Abstract
This article scrutinizes two texts written or based in late colonial India, authored by a British and an Indian woman: “Feroza” by Flora Annie Steel from her anthology The Flower of Forgiveness (1894) and Saguna: The Story of Native Christian Life (1895) by Krupabai Satthianadhan, which was reissued in 1998 as Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman. Taking into account the dressed body, Christian conversion, and interactions with missionaries in these texts, this article argues about the consequences and repercussions of Indian women assuming English dress or refusing to do so in a reforming late Victorian India. I unpack how the narratives punctuate the social factors of anglicisation, the expected outcomes of Christian conversion, and women’s agency in choosing their own dress, using the theory of the “dressed body” and colonial mimicry. The female body is racialized and determined by social structures but also constitutes the individual’s social and personal identity. Dress, in adding an envelope and a visual metaphor to the woman’s body becomes part of her bodily presentation, becoming an embodied practice, and making an embodied subject out of the wearer. I use dress and the “dressed body” as methodological media within a postcolonial framework in analysing how the women’s sartorial choices affect their encounters and their overall existence in late colonial India.
This article scrutinizes two texts written or based in late colonial India, authored by a British and an Indian woman, respectively: “Feroza” by Flora Annie Steel from her short-story collection The Flower of Forgiveness (1894) and Saguna: The Story of Native Christian Life (1895) by Krupabai Satthianadhan, which was reissued in 1998 as Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman. 1 Taking into account the dressed body, Christian conversion, and interactions with missionaries in these texts, this article analyses the consequences of Indian women assuming English dress or refusing to do so in a reforming, late-Victorian India. In analysing the representations of two Indian women in these women-authored texts published in the 1890s, I unpack the narratives to examine the social factors of anglicization, the expectations of Christian converts, and women’s agency in choosing their own dress. I borrow Homi Bhabha’s influential concept of the mimicry of colonial subjects in studying the repercussions women faced for their dress choices in late colonial India.
I complicate the idea of Indian women wearing or refusing to wear English dress to unravel the socio-political consequences that these decisions entail for the women in Steel and Satthianadhan’s works. Joanne Entwistle’s (2001) articulation of the “dressed body” is useful in directing scrutiny at the dress choices that the women make. Her approach reconciles “the socially discursive world which regulates the dressed body with the lived experience of the body which selects, feels, and wears clothing” (Thomas, 2007: 372). The female body is racialized and determined by social structures but also constitutes the individual’s social and personal identity. Dress, in adding an envelope and “a visual metaphor” to the woman’s body, becomes part of her bodily presentation, an embodied practice that makes an embodied subject out of the wearer (Entwistle, 2001: 37). Dress imbues the body with further social meaning and the body is a potent field that enlivens the dress; I use dress and dressed body as methodological media to analyse how the women’s sartorial choices affect their encounters and their overall existence in colonial society.
Tapan Raychaudhuri (1988), in Europe Reconsidered, his seminal work on Indian discourses on imperialism in the nineteenth century, heeds the effects that exposure to a foreign culture had on the socio-political fabric of Indian society and its inherited system of beliefs — effects that were equally attractive and repulsive to the people. He remarks that:
whether the change was induced by self-conscious effort or impersonal influences, one notes an all-pervasive concern, almost obsessive, in their social and intellectual life — an anxiety to assess European culture in the widest sense of the term as something to be emulated or rejected. (1988: ix)
The two titular protagonists — Feroza and Saguna — witness the effects of colonization on Indian culture and beliefs as Indian women who are a part of a reforming and modernizing society. I analyse Steel and Satthianadhan’s narratives to assess how the two characters navigate change, in their personal and political lives, and whether they do so with “self-conscious effort or impersonal influences” (Raychaudhuri, 1988: xi).
It is also important to note that the acceptance of such western and European cultural influences had different meanings and consequences for Indian men and Indian women. An analysis of the political repercussions of women’s dressed bodies also invites a discussion of the burden freighted upon their clothing choices and bodies by the nationalist and patriarchal institutions that sought to govern them. Deniz Kandiyoti (1991), in her work on the relation between the nation and women’s identities, describes how national identity and cultural difference are articulated as forms of control over women. Kandiyoti writes that “modernity was invested with different meanings for men […] and women” (1991: 432). Women’s bodies were designated the role of upholding national and cultural identity, and their dress became crucial to the presentation of this cultural image. Nationalist and patriarchal institutions tried to exercise control over their choice of dress, and through it, their bodily agency, emphasizing the correlation between woman and state, and making women the bulwarks of traditionality.
