Domesticity under siege: british women and imperial crisis at the siege of lucknow, 1857

Abstract

The siege of Lucknow during the 1857 Indian Revolt lasted for over four months. In this article, the multiple ways in which the British women who survived it adapted their feminine subjectivities to the material realities of the siege are examined. In the early nineteenth century, British women came to play an increasingly important ideological role in Britain's imperial project in India, often moving to India with their husbands in order to recreate in the colony the civilized and civilizing ideal of English domesticity. Their symbolic role was heightened further when the Revolt broke out in May 1857, and large numbers of British women and children were killed in Meerut, Delhi, Seetapore, and Cawnpore. The British women who were besieged at Lucknow were aware of their role as national symbols of domesticity, civilization, and endangered empire, but they were also confronted with material conditions that threatened to undermine their own claims to occupy such a symbolic role. Through the examination of the published journals and memoirs of six women survivors of the siege, it is argued that these women developed a number of imaginative and narrative strategies through which they were able, quite successfully, to negotiate the tensions between the material and ideological aspects of their existence during the siege. At the same time, these mark their narrative projects in ways that sharply distinguish them from the journals and memoirs of British women in India before the Revolt and signal a profound change in the way British women in India imagined their relationship to the material, as well as ideological, project of empire.