Of sartorial mimicry and woman: Indian women emulating or rejecting English dress in women’s late colonial writing

This article scrutinizes two texts written or based in late colonial India, authored by a British and an Indian woman: “Feroza” by Flora Annie Steel from her anthology The Flower of Forgiveness (1894) and Saguna: The Story of Native Christian Life (1895) by Krupabai Satthianadhan, which was reissued in 1998 as Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman. Taking into account the dressed body, Christian conversion, and interactions with missionaries in these texts, this article argues about the consequences and repercussions of Indian women assuming English dress or refusing to do so in a reforming late Victorian India. I unpack how the narratives punctuate the social factors of anglicisation, the expected outcomes of Christian conversion, and women’s agency in choosing their own dress, using the theory of the “dressed body” and colonial mimicry. The female body is racialized and determined by social structures but also constitutes the individual’s social and personal identity. Dress, in adding an envelope and a visual metaphor to the woman’s body becomes part of her bodily presentation, becoming an embodied practice, and making an embodied subject out of the wearer. I use dress and the “dressed body” as methodological media within a postcolonial framework in analysing how the women’s sartorial choices affect their encounters and their overall existence in late colonial India.