In anatomizing Steel and Satthianadhan’s characters’ lives, their active, consequential, and sometimes defiant, sartorial choices become visible, revealing their agential decisions to either emulate or reject western culture. Satthianadhan’s Saguna and her mother Radhabai — the wife of a converted Christian Indian man, who later herself converts — resist the cultural colonization and the urge to adopt reformed English dress, continuing to wear their own traditional clothes whilst following a newer, reformed way of life ideologically. On the other hand, Flora Annie Steel’s “Feroza” tells the story of a young, married Muslim woman from an upper middle-class Indian family, negotiating her experiences with reform, and her encounters with the missionary women in her town, western education, and modernity. Feroza grapples with the idea of anglicization, as she considers westernizing her dress on the pretext of her husband’s approaching return from England, where he has travelled for education. Feroza and Saguna imitate and reject western dress, respectively, as they navigate encounters with missionaries, scuffles with the terms of colonial modernity, and the socio-political ramifications of their dress choices.
The publishing circuits of these two works shed light on their likely differing readerships. Steel’s short-story collection was published by Macmillan and Co. in London. Satthianadhan’s Saguna was serialized between 1887 and 1888 in the Madras Christian College Magazine, a monthly published by the Lawrence Asylum Press in Madras in India. The magazine, edited by George Patterson and C. Michie Smith, was aimed at Indian Christians as well as the general English-reading public in India. Saguna was later published as a book by Srinivasa, Varadachari, and Co., another publisher based in India, in 1895. In categorizing Steel and Satthianadhan’s act of writing about Indian women as an “outsider’s” and “insider’s” perspective, respectively, I contend that their writing also belongs to two varying literary traditions. Steel’s writing falls within the realm of Anglo-Indian fiction, a genre that was characterized by British representations of their observations from and about colonial India, written for both Anglo-Indian as well as metropolitan readers in the imperial centre. Satthianadhan’s writing can be situated within the emerging nineteenth-century circuit of Indian writing in English, which several scholars such as Susmita Roye (2020) and Priya Joshi (2002) have explored as being significant to the literary history of India. Recognizing these different publishing contexts is important to a reading of the works of the two authors with their contrasting identities as British and Indian, and allows us to pay heed to how Steel’s short story and Satthianadhan’s autobiographical novel are distinguishable from each other. Whereas Steel’s short story collection was probably read more widely by a British readership in the metropole, Satthianadhan’s Saguna, serialized and published in India, was read not only by Anglo-Indians and British people but also by Indian people who could read English. 2
The sartorial complexities prevalent in late colonial India were intricate. Dress and clothing, which situated the body racially and culturally, were important issues for both the British colonizers and the Indian peoples in colonial India. The British sought to maintain their identity and hierarchy as colonizers through a proper deportment, especially after the Rebellion of 1857, ensuring they wore British fashions, sometimes regardless of the testing climes and other challenges. Helen Callaway, in her work on self-definition and dress of the British colonizers in African colonies, writes about how the idea of “dressing for dinner” became the visible sign of “innate superiority” for the British living across the extended geographies of the empire (1993: 235). Indian attitudes to dress in the nineteenth century were also ambivalent, particularly in the decision to adopt or reject the colonizer’s garb. The most interesting group amongst Indians, in this case, were the elite “mimic men” (as Bhabha calls them) who adopted the dress of the British in an attempt to embody the values and cultural advancement that they thought Britishness brought. As Emma Tarlo (1996) writes in her seminal anthropological work on the relation between clothing and identity in India, both choosing British dress and rejecting it had consequences for Indian people, and people were torn between adopting a full British trousseau or working to mix the styles and fabrics. As for Indian women, the politics surrounding their dressed bodies were even more complex: their choices were inspected in line with nationalist discourse and governed by questions of decency and tradition. Having noted the complicated crossovers between the dressed body, nation, and gender in late colonial India, I now turn to the two main texts to be explored in this article.
