills. She knew what the scene meant, although she could not clearly distinguish the people. For had not her lord and master made a wager with his favourite dancing-girl that she would not walk the width of the lake on a tight-rope, a wager made in a drunken delirium and the reward to be half his kingdom? How she hated the girl and yet shuddered at this cruel test!
This 1934 image of the secluded Indian royal woman locked within the stultifying confines of her palace zenana is a recurrent vision of late colonial princely India. The writer paints this Maharani with all the trappings of eastern lore and western voyeuristic fantasy. She is hidden behind the ‘latticed’ window from the masculine gaze of the imperial observer, and languishes within the hot bed of intrigue, vying with a nautch girl for the favour of her husband. The Maharani is both disturbed by the image of her husband's mistress, yet empathetic to the ‘cruelty’ of the wager she is playing. In such portraits, courtly Eastern women appear to be the passive, sexual objects of lascivious Eastern autocrats or the pawns of the liberating, enlightened British occupier. Mythologized by colonial literature as lascivious and sensual and reconstructed by the nationalist discourse as silent and secluded, courtly Indian women have invariably been depicted as the object of male desire and conquest, with little or no agency. The English novelist E. M. Forster described the beautiful Hindu Maharani of Dewas Senior as languid and mute, while giving audience to her European guests in only a negligee.
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- Information
- Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India , pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014