Introduction
In 1943, when Brijraj Kumari, princess of Jodhpur, arrived at Ajitnivas Palace in Dhrangadhra state as a young bride, she entered a palatial residence which embodied the ambitions of a late imperial, hybrid Anglo-Indian architectural style. Commissioned by her grandfather-in-law, Maharajah Ajit Sinhji, in 1896, the palace was designed by an architect who fused together European and Indic aesthetic sensibilities. There were Indo-Saracenic domes which capped the sprawling structure, private, sequestered courtyards in the tradition of earlier Rajput and Mughal palaces, and large bas-relief stone panels on the building's facade, which simultaneously showcased scenes from the Hindu Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and portraits of Queen Victoria, spectre and globe in hand, holding court with her British subjects.
The palace compound itself held not one, but two buildings. The first, from the lakeside entrance, was the zenana, or women's quarters, where female members of the dynastic family, household staff, and visitors resided. This was the antahpura, a separate space within the palace where courtly women were sequestered from view. It was also a distinct location of power, which served as a women-oriented court within the larger royal household. It was here that Brijraj Kumari was first welcomed as a new bride. On the other side of the zenana, connected by a long hallway, or chal, lay the mardana. The mardana, or men's section, housed the reception hall, where the maharajah conducted official meetings; the private residences of the ruler, his male relations, and staff; and several public entertaining spaces, such as a formal banquet room, drawing room, card room, and projection room, as well as stylized gardens to host European dignitaries and fellow princes. The large Darbar Hall lay between these two sections of the palace, surrounded on all sides by the zenana quarters upstairs and the mardana below. During state occasions, zenana women would gather in the upstairs rooms and listen, through latticed windows that looked upon the hall below, to the proceedings.
The idea of such separate homosocial living spaces for aristocratic Indian families had roots in the medieval period and even earlier, finding reference in the Sanskrit epics. The Persianate concept of the zenana, or female court, had arrived in India during the thirteenth century with the growing spread of Islam,Footnote 1 and was adopted alongside the practice of pardah (the ‘curtain’ or ‘veil’) by Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist ruling dynasties.Footnote 2 With the marriages of Mughal Emperor Akbar to Hindu Rajput princesses in the latter half of the sixteenth century, Mughal ideas of gendered architecture and courtly life were further imitated and adopted by non-Muslim elites,Footnote 3 such as the Hindu Rajput royal house of Dhrangadhra.
It was in these palace compounds that the separate spheres of ‘home’ and ‘the world’ invariably overlapped. With the ruler's court only steps away, zenana women became intimately familiar with the public nature and spectacle of royal power, despite their perceived seclusion and bounded isolation within the palace antahpura. It was also an inherently cosmopolitan environment, where women from different regional, religious, racial, ethnic, caste, and class backgrounds intermixed. Zenana women, by virtue of the act of dynastic marriage, crossed both geographic and cultural divides, invariably serving as ambassadors bringing new languages, religious practices, and regional modes of dress, cuisine, and ornamentation from their natal families to their husbands’ families, thus adding to the development of hybrid forms of expression, first during the medieval Indo-Islamic era and then later under British colonialism. A typical zenana woman would have been multilingual, speaking her father’s, mother’s, and often her paternal grandmother's languages, in addition to that of her husband's family. The fact that women like Brijraj Kumari lived during the ‘high noon’ of empire placed them in an additionally unique, transnational world of moving borders, where they were constantly crossing boundaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and ‘court’, Europe and Asia, colony and metropole. In particular, this article will illuminate how colonial education and its associated themes of imperial travel and cultural exposure influenced the definition and practice of marriage and sexuality in the zenana.
Despite the perceived boundaries of seclusion constructed by pardah and zenana architecture, courtly Indian women were engaged in the wider public sphere of politics, governance, intellectual exchange, and religious and aesthetic patronage. Indeed, pardah women of the pre-colonial and colonial periods, from the Ottoman and Mughal harems to the zenanas of Bhopal, Rajputana, and Saurashtra, were active players in indigenous state politics and larger power-sharing relationships with external hegemonic forces.Footnote 4 They were acutely aware that the private functions of female domestic life, such as courtship, sex, marriage, and mothering, were intricately tied with the running of the state in what Ruby Lal has described as the blurring of the ‘private’, the ‘public’, the ‘personal’, and the ‘political’ in royal households.Footnote 5 During the colonial period, pardah women arranged marriages of alliance for their children and were among the first Indian women to travel abroad to Europe, America, and Asia at a time when few Indians did so,Footnote 6 to write their memoirsFootnote 7 and educational treatisesFootnote 8 in English, and to study at university.Footnote 9 They served as active leaders and members of India-wide women's movements,Footnote 10 received counsel from legal courts (colonial and customary) to adjudicate matters of state, and manipulated colonial policies and British officials towards their own ends.Footnote 11 They were also patrons of local religious, aesthetic, and educational institutions, such as temples, mosques, cremation grounds, stepwells, and schools, as well as regional industries, including textile manufacturers, jewellers, and architects. They were consumers and collectors of a dynamic, transregional, and later transnational, aesthetic style under the British Raj.Footnote 12 In the process, zenana women were introduced to European forms of domesticity and social practice, which celebrated a new, progressive femininity. They learned European languages and literature and enjoyed Western forms of sport (including tennis, badminton, and riding), entertainment, and pastimes such as ballroom dancing, playing cards and charades, arranging flowers, and sewing, knitting, and embroidery. By the early twentieth century, they were engaged intellectually, socially, and politically with the wider mechanisms of empire, thus crossing national identities of home between their regional kingdoms and the metropolitan cities of British India, such as Delhi, Bombay, or Calcutta, as well as between the metropole and the colony.
