Ghose, Indira

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GHOSE, Indira

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Free University of Berlin, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Free University of Berlin, Gosslerstr. 2-4, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. Free University of Berlin, Germany, professor of English.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth-Century India, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor and author of introduction and notes, with Sara Mills) Fanny Parkes Parlby, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 2001.

Editor of India, volumes 3 and 5, Pickering and Chatto (London, England), 2002 and 2003 respectively.

SIDELIGHTS: Indira Ghose is an English professor with a strong interest in the writings of "memsahibs," European (mostly English) women who lived and/or traveled in India during its colonial period, when it was ruled by Great Britain. She is the editor of Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth-Century India, which presents the writings of English women who wanted to see the "real India." She also coedited and provided notes and the introduction to Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, a book by noted travel writer, diarist, and memsahib Fanny Parkes Parlby.

Ghose turns a critical eye toward the travel writing of memsahibs in her book Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze. In the book she writes that her aims are "to help displace the stereotype of the memsahib" and "to draw attention to the contribution these women travellers have made to the genre of travel writing." In the process, Ghose explores gender differences by discussing the different aspects of Indian life that women focused on, as opposed to their male counterparts. The scholarly book also explores concepts of race and empire within the British and Indian context. Among the writers whose work she discusses are well-known travelers such as Emily Eden, Fanny Parks Parlby, and Mary Carpenter, but Ghose also explores the writings of lesser-known women travelers such as Anne Elwood and Frances Isabella Duberly.

Writing in Victorian Studies, Ali Behdad felt that in Women Travellers in Colonial India Ghose's aims are much more than the author states, namely that she has "a desire to make a theoretically broader claim: that the 'plurality of female gazes' sheds light on the ambivalent web of colonial power relations." Behdad went on to note, "Ghose's book is a contribution to the field of colonial historiography and points to the need for further exploration of the political implications of colonialism's cultural ambivalences." Journal of Asian Studies contributor Durba Ghosh commented that the "book charts the complex ways in which European women in India alternately transgressed and maintained gender norms while sustaining and contesting the imperial cause in various ways." Ghosh also noted, "The strength of the book lies in the analysis of the more obscure authors and its extensive quotations of written texts."