“Feroza”
Flora Annie Steel, a Scottish memsahib, travelled to India with her English husband and stayed for twenty-two years until his retirement in 1889, living in and travelling across the Punjab region of British India. 3 Involved publicly in women’s education and educational projects, Steel interacted greatly with Indian girls and women, also serving as the inspector of a girls’ school in 1884. She was a sharp critic of female missionaries and questioned British memsahibs’ fulfilment of their imperial responsibility; she often denounced the impropriety and unideal femininity of most British women living in India. Steel wrote extensively — both fiction and non-fiction — including short stories and novels based on different episodes of Indian colonial history and the everyday lives of Anglo-Indian and Indian people in colonial society. Scholars such as Susmita Roye (2017) and Nancy Paxton (1990) have written considerably on Steel’s life as a memsahib in India, and on her colonial fiction. Her writing often highlights the dangers of an excessive westernization of the Indian woman, seen through the Indian woman’s choices of dress, manners, and lifestyle. My analysis of Steel’s short story explores her fictional treatment of an Indian woman’s decision to don English dress in late nineteenth-century India, a period of considerable gender and educational reform. Steel’s titular character Feroza’s encounters with reform, the missionaries, and anglicization, along with her adoption of western dress, put the trope of colonial mimicry to the test.
It is also necessary here, in the acknowledgment of colonial power relations, narrative voices, and questions of agency, to ponder on Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) critique of colonial writing about Indian women. Spivak critiques colonial writing as being mediated and not giving voice to the Indian women it depicts. It is necessary to pay heed to this, with Steel’s identity as the colonizer who is writing about colonized women. But working in the light of this knowledge does not mean that one should call for the total repudiation of texts by the likes of Steel. Her work and her presentation of Indian women’s lives, albeit fictional, is a fruitful field for studying the socio-political context of the colonial India that she lived in.
Feroza is an upper-class, Muslim woman who is described as struggling with the constrictions of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She finds this control and restriction hard to deal with, owing to her dynamic personality and the reforming society around her in late Victorian India. Steel narrates Feroza’s relationship with westernization and its influence on her choice of dress, and the ensuing politicization of her dressed body when she adopts hybridized clothing that combines English and Indian styles. The story explores the complicated aspects of colonialist discourse and the expectations weighted on the colonized people, such as the conflation of anglicization with modernity and progress, and the concurrent denigration of Indian ways of life. It also brings the missionary project into the fold, underscoring the repercussions of missionary-led activities and beliefs on the lives of Indian women. The sartorial theme runs strongly in the story, in parallel and tied together with discussions about intellectuality and women’s access to education.
Feroza, who is awaiting the return of her husband Meer Ahmed Ali from England, is an eager character, struggling silently in her veil with the customs of an upper-class Muslim household in northern India. Though denied the education she desires and told that she would only “enter Paradise at a man’s coat-tails”, she still occasionally finds herself among a party of “young women disguised in boy’s clothes” and does not hesitate to head out to converse with the “mission-ladies” when in desperation (Steel, 1894: 161–3). 4 Deep down, Feroza harbours an unsettling disquietude about the upcoming return of her husband from England, where he has moved for his education, and is gripped by the apprehension of not being adequately modern or westernized for an England-returned husband. In the context of this disquiet, and her dread of Meer Ahmed Ali’s presumed westernization, the narrative lays out the consequences of Feroza’s unsettled mind and decisions, through her public encounters with missionaries and her personal tussle with westernization. She westernizes her dress in the wake of her involvement with the local missionaries, assuming this makes her modern, anglicized, and worthy of her husband. There is a symbolic and political weight to her alteration, as an Indian woman trying to adopt English dress in late nineteenth-century India, and to the anxieties surrounding, and reasons for making, such a decision.
Feroza’s adoption of westernized clothing while also maintaining some elements of her traditional style, symbolizes the consequences of a clash of cultures — a clash that plays out on the woman’s body, thus making a political allegory out of her. Referring again to Kandiyoti’s (1991) work, this instance highlights the responsibility that is placed on women to reproduce the boundaries of ethnic and national groups, making them the deputed signifiers of national and cultural difference. Feroza’s intentions, in the kind of cultural dualism she tries to practise through the sartorial medium, are to appear as a progressive, westernized, modern woman. But progress, as nationalist discourse dictated, should not come at the cost of a dilution of national identity.
Steel, in her portrayal of Feroza as an Indian woman attempting to be modern, grounds her character’s choices in her — Feroza’s — belief in the superiority of European culture, and in the power of dress to indicate this superiority. When discussing the possibility of her husband’s adoption of English dress, Feroza says to her sister-in-law Kareema: “Of course the Meer dresses Europe-fashion”, adding, “Thou seemest to forget that my husband is a man of culture” (178). Her attitude to English dress signals the symbolism and social power relations vested in dress — whereby English dress was viewed not merely as sophisticated garb but also as the dress of the rulers, bringing symbolic progress, cultural elevation, and power with its threads and fabrics. Feroza’s misjudgements also underscore colonial Indian attitudes to adopting European dress, cohering with Tarlo’s (1996) points about clothing and identity in India. Tarlo notes that British dress in colonial India came to represent to Indians “all the values which the British boasted: superiority, progress, decency, refinement, masculinity and civilization” (1996: 45). For Feroza, who is working towards reforming her dress in the English style, this style of dress seems to symbolize progress and modernity, and a break from the patriarchal traditions that encumber her regular life, along with enabling her to be worthy of her England-returned husband. Her reformed dress and her contact with the missionaries seem to her to be the two routes to achieving this modernity and westernization. Through the character of Feroza, Steel depicts the fallacies of Indian women’s yearning for western dress, criticizing their perception of it as a path to reform.
