INTRODUCTION
Mapping a Critical Geography of Late-Nineteenth-Century Imperial Britain

This book examines three discrete instances of the colonial encounter in Victorian society—Pandita Ramabai at Cheltenham and Wantage, Cornelia Sorabji at Oxford, and Behramji Malabari in London—in order to explore how imperial ideologies played themselves out in personal, political, social, and cultural relations in late-nineteenth-century Britain. The accounts that these three left of their experiences in the British Isles in the 1880s and 1890s suggest that the United Kingdom could be as much of a "contact zone" as the colonies themselves.1 Their experiences also provide historical evidence of how imperial power was staged at home and how it was contested by colonial "natives" at the heart of the empire itself. By investigating Indians' negotiations of colonialism in metropolitan localities, students of Victorian culture can more fully understand how Britain itself has historically been an imperial terrain—a site productive not just of imperial policy or attitudes directed outward, but of colonial encounters within. And by engaging with some historically specific colonial encounters "at home," readers of British history can more fully appreciate some of the ways imperial power relations were challenged and remade by colonial subjects not just in the far-flung territories of the empire but more centrally, in the social spaces of "domestic" Victorian imperial culture itself.

As Edward Said observes in the first few pages of Culture and Imperialism, historians of the West can no longer ignore "empires and the imperial context" in their history-writing.2 The enduring purchase of Said's work—its "irritative process of critique"—lies in its insistence

that what is at risk from attention to orientalism is the integrity of the European "heartland" itself, because "the principal motifs and tropes of . . . European cultural tradition, far from being self-generated, were the product[s] of constant, intricate, but mostly unacknowledged traffic with the non-European world.3 Recent scholarship in British history has documented the traces of empire that were everywhere to be found at home before World War I—in spaces as diverse as the Boy Scouts, Bovril advertisements, and biscuit tins; in productions as varied as novels, feminist pamphlets, and music halls; and in cartographies as particular as Oxbridge, London, and the Franco-British Exhibition.4 If there is little consensus about the significance of empire's impact on Britain's domestic cultural formations, primary evidence of its constitutive role nonetheless abounds, and scholars of the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian periods are at work to remap Greater Britain as an imperial landscape, using a variety of evidentiary bases and techniques.5 More attention needs to be paid, however, to the cultures of movement that brought a variety of colonial subjects—Indian, African, Caribbean, Chinese, and even Irish—to England's "green and pleasant land" and made them visible on the cultural landscape well before the immigration trends of the post-1945 period.6 Mohandas K. Gandhi, who lived in London in the 1880s, is just the most famous of many "native" Indian subjects who lived and worked in England, walking the city streets and encountering "native" Britons along their pathways.7 And yet although it was axiomatic from the eighteenth century onward that even slaves were free once they set foot onto British soil, Indians were not at liberty to wander Victorian Britain without facing barriers thrown up by the exigencies of Britain's role as an imperial power and, more specifically, by the dictates of the civilizing mission that a variety of Britons believed to be their special gift to colonial peoples. As Liz Stanley has suggested, the map of the British Isles was itself inscribed with the colonial power of Britain.8 This power was consequential not only in terms of its economic and political impact but also in its effect on everyday relations between Britons and their colonial "fellow subjects"—and between Britons and Britons as well, since the status of former slaves and colonial peoples was crucial to debates about what constituted "British" citizenship in the nineteenth century and after.9

Thanks to Rozina Visram's invaluable work, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 1700-1947, we know that by the 1880s, Indians had been a presence in the British Isles for a hundred and fifty years: at least as long, in fact, as the British Empire in India.10 What

is less well-known is how, as "colonial" subjects, they experienced imperial ideologies at work in the so-called motherland: what it was like to be the "Other" in the British Isles, to encounter English people and prejudices on English soil, and to confront the kinds of colonial stereotypes that were the stuff of imperial culture not just in India but in Great Britain proper and among native Britons. This study examines how ideologies of imperialism worked in the cultural practices of some English people at the epicenter of empire—that is, the southeast comer of Great Britain—and how the colonial subjects they encountered there engaged with those practices.11 It suggests that many Britons, even those who never left Britain, were implicated in imperial power relations because Victorian culture at home sponsored a variety of possibilities for colonial encounters of the most casual and the most spectacular kind. And it treats the accounts that Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari left of their sojourns in Britain not simply as the return or even the refusal of the colonizing gaze but as complex and critical ethnographies of late-Victorian British culture and society. In their letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and travelogues, colonial travelers worked to transform themselves (variously, temporarily, and often unstably) from objects of metropolitan spectacle to exhibitors of Western mores, and displayed for audiences (both public and private, Indian and British) exactly how unmannered and coercive Western "civilization," could be, particularly where imperial benevolence was concerned. In doing so they left historical evidence of empire's local impact in Britain, especially on convictions about what Victorian "Englishness" was and ought to be. Ramabai's, Sorabji's, and Malabari's sojourns in Britain illustrate how the colonial encounter in the late nineteenth-century Western metropole could unsettle the boundaries of empire and remake power relations in imperial culture. They also provide a glimpse of some of the shrewd social and cultural strategies that "the voyage in" required.

Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) was an educator and social reformer who came to England in 1883 seeking a medical education through the good offices of sympathetic English women. Her initial contacts were with the Anglican Sisters of Saint Mary the Virgin at Wantage, whose connections with the educator Dorothea Beale in turn enabled her to study at Cheltenham Ladies' College. Although deeply influenced by her relationships with English women, Ramabai's conversion to Christianity and her subsequent struggles with the Anglican Church hierarchy over doctrinal matters caused her ultimately to break with both of the women's communities, religious and educational, in which she had re-

sided. When she left England in 1886 she had not fulfilled her intention of becoming a medical doctor and, indeed, had found more sympathy and financial support among American women reformers than among her British "sisters"—in large measure because she resisted her benefactors' attempts to make her an evangelical missionary for India. Ramabai returned to India, where she became a champion of the Hindu widows' cause whose reform work in western India was celebrated throughout the world. The letters she wrote to a variety of English patrons while in Britain contested the reach of ecclesiastical authority in determining the direction of her reform activities. They also document Ramabai's close, critical reading of the colonizing practices enacted in the domestic Christianizing mission for India—an ethnographic approach that was pedagogic in purpose, aiming as it did to educate her patrons about the orientalist presumptions of their evangelizing intentions.12 Ramabai's travels to the metropole reveal some of the constraints that imperial power relationships placed on the possibilities of women's solidarity, as well as the courage and self-determination required by an Indian woman trying to negotiate a path for herself and her reform program at the intersection of imperial Christianity, women's philanthropy, and social reform.

Three years after Ramabai's departure, Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954) arrived in Britain to take up the study of law at Somerville College, Oxford. Sorabji came into contact with some of the great minds of her time—A. V. Dicey, Max Muller, Benjamin Jowett—and despite considerable opposition to her pursuit of credentials in the law, she passed the Bachelor of Civil Law exam in 1892 and qualified for the bar in 1922.13 She became a pleader in the Calcutta court of wards and was famous internationally by the 1930s, both for her work on behalf of purdahnashin and because of her defense of Katherine Mayo's Mother India.14 As in Ramabai's case, Sorabji's original intention in coming to Britain was to train as a doctor. A Parsi born into a Christian family in Bombay presidency, she believed, as did many other women of her generation (whether Indian or British), that the practice of medicine was among the most culturally appropriate professions for women. But her English friends in Britain dissuaded her from this path, hoping instead that she would become a teacher and hence help to advance their own schemes for female education in India. Sorabji strenuously resisted her patrons' attempts to fix her as a secular missionary for India and, as her correspondence to her family in Poona during these years attests, she struggled to wrest control of her own destiny from those do-gooders in Brit-

ain who claimed to have her best interests at heart. Her letters furnish us with another close reading of how imperial ideologies were at work in and around the philanthropic world of Victorian Oxford. Sorabji's success in negotiating both her patrons and the Oxford examination system testifies not simply to her personal determination to succeed but to her canny discernment of, and at times her complicity with, the ways in which imperial priorities masqueraded as "civilizing" philanthropy in Victorian imperial culture, especially where Indian women were concerned.

Behramji Malabari (1853-1912) did not come to Britain to pursue an education; nor was he dependent on benefactors for his passage, his living arrangements, or his maintenance. Unlike either Ramabai or Sorabji, he was a well-established professional man, a Bombay poet and journalist of some renown, before he arrived in London in 1890. And yet he too had to negotiate the status of "colonial native" that was continually ascribed to him as he wandered the byways of the late-Victorian imperial metropolis. Also a Parsi, he thought of himself as a patriotic colonial citizen-subject, and he arrived in England in order to organize support among English reformers and politicians for Hindu child-wives and child-widows in India. Like his countrywomen he encountered all manner of Britons in public and private; his account of his London sojourn, The Indian Eye on English Life, is most remarkable for what it reveals about the kind of reception Indian men might expect on the streets of the empire's capital city. Malabari encountered challenge after challenge to his aspirations to be a flaneur and, in the chaos of the urban metropole, to his quest to be seen as a respectable Indian gentleman as well. If his trip to London did not diminish his anglophilia, it nonetheless prompted him to produce a more critical reading of English culture, Western sexual mores, and European modernity than he might have done from Bombay. Partly as a result of his lobbying efforts in Britain and of the campaign against child marriage he helped to wage in Bombay, the Government of India passed the Age of Consent Act of 1891, legislation that raised the age of consent for girls in India from ten to twelve years of age, making sexual intercourse illegal with a girl below the stipulated age.15

Like Ramabai's and Sorabji's correspondence, Malabari's narrative of his sojourn in the "motherland" of the empire is a kind of ethnographic text, offering yet another close reading of English civilization, and especially of London life, in the late-Victorian period. As Sherry Ortner has argued, an ethnographic stance is as much a process contingent on

the location of the body in space and time as it is "an interpretive mode"—a mode that travel throws into particularly bold relief.16 Just as it did for the others, travel to Britain and across its various landscapes enabled Malabari to evaluate the twin phenomena of "English-ness" and British imperialism from a different perspective than was available in India, where encounters between the "native" and the "Briton" were different in degree if not in kind. Janaki Agnes Penelope Majumdar (W. C. Bonnerjee's daughter) recalled the fin de siècle Raj as a time when "Anglo-Indians thoroughly despised 'natives' as a class, though they were friendly enough to those whom they thought had money and position." If Indians wished to gain access to European society in India they had to adapt themselves to English manners and culture, though this was not necessarily a guarantee of social intercourse.17 While opportunities for personal interaction with Britons may have been more available in Britain than in India (where the regulation of space was a crucial technology of colonial rule), the relative intimacy of metropolitan social life was routinely intruded upon, and indeed already fully constituted by, the presumptions of British imperial power. What Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari all came to understand, through different experiences and with various degrees of critical appreciation, was how elusive the goal of feeling comfortably "at home" as a British colonial subject in domestic imperial culture could be.