What makes Ajitnivas and other palaces built during this same period significant is this coupling of an emerging colonial consciousness with a pre-colonial past. Such princely buildings, and the royal courts they housed, borrowed attributes from various locations within the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘European’ in new and profoundly different ways. This cultural cross-pollination made the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century zenana fundamentally cosmopolitan.Footnote 13 ‘Mongrel’Footnote 14 and ‘hybrid’Footnote 15 institutions, these female courts adopted diverse Indic practices from different historic periods, across religious, class, and regional lines, as well as from European, American, East Asian, and other non-Indian cultural points of reference. British imperial historians of gender have noted that there was a constant traffic of ‘people, ideas, and products’ between Britain and its colonies, resulting in spirited exchanges between the metropole and periphery, which did not create separate spheres of ‘here’ and ‘out there’.Footnote 16 Just as the builders of Ajitnivas Palace adopted European architectural motifs in the construction of the antahpura, the internal socio-political institutions of the zenana itself were marked by British imperial policies and colonial attitudes.
While being open to new cultural influences and products, courtly households simultaneously continued to practice various pre-colonial customs, albeit in modified forms. While the practice of pardah was gradually relaxed, the continued convention of gender-segregated architecture remained de rigueur for courtly households. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century royal residences, such as the imposing art deco Umaid Bhavan palace in Jodhpur, which was completed in 1943, utilized modern technologies—including electrical lighting and subterranean, heated swimming pools—but continued to have zenana quarters with latticed stone screens and enclosed courtyard gardens for the women of the household.Footnote 17Zenana women themselves were expected to learn Hindu ritual and worship and study regional vernaculars, such as Marwari, Gujarati, Hindi or Bengali, as well as languages of Indic antiquity, including Vedic and classical Sanskrit, and courtly Persian and Arabic, in addition to their lessons in Western subjects. They also upheld traditional clan and social hierarchies and maintained pre-colonial forms of wealth and property distribution and maintenance, such as the practice of daija (dowry) and stridhana (women's wealth).
The daija, or dowry, that a woman brought with her into her marriage was one way in which she could distinguish herself from her female in-laws in her conjugal home. An aristocratic or royal woman's daija would have included a wide paraphernalia of objects, persons, and sensibilities, such as ‘her gods, her retinue of ranked servants and members of service caste, a body of animals, her natal language, the cultures of cuisine, music, painting, poetry and sartorial conventions, cash and bullion, household goods, jewelry and her personal beauty’.Footnote 18 When Brijraj Kumari married the maharajah of Dhrangadhra in 1943, she brought her own priests, bards, servants, tailors, dyers, accountants, and cooks. She was also given a Rolls Royce, horses, jewellery, clothing, musical instruments, and furniture.Footnote 19
The daija enabled the new bride to cultivate her own persona at her husband's court. In many ways, it continued pre-colonial forms of status-building and emphasized the significance of a woman's natal male connections, or saga. During the medieval period, a woman's saga relations were crucial during contentious succession disputes or conflicts within the dynastic family, when her brothers, father or uncle might have intervened to provide support to her, either through military force or political and economic pressure. This emphasis on retaining her father's traditions in a foreign, conjugal household also enabled the new bride to distinguish herself from co-wives, mothers-in-law, and her husband's sisters while further hybridizing the new court.Footnote 20 In this way, women brought external influences into the bounded world of the royal zenana, and served to make the court more cosmopolitan, cross-regional, and, in several cases, inter-religious.
This article examines these narratives of cosmopolitan identity as windows into changing ideals of marriage, sexuality, and domesticity in the colonial zenana through the words of zenana women themselves. It critiques earlier reifications of colonized South Asian women by both orientalistFootnote 21 and subaltern scholars, which have emphasized the repressive history of both British imperialism and traditional patriarchies on silencing Indian women.Footnote 22 In contrast, the historical record reveals that colonized Indian women were indeed present and ‘spoke’ in several different venues, as Padma Anagol and Kamala Visweswaran have argued.Footnote 23 They also left behind records such as autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories which further illuminate colonial Indian women as ‘cosmopolitan’ subjects rather than ‘subaltern’ figures.Footnote 24
Furthermore, such accounts reveal that the zenana was porous as it came into constant contact with forces beyond its boundaries, borrowing elements from various locations within the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, the ‘indigenous’ and ‘European’, the ‘colony’ and the ‘metropole’. Indeed, these female courts combined aspects of modernity with ‘tradition’ not as its fundamental opposite but as a constitutive element of being modern.Footnote 25 As Sanjay Joshi has argued in regards to colonial Lucknow, ‘modern’ ideas about female education went hand in hand with older patriarchal attitudes, such as the model of the woman as the ideal wife, or pativrata, who lived to serve her husband—a practice which could similarly be applied to the zenana.Footnote 26
Investigating the zenana is furthermore relevant to a broader understanding of imperial history, as it complicates the narrative of the colonial encounter and breaks down rigid cultural, racial, national, religious, and class boundaries. Building upon the work of David Cannadine, William Dalrymple, Durba Ghosh, and Maya Jasanoff, I argue that there was a cross-cultural exchange between imperial actors and colonized subjects in India. As Cannadine has argued in relation to class,Footnote 27 Ghosh and Dalrymple in terms of domesticity and family,Footnote 28 and Jasanoff with regards to imperial collecting,Footnote 29 the colonial encounter was often a conversation of reciprocal rapport, exchange, and influence based on the diversity of particular life histories, which cannot be neatly encapsulated into monolithic paradigms. While it should be noted that my work, like that of Cannadine, Dalrymple, and Ghosh, tends to focus on the elite and privileged, these women are nonetheless representative of broader misconceptions of limited female agency, especially from behind pardah (or seclusion). Indeed, as this article will reveal through the marriages of two twentieth-century zenana women, Maharani Krishna Kumari of Jodhpur and Maharani Brijraj Kumari of Dhrangadhra, ideas of marriage, domesticity, and sexuality were influenced by multivalent definitions that crossed locus points both in indigenous practices and colonial innovations. Indeed, it is this very hybridity, which cannot be neatly classified into limited binary paradigms, that makes the late colonial zenana fascinating as an area for historical investigation.
