"Brown Ladies: Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1800-1920" a talk by Dr. Tim Allender at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 30th November 2012

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Details : Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar on ‘Brown Ladies: Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1800-1920’ by Dr. Tim Allender, Associate Professor, History Curriculum Coordinator, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia .

Abstract : This paper is based on Dr. Tim Allender’s forthcoming book, for Manchester University Press, Brown Ladies: Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1800-1920. The paper offers a survey of changing state perceptions of the Indian and European female throughout most of the British colonial period in India. This survey is done principally through the fulcrum of the colonial classroom and the hospital dispensary. These official constructions were variously based throughout this long era on intimacy, malignancy, femininity, learner and ‘clean’ carer as taught in school and at the hospital.
‘Brown ladies’ objectifies the Indian female, if she is connected with empire, in Vron Ware’s (1992) primary terms of race and class: Brown the ‘race’ part and ‘ladies’, not ‘women’, the Western-constructed class part. Yet, this paper sees more filigreed socio-political and cultural implications in the way she was imagined in the Raj classroom and hospital: and, particularly, how this imagination changed over time. Networks of European women in the UK, Antoinette Burton’s (1994) ‘racial mother-hood’, played their part in this identity formation. However, European, Eurasian and Indian females actually resident in India created new classroom terrain. Their learning engaged racial and femininity spaces of mutual inclusion and exclusion, as their respective networks of knowledge transfer intervened in situ in India. The paper surveys this phenomenology and is responsive to Padma Anagol’s (2006) invocation about the neglect of otherwise powerful subaltern scholarship to see internal oppression within those classes of women who suffered under empire.

Speaker : Dr. Tim Allender is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia. His principal work concerns colonial education focusing on India using postcolonial and feminist paradigms. He has published international articles on these topics and his book, Ruling Through Education analyses, in postcolonial perspective, colonial education (2006) in north India in the late nineteenth century. Dr. Allender is working on a large Australian Research Council (ARC) grant concerning the disciplinarity of classroom language and is currently using the models of 'knowledge transfer', transnational histories and gender for three research projects based in India and in Australia. His current book, Brown Ladies: Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1800-1920, will be published in 2013.

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