During an extended historical moment like ours when much attention is being given to the ways in which empire and its Others shaped Euro-American consciousness and cultural practices, narratives of colonial travelers in Victorian Britain remind Westerners that the flow of ideas, commerce, and people was not just from Britain to the colonies. Either because they were part of permanent communities with long histories and traditions in the British Isles, or because they were travelers or temporary residents in various metropoles and regions throughout the United Kingdom, a variety of colonial "Others" circulated at the very heart of the British Empire before the twentieth century. They were, as Gretchen Gerzina has noted, a "continual and very English presence" from the Elizabethan settlement onward.18 To draw attention to this phenomenon is no mere pluralizing gesture. Ramabai's, Sorabji's, and Malabari's accounts rematerialize the movement of colonial subjects from the so-called peripheries to the ostensible center of the late-Victorian empire. In examining their narratives I hope to contribute to the project of recovering the presence of nonwhite peoples in Victorian Britain, to conversations about empire's impact on metropolitan society, and

to the mapping of a new critical geography of "national" history in imperial Britain.19 An enterprise like this one, which is committed to moving current debates about British imperial culture into the physical spaces of "home," requires a recognition of the fact that the will of the Victorian age was conceived in spatial terms. Consequently, the story of Britain's insularity from empire remains one of the most enduring fictions produced by Victorian culture, even if some elites and historians (like J. R. Seeley) were astute enough to see through the "conceptual separation of metropole and colony" that was a common, though unspoken, Victorian cultural possession.20 People, ideas and commerce flowed from West to East in the narratives that dominated the nineteenth-century cultural imagination, with the "voyage out" serving as a recurrent metaphor for the centrifugal pull of Britain's colonial possessions. The exotic and safely distant world that Victorians mapped as empire figured almost as another planet, far away from England's green and pleasant land, disconnected in time and space from the mother country—that stolid and basically static domestic referent. In fact, of course, metropolitan society had been both indissolubly linked to and continuously remade by Britain's colonial possessions since the sixteenth century, when merchant capitalists first brought products of the European slave trade—gold, ivory, pepper, as well as some slaves—to English and Scottish shores. One simple and stunning measure of the material and symbolic impact of empire on "domestic" British society is to be found in the word "guinea," which, by the eighteenth century, had become the popular name for the gold struck into coin in 1663 from the coast of Africa.21 Evidence of Britain's imperial wealth and power continued to make its way to the heart of the empire in the form of both human and commercial capital, as the traffic in goods and people from the colonies became crucial to Britain's national prosperity and international preeminence down to the midtwentieth century and beyond. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, colonial peoples came to Britain, taking up permanent or semipermanent residence; manufactures based on the raw materials produced from colonial plantations filled the marketplaces of the "nation of shopkeepers"; and displays of Britain's colonial influence and power were everywhere on offer in Britain at home—whether it was through the medium of political debates, missionary activities, consumer capitalism, novels, children's books, regional exhibitions, the decorative arts, or popular entertainments. Especially because claims about the impact of the imperial enterprise in Britain "proper" are coming under assault at the very moment when

they are becoming axiomatic, it bears repeating that empire was and is not just a phenomenon "out there" but a fundamental and constitutive part of English culture and national identity at home, where "the fact of empire was registered not only in political debate . . . but entered the social fabric, the intellectual discourse and the life of the imagination."22 Confronting the "local" effects of imperialism requires, therefore, a new cultural geography and, more important, a radically different way of looking at those cartographies to which we have become accustomed. It means working to see and to read the domestic cultural landscape for the traces of imperialism that are there, unobtrusive and perhaps even invisible to the eye trained in thinking of empire as something remote, at one remove from the "motherland." Historicizing the presence of colonial peoples in Victorian Britain makes manifest, above all, the various ways in which imperial England itself was available for consumption, appropriation, and refiguration by its colonial subjects.

Despite historical evidence to the contrary, the persistent conviction that home and empire were separate spheres—to which the Victorians, and many historians after them, have been so deeply attached—cannot be dismissed as just any other fiction.23 As with all accounts of cultural identity, this particular representation of Britain's past and of its present involves a contest over geography, over territorial integrity—over what Victorians themselves called "the Island Story."24 Histories of the presence of colonial peoples in the British Isles before 1945 provide the most contentious challenge to the narrative of splendid isolation produced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians, and not simply because they suggest that the flow of people and ideas from East to West helped to create and sustain metropolitan society. As Paul Gilroy has argued with regard to the emergence of black history in Britain, such narratives themselves are perceived as "an illegitimate intrusion into a vision of authentic national life that, prior to their arrival, was as stable and peaceful as it was ethnically undifferentiated."25 Twentieth-century British politicians no less than nineteenth-century British historians have been opposed to narratives of Britain "as a racially-mixed . . . painfully divided, class-ridden society . . . [because that is not] the image of Britain that others should be allowed to see."26 There can be little doubt that history, as a representation of a culture's past to itself and to the world, is above all else a terrain of struggle—or that representation itself, as a technology of cultural meanings, is implicated in all struggles for power. Accusations by a British government minister in 1995 that the elevation of historical figures like Olaudah Equiano and Mary Seacole to the status

of British heroes constituted a "betrayal" of true British history and "national identity" surely testifies to the political contests that representation has the power to set in motion.27 In their capacity as critics of the legend of the rise of a homogeneous, consensual nation-state, historians of domestic imperial culture insist on this struggle: for they challenge the presumption, foundational to the very notion of "English" history, that Victorian Britain, at least, was either purely white or unproblematically English. In doing so, they question the legitimacy of a national history that views the nonwhite populations of the late twentieth century as fallout from the disintegration of empire rather than as the predictable outcome of centuries of imperial power and engagement—or, more subversively, as Britons with a history at once inseparable from and at odds with the Island Story. As David Dabydeen has observed, the historical meanings attached to English convictions of insularity must be grappled with since, with over half a million West Indians in late twentieth-century Britain, "England today is the largest West Indian island after Jamaica and Trinidad."28

