Gender and nationality: Experiences of “foreign” women in colonial India during the war years

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to open up a field of enquiry and focus on encounters between the colonial regime in India and “foreign” women around the time of the World Wars. The terms on which trans-continental lives were negotiated came to be embedded in legal regimes which were continuously evolving. The interface of women and the colonial state needs to be studied from multiple socio-political locations. The lens of gender, generally invoked with reference to Indian women subjects, does not encompass the different categories of women with whom the state established formal juridical relations, through routes and relationships that had evolved over long periods of history. War and conflict led to the fracturing of the binary of Indian and foreign/ western women. Apart from British women, who traveled across the seas to “join” their families, there were other European women as well. Given the regulatory regimes of the times, their experiences were highly gendered and complex. Women from “hostile” countries came to be marked by their origins, identities and nationalities. Focusing on aspects of Citizenship and Gender, this paper underscores the need to trace these different trajectories, to uncover the layered experiences of “foreign” women, caught across borders in times of conflict.