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perspective, where the author would put all blame on corrupt politicians and use
Indian designs against Pakistan to justify the army’s rule and control over the country.
Even though he does provide some insight into how a Garrison State, like Pakistan,
virtually functions, he also accepts his own mistakes, as well as shortcomings of the
military and the ISI.
It would have done the book’s narrative a lot of good if it had been written in a
chronological order. However, even with this non-linear write-up and description of
events, the book still presents a wealth of effective insights into the author’s experiences
as a military officer who has enjoyed important and influential positions within the
military and diplomacy.

Farooq Yousaf
University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia

Indrani Sen, Gendered Transactions: The White Woman in Colonial India, c. 1820–1930
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), x + 226 pp.
DOI: 10.1177/0262728019844054

This excellent interdisciplinary study contributes to the fields of gender, literature,

culture and social history of medicine in colonial India. Certain sections have appeared
earlier as journal articles or book chapters, further reworked for this current volume,
a product of rigorous research of sources across genres. It includes letters, memoirs,
personal accounts, literary narratives, housekeeping manuals and medical handbooks
written by ‘white’ women and men as well as Western-educated Indian women (p. 1).
Sen’s main aim is to provide fascinating, contradictory and multilayered constructions
of white women in colonial India. She focuses on the complex experiences of three
groups of such women, missionaries, memsahibs (middle-class white women, mostly
administrators’ wives) and, to a lesser extent, ordinary soldiers’ wives.
The book is divided into two parts with three chapters each. Thematic
interconnectedness is maintained between the chapters by problematising and
analysing the nuances of power and dominance (Part I) as well as the ambivalence
and disadvantage faced by white women in colonial India (Part II). Such women
were often privileged based on ‘race’ and class, and yet fell victim to ‘gendered
disadvantage’ from men of their own community (p. 1). The study extends feminist
scholarship particularly from the 1990s onwards, which has contributed enormously
to a nuanced understanding of European women in India as both beneficiaries and
victims of colonialism (p. 2).
Sen begins by studying missionary writings, including ‘missionary novels’, to
understand the ‘female missionary gaze’ and its construction of ‘Indian women’.
The ‘civilising mission’ of zenana visitation and its civilising rhetoric with the
predominance of the ‘prison’ and ‘rescue’ metaphors constructed both the European
Book Reviews 239

‘Self ’ as ‘maternal imperialists’, a term originally coined by Ramusack (1992), and the
zenana women as the ‘Other’, who were ‘waiting to be “rescued” from their benighted
existence’ (p. 31). There was another tussle for power/knowledge here. Sen points
out that European female missionaries were often accompanied by ‘Bible women’ or
‘native’ female converts who were not given the same status as a missionary ‘lady’,
yet carried out most of the teaching (p. 27). This is followed by an in-depth study of
the complex and contradictory case of the Punjab-based administrator’s wife, Flora
Annie Steel (1847–1929) and her previously unexplored short stories. These criticised
missionaries’ ‘civilising missions’ (p. 71) and upheld the ‘Western female paradigm’,
while advocating that European women should model themselves according to the
ideal of the ‘self-sacrificing Indian woman’ (p. 75). Part I closes with an exploration
of the two main works of fiction written in English by two Indian Christian women
of Brahmin origin, namely, Shevantibai Nikambe’s Ratanbai, published in 1895, and
Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna, of the same year, in effect ‘returning the gaze’ to take
a look into the emancipatory promises of the ‘ideal’ gender paradigm, female education
and conversion to Christianity. Without going into excessive detail about the place
of English in the context of contemporary print culture in the Bombay presidency,
the chapter successfully manages to unveil the very nature and role of such narratives
in outlining how ‘race’, gender, class and religion together complicated cross-cultural
encounters between Indian women of the older generation and the ‘New Indian
Woman’ and white women, as well as their negotiations with ‘native’ and Western
patriarchies in the late nineteenth century.
Even though a detailed theorisation of ‘whiteness’ and gender may be absent, Sen
provides a critical analysis of significant racialised gender and class ideologies central
to British cultural identity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial
India. In Part II of the book, she delves into the memsahib’s moral responsibilities
and anxieties concerning health problems in the colonial home. These were viewed
mostly through the lenses of imperial and colonial gaze, ‘gendered medical gaze’
(p. 14) and ‘colonial misogyny’ (p. 5), often rife in the form of popular stereotypes
that circulated in colonial medical discourse. Sen points out the ways in which
colonial modernity, domesticity and motherhood were carefully constructed as
discourses of ‘power/knowledge’ of empire in domestic conduct manuals and medical
handbooks. She reminds us, however, that despite the advent of ‘family medicine’
and the entry of female doctors by the late nineteenth century, childbirth and
childrearing remained peripheral topics in ‘masculinist’, ‘empire-centric’ colonial
medical discourse (p. 166).
Particularly akin to and furthering the main arguments of Nupur Chaudhuri (1988)
and Elizabeth Buettner (2004), among others, is Sen’s scrutiny of representations of
the colonial mother’s anxieties about the closeness of the European child to ‘native’
female servants which threatened to dismantle the coloniser/colonised divide and undo
the very foundation of the British empire (p. 129). The colonial home was supposed
to be ‘a microcosm of the empire, with the memsahib at the head of a large retinue of

