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BOOKS
Bibis
of the Raj
Revisiting
the British gaze on the begums, the nautch girls and the ayahs of India
By
S. Kalidas
BEYOND
THE VEIL
By: PRAN NEVILE
NEVILE
BOOKS
Price:
Rs.1,950 |
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"When
one writes about women, one must dip one's pen in the colours of the rainbow
and scatter the dust from butterfly wings on the page..."
-Denis Diderot, Sur les Femmes
Well, Pran
Nevile surely lives up to this prescription in this book-his fourth about
"native" life in the times of the British Raj - on Indian women
in the Raj. Even if the adjectives tend to be repetitive, the descriptions
a trifle too gushing and the viewpoint a nightmare of post-modern feminists,
the sheer panoramic sweep of this beautifully illustrated book (with period
drawings, etchings and photographs) makes for a very interesting read.
From the aristocratic princesses of the zenana to the nautch girls of
the bazaars to the working class women in the fields-this book covers
them all, albeit through the eyes of Britishers of the East India Company
and, later, the imperial government.
With lots
of first hand accounts and anecdotes Nevile recreates the sensuous languor
of the native harem with all its redolence, rivalries and intrigues. There
are several orientalist dispatches glorifying the exotic opulence of the
"Hoories of the East". There are also sobering observations
like that of Fanny Parks in her Wanderings of a Pilgrim, In Search
of the Picturesque (1850): "... in a whole zenana there may be
two or three handsome women, all the rest remarkably ugly". Parks
found ladies in the zenana of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah II
to be "singularly plain".
Not so the
bibis or the native mistresses. Captain Thomas Williams encouraged Englishmen
to make local liaisons as "keeping Indian mistresses was far more
economical than maintaining European wives". John Short, a surgeon
in Madras, records that "several of these girls (Telugu devadasis)
while they lived with European officers surprised me by their ladylike
manner, modesty and gentleness".
For aficionados
of the Raj this book will prove a delightful addition to their library.
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