In particular, I will examine the close connection between zenana women's education and emergent adolescent sexuality. In a number of cases, zenana women began their education in mixed classrooms with their brothers and male cousins as children. As they neared the age of menarche, they were separated from their male relations and the nature of their schoolroom lessons was dramatically altered. Education and sexual danger, expressed through the often unspoken fear of premarital pregnancy and the ‘damaged’ woman made impure through the act of viewing, were deeply connected in households which had long practised gendered segregation. With menstruation, young women's education shifted from the formal school room to lessons in household management and childcare, in preparation for marriage and motherhood.
However, while prematurely cut off from the childhood classroom, women's educational backgrounds and future learning potential remained an important part of their postmarital identity. As we shall see, in these marriages of zenana queens, their husbands quizzed them about their educational training on their wedding nights. Young anglicized Indian princes desired wives who reflected the modernity they hoped to represent as imperial subjects and were encouraged to adopt by British advisors and tutors. As they were often products of a British public school or its Indian equivalent, these young Indian scions aspired to have wives who would similarly combine pre-colonial and modern identities. They required wives who would not wear pardah and thus reflect more Western ideals of companionate marriages of friendship. Simultaneously, they still expected their wives to live in zenana palaces, uphold traditional kinship networks, express religious duty and sacredness, and engage in the maintenance of a large polygamous household with several mothers-in-law and potential co-wives.
Premarital education and female sexuality
The weddings between the kingdoms of Dhrangadhra and Jodhpur in 1943 were unions between Hindu-Rajput states that had inter-married in the past. While these alliances were arranged in line with a pre-colonial definition of status-building, the education of the prospective partners and their postmarital interactions reflect the growing influence of European attitudes of companionate marriage upon Indian domestic households. In these alliances, royal princesses from both states were wed to the corresponding young ruler or heir apparent. Krishna Kumari, princess of Dhrangadhra, was married to Maharajkumar Hanwant Singh, the yuvraj of Jodhpur, while her uterine brother, Meghrajji III, the maharajah of Dhrangadhra, married the young Jodhpur heir's adopted sister, Brijraj Kumari. Such brother–sister marriages were not unusual; the Dhrangadhra princess's union was contingent on the acceptance of the Jodhpur bride.
While Krishna Kumari was considered a beauty, Brijraj Kumari, although fair-complexioned, did not have such a reputation. In addition, she was adopted by Maharajah Umaidsinh of Jodhpur from his younger brother, Maharaj Kumar Ajitsinhji, who was her biological father. As she was not the full-blood daughter of the ruler or sister of the heir apparent, her rank and status were somewhat questionable and at first caused anxiety for Maharajah Ghanshyamsinhji of Dhrangadhra, who arranged these dynastic marriages for his eldest son and most beautiful daughter. While Meghrajji was initially cautious to marry, he agreed to the match once he realized how it would benefit his sister and state by ensuring strong ties between Dhrangadhra and the wealthier Rajasthani kingdom of Jodhpur.
All four were informed by Anglo-European educational systems during the colonial period, particularly British governesses and teachers. The yuvraj of Jodhpur was schooled at the anglicized palace school in Jodhpur and the Indian princely boarding school, Mayo College, while the maharajah of Dhrangadhra was educated at the Dhrangadhra Palace School (which was later moved to England) and various British public schools, including Haileybury, during the 1930s.Footnote 30 While protected from outside influence behind pardah, the women were also introduced to Western modes of learning, particularly through the cultural intermediary of the governess.
Zenana women's education and the role of European tutors and governesses
While the British government had sway over the legal courts and business boardrooms, European governesses and tutors were direct members of princely households and could influence the minds, attitudes, and tastes of aristocratic members. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the subsequent arrival of single professional women from Europe,Footnote 31 the zenana began employing Western women as doctors, nurses, nannies, and, most significantly, governesses in response to a growing demand for British forms of medicine, education, and social etiquette by Indian courtly families.Footnote 32 They were integral in instilling European values upon young royal Indian women (and men) from an early age and imparting Victorian and Edwardian attitudes regarding marriage, domesticity, and family to their young charges. Governesses and tutors were part of the larger courtly staff, which included Indian ayahs (nursemaids), religious teachers, and attendants.Footnote 33
In Dhrangadhra, Princess Krishna Kumari was a member of the Dhrangadhra Palace School along with her brothers and male cousins. The Dhrangadhra Rajshala was founded in a wing of the Ajitnivas palace in 1929, before being moved later to England, when the boys were sent off to school. In England, the school was renamed Millfield; today it is one of the most exclusive boarding schools in England and the only one founded by an Indian prince. Jack Meyer, who later became the principal of Millfield, supervised the Dhrangadhra Palace School.
Meyer's pupils included Krishna Kumari and her siblings, as well as her cousins, the yuvraj of Jhalrapatan, Thakor Saheb of Wadhwan, and his younger brother. It is probable that the girls, in these early years, were schooled in the same subjects as the boys, which included British history, English language and literature, and classical Greek and Latin mottos. They studied the reign of Alexander the Great and memorized glib quotations such as ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’ Krishna Kumari was also instructed in English and studied human biology, examining scientific textbooks with pictures of the human anatomy.Footnote 34
Similarly, in Europeanized Jodhpur, Brijraj Kumari, along with her sisters and brothers, was schooled at the Sri Umed Palace School, where she studied geography, Indian, European and empire history, civics, economics, mathematics, English language and literature, Sanskrit scriptures and epics, Hindi, Marwari, and Hindu puja. She read novels such as Black Beauty, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre, wrote out The Charge of the Light Brigade in long-hand, and sang Scottish ballads and Indian nationalist songs. In her notebooks, she composed essays on the early inhabitants of Britain, the lives of the Iberians, the Teutonic tribes, and the Norman invasion. Some of the subjects in which she was instructed were less academic, such as physical health, hygiene, and painting.Footnote 35 She also had a rigorous schedule of early morning riding, walks, and calisthenics as well as, on occasion, shikar, or shooting.
