Imperial geographies of home: Memsahibs and Miss-Sahibs in India and Britain, 1915-1947

Abstract

Recent debates concerning both transnational and diasporic populations have pointed to the complex and fluid senses of belonging experienced by many of those moving - or being moved - across borders and away from homelands. In particular it has been emphasized that as well as promoting a sense of plurilocality, such movements frequently evoke intense and privileged understandings of the homeland. In this paper, I highlight the multi-directionality that is often demonstrated by such populations, and reflect on the implications that physical (rather than just conceptual) movement between imagined and material geographies of home might have for senses of belonging. In order to do this I explore the experiences of middle-class British women and children who travelled repeatedly between India and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. I discuss their senses of belonging, self and home as they moved between the two countries, and begin to examine not only the implications for maintaining notions of Britain as home but also the ways in which this operates at a number of scales, including the domestic, national and imperial.

‘Sainsbury's is my local’: English alcohol policy, domestic drinking practices and the meaning of home

“…A final strand in the literature is concerned with ideas about home in a mobile world. Blunt (1999 2003) and Gowans (2003 2006) illustrate the power of notions of home and homeland in imperial and post‐imperial contexts, demonstrating the importance of individuals’ homemaking practices and the links between the supposedly private worlds of home and the politics of Empire. Conceptions of home are equally important in the contemporary era, as Blunt and Dowling (2006) show in a review the significance of notions of home, homeland and homemaking practices amongst contemporary transnational migrants, including business elites, retirees, students, domestic workers, asylum seekers and refugees, who have varying degrees of control over their own mobility (see also, for example, Black 2002; Staeheli and Nagel 2006).…”

Bordering intimacy

“…Certain religions and castes were labelled as emulating nascent forms of European domesticity such as Sikhs and Brahmins (Goody 1990: 17; on the role of religion and sexuality in colonial India see Nandy 1988 andChatterjee 2010). Against this, 'traditional' practices such as polygamy, child marriage and purdah were viewed as a sign of backwards and uncivilised tendencies in other lower caste Hindu and Islamic communities (Gowans 2003).…”

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

“…Scholars have examined home as a site for reproductive labour and the construction of gendered identities especially for women (Llewellyn, 2004;Lloyd and Johnson, 2004;Tasca, 2004;Jerram, 2006;Pooley and Pooley, 2010), as well as interrogated domestic space as a site where those identities might intersect with imperial power relations and colonial and hybrid identities (Wyse, 2002;Gowans, 2003;Blunt, 1999Blunt, , 2005b. Alert to both new insights from feminist geopolitics (on which see Massaro and Williams, 2013;Dixon, 2015) and what might be broadly thought of as the emergence of 'critical geographies of home' (Brickell, 2012), scholars have recently offered critical new readings of home as a site of unease, struggle, conflict and resistance (Gowans, 2001;see too Creswell's (1994) study of the making and meaning of home at the Greenham Common women's peace camp).…”