The trajectories of Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari through late-Victorian Britain are part of these counternarratives, though not necessarily in any self-evident way. They were only three of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of colonial subjects who passed through the imperial metropole for travel, for study, or in search of support for their reform projects in India in the nineteenth century. They are hardly representative of nineteenth-century Indians, let alone of the wide variety of colonized peoples, the Irish included, who came to British shores seeking education, work, or escape from economic or political oppression in the lands of their birth. A Hindu woman converted to Christianity, a Parsi Christian woman training in the law, a Parsi male social reformer—none of them was even predictably "Indian" in Victorian cultural terms, where stereotypes of "the Hindu" and "the Muslim" were common despite the cultural heterogeneity of the colonial population, and at a time when the notion of any kind of "Indian" national unity or identity was considered impossible.29 At the same time, differences of gender, class, caste, religion, and sociocultural location guaranteed that their experiences of Britain and their appropriations of "Indianness" could not be identical or even typical of what any or all Indians on the move experienced. Most significantly perhaps, none of them took up permanent residence in the British Isles. Malabari's 1890 voyage was one of at least two between Bombay and London, and Ramabai visited England only once after 1886. Cornelia Sorabji, for her part, returned again and again over

the course of her lifetime, insisting in her autobiography that she was someone who had "warmed her hands at two fires" and had been "horned in two countries, England and India."30 The ways in which their narratives are linked to revisionist histories of Britain are thus complex, especially since those histories have often been produced in the service of reclaiming a "black Britannia," where "black" can mean colonial (i.e., South Asian, East Asian, Arab) but can also signify exclusively African and Afro-Caribbean communities.31

And yet, just as the Salman Rushdie affair is, to quote Gilroy, part of "the convoluted history of black settlement in Britain," the traces left by Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari of their experiences in the United Kingdom also have something to contribute to new cultural geographies of the imperial metropolis.32 Their deliberate migrations remind us that in addition to the flow of European troops, travelers, and settlers from home to empire, there was a smaller but nonetheless influential movement of colonial peoples moving through the United Kingdom, making Britain at home a multiethnic nation and a site of diasporic movement across the whole of the nineteenth century. Gandhi's passage from India to South Africa to London and back again during the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods is perhaps the most famous example of how significant such colonial migrancy could be, though his impact on world-historical events should not distract us from the influence Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari each had on regional Indian politics and with it, on "national" Indian history as well.33 To insist upon the phenomenon of migrancy in the Victorian period is not simply a function of updating or otherwise modernizing a British historical tradition that willfully disavows its own imperial past. Rather, I am interested in rematerializing the movement of colonial subjects from the "peripheries" to the ostensible center of the late-Victorian empire in order to interrogate the distinctions between Home and Away that defined the imagined geography of empire in the nineteenth century and, in the process, to challenge the quintessentially Victorian conviction that "England possesses an unbroken history of cultural homogeneity and territorial integrity."34 And I take as my point of departure Mrinalini Sinha's call to revision Britain's historically national frame of reference in order "to recognize its location in a larger imperial social formation."35 Integral to these projects is a recognition of the ways in which colonial peoples on the move to and through the metropole helped to established some South Asians as "Indian" and in the process, worked to consolidate Britons as "British" (or, more commonly, as "English") and Britain itself as "Britain" in the late

nineteenth century. Although the mobility of colonial peoples and their embrace of travel as an anticolonial and modernizing possibility may be something of a truism in cultural studies, the fact that their encounters with Britons in a variety of social spaces helped to secure "Englishness" as a cultural practice is by no means axiomatic among students of British, and especially Victorian, history. Indeed, for the cultural episteme of the Victorian Period, where fixity—geographical, social, political—was nothing less than an emblem of the modem, foregrounding the movements of colonial Peoples between, across, and around a variety of "modern" Western landscapes poses a critical challenge to traditions of Western history-writing dependent on the progress of the territorially bounded nations out of which such narratives have been produced.36

All of the individuals figured here also traveled in India both before and after their trips abroad, suggesting that the British "colonial" border need not be read as the chief marker of urbanity, modernity, or identity.37 Paris loomed as large as London in the imaginations of many Indian travelers in the nineteenth century, as a survey of colonial guidebooks reveals.38 Nor was Britain the only Western country to which these three traveled. Ramabai went to the United States; both Sorabji and Malabari traveled in Europe as well. All of these experiences are important for understanding who they were and how they engaged with "the West" more generally. At the same time, travel to and through Britain was freighted with specific (if varied) symbolic meanings for Indians in the nineteenth century because it produced a series of encounters—and for some, a display of cosmopolitanism—peculiar to India's relationship to the Raj. Taken together, the accounts left by Ramabai and others underscore the fact that the Victorian empire produced cultures not just of travel but of Perpetual movement from East to West, out of which contemporary diasporas have grown and have begun to make their impact felt on nation-states globally. And their testimonies require us to remember that during the same historical moment when Indian culture and society was the relentless object of colonial scrutiny, there were some admittedly privileged colonial subjects at work producing ethnographies of "native" British culture that Britons had to confront and contend with.39