In Jodhpur, Brijraj Kumari was brought up under the aegis of her Scottish nanny, Miss Thompson, who reported to her mother on a monthly basis. An arch Victorian, the governess instilled discipline, hygienic cleanliness, and moral uprightness in her ward. The young Jodhpur princess learned the virtue of tidiness, making her bed in the morning, ironing her clothes, and keeping her cupboards neat. She and her sisters received graded marks for their husbandry.Footnote 36
Governesses like Miss Thompson were responsible not only for teaching the girls their academic subjects but also for guiding them through the essentials of expected social behaviour and the hierarchical relationships, which lay at the heart of courtly households.Footnote 37 In various situations, they had full authority to curb inappropriate behaviour on the part of their young charges. In Dhrangadhara, the staff instructed Krishna Kumari and her siblings on how to behave ‘in a dignified manner. We could not use bad language that other children were allowed to speak in any way [we] liked . . . We were checked if we made anybody feel low.’Footnote 38 It was a similar situation for Princess Sita Devi in the Rajput state of Kashipur, where unmarried girls ‘were taught never to be rude. Each girl had her own little maid according to her age. If you didn't treat your maid properly she was taken away and it was a great insult.’ Furthermore, she and her sisters were required to speak to the staff only using honorifics: ‘We had to say, tum, dedo, merbani.’Footnote 39 ‘Tum’, ‘dedo’, and ‘merbani’ translate as ‘you’, ‘please give’, and ‘thank you.’ Like the French ‘vous’ or the Hindi ‘aap’, these terms are polite forms of address, usually reserved for elders or respected guests. Such expectations regarding deference in speech reflected aristocratic dignity and grace in children. Several of these precepts were laid out in ‘Education and Upbringing of the Ruler’, from Maharajah Madhav Rao Scindia of Gwalior's General Policy Durbar of 1925:
Attain good health and do not impair it.
Do not give up your religion and respect other religions.
Be neither miserly nor extravagant.
Speak out the truth and fear not.
Never tell a lie.
Always speak the truth.
Do not forget God.
Accept what is just and be always polite.
Always respect your family customs.
. . .
Respect your parents and elders.Footnote 40
Learning to respect the social hierarchies embedded in courtly households, especially through the polite treatment of tutors, governesses, and servants, would serve the young princesses well when they became new brides, where often the staff would be among the first strangers they would have to befriend and ally with in their marital homes. These same qualities were useful in any sort of ambassadorial position they served—whether as representatives of their natal or married homes—when they went to other zenanas, particularly on occasions of royal marriages, engagements, deaths, or births.
Furthermore, the relationship between governess and pupil was not merely an instructional one but often also an emotional, intimate exchange. Brijraj Kumari described Miss Thompson as dearer to her than any other familial figure and closer than her own biological or adopted mothers. More than 50 years later, she would recall the touching words her governess said the day after her wedding: ‘[M]y governess came the next morning. She met [my husband]. She said nice things about me. She told him to look after me and make me happy.’Footnote 41 It is worth mentioning here that Brijraj Kumari emphasized that it was Miss Thompson who chided and warned her new husband to protect and look after her—words her own mother perhaps never expressed to the Dhrangadhra maharajah. Such remembrances highlight the close connections between zenana girls and non-family women, as well as the nature of Western educators in shaping not only the intellect of their pupils, but also their expectations for marital closeness. Clearly, Brijraj Kumari's governess had hopes not only for protection in marriage, but also companionship and care. Such relationships between European governesses and courtly Indian brides thus served to spread middle-class Victorian social mores and European domestic practices in colonial zenanas.
In large part, this was due to the fact that the British saw the education of Indian rulers and zenana women as a fundamental part of the civilizing mission. They believed that the mothers, sisters, wives, and mistresses of royal men were corrupting influences upon the impressionable minds of young princely males, whom they wished to influence positively. Many of these pejorative views of Indian women were rooted in Victorian definitions of sexuality. Abnormal sexual practice invariably reflected a native ruler's ‘unfitness’ to govern.Footnote 42 Polygamy, as manifest in the zenana, was particularly abhorred as it contrasted sharply with European ideals of companionate, monogamous conjugality. For these reasons, whom Indian princes chose as wives, lovers, and companions was of vital concern to the colonial state, and the British actively intervened in the intimate life of the indigenous courtly family. British political officers (and even English royals) arranged marriages of state between different Indian princely families, supervised the education of young princes, and advocated a European ideal of the domestic household.Footnote 43
Education became a central concern in attempts to ‘sanitize’ the zenana of its more prurient elements. Colonial educational policy often included separating indigenous children from native family systems,Footnote 44 such as the extended homosocial world of female relations in the zenana. Colonial administrators sent Indian princes to British-style boarding schools in India or Europe as part of a larger project of cultural assimilation, which they believed would reduce the influence of ‘dangerous deviants’. Indian princes not only pursued a modern education in such institutions but also learned Victorian ideals of manliness and moral conduct.Footnote 45 Regulating Indian princely sexuality therefore went hand in hand with refashioning indigenous rulers as model English gentlemen who understood both the values of Victorian domesticity and the creed of ‘enlightened’ imperialism. Colonial officials believed that young princes acquired a restrained but robust masculinity through the disciplined rigour of British public school life.