Feroza’s westernized dress — her attempt at colonial imitation — reduces her to having what Homi Bhabha (1984: 127) has termed as the “partial presence” of a colonized subject. She looks practically and physically incomplete:
Feroza had adopted the dress of the advanced Indian lady, which, with surprisingly little change, manages to destroy all the grace of the original costume. The lack of braided hair and clustering jewels degrades the veil to an unnecessary wrap; the propriety of the bodice intensifies its shapelessness; the very face suffers by the unconcealed holes in ears and nose. (179)
In Steel’s eyes, the Indian woman loses all the grace of her “original costume” when she adopts this “advanced” dress style which is an outcome of her fantasies about westernization. 5 Caught in the web of being “almost the same, but not quite”, Feroza, in her hybridized mimicry, displays a form of power as she integrates the new and the old, Indian and western, into an affectively strong image; but her attempt at adapting the colonizer’s clothes results in an unfortunately burlesque reformed dress (Bhabha, 1984: 127). In the tragedy of her failed emulation, she stands out as the travestied, non-conforming woman. The grip of colonial desire alongside the corresponding urge to retain one’s traditionality is obfuscating and ruptures the Indian woman’s otherwise powerful effort to incorporate that reform and modernity into her sartorial style. It is people’s perception and the bindings of colonial discourse that destroy Feroza’s otherwise strong, agential move as she must submit to the throes of patriarchal expectations and colonialist ideology.
Feroza becomes an incomplete caricature of her previous traditional self. There is also evidence of a suggestive lack, including in a direct word reference (“lack of”), in the scripting of Feroza’s physical appearance in the quote above. There is a lack of braiding in her hair and the “clustering jewels” are absent; there is a shapelessness to the body, and the absence of traditional jewellery leaves unconcealed holes. The traditional markers of her “Indianness” are missing, and she appears undesirable and incomplete.
Traceable here within the narrative are the signs of a Lacanian concept of lack (“manque-à-être”, which Lacan translates as “want-to-be”) (Miller and Sheridan, 1977). The textual descriptions of the character demonstrate both a literal and a metaphorical lack. Feroza, burdening herself with the patriarchal pressure to live up to the (supposed) expectations of her husband, displays a lack within herself which she wishes to fill. An experience of lack causes a human being to use imagination to construct symbols, fantasies, and desires, or even reconstruct their whole image or identity. Feroza’s colonial desire leads her to finding this lack within herself, established through the superiority she assigns to Englishness, her keenness to engage with missionaries, and through her patriarchally fuelled desire to fulfil the expectations of being a suitable wife to her English-educated husband. She is determined to fill the lack that she sees in herself by embracing a modern or westernized dress style that would make her more English. But contrarily, for Steel, as an author who sees the Indian woman’s appearance as characterized by traditional attire and accessories, it is this image of the westernized Indian woman that symbolizes a lack — not just the lack of the usual excess (of her bodice and jewels), but the overbearing absence of the primary, preconceived external signifiers of her Indianness. Her traditional husband, the Meer, is also described as having a similar judgement of Feroza’s hybridized clothing.
Feroza’s appearance seems incomplete, as does her identity. Lacan, in his study of desire, assigns an ontological aspect to his concept of lack, where he discusses how the “structuring function of lack” is itself predicated upon a pre-ontological “gap” which is “the gap of the unconscious”, where desire originates (Miller and Sheridan, 1977: 29). This lack and the absence Feroza finds in herself lead to her desire to be more westernized, however, ironically, the struggle to fulfil that desire and to plug the lack is what condemns her to a permanent incompleteness. The “incomplete” colonial subject is left with a fragmented identity through her attempt at mimicry — neither here nor there, a position in which Feroza finds herself. Whatever foreign Englishness she incorporates into her sartorial styles is portrayed as ill-fitting on her Indian body, encumbering her like the very traditions she shod in striving for a westernized and modernized look. The legs in “white stockings and patent-leather shoes” twist themselves “tortuously” about the chair (172). Everything she has worn appears a “pitiful caricature of foreign fashions” (172). Feroza, feeling incomplete in her struggles with the lack she finds in herself, emerges as nothing more than an incongruous mimic of the Englishness she tries to assume externally.
