NWSA Journal

NWSA Journal 13.2 (2001) 182-187

Book Review

At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain

Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race

Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947

Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race edited by Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 314 pp., $29.95.

Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 by Nancy L. Paxton. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, 228 pp., $29.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper. [End Page 182]

In Women's Studies in the United States, it often seems that research not focused on North America is marginal to core issues in feminist thought, and that the so-called "Third" World can be brought in only to showcase issues of poverty and victimization. Burton's, Paxton's, and Pierson and Chaudhuri's research reminds us that investigations of empire and colonialism are not of remote significance. The authors present important insights about consent and agency and victimhood, and the interplay among discourses of gender, race, religion, and nation. Their research reveals critical interventions in feminist theoretical debates about identity and politics.

Travel is a way in which these books examine the representational dynamics between colonizer and colonized. Burton's book inverts the more customary examination of colonialism through life in the colonies by choosing life in England, the "heart of the empire" of the title, as the palette for her investigation of "the politics of space and of territoriality" that is "at the heart of historiography of the West" (13). Burton seeks to displace the nation-state as the inevitable unit of analysis, and to interrogate pristine histories of Britain which "view nonwhite populations of the late twentieth century as fallout from the disintegration of empire rather than as the predictable outcome of centuries of imperial power and engagement" (11). While the primary focus is on India, she argues that "a variety of colonial Others" inhabited England since the Elizabethan settlement, and the ways in which the natives of England received and interacted with them indicate some of the mechanisms through which colonial power was consolidated. That is, the project is not merely one of stirring invisible Others into the mix, but rather, re-evaluating the categories of British history.

Importantly, the project is also one of complicating the subjectivity of "colonial Others" by examining contradictory moments through which their identities are constituted. The various symbolic meanings of traveling to England, as well as the unexpected intersections among gender, religion, access to resources, access to public space, and hence complex forms of both compliance and resistance, are explored through three subjects who exemplify these contradictions.

Pandita Ramabai, born in a poor family with Sanskrit scholars as parents, became renowned as a Sanskrit scholar and trenchant critic of orthodox Hindu attitudes towards women. She came to England to study medicine and shortly thereafter converted to Christianity. This conversion, her scholarly reputation, and critique of Hinduism made her appear to her patrons as an ideal candidate for missionary work in India. However, to their great alarm, Ramabai continued to apply her critique to Christian texts and customs, refusing to be Christian on any terms [End Page 183] other than her own. Burton argues that the Victorian encounter helped Ramabai "refine her understanding of the ways in which colonial social relations were being made through theological argument and evangelical institutional practice" (75).

Cornelia Sorabjee, on the contrary, came from a relatively prosperous family with a strong history of social activism and studied law at Oxford. Her parents were Christians, although her father originally belonged to...