Just as the British made a concerted effort to depoliticize the zenana by separating Indian princely males from its influences, they were also actively engaged in reforming it from within. Colonial debates on indigenous women in British India produced various pieces of legislation, such as the prohibition of sati (widow immolation) in 1829, widow remarriage in 1856, and the Age of Consent Act in 1891, which increased the minimum marital age for girls and boys. Nowhere was this colonial agenda more strongly felt than in the education of Indian women. From the 1860s onwards, the British saw the zenana as a place for educational reform,Footnote 46 where they could train Indian women to become good wives and mothers in an Occidental mould. Upper-caste and upper-class nineteenth-century Hindu Bengali women, for instance, adopted the model of the grihalakshmi, a female archetype who combined Victorian virtues of household hygiene and women's education with the continued observation of indigenous family traditions in the kula, or clan.Footnote 47 In her 1920 memoir, Maharani Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar, the daughter of Keshab Chandra Sen, the Hindu reformist leader of the Brahmo Samaj, recounted how her Western education (in English language, literature, music, and history) made her an attractive royal bride for the maharajah of Cooch Behar in 1878. She recalled being screened in the months leading up to her marriage by the maharajah's British advisor, a Mr John Kneller, who asked her to play the piano and discourse in English, before recommending her as the next Cooch Behar maharani.Footnote 48
The desire for such educated wives, literate equally in occidental and indigenous forms of knowledge, became more highly valued during the colonial period.Footnote 49 Both British and Indian reformers saw education as synonymous with modernity and a way to counteract the anachronistic, outmoded practices of the zenana. Social reform, whether through legislation or education, became closely linked with colonial attitudes towards indigenous marriage, motherhood, and sexuality.Footnote 50
In many ways, female education in the zenana was directly connected with prevailing normative ideas of sexuality. As mentioned earlier, many twentieth-century royal women grew up with their brothers in the zenana in their early years. During this period, they shared a similar fixed routine from morning until night which included a heady combination of lessons in history, literature, religion, and languages, as well as rigorous athletics, such as tennis and riding. It was only after the boys turned ten years of age, presumably the year they neared puberty, that they were often sent to the mardana.
At this point, the young girls began living a separate existence from their male relations. In Dhrangadhra, Krishna Kumari was not allowed to ‘go alone with any unknown person’ and was supervised by an elderly chaperone even in the company of her brothers.Footnote 51 Separation from the boys coincided with a more stringent adoption of pardah, especially as the girls neared menarche. In the Hindu Rajput state of Kashipur, Sita Devi, a contemporary of Brijraj Kumari and Krishna Kumari, remembered the first time she was distinguished from her brothers, during a riding lesson:
I used to go down to the temple on horseback with my two brothers, accompanied by the nurses and of course the savars [attendants]. One morning I was on the point of getting on my horse, when a servant came and said, ‘Maharajsaheb is calling you.’ So we all trooped up to his rooms and my father looked at me. I must have been about seven-and-a-half. He said, ‘you’re in Pardah, you can't go out.’ I said, ‘that's not possible. I already have on my riding clothes. I am ready, and you’ve always allowed me to go on the horse.’ He replied, ‘From today, you can't step out of the main door.’ Everyone was against it but there was nothing that could be done about it. So the girls then had a little pardah garden where we used to play about.Footnote 52
Later, when her brothers were sent away to a British boarding school, her father, out of ‘sheer eccentricity’, stopped her English lessons. It was not until she married into the Francophile Sikh state of Kapurthala that she would continue her education, when her father-in-law engaged a tutor to teach her French.Footnote 53 Maharajah Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, in part due to his own anti-British sentiments, which had emerged out of a childhood antipathy for his British tutor, was strongly pro-French and adopted French social practices in his Sikh Punjabi kingdom of Kapurthala. His Francophile court not only spoke French, but adopted French architectural styles in the building of their palatial residences, French cuisine at table, French education for their sons and daughters-in-laws (famously, Jagatjit Singh schooled Sita Devi's elder sister-in-law, Brinda, in Paris before her marriage to his heir), and owned private residences in France.Footnote 54 Certainly, for Maharajah Jagatjit Singh and his sons, educated wives reflected their own modern, Continental sensibilities.
Sita Devi's childhood observations reveal that once a woman became a sexualized being, she had to be shielded from the male gaze—including that of tutors and brothers—and focus on the duties that prepared her for marriage. Education, either of an indigenous or foreign nature, in such contexts was intertwined with the dangers of sexual awakening.
For this reason, the first menses was a moment of great transformation for a woman. It alerted her family to the imminent need for marriage, given the spectre of possible motherhood. In many Hindu homes, women were further secluded during menses, separated from the rest of the female household, in part due to the observation of purity and hygiene laws. Particular customs relating to dress, toilette, and bathing were practiced during this time. Menstruating women were restricted from entering places of worship, such as temples, prayer rooms, or shrines, which disabled them from carrying out one of the fundamental parts of their daily routine—the performance of puja rituals, or prayer.Footnote 55 In Dhrangadhra, Krishna Kumari additionally did not touch anyone, male or female, for three days when she had her period. During that time, she served and dressed herself and wore linen saris.Footnote 56 In the princely state of Cooch Behar in Bengal, girls only washed their hair on the fourth day of menses.Footnote 57
The onset of menarche immediately necessitated arranging a marriage, if one had not been contracted already. Marriage, as Brijraj Kumari believed, came ‘more or less’ soon after. In Jodhpur, she and her sisters were heavily guarded by the household staff after they came of age, and not even their brothers could visit them, except in the company of the girls’ governesses. The unwed girls had been warned that they could ‘go astray even in Pardah [where] there are lots of wolves’.Footnote 58
This understanding of the dangers of nascent adolescent sexuality, however, was not accompanied by instruction on the nature of sexual relations. While schooled in European and Indic subjects and languages, unmarried girls were not given sex education, one of the primary skills they needed as suitable—and pleasing—wives. As Krishna Kumari noted, even if elder women were discussing sex, ‘they would stop the moment [the girls] came in’.Footnote 59 She continued, saying, ‘we had dolls dressed up like brides and grooms and married them . . .that we could do’, but nothing beyond. As her contemporary, Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, observed, ‘It was taboo to have conversations on sex.’Footnote 60
In large part, older women did not discuss sexual matters with their unmarried female relations in order to preserve the image of sexual purity and innocence that was so essential for unwed girls on the marriage market. As Brijraj Kumari recalled, future in-laws had various methods, including domestic spying, to discover the character and behaviour of potential brides. Often the means for collecting such sensitive information was bribery. A member of the future husband's staff would question the maids from the home of the bride's father, encouraging them with gifts or money. ‘They would ask is your Baisa [princess] a good girl?’ she noted. Thus they learned ‘how strict my mother was with us and that we were under her thumb . . . Mother did look at us like a hawk and she did keep people around us all the time. We didn't realize that then but we do now.’Footnote 61 Such careful protection and surveillance were clearly essential for the girls’ reputations, and Brijraj Kumari's observation expresses both indigenous as well as Victorian expectations of demure femininity and sexual inexperience.