My emphasis on individual figures notwithstanding, I am not attempting to write definitive biographies of Ramabai, Sorabji, or Malabari. Critical evaluations of Ramabai's life exist, many of them written by feminist historians in and outside India, upon whom I have drawn heavily in my focus on her time in Britain. Sorabji is beginning to be

treated as a subject of feminist inquiry, though until now little attention has been paid to the letters she wrote to her parents from Oxford. And while Malabari's activity in the Age of Consent Act controversy has been well documented, his roles as flaneur and ethnographer have not been examined in depth. Although their time in Britain undoubtedly shaped their biographies, I want to read the accounts of these three more specifically as evidence of how movement to and through the colonial metropole might influence, without fully determining, the variegated experiences of colonial subjects at a specific historical moment.40 My emphasis on specificity of time (the 1880s and early 1890s) and place (Cheltenham, Wantage, London, Oxford) marks out a commitment to cultural analysis that is nonetheless vested in a densely historicized reading rather than in either pastiche or change over the longue durée. This commitment to historical "thickness" has been identified as one of the characteristics of cultural history.—an investment that highlights its ethnographic as well as its linguistic turn and allows for a vertical rather than an exclusively horizontal vision.41 A close reading of the testimonies treated here allows us to appreciate not only the particularized experiences of these three individuals but also some of the structural conditions and contingencies of late-Victorian imperial benevolence, one of whose primary objects of reform was "the Indian woman"—a late-Victorian metropolitan trope with which Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari each engaged, albeit in different ways. The fact that all three left textual accounts behind highlights their elite status compared with that of many colonial peoples who traveled in Britain, as well as the structural privilege such travel itself conferred on their discursive productions. The preservation of Sorabji's letters in the India Office Library in London through the influence of her friend, Lady Elena Richmond, effectively demonstrates how deeply archival collections are implicated in systems of socioeconomic power.42 That many of her papers are housed in Britain and not in India may be a lasting testimony to Sorabji's anglophilia, but it is also evidence of the enduring power of colonial knowledge systems (like archives) to shape history-writing as well.

Significantly perhaps, the women wrote private letters, while Malabari published a book in two editions, in Bombay and London. Although I have focused on the writing each one did in the 1880s and 1890s for the sake of underscoring their contemporaneity as well as the significance of the fin de siècle for colonial cultures of movement, all of them wrote in a variety of genres during their lifetimes, a fact to which I have alluded in their respective chapters. In addition to being an ac-

claimed Gujerati poet, Malabari wrote for newspapers both in India and in Britain. Sorabji wrote journal articles and a number of books in English, including a 1934 autobiography. Ramabai, for her part, wrote books in English and Marathi, including a travelogue, Pandita Ramabai yancha Englandcha Prayas (1883) that details her time in England.43 In this sense, the genres that shaped their ethnographies were neither singular nor categorizable as simply "gendered." The publication of Malabari's Indian Eye undoubtedly had much to do with the colonial sexual politics of the Age of Consent Act of 1891 which gave him such visibility in Britain as a spokesman for Indian women. Ramabai's and Sorabji's financial and emotional dependence on their benefactors and their families, who form the audiences for their correspondence, surely structured their letter-writing habits no less than their self-representations—circumstances that were as much the product of colonialism in all its complex dynamics as of their situations "as women." As with all primary sources, the experiences these materials give us access to are partial representations of complex historical realities, and the voices they permit us to hear require us to ask under what material conditions they have been made available, and for what purposes.44

Engaging critically with the temporarily diasporic voices such as those dealt with in this book calls for not just a reappraisal of the parameters and permeability of the nineteenth-century imperial nation-state, but an interrogation of what—and who—has traditionally been considered a legitimate subject of "British" history.45 And because the politics of space and of territoriality is at the heart of historiography in the West, asking where imperial culture begins, where it ends, and how it is transported across boundaries must be part of that interrogation as well. Any struggle to reconstitute power relations is undoubtedly a struggle "to reorganize their spatial bases."46 Few can escape the struggle over geography, and British history in an age of postcoloniality is no exception.47 If narratives of geography are at stake in narratives of history,48 then in the end making colonial people in Victorian England subjects of history may mean displacing nation-states like Britain and even India from center stage. It may call for an analytic frame, as Carol Breckenridge has argued, that recognizes that "the imperium at the heart of the nation-state" was "not an entity sui generis ."49 It may even require a cultural map that is "all border" as well—especially since the nation itself has historically functioned as "the ideological alibi of the territorial state."50 "Who needs the nation?" is, therefore, not simply a rhetorical question.51 It represents a call for history-writing that does not take the nation-state for

granted, and may even question its imaginative centrality for some historical actors operating under specific material circumstances. In the case of Indian travelers to the Victorian metropole, at any rate, Britain was merely a temporary theater where colonial encounters occurred and certain kinds of cultural responses could be enacted. Resistance to the operations of colonial power at home was both possible and effective, even if it was not always chosen as a strategy of negotiation. It is worth underscoring that for Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari, as for many colonial peoples who traveled through the British Isles in this period, late-nineteenth-century Britain was in many respects just a passageway, one staging ground in a lifetime of professional commitments, political identifications, and social action. To those who doubted this, Ramabai and the others would likely have replied that the nature of their engagements with imperial culture in Britain had as much to do with the exigencies of contemporary Maharashtrian cultural politics as they did with concerns about British metropolitan perceptions. Indeed, as Kumkum Sangari has argued, "the colonial states and cultural formations established under the aegis of imperialism . . . produced specifiable ideological configurations which loop and spread across 'national' boundaries"—so that empire, nation, and colony were not necessarily always imaginatively distinct for these particular "Indian fellow-subjects."52 The movements of colonial travelers across a variety of borders, and back again, suggest not that the transient inevitably becomes permanent but that "'permanence' itself is an ongoing fabrication" upon which national histories no less than nation-states evidently depend. To echo Catherine Hall's evocative phrase, "unpacking imperial histories" means recognizing the insufficiency of core-periphery models and calls for analysis of the ways in which colonial subjects, goods, and ideas "criss-crossed" the globe.53 The narratives examined here may, finally, be said to exemplify the claim that colonialism was not a process that began in the metropole and expanded outward but was, rather, an historical moment "when new encounters within the world facilitated the formation of the categories of metropole and colony in the first place."54

