Standing outside Lincoln College, Oxford; I got lost trying to find Brasenose College, so my professor had to come here to find me. Photo credit: Renu Sisodia and Hitendra Wadhwa.
It has always struck me as somewhat paradoxical that some of the Indian subcontinent’s most famous political activists in the twentieth-century journeyed to Britain to complete their education: from the anticolonial leader M.K. Gandhi, to the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to ‘extremist’ independence activists Aurobindo Ghose [later, Saint Aurobindo] and Subhas Chandra Bose, to the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to the constitutional scholar and anti-caste activist (and Columbia alum!) B.R. Ambedkar. Whether their English sojourns have been heavily documented (as in the case of Nehru), or omitted from their biographies (as in the case of Bose, among others), I have been fascinated by how a journey to the colonial metropole shaped these figures’ political outlooks—their responses to British imperial power, their engagement with class divides and leftist political activism, their ‘radicalism’ and views on colonial and anticolonial violence, their position on social reform with regard to gender and caste—and gave them access to powerful political networks that they leveraged, to great effect, upon their return to British India [present day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh].
Missing from these accounts have been Indian women. In a period where perhaps not even two percent of Indian women were literate, and where girls, if they were educated at all, would be “educated… in Hindi” or other regional languages, never English, it was nearly impossible to imagine an Indian woman coming to Britain for postgraduate study, and having access to the powerful political ideologies, and networks, of their male counterparts. We have a few cases of Indian women travelling abroad (Pandita Ramabai travelling in Britain and America and Cornelia Sorabji graduating from Oxford in the nineteenth century, for instance), but these are few and far in between in histories of Indian independence and political reform that have privileged the theories, activism, and individual contributions of certain prominent Indian men.
It is for this reason that, when I first spoke to Professor Sneha Krishnan—an Associate Professor of Human Geography at Brasenose College, University of Oxford—about her research, I was thoroughly surprised to hear that she was investigating networks of middle-class Indian women who came to Oxford between the 1910s-40s for postgraduate study. Most existing scholarship would suggest that no such networks could even exist. How, then, does a historian go about locating these networks, finding these women’s names, and analyzing their aspirations, contributions, and ideas vis-à-vis those of their far more well-known male counterparts?
I realize I have begun this post in medias res, so I will offer a little more context before going any further. I am a rising junior in Columbia College, originally from New Delhi, India, and New York City, a double-major in history and mathematics, and a 2021 cohort member of the Laidlaw Undergraduate Research and Leadership Scholars Program (which I highly encourage any incoming first-years to apply to!). Last year, in my first summer of Laidlaw research, I focused on the Indian poet, educator, and anticolonial and women’s rights activist Mahadevi Varma (1907-87), reviewing a series of essays she published in the 1930s on women’s rights in Hindu marriages. This experience deepened my interest in networks of Indian women’s education in twentieth-century British India, since Mahadevi (as she was known during her literary career) wrote poignantly of how “alone” the “modern,” educated, Indian woman was, and of the pernicious effects of denying women an education through the widespread practice of child-marriage. Mahadevi had rejected her own child-marriage, and went on to earn a B.A. and M.A. in Sanskrit at the University of Allahabad, never going abroad, unlike Gandhi, Nehru, and her other male contemporaries.
As I entered my second year of the Laidlaw scholarship—where we, as undergraduate scholars, are encouraged and given the funding to go abroad—I was drawn to the idea of coming to Britain to experience research in a different university system and trace the journey to the colonial metropole that so many famous Indian political activists had undertaken a century ago to continue their own education. Simultaneously, I was plagued with questions about how to understand and contextualize the “isolated” figure of educated women like Mahadevi, who seemed to be completely left out of these narratives, especially given the Laidlaw foundation’s aim that second-year scholars step outside the sphere of purely academic work and take part in community engagement initiatives. In this period, I read about many of the different research projects developed by scholars at the Oxford and Empire Network, sending cold emails in the hopes of learning more about their work and finding a way to get involved (highly recommend URF’s presentation on cold-emailing to anyone who finds themself in a similar position!). I was fortunate to hear back from Professor Krishnan, have the chance to speak with her about her work, and arrange to come to Oxford in August, on Laidlaw funding, to assist with her project—to trace networks of Indian women who, against all odds (their gender, but also their socioeconomic, caste, and religious backgrounds), made it to Oxford in the colonial period, eventually for a public exhibit for St. Anne’s College, Oxford (where many of them studied) as well as for scholarly writing.