As opposed to Feroza, her sister-in-law, Kareema — Feroza’s posited rival in the story — retains the colourful attire and accessories of a traditional Mohammedan lady. Steel herself pointedly narrates the graceful beauty of Kareema’s appearance in striking contrast to Feroza’s pared back, “advanced” dress style:
Gleams of jewelled hair under the gold threaded veil; a figure revealed by the net bodice worn over a scantier one of flowered muslin; bare feet tucked away in shells of shoes; long gauze draperies showing a shadow of silk-clad limbs; above it all that dimpling, smiling face. (180)
All the signifiers of an Indian Muslim woman’s traditional appearance that are absent on Feroza, find their place rightly on Kareema’s body and are described as illuminating her beauty. There is a beauty in the excess of her accessorized attire (a literal absence of lack), the gold veil and the gleaming hair, the flowered muslin and the draperies, and, especially, the smiling face. The diaphanous garments add a sensuality to her look, awarding her an Indianized elegance which is missing in Feroza. Kareema is at home in her attire, at peace with her culture and her appearance, and is not trying to be a “brown memsahib” like Feroza. 6
The motif of sartorial Indianness is a significant determinant of the way Feroza’s and Kareema’s respective fates unravel. Kareema is self-confident about her choices; her dress is an Indian Muslim woman’s — almost a calculated, coquettish performance of it. She mockingly asks Feroza to see the contrast in their dress and beauty, also hinting that she can help make Feroza “twice as well” than she — Feroza — looks in her reformed style of dress (179). If Feroza herself feels alienated in the process of her mimicry, others like Kareema solidify her feeling of lack and incompleteness. The delegation of women as markers of traditional and cultural identity bears down on a woman who chooses to wear a style of dress alien to her own culture. Feroza, who, through her sartorial transgression, dares to dismiss this cultural identity that she is expected to uphold, meets an ill-fated end.
The prominent missionary woman in the text, Julia Smith, who plays a significant role in Feroza’s journey, harbours dubious feelings about her changing dress. She ponders anxiously over the alterations Feroza gradually makes in her dress practices. Julia, who has engaged Feroza’s interests in Christian learning and education, finds herself questioning the correctness of her decision when she sees Feroza adopt a warped form of westernization in order to be “modern”. She finds herself in a jumble when Feroza, with pride, asks her if her husband would “feel himself back amongst the mems” upon seeing the way of life she has adopted (170). 7 Feroza is thus left to grapple with the complexities of the colonial mimicry she has initiated for herself.
Motivated by a sense of duty, Feroza’s husband wants her to receive an education, but the reformed dress that she adopts is her own choice and is unfortunately rejected by the Meer. His rejection of her reformed dress comes as a shock to Feroza. The Meer is drawn to a sense of tradition and culture, and does not wish to be back with the mems, as she assumes. He believes in maintaining one’s cultural identity and seems to see it as errant for a woman to abandon the traditional sartorial markers of her culture, when she should in fact retain and protect them. 8
The Meer’s rejection of Feroza is the climactic moment in Steel’s story, which also reveals the author’s own beliefs about the travesties of westernization amongst Indian women. Steel reveals her own reservations about Indian women’s westernization by writing a type of moral story about its ill-fated consequences. The dynamics of a patriarchal society and the expectations placed on women make Feroza feel compelled to invest in impressing her husband by striving for what she believes to be an ideal image of the Meer’s wife. The man, contrary to Feroza’s presuppositions, has stoically retained his Indianness and his cultural upbringing, evinced instantly through his Mohammedan dress style. Moreover, he has eyes only for the traditional beauty of Kareema, whom he sees as having kept her cultural look, and turns away from his own westernized wife. The complex politics of the Indian woman’s dressed body and the control exercised over it unravel when the England-returned husband disagrees with his wife’s westernized sartorial choices and instead gravitates towards the more sensual, Indian beauty that he sees in Kareema. The misery from the rejection affects Feroza tragically, as she succumbs of despair.