The project of historicizing the action—and the agency—of such ambiguously "national" subjects as the three people under consideration here presents exciting and unsettling challenges to the historian. Because critically engaged historical work aims to trouble conventional narratives and exhilarates in the shifting ground of historical production itself, it is important, and indeed essential, to embrace the challenges and offer interpretive frameworks against which evidence can be tested and new

categories of analysis can be measured. This book attempts to take the question of cultural identity seriously because it has been and remains an extremely powerful discourse in the West, and because it provides important dues as to how subjects of history are simultaneously made and make themselves. Critical interest in identity is arguably a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, though as Himani Bannerji observes, "[T]here has been throughout colonization, slavery and after, an identity politics already in place—though not acknowledged as such." Indeed, one of the questions generated by the colonial encounter on the subcontinent and outside it was precisely how "Indians" were to acquire markers of cultural, regional, and religious identity that did not betray their "origins" but that were also intelligible—and instructive—to Western interlocutors.55At the Heart of the Empire presumes that colonial identities have not historically been unified but have instead been fragmented across a variety of cultural axes, and that they have been determined in part in the social relations of the everyday—at the intersection, in other words, of the public and the private, the personal and the historical, the social and the political.56 The question of "determination" is undoubtedly a vexed one. Working out the connections between social determination and individual subjectivity is, as Ania Loomba remarks, an ongoing political struggle for students of power interested in understanding how culture operates and how people work within and against it.57 With Aijaz Ahmad, Judith Walkowitz, and others, I define culture not as "entrapment," but as "the givenness of circumstances within which individuals make their choices, their lives, their histories."58 The field of culture, in other words, is a terrain of ongoing struggle and practice, a "realm where one engages with and elaborates a politics.59 As we shall see, in domestic Victorian imperial culture the fact of colonialism shaped the terrains through which Indians walked and the spaces where they were required to elaborate the politics of their location(s) as colonial subjects. Most significantly, even the "givenness" of these terrains was in flux, negotiable, contestable—so that they were able to act as agents even while they were interpolated in particular ways by colonial discourses.60

The case of Ramabai is instructive here. As chapter 3 illustrates, her experience of imperial culture at Cheltenham and Wantage brought her into dialogue not with a monolithic colonial Christian culture but with a variety of individuals and institutions who were differently implicated in the colonial projects of the Anglican Church. The bishops with whom she corresponded had an unmistakably evangelical agenda in mind: they

wanted Ramabai for the mission field. So did the sisters of Saint Mary, the Virgin—but at stake for them as an order and for Sister Geraldine as Ramabai's spiritual mother was their authority over a recalcitrant Christian convert from Hinduism. For them as for Dorothea Beale of the Cheltenham Ladies' College, fears about what the impact would be for the reputations of their all-female institutions should Ramabai not fulfill the wishes of their male superiors and benefactors contributed to their "colonial" attitudes toward Ramabai. Their personal and social locations, in other words, helped to determine their actions. Nor can English women's attitudes be judged the same simply by virtue of shared national and gender identities. Bcale's own religious doubts made her more sympathetic to Ramabai than Sister Geraldine was, though perhaps no less colonial in her evaluations—an important reminder that Britons' relationships to empire were as differentiated as those of colonial travelers.61 As for Ramabai, the theological arguments she advanced about the true nature of Christianity reveal the dangers of imagining identity as pure, homogenized, or unaffected by personal history and ever-shifting cultural locations. As shall be evident, her conversion to Christianity did not make her a Christian in any "given" or self-evident sense of the word: she fought the orthodoxies of Anglicanism in order to synthesize her own particular definition of the term and with it, her own pathway out of the constraints of imperial culture in Britain toward the reform of Indian women's condition in India. The convert is surely inescapably hybrid, especially where, as Sangari has suggested, to be hybrid means "to represent the pressure of . . . historical placement."62 Ramabai's hybridity was neither predictable nor static, but radically contingent on time and place, as her contests with orthodox Hindus in India in the 1890s illustrate.63

If Ramabai's performances of cultural identity can be deemed resistant and even heroic, Sorabji's negotiations of imperial power and colonial relations in Britain provide an interesting contrast. They suggest in the first instance that the dynamics of "resistance" and "complicity" only partially capture the dialectics of the colonial encounter, regardless of what ground it occurs on.64 Sorabji's letters moreover demonstrate that the behavior and attitudes of "the Indian woman" are never predictable, and that without a carefully historicized account of her "contexts of utterance," the category of "the Indian woman"—like the trope of "woman" itself—cannot stand.65 I want to be clear here that my purpose is not to find the "authentic Indian woman" or to make "the native" speak—in part because I recognize, with Lata Mani and Rey

Chow, that speaking itself always already "belongs to a . . . well-defined structure and history of domination."66 The task at hand is to resist interpretive regimes that require homogeneous selves by grounding an analysis of identities in the materiality of historical circumstances—by trying to match Sorabji's narratives, in other words, "to the occasion of their telling."67 In scrutinizing the complex of cultural meanings that a figure like Sorabji engaged with as she struggled to speak "as 'the' Indian woman," I hope "to make available for political critique the network of meanings, assumptions, and images that constitute the background and the stuff of intentional action." Rather than representing a threat to agency, this kind of analysis helps to explain how agency is possible while recognizing at the same time the constraints imposed upon it by structural determinants.68