It was inevitably other zenana women—future mothers and grandmothers-in-law—who served as the ultimate evaluators of brides. While the father of the bride and the potential groom often played important roles through forging political alliances and financing weddings, mothers and senior female relations made the final decisions:
[I]t was the women procuring women for themselves for which purpose the man was merely a tool and a conduit. The strong pull of women to gather to themselves compatible daughter-in-laws meant a strong preference for the selection of the king which in turn fed the impulse for the creation of a restricted pool from which to bring in women, heightening as a consequence the impulse for a particular lineage and family of a particular kul.Footnote 62
In particular, the mother of the groom, the future mother-in-law of the bride, held the conclusive reins of decision-making. Her choice often irrevocably altered the course of the family's history, establishing a precedent for future brides. Thus, in large part, older women did not discuss sex with their unmarried female relations in order to maintain this ideal of feminine innocence, purity, and obedience.
For this reason, it was expected that women would learn about sex from their husbands. They were informed that sex could happen any time, anywhere, with any man: hence, the necessity of pardah, the protection of chaperones, and the need to marry well as soon as possible. Growing up, Brijraj Kumari believed that ‘when you met a man for the first time, he could take you that very day’.Footnote 63 The image of the husband thus became synonymous with the ‘teacher’—both in the marital bed and the postmarital classroom. This postmarital ‘classroom’ was the arena for both continued book learning and an education in family dynamics, state politics, etiquette, pregnancy, and motherhood—duties that reflected a zenana woman's role as both private and public personage within the dynastic family, household, and court.
English in the bedroomFootnote 64
In this manner, not only was childhood in the zenana marked by the colonial experience, but so were the intimate wedding nights of these women, where English became the language of courtship and seduction. For both Brijraj Kumari and Krishna Kumari, those midnight meetings—after hours of ceremonies, pujas, and dinners with the extended families and court during the marriage rites—constituted their first conversations with their husbands. As they were marrying across geographic and linguistic divides, English was one way of mediating difference. It was the lingua franca throughout the varying principalities of colonial India. Women who married outside the region in which they were born ordinarily did not learn the language of their married homes until after they arrived there and engaged with their in-laws and new attendants, and thus English invariably served as the language for the intermediary period of transition.
These first meetings between courtly women and their husbands are powerful windows into the cultural world of an imperial zenana. When Krishna Kumari married in 1943, she was alone with her husband for the first time at five in the morning in the zenana palace, after hours of celebratory functions. The Jodhpur barat (wedding party) was housed in white, tented camps outside the main gates of the Ajitnivas palace. Trembling in a cotton wedding gaghra (a flared skirt, gathered at the waist) with heavy gold border, she remembered growing so nervous that she lost her voice; in addition to the fact that it was her wedding night, this was her first encounter with men outside her family circle.Footnote 65 Although only a few yards away from the zenana where she grew up, Krishna Kumari was aware that her life was completely divorced from an earlier childhood reality. Marriage was her initiation not only into conjugal relations and a new family, but also a foreign social environment of strangers.
As she recalled, both she and her husband were exhausted by the lengthy ceremonies, which had lasted several days. After hours spent sitting in the wedding mandap (a canopied pavilion, placed in the zenana courtyard) burdened with heavy jewellery, she was nearly spent with fatigue. Nonetheless, the yuvraj of Jodhpur was keen to outline from the start the political dynamics within his father's court and his expectations of his new bride. She was 17, and he was only 20. In this first private meeting together, he explained his views on his family, the practice of pardah, which he did not endorse (a somewhat radical opinion at the time), although his mother did, and his conception of a royal wife's duty to her husband. The conversation was entirely in English, as the two newly-weds could speak no other common language with the same ease.
The concerns he raised reflect both an anglicized and indigenous concept of political marriage. He told her quite clearly that he was adamantly opposed to pardah, stating that he wanted a woman to be out ‘in company’ with her husband. A woman who did not go out with her husband was to all intents and purposes ‘dead’ in Hanwant Singh's opinion. In this manner, he advocated new ideas of traditional marriage, and of a modern wife who accompanied her husband in various social venues. This modern definition of wifehood was nonetheless to be combined with traditional, customary practices. Accordingly, the Jodhpur yuvraj outlined what roles Krishna Kumari should embody as a wife and future queen:
1. She must give counsel like a mantrin (minister) in presiding over the palace household
2. She must be a dasi (slave woman) in unremittingly looking after her home
3. She must treat her husband and the kingdom of her married home like a matr (mother), feeding them love and affection
4. She must be a rambha (dancing girl or seductress) in bed with her husband. Footnote 66
This statement delineates the merging of indigenous and Western ideas of marriage. The traditional qualities of an ideal Rajput wife are expressed in an alien language, English, which has simultaneously been domesticated, marking the hybridity of private communication among young Indian royals. For Krishna Kumari, the last quality of sexual ability and pleasure fulfilment was as important as the other roles, for it was through the bedroom that she could maintain power over her husband and his affections despite the distractions of a polygamous household, and thereby more likely guarantee herself the security of becoming pregnant and having a son. To prevent her spouse from enjoying other women, she argued that a wife had to cultivate the allure of a dancing girl to entice, captivate, and retain her own husband. In the marriage bed, Krishna Kumari believed a wife must ‘forget all the worldly things and please [her husband] with . . . affection . . . Because when a man goes to the “red light district”, a woman there does not have worries; she just pleases him. If a wife is like that, the husband doesn't go to the “red light district”. That is what my husband said to me the first night. A wife has to act like a prostitute to her own husband.’Footnote 67
For Krishna Kumari, her first night of marriage was a learning session, where her husband imparted his views on marriage, love, and sex. For him, sexual compatibility was vital to the success of a marriage. To his virginal bride, who had never heard about sex or reproduction from her female relatives (the only exception being her brief exposure to male and female nudes in a medical text), these were eye-opening revelations. Later she would herself live with two of her husband's additional mistresses, who became his wives—an English nurse, Sandra McBryde, and a Muslim dancing girl named Zubeida—in the Jodhpur zenana. Only by having prowess in the bedroom and ensuring that she was the mother of the future king would her place in the courtly hierarchy be ensured.
