Burmese Women in the Colonial Imaginary: Gendered Representations in Kipling’s “Mandalay” and Croker’s The Road to Mandalay

Abstract:Burmese women occupied a pivotal if not exactly central role in colonial narratives about Burma. With British travelers and authors routinely marveling at their comparative social autonomy, and marital and more temporary unions between European men and Burmese women remaining acceptable until the First World War, the country’s female population as presented in colonial literature was an object as fascinating as it was contentious. In reading the female Burmese characters in both Rudyard Kipling’s famed poem, “Mandalay”, and Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-Indian romance novel, The Road to Mandalay, different and to a degree competing visions of the British empire emerge. In Kipling, colonies such as Burma offer the colonizing man a sphere freed from the moral duties prescribed by the metropole, while in Croker, moral diligence is demanded as a safeguard against the perils inherent to non-British—that is to say, non-white—societies. In each case, the specter of the Burmese woman represents a different figuration of empire for the narrative’s protagonist, suggesting that this colonial archetype was imagined in terms that reflected the gendered roles of colonizing women and men.