Saguna
In contrast to Feroza’s sartorial westernization and its failings, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s (1998/1895) Saguna, her semi-autobiographical novel, depicts the consequences of women’s refusal to alter their traditional dress and fabrics, despite converting to Christianity. 9 The novel — based loosely on Satthianadhan’s own life — tells the story of the titular character, Saguna, an Indian girl born to newly converted Christian parents from an orthodox Maharashtrian Brahmin family. 10 The narrative focuses in detail on Saguna’s parents, especially her mother Radhabai, and the way she bears the consequences of her husband’s secret conversion in the context of severe objections from family. After periodic resistance to letting go of her traditional Maharashtrian way of life, Radhabai also agrees to convert, and the couple decide to raise their two children as Christians.
Previous scholarship has assessed some prominent tropes from this book — of Christianity as enabling a companionate marriage, of women’s emancipation from the orthodox and oppressive throes of Hindu wifehood, and of improving one’s life through education (Lokuge, 1998; Sen, 2014; Chaturvedi, 2020). In reading Saguna, I focus on the politics of the dress choices made by the Indian Christian women in the book. Along with reading dress as a marker of cultural identity, I think about it in terms of religious signification and racial, colonial hierarchies, considering how Christianity was increasingly tied in with modernity and reform in this period. Radhabai and Saguna’s negotiation of their dress choices are compelling considering their religious identity as Christians. They exercise a form of agency in making bold choices as regards their dress practices despite knowing the expectations of them, and the consequences of keeping their traditional dress. They form a contrast with Steel’s Feroza who does not convert but merely adopts hybrid clothing. Saguna and Radhabai, though converted Christians, refuse to change their traditional dressing styles, keeping to their Hindu drapes and fabrics. I explore Satthianadhan’s depiction of women who make their own decisions about the clothing they wear, even if these choices defy expectations.
The history of Christianity in India dates back several centuries, with influences from various Catholic and Protestant European missions. In the nineteenth century, under the influence of British missionaries who made introducing “western civilization” to Indians their goal, the Indian Christian community embraced a composite culture, adopting not just the doctrine of Christianity but also the cultural influences of the British.
11
Eliza F. Kent, in her work on Indian Christian dress politics, has stated how clothing and dress styles were significant for a person who wanted to appear “civilized” and respectable:
One of the most striking ways in which Indian Christians asserted their new identities and claims to respectability was through dress. In nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century south India, visual presentations of the self were key components in the assertion of status. (Kent, 2004: 201)
Western clothing, as also noted by Tarlo (1996), brought with it the promise of sophistication and class status to Indian people in the colony. But Satthianadhan’s novel reveals a different form of choice and agency, evinced through Saguna’s and her mother’s decisions to keep their caste-based traditional dress. Radhabai is committed to retaining her classical Maharashtrian fashions, draping herself in the traditional nine-yard sari every day, even while she follows Christian religious practices. Saguna expresses her dismay at the “unconscious imitation of English customs and manners by the people of India” when she makes friends with the anglicized Prema, who went to an “English school”, and her family (Satthianadhan, 1998/1895: 80). 12 One day, Prema’s father introduces a young man to the Indian Christian circle that also includes Saguna and her family, describing him as a newly converted Christian man who is also rich — one of “the nice rich people who will be one with us” and not one of “the young scamps who run after all that is English” or the “stuck-up England-returneds” (82). But Saguna is mistrusting of this: the stranger is “dressed in English clothes, very self-confident, and with an air of swagger which showed that he thought himself somebody (important)”, she relates sceptically, judging from the man’s westernized manners and appearance (82). Saguna’s hesitations about the young man point to Satthianadhan’s critical stance towards an Indian imitation of western clothing and lifestyle — the idea of English dress and manners “as necessary concomitants of a higher stage of civilisation” (80).
In assessing the colonial influence of Indian Christians who adopted western dress, it is useful to shine a postcolonial light on this aspect of imitation. Homi Bhabha (1984: 126) has described colonial mimics as creating for themselves the identity of a “reformed, recognizable Other”, an identity achieved through a mimicry of the colonizer’s ways, one that the colonizer seeks to see in colonized subjects because it is more desirable than their strikingly different lifestyle and culture. Dress, as the one of the primary visible features on a person, is readable and connotative. The colonial mimics, in wearing English clothing, used the colonizer’s dress to elevate their status in society, as they attributed English dress and manners with a higher class, progress, and modernity. Their desire was to appear as aspirational, English-educated Indian people. Ironically, this very mimicry also functioned as a point of rupture or a space of splitting in the colonial identification of the colonized person. Despite their desire for and imitation of the colonizer’s way of life, they still remained colonized subjects, hierarchically lower, only to be governed over and never to be seen as the colonizer’s equals. In Saguna, the encounters with the Indian “mimic people” also disclose the fractures within the Indian Christian community itself; the identification of community members as newly converted Christians seems to depend on how well they adopt western manners and lifestyles.
