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Anxious Notes on College Life: The Gossipy Journals of Eleanor McDougall1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2017

SNEHA KRISHNAN
SNEHA KRISHNAN*
Affiliation:
St John's College, University of OxfordSneha.krishnan@sjc.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

The educated woman and the college girl were, for the great part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India, subjects of immense anxiety. In this article, I examine the gossipy narratives that a missionary educator in South India, Eleanor McDougall, wrote biannually for readers in America and Britain, whilst she was Principal of Women's Christian College (WCC) in erstwhile Madras, along with the book on her experience that she eventually published. In doing so, I locate the circulation of gossip in transnational circuits as a site where colonial anxieties about young Indian women as subjects of uplift came to be produced. For women like McDougall, the expression of urgent anxiety about young women's moral and social conditions served as a means to secure legitimacy for the work they did, and position themselves as important participants in a new discourse of philanthropically mediated development that emerged in the early twentieth century with the influx of American charitable capital into countries like India. At the same time, I show, in responding to her writing about them, that the Indian staff and students at WCC did not concur with colonial authority marks a site of refusal: suggesting the anxious boundaries of colonial knowledge production at a time when the surety of discourses of racial difference was beginning to unravel. In its study of McDougall's gossipy writing, this article therefore contributes to a complicated and non-linear understanding of emotions as a site of power and hierarchy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia , October 2017 , pp. 575 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2017 

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Megan Robb, Elizabeth Chatterjee and Anusha Hariharan for their patient reading of many drafts of this article. I also thank the other contributors to this volume for their comments and participation in the workshop where many of these ideas evolved. I am, most especially, grateful to the staff of the Roja Muthiah Library in Chennai, the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library at Oxford for their support. Any misreading and error is of course all mine.

References

2 Shanmugasundaram, N., “What is Wrong with Education Today?”, in The Queen Mary's College Madras Diamond Jubilee Magazine (Chennai, 1974)Google Scholar, no page numbers.

3 The city of Madras, like many other Indian cities, underwent a name change and since 1996 has been called Chennai. Though Tamil sources have always referred to the city as Chennai, in this paper I use ‘Madras’ to refer to the city in the time period under discussion, as this is the word largely used by missionaries, British government officials and the upper caste upper middle class students who were educated in this time.

4 Seth, S., Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 129.

5 Ibid . p. 129.

6 For example, in an issue of the Women's Indian Association's Stri Dharma, the editors announced the founding of a home for women of ill repute, where they might be educated and reintroduced into respectable society, writing: “Ananda Vilas, where the girls now stay has a happy meaning and we are sure that its inmates will know the real ‘Ananda’ [happiness] that will come to them through lives that have been cleansed and healed of all perversity”. Editors, “The Home for Women”, Stri Dharma XVII, 6 (1934), p. 280.

7 See for instance Hancock, M., “Home science and the nationalization of domesticity in colonial India”, Modern Asian Studies 35, 4 (2001), pp. 871–903 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 See also Sinha, M., Spectres of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, 2007)Google Scholar.

10 For example, see the article titled “India” in the 48th Report of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (in Zenanas, Harems and Schools), 1883, pp. 15-17. Also Boswell, H. B., “A Plea for Zenana Work and Zenana Missions”, India's Women: The Magazine of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society III (1883), pp. 3–5 Google Scholar.

11 For instance, Anonymous, “Ketta Penkal” [Bad Girls], Manjari 12, 8 (1959), p. 23, and a play called Anonymous, “College Pen” [College Girl], Kalaimagal 28, 154 (1944), pp. 141-146.

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14 See for example Mann, M.. ‘Delhi's Belly: The Management of Water, Sewage and Excreta in a Changing Urban Environment during the Nineteenth Century’, Studies in History, 1 (23), 2007, pp. 1–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in the wider context of colonial history, Bissell, W.C. Urban Design, Chaos and Colonial Power in Zanzibar, Indiana, 2011.

15 L. White, ‘Between Gluckman and Foucault’.

16 I refer here to the understanding within the field of history of emotions that emotions ‘do’ – i.e. they are aspects of a world of practice as much as they simply affect and induce physical sensations. For example, see M. Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is that what makes them have a history?) A Bourdieuian Approach to understanding Emotion’, 51 (May 2012), 193-220. Anxiety, as I will demonstrate, is a site where social boundaries are drawn and renegotiated.

17 Haggis, J. and Allen, M., “Imperial emotions: Affective communities of mission in British protestant women's missionary publications c1880–1920”, Journal of Social History 41, 3 (2008), pp. 691–716 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 McDougall, E., Lamps in the Wind (Edinburgh, 1940)Google Scholar, p. 125.

19 See for instance, Burton, A., “Fearful Bodies into Disciplined Subjects: Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary Carpenter's Six Months in India’”, Signs 20, 3 (1995), pp. 545–574 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 E. McDougall, The Principal's Journal, 2 (October 1915), p. 5.

21 Ibid , pp. 5-6.

22 For instance, McDougall, The Principal's Journal, 2 (October 1915), p. 6. Also see McDougall, E., Women's Christian College, Madras 1915-1925 (Madras, 1925)Google Scholar, pp. 1-2.

23 Burton, A., Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar.

24 Ibid .

25 See for instance White, L., Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar.

26 See White, L., “Between Gluckman and Foucault: historicizing rumour and gossip”, Social Dynamics 20, 1 (1994), pp.75–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a discussion of an unpublished gossipy memoir written by a colonial official.

27 Stoler, A. L., Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009)Google Scholar, p. 183.

28 Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar.

29 The Women's Indian Association's Stri Dharma, for instance, often attempted to foster such partnerships by featuring the writing of foreign women interested in political and social questions to do with India.

