Abstract

This article examines two royal women’s autobiographies—The Autobiography of an Indian Princess (1921) by Sunity Devi and Maharani: The Story of an Indian Princess (1953) by Brinda Devi, queen consorts in the princely states of Cooch Behar and Kapurthala, respectively—to study their employment of the literary genre of autobiography as a site for self-fashioning in the context of the emergent public sphere in India. Locating them at the intersection of multiple historical shifts in the late colonial period, the article aims to trace their negotiations of power through self-fashioning in a socio-political context in which they were both privileged (as royalty) and marginalised (as colonial subjects and women in a patriarchal structure). In doing so, it posits the motif of ‘un/veiling’ as central to the royal women’s autobiographical self-representation and argues how it is metaphorical of the larger act of self-fashioning performed by them in public.

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