Chapter 3 therefore looks at Sorabji's circulation around Victorian Oxford and London, using her weekly letters home to examine the kinds of strategic identifications she mobilized so that she could survive the pressures of being "the Indian woman" at Somerville College. As a Parsi "by nationality," the daughter of Christian converts wall-known in the mission community in India and Britain, and an Indian woman studying for a degree in the law (when few women, whether English or Indian, pursued such a course), Sorabji was also a profoundly hybrid subject, laying claim to several interlocking identities at once. This point about the simultaneity of identifies cannot be overemphasized: for her Parsiness and her Christianity were not serially related, as in laid side by side, but mutually constitutive. Nor were they the effects of an historically objective condition ("Indian womanhood"). They were, as we shall see, "very much a matter of narrative production"—with Sorabji as well as her English friends and patrons constructing her identity to suit their own purposes.69 Deeply influenced by her parents' evangelical and reform activities, Sorabji was invested in a sense of ethnic authenticity vis-à-vis other Indians, especially Hindus, and indeed came to pathologize Hindu women in the same terms as many Britons did—all this while calling herself, and practicing as, a Christian. She was at times a resistant subject, as when she refused to be "placarded about" by the Church Missionary Society or when she opted for law rather than teacher training, against the wishes of one of her supporters. She was also resolutely anglophilic, antinationalist, and anti-women's suffrage—positions she first articulated at Oxford and that would continue to characterize her politics later in life. Nor was gender "extractable" from Sorabji's status as an Indian, a Parsi Christian, and a colonial subject—either in her eyes

or those of the Britons she encountered.70 It is worth underscoring here that Sorabji's time in Oxford was preceded by Ramabai's at Cheltenham and Wantage, and that Sorabji therefore lived, in the Victorian public eye, partly in the shadow of Ramabai's reputation. The publicity given to Sorabji's Oxford education was also preceded somewhat more sensationally by the reputation of another Hindu woman, Rukhmabai, whose Bombay divorce case filled the metropolitan and provincial newspapers in Britain between 1884 and 1888. Sorabji's quest to represent herself as "the" authentic Indian woman in Britain must thus be read against these and other floating signifiers of "Indian womanhood" that circulated throughout Victorian culture at home.71 Her story is, therefore, important historical evidence of the instability and contingency of Victorian colonial identifies not just at the level of macrohistorical circumstances but, as Vinay Lal has suggested in a different context, "at the micro-level of colonial practices in their minutiae."72 The point is not that nothing can be generalized from an account of Sorabji's experiences, but that generalizations are often insufficient for understanding how multiple, contradictory, partial, and strategic identities can be in certain historical circumstances. Her identities were not, in other words, "an historically accomplished fact" but an ongoing, productive process.73 What Sorabji's narrative suggests is that they were not only situated individually, but that she was continually producing them through recourse to what Frances Gouda calls a variety of "cultural grammars" as well.74

If Western ideals of femininity were crucial to these cultural grammars, Victorian ideals of manliness were also critical to dynamics of the colonial encounter as it occurred on British soil. The story of Behramji Malabari's sojourn in London detailed in chapter 4 illustrates how the presumptions of Victorian masculinity could shape an Indian man's "identity project" in a specific cultural context—that is, in the "mother" city of the kingdom and the empire.75The Indian Eye was part of a genre of travel literature written by Indian men in the 1880s and after for an English-speaking Indian audience; it also participated in the literature of investigative journalism in Britain initiated by Henry Mayhew and carried out by Henry Gavin, John Shaw, and Jack London well into the twentieth century. Malabari not only mediated both traditions, but his text demonstrates the facility with which a colonial subject could work the connections and inhabit the discursive domains between the two. Mediation was a cultural strategy perhaps uniquely available to Parsis,

who in the nineteenth century acted as cultural negotiators between the English in India and other "native populations." It was a liminal position Malabari took up with great vigor in his campaign against child marriage, in which he chastised antireform Hindus for failing to protect vulnerable child brides with many of the same arguments English reformers had used against sati and child marriage. Indeed, his anglophilia matched Sorabji's and derived from the same sense of Parsi ethnic superiority to "other" Indians that she articulated.76 Dressed in Indian "costume" and wandering around London in the company of an English woman, an Indian servant, or an Indian friend, Malabari was constantly assaulted by "street arabs" and other evidently well-meaning but curious native onlookers—as an object of fun, of ridicule, and of unwelcome solicitation. He was not much more free to walk the streets of empire than Sorabji was, although the terms upon which they were interpolated were perhaps gender specific: like a number of Indian men passing through English cities in this period, he was approached by a London prostitute, while Cornelia was accosted by an English woman who pronounced her to be "look[ing] so very heathen."77 Malabari's intensified chivalry toward Hindu women in the wake of his trip suggests that like femininity, masculinity is not an exclusive or stable identity, that it is always mediated by race, class, and historical context, and that it is called into question variously, depending on specific, situational asymmetries of power.78 Given the tremendous weight that Britons placed on the performance of "English" masculinity as evidence of colonial men's capacity for self-government, its confident display was considered necessary in order to prove that Indians were able to reform, if not rule, themselves. At stake, then, in the micropolitics of gentlemanliness for Malabari, as well as for a variety of members of the Indian National Congress who traveled to Britain in the late-Victorian period, was nothing less than the future and direction of British rule in India.

Implicit in each of these readings is the presumption that "the terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively"—and that there is no authentic or originary "Indianness" to be (re)captured.79 In fact, each of the three colonial subjects here was engaged in performing "the" colonial as "the Indian" either willingly or resistantly—or in some less binary way, depending on the specific context and the stakes involved.80 In many respects, "being Indian" was something to be learned by travel to Britain—a performance to be tested, a habitus to be tried out and reinvented on a regular basis,

especially given the fact that "India" was not considered to be a coherent national political entity in the late-Victorian period.81 Also implied here is a particular notion of hybridity. In contrast to some interpretations, from which I have certainly gained insight, the examples excavated here suggest that hybridity is not necessarily only about "mixed" biological or even cultural origins, but manifestly about movement through space and through time.82 Sorabji's experiences and representations were not identical to Ramabai's, and their differences cannot be understood either in terms of their personal idiosyncrasies or the most obvious distinctions (i.e., Sorabji's Parsi Christianness versus Ramabai's conversion) between them.83 Each woman operated within and against different "territorial imperatives"—different contexts of utterance that, although finally both Victorian and colonial, interpolated each woman in local and specific ways.84 Malabari's experiences were both similar and different from those of his countrywomen, not just because he was a man but, again, because his masculinity had specific signification in the sexual-cultural economy of imperial London—signs that at once enabled him to make certain choices and worked to prevent him, in domestic imperial culture, from making others. These kinds of readings recognize that cultural identities are grounded in place85 even as they self-consciously attempt to deracinate identity from its potentially static geographical moorings—at a moment when any theoretical engagement with identity, especially colonial identities, risks being dismissed as either fetishism or as an unreflected "romance of the indigene."86

