European Women’s Writing and Construction Of India : A Select Study of writings of Emma Roberts and Marry Carpenter

The paper will discuss the European women writers Emma Roberts and Mary Carpenter and how they portrayed India in their novels and writings. Placing their works in the context of the overall discourse on colonialism and gendered travelwriting, the study addresses the way these authors approached Indian society, culture, religion, and social reform. The main writer Emma Roberts who mostly writes about her travels and literary sketches represents India in a prism of colonial aesthetics, domestic ideology and orientalist fantasy. Comparatively, the works of Mary Carpenter, and in this case, her works regarding education and social reform, were characterized by an active involvement of philanthropy and reformist activity. She also did social activities with in the Indian society, specially in the context of the issue of female education and reform of the prisons in India. The paper believes that although both authors functioned in the ideological framework of British imperialism, they each did so through the reactions of their genders that enabled them to approach and make meaning of the Indian life specifically the status of women in unique ways. Their stories helped to build the India as the place of moral, social, and civilizational otherness, but also show instances of empathy, negotiation, and cross-cultural contact. This paper presents an analysis of the selected texts by Roberts and Carpenter where the writing of European women is implicated in the production of colonial knowledge and the cultural imagination of the nineteenth-century India.