Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions of
women in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how European
women were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting the
comparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especially
males) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenth
century. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) of
racial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century,
European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating)
social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distance
between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped as
frivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot
1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been described
so negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attention
to these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, in
mitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official British
attitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjects
of a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5;
Bharucha 1994: 88–9).