The Memsahib Myth: Englishwomen in Colonial India

Abstract

In his travel journal J. R. Ackerley, a close friend of E. M. Forster, reports an anecdote related to him by an Englishwoman living in India. The memsahib had been returning to her bungalow in the evening, accompanied by a servant.1 Suddenly a krait—one of the most venomous snakes in India—slithered onto the middle of the path. Ackerley quotes the memsahib as saying, “Then the servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India—he touched me!—he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back … Of course if he hadn’t done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn’t like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.”2