‘Goods,Chattels and Sundry Items’

Abstract

One of the most common assumptions regarding the culture of British colonialism in India is that the Victorian ideal of separate spheres for men and women found an exaggerated expression in the separation of the colonial bungalow and camp/court. As marginal figures who often disturbed the masculine image and occupation of running an empire, the appropriate role of British women was limited to gracing the household, creating a semblance of ‘home’. This reading of British domestic life in India also assumes that the domestic ideology used in Britain to shape a distinction between public and private spheres was not only applicable in the colonial context, but was even more distinctly articulated. Through an examination of written documents describing Anglo-Indian life in Calcutta, housekeeping guides written by British women, house plans, and probate inventories of British residents of Calcutta, I argue that the model of domestic space was formulated on a fundamentally different premise, on an overlap of public and private spheres. And the possibilities of this overlap were utilized by British women to redefine the meaning of Anglo-Indian domestic material culture in late 19th-century India. A spatial inquiry into colonial domestic practices reveals the difficulties and disruptions that such redefinition entailed.