Displacement Strategy and Colonial Geopolitics: Representation of Indian Women in British Colonial Narratives

This chapter examines how nineteenth-century British colonial narratives represented Indian women as part of a broader displacement strategy embedded in imperial geopolitics and knowledge production. Situating Victorian popular literature within the political and cultural climate of high imperialism, the chapter argues that literary forms such as yellowbacks played a crucial role in shaping colonial perceptions of India by translating unfamiliar social practices into recognizable and controllable stereotypes. Drawing on Northrop Frye’s concept of displacement and Edward Said’s formulation of Orientalism, the analysis demonstrates how British authors recast Indian women through recurring figures such as the devoted wife, the eroticized nautch girl, and the loyal ayah in order to render colonial difference intelligible and morally legible to metropolitan readers. Through close readings of texts by John Stocqueler and James Grant, the chapter shows how these representations displaced indigenous cultural complexity with mythic, exoticized, or moralized images that reinforced racial hierarchy and justified imperial authority. Gender emerges as a central axis through which colonial power operated, with women’s bodies and conduct serving as markers of civilizational difference and sites of ideological regulation. The chapter argues that such narrative strategies were not incidental but integral to the maintenance of empire, revealing how literary representation functioned as a geopolitical tool that normalized colonial domination while obscuring the lived realities of Indian women.