Unexpected and Unexplained Intellectual Exchanges between British and Indian Women Writers 1840-1940

What intellectual exchanges occurred between British and Indian women writers during the colonial period? Why does recovering these conversations fundamentally challenge our understanding of empire, nationalism, and gendered subalternity? And what methodological interventions does archival recovery demand of postcolonial scholarship?

Purna Banerjee’s archival investigation began with a revealing discovery: deteriorating issues of The Indian Ladies Magazine in Kolkata’s National Library-never catalogued, never preserved, never analysed. What emerged from these crumbling pages rewrites the historiography of colonial modernity. Drawing on travel narratives, New Woman novels, and periodical correspondence, Banerjee documents a transnational ’female counter-public sphere’ where women engaged in complex intellectual exchanges. From Mary Frere’s subversive retellings of Indian folklore to Victoria Cross’s provocative Anna Lombard, from Pandita Ramabai’s strategic Christian conversion to Krishnabhabini Das’s critical ethnography-these writers negotiated what Simon Gikandi terms the ’complicity/resistance dialectic’, simultaneously inhabiting and critiquing colonial and nationalist patriarchies. Theorising through Habermas, Bhabha, and Spivak, Banerjee demonstrates how women constructed hybrid identities that resist metropolitan/peripheral binaries. Their fragmented narratives-spanning the 1835 Minute on Indian Education to the 1929 Sarda Act-reveal collaborative activism shaping social reform, educational policy, and women’s rights across national boundaries. This study makes crucial interventions in postcolonial literary studies, subaltern historiography, and transnational feminism. By radically reorganising the colonial archive, Banerjee recovers the intellectual labour that traditional scholarship has systematically marginalised, offering new methodologies for reading women’s agency in the empire.

Purna Banerjee is the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Constance Fulmer Award in Mentorship, conferred by the British Women Writers Association (BWWA), USA. She has published on Victorian novels, nineteenth-century travel literatures, periodicals, twentieth-century displaced women’s narratives from Indo-Bangladesh border and contemporary social-media-driven protest movements. Feminist, postcolonial, and subaltern theories are the lenses through which she critiques all cultural and literary texts. Purna returned home to Kolkata (India) and joined Presidency University, as an Associate Professor of English. For the previous two decades she lived and taught in the USA (Associate Professor of English, the Co-Director of Gender Studies, Millikin University, 2005 to 2013 & again in 2015). She received her MA degree (1999) from the University of Rochester (NY, USA) and her PhD (2005) from Texas Christian University (TX, USA).