Widows, Violence and Death: The Construction of Imperial Identity and Memory by Women in Mourning across British India, 1857–1926

Abstract

This article examines the work of British widows in the construction of their husbands’ memory following their violent deaths in British India, during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Exploring the collections of a military, missionary and Indian Civil Service widow, it suggests that a specifically feminised culture of mourning nurtured imperial narratives. It moves between personal correspondence, to published accounts of frontier ‘murders’, to a new understanding of South Asian ‘condolence meetings’ and resolutions addressed to British widows, arguing that women were critical to the fashioning of men's identity in death and a broader colonial politics of grief.