Thus far, I am only a week into our work here, but wanted to reflect upon both the significance (emotional, intellectual, historical) of this journey abroad, as well as on the practical implications of trying to find networks that most historical scholarship would have you believe simply do not exist. Professor Krishnan has coined the project “intimate internationalisms.” “Internationalism,” because, defying the usual exclusion of non-Westerners and women from histories of international ties, institutions, and ideas in the twentieth-century, this project works to draw Indian women into an international history of education networks in the late colonial/interwar period; “intimate” because, since official scholarships for studying in Britain were closed off to Indian women, they relied often on ‘intimate ties’—ad hoc networks of British, American, and other Indian women (from Christian missionaries, to British educators, to wealthy Indian and white patrons) formed through chance connections and friendships—to provide them with the financial means and connections to arrive at Oxford.
Returning to the original question—how to find these women in the first place—I wanted to discuss a few of the means we have been using to find ‘leads’ in this early stage of the research process, in the hopes that this might be of some use to other student researchers studying figures who have been marginalized and erased in official national or colonial archives. Our work in the last week has, in a way, been like “detective work,” combing through secondary literature to find archives, networks, and names at Oxford that we can use. There is no major body of literature on Indian women studying in Britain during the colonial period. As a result, I have been looking at books that employ a similar approach to address related themes—situating the experiences of Indian girls and women, as they were inflected by British colonialism, in an international context. This has included Sumita Mukherjee’s books on Indian women suffragettes and the ‘England-returned’ [the phrase used to describe Indians who had studied in Britain and then returned to India to pursue careers in law, medicine, and civil services], and Kristine Alexander’s work on the 1920s-30s internationalist and imperialist vision of the ‘Girl Guides’ [the female equivalent of Boy Scouts] in Britain, Canada, and India.
In going through these books, I realized I was starting to adopt particular strategies of approaching this scholarship, with our project in mind, that often built upon my approaches to doing readings for history or Core seminars at Columbia during the academic year. Of course, if the scholar explicitly mentioned a ‘lead’—a name of a particular Indian woman studying at Oxford—I would record it, but such direct ‘leads’ were far too rare to count on. In turn, I started looking for mentions of events, societies, and individuals who might have some connection to the networks we were looking at: for instance, discussions of Indian students’ associations at Oxford, where these women might have participated, or of officials appointed by the India Office [Britain’s wing for managing Indian colonial affairs, based in London] to monitor the activities and housing of Indian students, or international women’s or Guide conferences that took place at universities such as Oxford in the 1920s and 30s. These were figures, sites, and events that Indian women might have passed through—and so, by reaching out to the respective Oxford colleges where these societies met, or tracking down the related papers in official archives—we might find more of their names and records of their activities. Another important point was looking at the sources and archives cited used by these scholars (i.e., reading the bibliography and footnotes or endnotes)—something my history professors strongly encouraged us to do in seminar this past year, particularly in a course I had taken this Spring on South Asian Historiography with Professor Manan Ahmed, where our focus was specifically on historians’ methodologies. This becomes all the more important now, in identifying ‘leads’ for further research, for footnotes and bibliographies revealed a number of document collections housed at Oxford or other peer institutions, which we could aim to access, as well as additional names, scholars, works of scholarship, and archives that would help with finding records of these women’s activities.
This is, of course, just the first stage of research—looking at secondary sources to compile a literature review, and to paint a mental picture of the ‘scene,’ of what it meant to be a woman coming from India to an elite British institution to study in the early twentieth-century. We are continuing with this work in the coming weeks by turning to primary sources, including magazines and periodicals published by St. Anne’s College and other Oxford colleges that admitted women at the time, to look for records, names, and contributions from Indian students, as well as the correspondences of some of these women that Professor Krishnan has already encountered while sifting through the St. Anne’s archives. Most of these papers were never officially compiled, recorded, or digitized by the respective college—not being seen as significant enough—meaning that we are never entirely sure what we will find, and making it necessary to conduct this work in-person.
I remain immensely excited about what we might discover in the coming weeks about these women: how they came here, what their aims were, how they engaged with their male Indian counterparts, whether they returned to India, married, and/or pursued ‘public’ careers. I hope that this research will reveal a network of pioneering Indian women that has not been seriously studied before, and will encourage future scholarship that centers the voices of figures who have been written out of international and national histories—women from former colonies, who have rarely been seen as intellectuals, reformers, and independence activists in their own right. And yet, I wonder how much of this work, of this ‘mental picture,’ will have to remain hypothetical. For, amidst all of our efforts to trace these networks and find these women’s names, it is impossible to ignore the fact that they were denied an official path to Britain to pursue an education in their own time, and continue to be denied an official place in university, national, and international archives in our times. This problem, ‘the silence of the archives,’ which so many historians and theorists have poignantly written of, is worth noting even as we think about ‘practical’ strategies to find archival materials that will lead us to the names, identities, and narratives of these women and other similarly overlooked figures. It reminds me, on the one hand, of the urgency of this kind of work—and, on the other, of the limits of history-writing, when much of how I might think of them, and how I think of my own position vis-à-vis theirs as I write this post from Oxford, might be shaped by my imagination filling in for a series of incomplete historical ‘facts.’