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The Construction of Anglo-Indian Spaces in Middlebrow Works of Raj Fiction, 1880-1914

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The Construction of Anglo-Indian Spaces in Middlebrow Works of Raj Fiction, 1880-1914 The construction of Anglo-Indian spaces in middlebrow works of Raj fiction, 1880-1914 Samuel James Caddick A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. 1 Abstract................................................................................................................ 3 Declaration ........................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 6 Chapter One: The Bungalow ............................................................................... 67 Chapter Two: The Colonial Club ........................................................................ 111 Chapter Three: Simla, the Summer Capital ........................................................ 136 Chapter Four: The Anglo-Indian Picnic .............................................................. 168 Chapter Five: England in Raj Fiction .................................................................. 198 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 228 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 244 Acknowledgements This thesis would have been impossible without the heroic patience, guidance, and encouragement of my supervisors Professor Glenda Norquay, Kate Walchester, and Michael Morris who have supported me and my worK from the very first day of my bachelor’s degree. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my parents for their enduring support and permitting me to turn their dining room into a repository for stacks of obscure, century old novels. I am also extremely appreciative to my sister and grandmother for keeping my spirits up during this entire process. My postgraduate buddy Tina Osborne has been instrumental in helping me navigate the often-byzantine world of academic. My peers across the Humanities and Social Sciences have been a wonderful support network to both celebrate and commiserate with. The unyielding support I have received from every staff member without exception at the LJMU English department has been extremely humbling. The support from other academics and historians has been a blessing and special thanks are due to Ralph Crane for granting me access to Maud Diver’s papers. The small Kindnesses and encouragements from historians of India and architecture such as Anita Anand, Tom Dyckhoff, and William Dalrymple meant an awful lot when I was starting out. The encouragement offered by Paolo d’Arienzo during the final crunch was invaluable to my getting the worK pulled together and finally submitted. I am also especially thanKful to my colleagues, past and present, at the mighty Waterstones Liverpool for having my bacK and Knowing when not to asK how the thesis is going. I would like to dedicate this thesis to the memory of my grandfather Christopher Moore and our trips to Fazakerley Library when I was a child. 1 2 Abstract Although bestsellers in their time, works of Raj fiction produced by women such as Maud Diver, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Alice Perrin, and Bithia May Croker have since fallen into obscurity with the general reading public and as a source of academic inquiry. This thesis readdresses this oversight through a reading of women-authored works of Raj fiction, a field of colonial literature that this thesis identifies as being fiction produced between 1857-1949 that in some way is related to the British Raj. The thesis suggests that in their depiction of the spaces of Anglo-Indian life these works shaped impressions of the Raj, but also contributed towards the maintenance of the Empire. Analysis of the imaginative organisation of space reveals both the limitations and nuances of Anglo-Indian women’s lives and the ideological expectations of Anglo-Indian femininity which is encoded through these spaces. Through an acknowledgement that these texts are part of the conservative middlebrow genre, the thesis argues that Raj fiction functioned as a form of anxiety management, containing and resolving anxieties around about the place of European women in the Raj and of a broader imperial decline. Each chapter of the thesis focuses on key spatial locations in this fiction. The Anglo-Indian home of the bungalow was considered as to be the responsibility for Anglo-Indian women and a space where fears of transgression may be depicted and then assuaged by the narrative. The traditionally masculine club space is decentralised from its emblematic position in Anglo-Indian life and is instead read as one that must be carefully navigated by female characters. The summer capital of Simla has similar connotations to the club social scene, but the feminine reputation of that city allows a 3 more stable imagined space to be constructed. The picnic emerges as a space from which anxieties of decline emerge; the temporary nature of the space allows for more permanent spaces to function as sites of resolution. The imperial centre of England is read as a space that can accommodate and possibly resolve anxieties that are disruptive in the less stable space of the Raj. An analysis of these specific, reoccurring spaces allows for both an alternate conception of the Raj to emerge as well as offering a method for analysing the anxiety-management function of the Raj fiction genre. 4 Declaration This submission is my own work and contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of the University or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgement has been made in the text, in the United Kingdom or overseas. SIGNATURE DATE: 03/09/19 5 Introduction In The Great Amulet (1908), Maud Diver’s second novel of Anglo-Indian romance, the author reintroduces Honor Desmond, the heroine of her first novel Captain Desmond V.C. (1907): In this era of hotels, clubs, and motors, of days spent in sowing hurry and reaping shattered nerves, the type is growing rarer, and it will be an ill day for England’s husbands and sons, nay, for her supremacy among nations, if it should ever become extinct. For it is no over-statement, but simple fact, that the women who follow, soon or late, in the track of her victorious arms, women of Honor Desmond’s calibre – home-loving, home-making, skilled in the lore of heart and spirit – have done fully as much to establish, strengthen, and settle her scattered Empire as shot, or steel, or the doubtful machinations of diplomacy.1 With its didactic voice extolling the virtues of European women in India the passage is emblematic of Diver’s oeuvre. This tone can be found throughout her Anglo- Indian novels as well as her guidebook, The Englishwoman in India (1909), and her biography of Honoria Lawrence (1936). In its positioning of Anglo-Indian woman in the colonial home space, the passage also reveals the intrinsic importance of buildings and spaces to the Anglo-Indian community. Diver’s celebration of the Anglo-Indian figures who maintain the home space is articulated through the prospect that national ruin would inevitably be brought about by the memsahib’s absence. Although literally translated as ‘ma’am-sahib’ and pertaining to the wife of the Anglo-Indian man, the term ‘memsahib’ is also frequently used to mean any female European resident in the Raj. Honor Desmond, for example, occupies the narrative and cultural expectations of the memsahib figure despite the fact she is not married to an Anglo-Indian man until her second 1 Maud Diver, The Great Amulet (New York: John Lane, 1908), p. 57. appearance in a work of fiction. The extinction of memsahibs in the mould of Honor Desmond would not only be ‘an ill day for England’s husbands and sons’ but also for ‘her supremacy among nations’: spaces – and the maintenance of these spaces – is directly tied to the health of the Empire at large. All Anglo-Indian spaces serve to support the British Empire while at the same time they also are infused with an anxiety of imperial decline and ruination. These spaces also offer ways in which anxieties around colonial structures and processes can be explored and contained. The role of women in writing about these spaces is central to that project. This thesis focuses on the literary depiction of Anglo-Indian spaces in works of women-authored Raj fiction produced during the final years of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth. As the feminine experience of Empire was so often spatially encoded into spaces of association, responsibility, exclusion, and prohibition the depiction of spaces in these works of fiction produced by women frequently holds a great significance. The depiction of literary Anglo-Indian spaces could be used as examples of the moral well-being of the Anglo-Indian community as well as the stability of British control over India. As the middlebrow genre of Raj fiction was a conservative form of cultural production these novels also functioned as a method of managing colonial anxieties of decline. Due to the narrative arc of the middlebrow form, which requires a sense of resolution at its conclusion, Raj fiction was able to depict and then resolve examples of
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