Book Reviews : INDRANI SEN, Woman and Empire. Representations in the Writings of British India (1858-1900), New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2002, pp. 211

Abstract

In the preface of Woman and Empire, Indrani Sen signals her intention to not contribute to the empirical endeavour of women’s history but to systematically examine Anglo-Indian literary texts of the period 1858-1900 as ’cultural products’. She takes as her subject the representation of Woman in selected non-fiction and fiction texts of Anglo-Indian and ’metropolitan’ (that is, British) writers. Although Dr Sen occasionally alludes to a distinction between literary representations and the ’historical real’ in her discussions of texts, she proceeds from the premise that both ‘literary’ and ’non-fictional’ writings constitute ’constructions [sic] of an imagined reality’ (p. xiii). She acknowledges the ’generic distinctiveness’ of the literary and non-literary texts that form the raw material of her study, while treating them as grist for the mill in the process of decoding ’colonial discursive practice’, the latter being understood as a ’means of exercising power and control’ and ’participating [sic] in the formation of ideologies’ (pp. xii-xiii). In the final analysis, Sen does speak to the ’historical real’ of the Raj-namely the attitudes and assumptions of Anglo-Indian writers, and presumably of their readers, about gender, race and social hierarchy. She refers to relevant recent work in gender history and literary studies-for instance, Jenny Sharpe’s Allegories of Empire and Nancy Paxton’s Writing Under the Raj-while clearly setting out her own judgements about particular texts as well as about