2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

These three papers trace the fortunes of two imperial powers, the fading Mughal Empire and the rising, “newly imperial” British East India Company (still technically a vassal of the Mughal Empire) through the images and objects deployed by, around and against them. The first paper, “A memsahib’s natural world” traces the way Lady Mary Impey, wife of the Chief Justice of the Supreme court of Judicature in Calcutta, sought to record Indian birds and animals, using Indian artists to do so.  Chatterjee looks at some of Lady Impey’s projects and the images they produced, both as gendered programs of domestication, and as a process whereby nature and representations of nature came “to be deployed in the service of imperial power and ideology.”  The second paper, Christina Casey’s “Caricatures of an eighteenth-century governor’s wife” examines the way Marian Hastings, wife of Warren Hastings, a controversial Governor-General of India, was represented by the political satirists in England during her husband’s trial for corruption.  Thus it joins and lends a colonial twist to the growing scholarship on the media treatment –visual and otherwise-- of high-profile women in the late eighteenth century.  The third paper, Sonal Singh’s “Imperial Masculinities in late eighteenth- and early Nineteenth-century India”  takes up the problem both of visual hybridity and of the Mughal/East India Company competition for cultural influence, focusing especially on key visual markers of Mughal masculinity at a time when Mughal authority, both political and cultural,  was under increasing pressure from the British.