Gendered Transactions : The White Woman in Colonial India, c. 1820–1930

This book seeks to capture the complex experience of the white woman in colonial India through an exploration of gendered interactions over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines representations of gender interactions in missionary and memsahibs' colonial writings, both literary and non-literary, probing their construction of Indian women of different classes and regions, such as zenana women, peasants, ayahs and wet-nurses. 

Also examined are delineations of European female health issues in male-authored colonial medical handbooks, which serve to underline the gender prejudices undergirding this discourse. Giving voice to the Indian woman, this book also scrutinises the fiction of the first generation of western-educated Indian women who wrote in English, exploring their construction of white women and their negotiations with colonial modernities.

This volume is unique in its wide range of themes: 'native' female education, missionary zenana visitation, the female 'gaze' (both colonising and colonised), the colonial home, as well as constructions of white women's reproductive and mental health in colonial medical discourse. Additionally, one of its major strengths is the fascinating diversity of its sources; letters, memoirs, fiction, housekeeping manuals, and forgotten texts from the colonial archives, such as missionary novels, medical manuals, and the largely forgotten 'Indian' short stories of Flora Annie Steel, with their preoccupation with gender issues. 

Gendered transactions will be of interest to the general reader as well as to experts and students of gender studies, colonial history, literary and cultural studies, and the social history of health and medicine.