Such readings give historical purchase to the concept of identity as performance and offer a possible way out of both the trap of essentialism and the vise of agency-versus-determination alluded to above—in large part because they presume that identity has historically always been "compromised." As shall become clear below, the travel accounts dealt with here suggest that identity may be, as Vera Kutzinski argues, "at best an open question, something to be negotiated and renegotiated across all kinds of divides on an almost-daily basis."87 This approach furnishes a flexible and usable method for historians and other practitioners who wish to ground their work in the radical contingency of both history and culture because they see the two as fundamentally interdependent. The space of the everyday, of social relations, is a place where "the 'unspeakable' stories of subjectivity. meet the narratives of history, [and] of culture."88 The everyday is, in other words, one place

where the work of historicizing cultural identities can profitably be undertaken, especially when the kinds of historical voices "recovered" here are not viewed as transparent, but are treated themselves as representations in a field of struggle and on a terrain of power.89 The fact that Britain was itself an imperialized terrain arguably transformed even the "everyday" passage of Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari through it into a set of spectacular events, and it raises questions about how the fabric of imperial culture in Britain lends a particular kind of political dimension to the problem of the "domestic" subject.90

A place on the map is indeed a place in history and in culture—in imperial culture in Victorian Britain as well as in many other contemporary and historical locations.91 And although this is an insight being produced and worked out at the margins of several disciplines and in the spaces in between—history, literature, African American studies, cultural studies, postcolonialism and women's studies—I acknowledge my intellectual debts to feminists, for whom the "dismantling of received geography," to borrow from Carole Boyce Davies, has been a preoccupation for a century and longer.92 It is no accident that some of the most innovative and challenging work in British history, in diaspora and cultural studies, and in postcolonialism is being undertaken by feminist women and men for whom the politics of identity and of their own implication in it is key to revisioning history, culture, and power. Indeed, feminist scholars, by virtue of their interdisciplinarity and their reliance on real and imagined communities outside conventionally institutional frameworks, may be said to work in something like a diasporic relationship to the academy.93 The kinds of rethinking and remapping that they have done, in dialogic tension with the lived realities of race, class, and postcolonial politics, under a plurality of signs and affiliations and for an equally diverse set of audiences and purposes, has been foundational to if not constitutive of the struggle for power inside the academy and out in the twentieth century. Feminist challenges have also been critical to contests about the politics of representation, of culture, and of history-writing. In aligning myself and this project with feminist work, I wish to make clearer the contributions that feminist practices can make to national histories, postcolonial projects, and gender studies.

Primary among these contributions is the conviction that "the recesses of domestic space," whether familial or national, are valid sites of historical excavation.94 As Nell Painter has argued, if feminist history has taught us anything, it is that the private and the historical are not seg-

regated domains of intellectual inquiry. Or, to put it another way, "intimate and social domains" are one.95 Despite the insistence of some recent critiques to the contrary, feminist engagement with social positionality and cultural identities need not substitute the personal for the political, the "ludic" for the material, or representation for "reality." Especially if it is grounded in the material and respectful of context, feminist historiography at least can illuminate how inaccurately these polarities reflect the untidy complex of even marginal identities at work in culture—sometimes in the interest of social transformation, sometimes in the service of conformism and tradition.96 Insisting on the intersection of racial and class systems with the intimately historical lives of women and men is crucial to the politics of this conviction. So is the emphasis on identities as multiple attachments, as contingent on time and space and, above all, as the products of struggle.97 As Meaghan Morris so succinctly puts it, "[T]here is now no way back from relational thinking about gender, race and class" to a simpler identity fundamentalism—along any single axis.98 Although this commitment is by now a commonplace of feminist theory, historical evidence that permits us to observe it in practice has been rare enough, especially outside the North American context. The colonial ethnographies examined here are exceedingly rich in this regard, and attention to them may help refine methodological approaches to the variously co-implicated systems of race, class, and gender—especially by challenging the facile use of race as a category of analysis, by insisting that it works not as a receptacle of meaning but rather as a crucible out of which gender and other identities are formed.99 At the same time, of course, the ideological work and material realities of race and ethnicity do not always displace other criteria of social status, cultural power, or historical agency; and, as Susan Thorne and Madhavi Kale have argued, one discourse may, under certain historical conditions, manage and even discipline another.100 For this reason I am committed to questioning approaches to colonialism that insist on a binary axis between colonizer and colonized because they do not do justice to the complexity of colonial relations in situ. Again, although this is not a uniquely feminist insight, it has drawn much of its theoretical power from the work of feminist historians in the West and outside it.101 Gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and religion complicated the apparently oppositional relations of colonial power in ways that are readily discernible—and like all historical interpretation, eminently contestable—in the narratives offered here. Taken separately or together, they may not tell the whole truth about Victorian imperial culture, but

they nevertheless attest to the fact that "we can no longer tell history as a single story"—or tell that story inside a single, national frame.102 Most important, they remind us how critical it is for historians to acknowledge the need for multiple pasts and to embrace what Ann Stoler calls "the scrambled categories in which people lived," not just under colonial regimes but in the postcolonial present as well.103