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Good Sports and Right Sorts: Guns, Gender, and Imperialism in British India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

In the early 1920s, a young British woman visiting India met the man she would subsequently marry. As the woman's daughter later revealed, she and her companions “were just sitting down to dinner when he came in through the door and one of the bearers came forward to take his gun and clean it, but my father would have none of that. He always cleaned his own gun before he did anything else. This impressed my mother.” If the narrative halted here, the contemporary reader might construe the story as yet another example of traditional gender dynamics. The love-struck young woman admiringly observes the male imperialist's competent, professional handling of his firearm, symbol both of his mastery over the colonized Indian landscape and its people and of his masculine sexual prowess. In this instance, however, the young woman was no passively adoring female quivering before this symbolic display of male power and sexuality. She herself, as her daughter revealed, had been “brought up with guns” and was a “crack shot.” Her admiration for the man who would become her husband stemmed not from feelings of awe or feminine inadequacy but rather from her cool assessment that here was someone who was her equal—and could be her partner—in hunting, shooting, and handling of firearms. Indeed as their daughter recalled, the successful marriage between these two gun aficionados was based in part on the wife's participation in her husband's hunting duties as an officer in the Indian Forest Service.

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Research Article
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

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References

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25 Women's ability successfully to enact this transformation is predicated on the difference between biological notions of sex and mutable social constructions of gender that, according to Joan Scott, lie at the heart of gender history. Scott, Joan Wallach, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 29Google Scholar. In his essay on Lawrence of Arabia, Graham Dawson similarly discusses a converse example of gender transformation, noting that “Lawrence himself is often presented in a distinctly feminine light.” Dawson, , “The Blond Bedouin,” p. 137Google Scholar.

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28 Greenberger, Allen, The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960 (London, 1969), p. 29Google Scholar. Mrinalini Sinha has argued that the construction of the categories of effeminate Bengali and manly Englishman similarly solidified imperial power in the hands of the British. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.

29 Plumwood, Val, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York, 1993), p. 5Google Scholar.

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35 “There was never any question of a married Memsahib doing a job.” Mrs. K. Mullan, interview, transcript, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, MT8, MT9.

36 Ibid.

37 Chitty's husband instructed her in riding and also taught her to school horses for polo. Chitty, Anna, Musings of a Memsahib (Lymington, 1988), p. 3Google Scholar.

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46 Although Eden did not herself shoot a tiger she was well aware of her extraordinary status as a woman on a big-game hunting trip. She wrote, “Certainly this expedition has quite answered to me in point of pleasure. Then I am rather proud of having seen a tiger killed, because, except for Mrs. Cockerelly, there is not another woman in India who has, I believe.” Quoted in Dunbar, Janet, Golden Interlude: The Edens in India, 1836–1842 (Boston, 1956), p. 81Google Scholar. Savory, Isabel, A Sportswoman in India: Personal Adventures and Experiences of Travel in Known and Unknown India (London, 1900)Google Scholar; Mrs.Tyacke, Richard, How I Shot My Bears, or Two Years' Tent Life in Kalluf Lahoul (London, 1893)Google Scholar.

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64 Other types of hunting that did not require the use of guns were also popular. Emulating the British squirearchy, Anglo-Indians rode to the hounds, although their quarry was the indigenous jackal rather than the fox. Pig-sticking, a dangerous sport involving the spearing of a wild boar with a seven- to nine-foot long weapon (shooting the “pig” was considered unsporting) was also popular, particularly among army officers. Anglo-Indian women participated in both sports.

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69 See Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the social and cultural dynamics of eighteenth-century legislation against poaching in Britain. For a summary of the various laws regulating hunting in England, see Whitehead, Kenneth G., Hunting and Stalking Deer in Britain through the Ages (Pomfret, Vt., 1980), pp. 161–85Google Scholar.

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94 John MacKenzie similarly points out the connection made by Baden-Powell and the Boy Scout movement between training hunters and creating soldiers. MacKenzie, , “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter,” pp. 176–98Google Scholar.

95 The most significant instance of this increasingly violent imperialism was the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which British-led Indian troops opened fire on unarmed Indian civilians. For an assessment of Anglo-Indian support of General Dyer, commander of the troops at Amritsar, see Sayer, Derek, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920,” Past and Present, no. 131 (May 1991): 159Google Scholar. Mildred and William Archer, Socialists who supported Indian nationalist aspirations, described their alienation from the rest of the Anglo-Indian community in Mildred Archer, “Memories of the British in India,” interview, tape recording, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, and in William, and Archer, Mildred, India Served and Observed (London, 1994), p. 6Google Scholar.

96 See, e.g., the recollections of Nancy Archer-Shee, “Memsahibs' Questionnaire,” University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies. Although at least one Anglo-Indian woman, Mildred Archer, asserted that few Europeans carried guns (neither she nor her husband was ever armed, although her husband, a civil service officer, did have a police bodyguard during the Quit India disturbances of 1942), my research reveals numerous instances of gun-toting wives during the interwar period. Mildred Archer, “Memories of the British in India.”

97 While particular districts such as Midnapore, where three I.C.S. officers were assassinated by terrorists (one in the midst of a football match) or Calcutta, where terrorists successfully raided a government office building killing several officials, might have been particularly dangerous, it appears that nationalist violence was more apparent than real in most regions of India. The British version of nationalist terrorist activities is presented in Hale, Political Trouble in India; the Indian perspective is set forth in Ghosh, The Roll of Honour. See also Sarkar, Tanika, Bengal, 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi, 1987)Google Scholar.

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99 “Had we been in France or Italy I think I should have feared to trust myself alone on a strange country road towards sundown with a crowd of unknown men, for none of my servants were with me; but in Kashmir one so quickly realises what an arrant coward the Kashmiri is at heart, in spite of his physique, that I never once during my stay felt any of that bodily fear which a woman alone is apt to feel in most so-called civilised countries.” Morison, Margaret Cotter, A Lonely Summer in Kashmir (London, 1904), pp. 7071Google Scholar.

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107 Ibid., pp. 33, 35. The extent of women's involvement in violent nationalist activities, however, is tiny compared with the massive female participation in Gandhi's campaign of nonviolence.

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116 However, Grace Seton, an American traveling on her own in India in the 1920s, remarked, “I think that nowhere in the world can a woman alone (attended by a good native servant, of course) travel more comfortably and safely, than in First-Class Reserved Ladies Compartment on Indian Railroads, except in those parts where seditious, anti-British propaganda has inflamed the masses.” This despite the fact that Seton had herself fended off a threatened break-in while on an Indian train! Seton, , “Yes, Lady Saheb,” pp. 63, 60–61Google Scholar.

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