Inside the royal zenanas in colonial India: Avadhi and other begums in the travel accounts of Fanny Parkes

Abstract

This essay examines the travel journal of a British woman, Fanny Parkes, who travelled to and within India (between the years 1822 to 1845) and wrote at length about her visits to royal zenanas in places like Avadh. Zenanas had formed part of a long-established and popular tradition of Western Orientalist writings – imagined as spaces where beautiful, indolent women languished under the despotic rule of their Oriental masters/husbands. However, some of the royal zenanas that British women like Parkes visited did contain dynamic and assertive begums who could hardly be accommodated in the category of either helpless brown women awaiting rescue by white men, or of the languidly erotic women associated in countless popular narratives with forbidden sexuality. The colonial administration, that saw itself as the rescuer of hapless Indian women, had in fact diluted their powers and imposed limits on their political roles. An attempt has been made in this paper to examine Parkes's descriptions of the Avadhi begums in ways that make visible their specific negotiations of contemporary gender and imperial politics. In examining the context of these accounts, considerable attention has been paid to the complex and heterogeneous histories of the Indian women themselves about whom Parkes has written. What has been eschewed is a simplistic and naïve assumption about the feminine perspective as being invariably oppositional to imperial politics and about the memsahibs as invariably capable of achieving trans-cultural solidarity with racially and culturally ‘other’ women.