Radhabai and Saguna, however, resist this colonization of the meaning of civilization and reform, and are constantly made to feel the consequences of their resistance socially. For example, they are made insultingly aware of the failings and absences in their sartorial get-up in a visit to a local missionary’s house, for which the narrator says she — Saguna — dresses with care and effort, hoping to evade judgment, and to converse and bond with the missionary’s young daughter. She wears an odhni while her mother also wears traditional clothes. 13 She anticipates her meeting with the young girl with whom she hopes to exchange books and from whom she wishes to learn more about the lifestyle of English girls. Saguna emphasizes her mother’s agential decision to wear traditional attire — there is evidence of a choice, a choice which Radhabai makes and resolutely stands by despite being a Christian convert and in defiance of the sartorial expectations that came with conversion: “My mother was dressed in the orthodox fashion, as if she had been a typical Brahmin lady. Nothing would induce her to alter her dress” (98). Inevitably, though, Radhabai’s and Saguna’s Indian Christian identity is contested because of their decisions to maintain their traditional attire.
The image of an Indian woman appearing in incongruously styled western clothing is critically rejected in Feroza’s story. As a corresponding polarity, these female Christian-converts are singled out by the western gaze for their active resistance to adapting their dress in any form or manner. Saguna is doubtful if they would even be recognized as Christians in the first place, such is the emblematic and significatory nature of their dress, seen as antithetical to their beliefs and religious identity. The missionary’s wife is dismissive and impertinent, as is the young girl with whom Saguna interacts. “I began to feel all the deficiencies in my dress”, Saguna remarks, upon experiencing the harsh condescension (99). The missionary’s daughter nonchalantly expresses her inability to believe that Saguna reads the same books as she herself does: “You read? You can’t read what I read. You won’t understand” (99). She does not view Saguna as her equal, in line with the rigid racial and colonial hierarchies in India. It is in this moment that the incompleteness and instability of colonial modernity displays itself. The education and knowledge of reformed Indian Christian women is doubted owing to their sartorial choices, thus putting their religious identity into question — they become inappropriate colonial subjects, because they refuse to engage in a sartorial mimicry of the colonizers.
A sense of alienation manifests through their clothing choices as the intensified surveillance of colonial power establishes an immanent difference between the colonizers and these women, showcasing a lack in the latter. The desire of the colonizers for a reformed, recognizable other, especially in the form of Christian converts, is impeded by this lack in the two Indian Christian women’s external, sartorial presentation. The mother and daughter’s sartorial performativity does not fit with their identification as educated, English-speaking and Christian women in the mind of the colonizer, and the Indian clothing renders them a partial representation or recognition. Almost the same, but not quite; only in this situation, it is the absence of English dress on the native body that displaces the identities of the women and leads to them being seen as “inappropriate” colonial subjects, as Saguna and her mother appear to the missionary’s wife and daughter.
Priya Joshi, in her cultural recovery of Anglophone novels in India, analyses Satthianadhan’s writing, detecting the author’s contentions about westernized modernity in late colonial India. Joshi (2002: 183) writes that “there is an emerging sense in Satthianadhan’s writing that India needs far more than a superficial application of Western modernity to reform the condition of its women”. The importance assigned to clothes for the construction of a societally suitable self-image is a prominent feature of the superficial modernity that Satthianadhan criticizes. Interestingly, Satthianadhan seems to echo Steel’s views on the political quagmire of Indian women’s bodies in English dress in a modernizing colonial India. But whether their opinions are of a similar nature is something that can be further interrogated: Steel critiques the Indian woman’s adoption of English dress, caricaturing the “advanced” styles, and rejecting women’s agential choices in doing so, all whilst writing from her position as a British woman and a colonizer. Satthianadhan, by contrast, is asking for the non-dismissal of people who choose not to wear English dress, and, in privileging their education and social reform over their sartorial presentation, drawing greatly from her own lived experience. She is loyal to her own “New Woman” convictions which conceived the Indian woman as one who elegantly balanced the traditional and the modern, a desirable melée of the two. 14
It is true that the Indian woman at a modernizing stage of history in the Indian colonial scene cuts a subversive and agential picture in reforming her dress to create a look inspired by both English and Indian styles. Satthianadhan’s reservations lie in the ability and danger of external appearance and clothing — of imitation — to overtake women’s independence and intellectual reform as determining factors of modernity and progress in Indian society, and she criticizes the class-based or racial exclusion that results from a refusal to dress in western styles. In a way — as studied through the encounters in her novel — clothing, though not a dominant factor, emerges as one of the features that is singled out in the judgment of a person’s education, class, or reform.
