Marjorie Ussher, who worked as governess to the five children of Begum Wali Ud-Dowla in Hyderabad, wrote a series of letters to her parents in Ireland, which provide rich glimpses into how imperial feminism and orientalism shaped Miss Ussher’s experiences with the widowed Begum, despite her much-lower economic and social status. For the reciprocal perspectives of South Asian princely women towards their European governesses, I will examine the memoirs of Maharani Brinda Devi of Kapurthala, who spend her childhood in the company of an English governess Miss Marble and her youth with a French governess Mademoiselle Meillon.
Despite attempts by the British colonial state to regulate the employment of European women in Indian princely states, the gender-segregated space of the zenana provided opportunities for cross-cultural intimacies and female friendships across the hierarchies of class, race, caste, age, and religion. While European governesses emphasized their racial and civilizational superiority, South Asian princely women highlighted their higher class-standing, caste-purity, and superior femininity. Particularly, in moments of emotional strife, elite princely women reduced their governesses to servant-figures, just as the governesses used colonial tropes of native ignorance. The cross-cultural homosociality of South Asian princely women and their European governesses/companions unsettles the naturalization of the ‘white mistress – native maid’ relation in the historiography of colonial domesticity.