Certainly, Yuvraj Hanwant Singh's expectations of his wife—as queen, administrator, mother, or lover—were not exceptional or without precedent. They incorporated a mixture of both prevailing Indic conceptions of conjugal, courtly love and Western romanticized ideals of companionable marriage. Indeed, there is a long history in South Asian literature of advocating sexual skill and erotic pleasure in the marriage bed. The Sanskrit Kama Sutra celebrated the ideal of the nayaka, or the refined, courtly gentleman of leisure, as having among his many attributes the sexual ability to cultivate pleasure and beauty. The king was inevitably seen within the hierarchy of the court as the pre-eminent nayaka, and his consort, his queen, the ideal nayika. In addition, sexual pleasure was intimately linked with aesthetics. For instance, skill in dancing, singing, rhetoric, comeliness in dress, the wearing of scent, and forms of play or entertainment were connected with sexual pleasure.Footnote 68 As part of their upbringing within the court, zenana women would have been informed about this broader aesthetic world and been familiar with expectations regarding appropriate clothing, etiquette, pleasing speech, and behaviour, if not the more explicit nature of sexual intercourse. Furthermore, according to the Kama Sutra, courtship after marriage should include a period of conversation, where the wife initially refuses her husband until she is wooed by gifts and speech,Footnote 69 in a manner not dissimilar to the way these royal women were wooed by their husbands on their wedding nights and during the first few weeks following marriage. Such ideals of love were also captured in Sanskrit kavya (courtly) poetry and the theatre of Kalidasa's plays, most famously memorialized in Shakuntala, the classic gandharva (love marriage) narrative between a king and his mistress, who later became his favoured wife and mother to his dynastic heir.
Expressions of desire were not limited to the literary form, but were also portrayed in Indian art such as medieval Rajput court paintings, of which the Jodhpur royal house had long been patrons, and the ideals of viraha (passionate longing through periods of physical separation) and kama (sensual desire) were celebrated in such aesthetic genres. There are numerous tableaux of Rajput rulers or their noblemen surrounded by the women of their zenanas, including their wives, eagerly cavorting in various love plays or in passionate celebration, such as the spring festival of Holi. Certainly, Hanwant Singh would have conceived that sexual pleasure was not solely the domain of courtesans or mistresses. He, as evidenced in his later relationships with other women, was a man of passionate needs; it is likely he would have conceived that marital relations should involve as much enjoyment as any other sexual encounter. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, Krishna Kumari's beauty made her highly desirable as a bride; the marriage may in part have been one of choice for Hanwant Singh.
Hanwant Singh also incorporated Western practices into his marriage. His own boyhood English education at the British-styled Indian public school Mayo College in Ajmer might have fuelled a desire for emotional companionship, friendship, and partnership in marriage, as expressed in his wish that his wife take down the pardah. It seems that he was suggesting a ‘modern’ ideal of companionable marriage, with his consort as his visible partner, perhaps emulating his fellow ruler, the Rajput maharajah of Jaipur, whose 1940 wedding to the Europeanized, educated, non-pardah princess of Cooch Behar, Gayatri Devi, had been touted by the Western press as a classic modern love story. Vivid photographs of the Jaipur maharani with cropped, bobbed hair, dressed in riding breeches in mixed-gender company while on shikar or dancing the foxtrot in London nightclubs, abounded on the pages of European and American women's magazines, newspapers, and periodicals of the period.Footnote 70 At the same time as following this model of a popular princely marriage, Hanwant Singh also emphasized pre-colonial, ‘traditional’ Indic conceptions of sexual companionability in marriage. In many ways, this early postmarital relationship fundamentally reflected hybrid elements of both European and indigenous courtship rituals.
The wedding night of Krishna Kumari's sister-in-law, Brijraj Kumari, was also informed by colonial attitudes towards education, but to a greater degree, with more emphasis placed on intellectual rather than sexual compatibility. The maharajah of Dhrangadhra, unlike his brother-in-law, neither mentions sexual relations nor romantic love, and his first meeting with his wife appears almost to be styled upon a university tutorial.
Like Krishna Kumari, Brijraj Kumari also met her husband in the early morning after days of wedding ceremonies. The Dhrangadhra barat in Jodhpur was stationed at the Ratanada Palace in the heart of the medieval Rajasthani city. It was seven in the morning when Brijraj Kumari finally arrived at the palace, which was ‘normally where brides were taken’.Footnote 71 The first time they met privately, she greeted her husband formally with nazar. Nazar is traditionally a form of obeisance by an inferior to a superior, from a subject to the king or queen, and was used not only by Hindu rulers but also the Mughal emperor as a symbol of sovereignty. The subject presents gold coins on a silk cloth held in the palms of both hands to the ruler. The king acknowledges the act by taking the gold pieces. It is a formal act of paying allegiance and pledging fealty which, in this context, can also be extended into one of offering in the typical guru–shikya, or teacher–student, relationship. Here Brijraj Kumari acted not only as the subject and wife of her royal husband, but also as a pupil offering herself as the untouched tabula rasa upon which he, as educator and reformer, would inscribe.