A reading of Satthianadhan’s collection of essays titled Miscellaneous Writings (1896) reveals that despite her reformative feminist ideas about women’s ability to lead liberal lives as inspired by western ideas, she was also in agreement with the Indian nationalist ideas of retaining a “distinctive spiritual essence of national culture” (Chatterjee, 1990: 239). She believed that the “New Indian Woman” should take inspiration from the west but also maintain her traditional image in carrying out her feminine roles, as Chandani Lokuge (1998) has emphasized in her introduction to the reissue of Saguna. These principles then pinpoint her conception of the ideal westernized, modern Indian woman as one who adopts the liberal spirit but also keeps her Hindu or Indian image and does not get carried away with indulging in the material activities of the western world — the love or desire for English dress being one of these. As Lokuge frames it:
It is possible to speculate that these women who were so directly caught in the crosscurrents of the Indian-British encounter suffered profound conflict and dislocation not clearly explained even to themselves, caused by the collision of recently acquired New Woman convictions with established ideologies. (12)
This shows the agency, and even pride, with which she depicts her autobiographical characters who keep their traditional dress in the wake of the craze for English fashions in the colonial space. What also comes to the fore is the idea that Satthianadhan was as caught within the ideological intertwining of woman and nation as any other female contemporary of hers.
Whereas Feroza, in her hybridized styles, finds herself disorientated in her mimicry when wearing western dress, Radhabai and Saguna as Christian converts find their identities adrift in their lack of imitation, in their refusal to adopt English dress (or elements of it). Feroza’s fallacious idealization of western dress and manners makes her an unworthy partner for her traditional husband, who disapproves of her decision to adopt the dress styles of the English. The author, Steel, sees the character as having sacrificed her original cultural identity which ultimately spells her doom. Saguna, on the other hand, refuses to adopt the colonizer’s dress, maintaining that conversion to Christianity and progressiveness need not come with the obligation to depart from one’s cultural lifestyle. In this, Feroza and Saguna are different: one emulates western dress whereas the other rejects it. However, in both situations, it is colonial and nationalist discourses that are in control of the narrative — whether concerning Indian women imitating or rejecting English dress. It is also useful to reiterate that the two women authors of the texts, as I have emphasized throughout the article, write from different subject positions in the colonial hierarchy of nineteenth-century India, as British (Steel) and Indian (Satthianadhan), colonizer and colonized, respectively, within a complicated, politically charged colonial topos.
Conclusion
Dress, as the foremost visible element on a person’s being, is linked to national identity and tradition, and, in the texts studied in this article, Indian women’s choice to emulate or reject English dress is cast under a critical light by the socio-political dictates of the circles they live in. Feroza’s decision to abandon classic Indian styles of dress in favour of British fashions disrupts the conception of women’s dressed bodies as signifiers and receptacles of national and cultural identity. Hybridized western dress on Indian women’s bodies ruptured the distinct ideas that people had about a typified “Indianness”; but simultaneously, the adoption of English dress was seen to afford a form of cultural elevation to Indians through their mimicry of the civilized colonizers, something that several colonized subjects like Satthianadhan grappled with. In both cases, women’s dressed bodies are found to be at the epicentre of the nationalist or colonialist debates and discussions about dress and identity. Working in the light of this knowledge helps us appreciate the agential power that both Feroza and Saguna display in making their respective choices, wresting momentary control of their own dressed bodies, whether through changing their clothing styles or maintaining their traditional ones.
Steel, through her colonial imagination, presents her fictionalized version of a failed adoption of English dress and styles by Indian women. Satthianadhan’s autobiographical writing, on its part, presents strong agential characters who refute this sort of adoption and, by depicting that resistance, creates the author’s own idealized image of the “New Indian Woman” as having both a western spirit and a traditional lifestyle. But overall, beyond their portrayal and characterization, the women that Steel and Satthianadhan write about are all inevitably stranded in that hybrid space, in the plural culture spawned by the transnational, colonial encounter. This article weighs the consequences of their dress choices and dress reform ideas, and how their reckoning with themselves and with the society is bewilderingly ambivalent — just as ambivalent as the colonial discourse that contains them. The colonized Indian women occupy what Homi Bhabha (1990) defines as the “third space” of the split self, in trying to reach for equilibrium between the ruler and the ruled. Their agencies and voices are at risk of being lost in the splitting of their identities amidst the radical choices they make, rendering the task of tracing them in colonial literature even more imperative.
