Constructing 'Respectable Society' in the Cantonment: the Social Lives of Army Wives in Colonial India

In his 1825 pamphlet on the moral and physical state of European troops in India, one anonymous King’s Officer insisted that the lack of ‘useful occupation’ in the social lives of soldiers’ wives in India, presented a possible moral threat to British rule in India. He stressed that while in England, women could productively occupy their time in the barracks, in India this was not the case. The tasks of laundering and mending soldier’s clothing in the cantonments were assigned to dhobis and maistries, while cooks, grooms and ayahs filled the households of the Officer-class. How then, if not in these useful, ‘proper’ occupations, were soldier’s wives expected to spend their time in colonial India? This paper will examine the social and domestic worlds of army wives in India. As the numbers of European women in India (while still minute, in relative terms) began to increase in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Military Board expressed increasing anxiety about the proper ways in which such women could occupy their time. Military and state attempts to control the social lives of army wives in India illuminates changing ideas about domesticity and leisure. In the Indian context, these ideas were shaped by an increasingly rigid Victorian sensibility critically informed by military and imperial anxieties.