30 Bhabha, H., “The other question: Difference, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism”, in Baker, H., Diawara, M. and Lindeborg, R. (eds), Black British cultural studies: A Reader (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar, pp. 87-106.

31 McDougall, E., The Education of Women and Girls (Edinburgh, 1914)Google Scholar, p. 12.

32 McDougall, Principal's Journal 1 (July 1915), p. 3.

33 Special Correspondent, “The Christian College for Women, Madras, and its Contribution to the Cause of India's Womanhood”, Looking East: The Journal of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society 10, 403 (1920), pp. 74–77 Google Scholar. While this fact would have been true also of women in England and America, it is often mentioned in missionary literature as a particularly important thing. Of the founding of WCC, Rev Pittendrigh, who helped Eleanor McDougall find land for the college on several occasions wrote: “Before a woman could get a degree it was necessary for her to attend a men's college and this, in the present social conditions of India, was felt to be open to serious disadvantages” ( Pittendrigh, G., “Historical Introduction”, in Women's Christian College, Madras 1915-1925 [Madras, 1925])Google Scholar.

34 McDougall, Principal's Journal 1 (July 1915)

35 McDougall, Principal's Journal 2 (October 1915), p. 4.

36 Ibid . p.4

37 McDougall, Lamps in the Wind, p. 151.

38 Ibid .

39 Ibid . pp. 152-156.

40 Anonymous, “For the College Girls of the Far East”, Woman's Journal 5, 29 (1920), p. 801 Google Scholar.

41 McDougall, Lamps in the Wind, p. 157

42 Ibid . p. 145.

43 Ibid . p. 125.

44 Ibid . p. 141.

45 Ibid . p. 126.

46 McDougall, Women's Christian College, Madras 1915-1925, p. 9.

47 McDougall, Principal's Journal 5 (August 1917).

48 McDougall, Women's Christian College, Madras 1915-1925, pp. 14-15.

49 McDougall, Principal's Journal, 5 (August 1917), Editor's Note (Separate, unnumbered leaf).

50 McDougall, Women's Christian College, Madras 1915-1925, pp. 14-15.

51 Special Correspondent, “The Christian College for Women, Madras, and its contribution to the cause of India's womanhood”, Looking East: the Journal of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society 40, 403 (1920), pp. 75–76 Google Scholar.

52 Peabody, H. W., “Story of the College Campaign”, Woman's Work 38, 4 (1923), p. 92 Google Scholar.

53 Kavadi, S. N., The Rockefeller Foundation and Public Health in Colonial India, 1916 – 1945: A Narrative History (Pune, 1999)Google Scholar. Also see Arnold, D., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988)Google Scholar.

54 Sinha, Specters of Mother India.

55 See for instance E. McDougall and E. M. Roberts, Statement by Miss Roberts and Miss McDougall Upon Investigations into Women's Education in India During their Tour 1912-1913, no page numbers. As well as Special Correspondent, “The Christian College for Women, Madras, and its contribution to the cause of India's womanhood”, Looking East: the Journal of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society 40, 403 (1920), pp. 75–76 Google Scholar. In the American context, Anonymous, “Address by Mrs. Henry Peabody”, Report of the American Ramabai Association (1915) pp. 31-38.

56 Ibid .

57 Sinha, Specters of Mother India, pp. 68-84.

58 See for instance Mohanty, C. T., “Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses”, Feminist Review 30 (1988), pp. 61–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kaplan, C., “The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Practice”, in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, (eds.) Kaplan, C. and Grewal, I. (Minneapolis, 2006 [1994])Google Scholar.

59 While future Principals wrote notes for the reading of “friends of Women's Christian College”, these were of a different character and were not prefaced with a similar warning note.

60 First seen in McDougall, Principal's Journal 8 (February 1919), p. 3 (emphasis original).

61 McDougall, Principal's Journal 7 (July 1918), p. 3.

62 McDougall, Principal's Journal 7 (July 1918), p. 3.

63 Burton, Burdens of History, p. 98.

64 See Cohn, B. S., Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar.

65 McDougall, Lamps in the Wind, Back Matter.

66 Rivett Eleanor, letter to Paton, 19 August 1940, Mss Eur F 220/117, British Library (henceforth BL).

67 Margaret Hunt, Journal 1940, Mss Eur F 241/18, BL. See also Haggis, J. and Allen, M., “Imperial emotions: Affective communities of mission in British protestant women's missionary publications c1880–1920”, Journal of Social History 41, 3 (2008), pp. 691–716 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 For instance, the emotionally laden description of the wedding of a Miss Hume, who became Mrs Philips, is described in Editorial, The Sunflower XXXVI (October 1937), pp. 4-6.

69 Margaret Hunt, Journal 1940, Mss Eur F 241/18, p. 43, BL.

70 McDougall, Principal's Journal 1 (July 1915), p. 15.

71 Visweswaran, K., Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis, 1994)Google Scholar.

72 McDougall, Lamps in the Wind, p.162.

73 Ibid . p.163.

74 Anthropologists of emotion and affect such as Pandian, A., “Interior Horizons: an ethical space of selfhood in South India”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, 1 (2010), pp. 16–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar – as well as historians such as Sreenivas, M., Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington, 2008)Google Scholar – take this approach to understanding emotion.

75 Bourke, J., “Fear and anxiety: Writing about emotion in modern history”, History Workshop Journal 55, 1 (2003), pp. 111–133 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Lefebvre, L., “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past”, in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, (ed.) Burke, Peter, translated by Folca, K. (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

77 Laura Stoler, Ann, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.