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240 South Asia Research Vol. 39(2): 236–251

servants reproducing the power relations characteristic of imperial administration’

(p. 137). Sen argues that such a ‘domestic administration’ (p. 115) model was a flawed
one, nonetheless, as female servants, like the ayah and the wet-nurse, constantly
destabilised the memsahib’s authority (p. 137).
It is most interesting to note that colonial ‘medical discourse (which was virtually
silent on ayahs) should have considered it necessary to single out the wet-nurse alone
among “natives”’ (p. 136). She was considered a dangerous and ‘deeply ambivalent
presence’ in the colonial home, most often portrayed with ‘unambiguous negativity’
(p. 137). Medical handbooks predominantly authored by male colonial physicians
particularly ‘denigrated the wet-nurse in colonial medical discourse’ (p. 164).
Memsahib’s writings also warned about the ‘ambivalences of power’ (p. 113) due
to the ‘complex dynamics of domestic relationships’ with female domestic servants
especially in the ‘colonial nursery’—‘a troubled, ambivalent and even contested space’
(p. 114). Sen points out that colonial physicians’ directives about ‘detailed anatomical
descriptions of the amah’s breasts tended to dehumanise her into some kind of a “milch-
cow”’ (p. 165) in the service of the empire. She aptly argues that it was ‘a combination
of prurience, power, as well as race, class and gender prejudices’ (p. 165). Here, one
may point out that Bengali daktars also strongly advocated a detailed examination of
the wet-nurse’s body and sometimes indicated that, once hired, she must be prepared
to give up nursing her own child if necessary.
Sen’s extensive research has opened up new avenues of research on this subject
whereby it might be worthwhile to draw local, national and transnational discursive
connections, or point out the lack thereof, to further nuance ‘race’ in gender and
medicine by comparing medical advice about motherhood and wet-nursing in colonial
India, Britain and the rest of the British empire. Part II concludes with a discussion
of further ramifications of ‘race’/gender/class ideologies in connection with mental
health, primarily psychopathological ‘neurasthenia’ variously affecting sahibs and
memsahibs. However, it is notable that, as Sen highlights, barrack wives in ‘tropical’
India were perceived as suffering not from neurasthenia, but from alcoholism and
‘delirium tremens’—a clear instance of class prejudices in the colonial gaze (p. 196).
Sen’s book skilfully tackles problematic questions about identity and agency in cross-
cultural encounters of white women in colonial India from various angles of gender,
‘race’, class, caste, region and religion. Spanning the longue durée from the 1820s
to the 1930s, it is, therefore, particularly attentive to the continuities and evolution
of political, ideological and socio-economic ethos of the Company and Crown rule
prior to and following the Great Rebellion of 1857. The richness, cogency and clarity
of the narrative is based on a thorough survey of literary and non-literary primary
sources, as well as a wide range of secondary sources, to reveal the violence underlying
initiatives of colonial modernity based on westernising and ‘civilising missions’ and
‘ideals’ of ‘respectability’ and well-being. To sum up, Gendered Transactions is not only
invaluable for students with a literature and history background at undergraduate and
postgraduate levels, but also a pleasurable and informative read for a wider audience.
Book Reviews 241

References
Buettner, E. (2004) Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Chaudhuri, N. (1988) ‘Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India’,
Victorian Studies, 31(4): 517–35.
Ramusack, B. N. (1992) ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British
Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’. In N. Chaudhuri & M. Strobel (Eds), Western Women
and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (pp. 119–36). Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.

Ranjana Saha
Humanities and Social Sciences Department
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research
Mohali, India

Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India

(London & New York: Routledge, 2018), ix + 321 pp.
DOI: 10.1177/0262728019844052

This important new book charts the role of women in the communist movement
in India from the early 1920s until the 1960s. By examining a range of writings by
and about communist women, including memoirs, autobiographies, novels, party
documents, newspaper articles and interviews conducted by the author and others,
Loomba weaves both the continuities and the changes in first-person experiences of
women into a compelling narrative. This will be of use to literary critics, historians
and indeed anyone interested in the trajectory of communism in India. This review
highlights four critical contributions of the book and then points out an important
limitation of its approach.
First, Loomba is right to insist that the story of communist women should begin
with their deep involvement in revolutionary organisations in the 1920s and 1930s,
especially in the Anushilan Samiti led by Surya Sen in Bengal, and in the Hindustan
Socialist Republican Army (HRSA) in Punjab. The book’s first two chapters are devoted
to women’s activities in these groups. Loomba is able to effectively demonstrate how
the experiences of both men and women leaders as ‘revolutionaries’ forced them to
rethink the value of violent action by a ‘few’ as compared to political action by ‘mass’
communist organisations. We are yet to grasp the full historical significance of this
internal transmutation of revolutionary action into organised communism.
Second, Loomba’s literary sensibilities have pushed her to emphasise not
extraordinary moments of rebellion, such as the Telangana uprising in Andhra or the
Tebhaga movement in Bengal, but rather ‘the more routine experiences of revolutionary
women of different class and regional backgrounds, with a view to understanding the

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