In response, her husband presented her with a necklace. There appears to be a restrained civility and quiet formality in their meeting. As she recalled 50 years later: ‘He was sitting down and I was standing up. I was wearing another sari, a purple sari. He was in his dressing gown.’ Thereafter, he promptly asked her, in what was their first private conversation, if she was educated. This very question, she would emphasize later, created a hierarchy of knowledge that would remain throughout their married lives. ‘He was well educated [and I felt uneducated],’ she remembered. Clearly, the Dhrangadhra maharajah saw education as a fundamental basis for marital compatibility. As Brijraj Kumari recalled the end of that meeting, ‘Nothing else happened.’ Clearly, there was no discussion of his sexual expectations or her duties towards his family.Footnote 72
Nonetheless, like his brother-in-law, the young Dhrangadhra ruler was already outlining a narrative for their marriage—one based on the exchange of ideas. It is important to note that in his definition of education, he did not include Indic practices, such as Hindu ritual, bhakti (devotional) worship, or knowledge of family history or kinship networks—all areas that Brijraj Kumari was very familiar with. His idea of education was grounded in (and somewhat limited to) a colonial definition, which included English poetry, literature, and philosophy, most likely gained from his own British public school experience. He told his wife that he was educated in the Western classics, such as Greek and Latin, English verse, and history (he would go on to spend six years studying anthropology and philosophy at Oxford). He subsequently quizzed his wife that day on her reading interests. In the weeks that followed, the Dhrangadhra maharajah would bring Shakespearean sonnets as well as other forms of literature to his wife so they could deconstruct and critique them as part of this postmarital tutorship/courtship. It was an ongoing discourse that would continue during the early months of their marriage and remain a refrain in their decades-long relationship.Footnote 73
Likewise, Brijraj Kumari, as mentioned earlier, perhaps also expected care and companionship in her marriage—a hope derived in part through the aspirations of her Scottish governess, Miss Thompson, and her own reading of British romantic literature, such as Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Thus, both Brijraj Kumari and her new husband had somewhat anglicized ideas of friendship within marriage, while simultaneously incorporating the pre-colonial expectations of dynastic procreation, royal duty, zenana hierarchy, and daily ceremonial.
The following day Brijraj Kumari was introduced to her husband's other male relatives. As she recalled, ‘Then I met his family in Jodhpur. Relatives from Shapura, Jhalawar. With my head covered.’Footnote 74 The most disconcerting moment of the entire proceedings was when the Dhrangadhra maharajah requested that she drop her pardah before the assembled men. As she recalled, her brother had already made her sister-in-law, Krishna Kumari, uncover her face. She described it as a ‘terrifying’ moment, for she was well aware that many of the older relatives were opposed to it. Like Hanwant Singh, the maharajah of Dhrangadhra was keen to show his peers that he was a forward-thinking man by distancing his wife and household from the practice of pardah. By being ‘modern’ in this regard, both these young male rulers were themselves reforming the zenana from within and remaking their wives as new women, navigating a changing social order and age.
Conclusions
As the 1943 marriages of Maharani Krishna Kumari of Jodhpur and Maharani Brijraj Kumari of Dhrangadhra reveal, the colonial zenana was inherently cosmopolitan in nature. Not only were the architectural structures of these ‘female courts’ transnational in nature, but so were the social, political, and cultural realities of zenana women themselves. In particular, the sexual practices and marital expectations for courtly Indian women reveal the hybrid and porous nature of the zenana. They refute the prevailing colonial and post-colonial stereotypes of the zenana as silent, secluded, and bounded from a broader, external sphere of cultural interplay and influence.
In particular, this article has emphasized the close interrelationship between emergent ideas of sexuality, education, and domesticity in the mid-twentieth-century zenana and demonstrated the degree to which colonial influence shaped the intimate space of the marital bedroom. Sexual awareness and maturity were deeply intertwined with education in the colonial zenana. While in their early childhood, courtly Indian women may have shared lessons with their male relations in a mixed-gender classroom, the moment they reached menarche they were removed from the palace school room. Girls were subsequently distanced from male teachers and fellow pupils out of fears of premarital sex and possible pregnancy. Thus, girlhood education was closely linked with the dangers of emergent adolescent sexuality. Most women would only continue their education later, under the direction of their husbands or fathers-in-law after marriage.
Both the maharajah of Jodhpur and his brother-in-law, the Dhrangadhra ruler, ascertained their brides’ level of education on their wedding nights. They spoke to their wives for the first time in the English language when addressing their expectations for marriage, inquired about the nature of their schooling, and requested their wives emerge out of pardah (or seclusion) as visible co-partners. These men saw themselves as educators of their wives, both in the marital bed and in the postmarital classroom. This postmarital ‘classroom’ allowed not only for continued school learning but also an introduction into sexual pleasure, family and state politics, pregnancy, and motherhood. Such instructions reflect both the private and public roles of a zenana woman within the dynastic family, household, and court.
Yet, while these men advocated that their wives take down the pardah, they still upheld elements of conventional practice such as separate gendered living quarters, polygamy, and a culturally hybrid view of sexual practice and pleasure. Clearly, from the kind of questions they asked, they believed educated women made more desirable and able wives, who could be moulded to personify both pre-colonial, Indic expectations of wifely duty, female sexuality, and queenship, as well as Western ideals of companionate conjugality. Such views on sex, marriage, and domesticity were cross-cultural and pan-historical in nature, incorporating aspects of both the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’, the Indic and the European, and the regional and the transnational.
