Lady Nugent’s East India Journal

Reviewed by: Lady Nugent’s East India Journal: A critical edition ed. by Ashley L. Cohen Priyasha Mukhopadhyay Lady Nugent’s East India Journal: A critical edition Edited and with an Introduction by Ashley L. Cohen. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Over the last two decades, the pull of the government archive and its claim to truth-telling have become increasingly less powerful. As the work of, among others, Anjali Arondekar, Betty Joseph and Ann Stoler has shown us, bureaucratic records never say what they mean (or mean what they say). With a healthy scepticism towards the “official” record and “authoritative” versions of events, professional historians have instead looked to alternative documents to trace narratives of the past: personal letters, diaries, autobiographies and literary writing. This has proved to be particularly useful in writing the stories of those who, more often than not, exist only in archival gaps and silences. Ashley Cohen’s edition of Lady Nugent’s East India Diary, the first since it was published for private circulation in 1839, will prove to be such a valuable source. Based on the travels of Maria Nugent, the wife of George Nugent, commander-in-chief of India between 1811 and 1814, the diary not only provides us with an entry point into the history of early nineteenth-century India, but also persuades us to read this through the perspective of the British woman in empire at a time before the imperial “memsahib” became a common phenomenon. While personal accounts of this kind abound in the mid-to-late nineteenth century—prominent examples include the works of Fanny Parkes, Emily Eden, Flora Annie Steel and Harriet Tytler—Cohen points out that Nugent’s is one of but a few to focus on the final decades of the East India Company, allowing us to witness firsthand the period’s cultural and administrative transformation in modes of colonial rule. It must be kept in mind, as Cohen’s introduction correctly highlights, that even as it was published as a “diary,” Nugent’s text was written for a specific audience—her children, who remained in England during their parents’ years in India. This very much shaped the kind of details and events it recorded; there are no pretensions of carving out an intimate, private self but rather, the concerted attempt to shield the reader from this. Cohen’s parallel references to Nugent’s letters to a friend, Lady Temple, during this period, reveal, for one, that she faced extreme personal and physical difficulties during her stay in the country. These are only hinted at in the diary, through references to sleepless nights, the unbearable heat, and the numerous flies and insects. Instead, as Cohen suggests, the work reads more like a piece of travel writing; in its eye to minute detail, it could even be said to aspire, if anachronistically, to the status of the anthropologist’s fieldwork notes. To this end, Nugent picks her recurrent subjects: fears of miscegenation and of “improper” marriages to Native or Eurasian women, popular historical sites (such as the Taj Mahal, which is described at length in verse of questionable quality), and the religious practices of non-Christian Indians. Alongside these sit descriptions of the physical landscape of the colony, particularly the Upper Provinces, which she tours with her husband; the exotic animals of India, the elephant, camel and monkey, make customary and frequent appearances. More exciting than these details in the diary, which are for the most part coloured over by racist presumptions and generic colonial superiority, are the passages that focus on relationships of exchange. Merchants, mendicants, street vendors, mahouts, begums, nawabs, sepoys and British officials all form part of this narrative. Nugent describes for us her broken and hesitant conversations with domestic help in as much detail as her encounters with the Indian aristocracy. These moments of cultural collaboration, aided in the latter cases by the give and take of expensive gifts, remind us that colonialism was, above all, a series of transactions, however uneven and shaped by racial and power hierarchies as these might be. Particular attention is paid to her visits to women’s quarters, or zenanas: visits that are highly stereotyped, and

Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History