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Queen Victoria through Punjabi Eyes: The Travel Writings of Hardevi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2024

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Arti Minocha*
Affiliation:
Delhi University, India
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Abstract

This essay examines two travel narratives written by Hardevi, a woman from Lahore who traveled to London for Queen Victoria's jubilee in 1887. The accounts contain Hardevi's narration of her journey by ship and describe the celebrations. Hardevi showcases the queen's marital home and her conjugal life, seamlessly accommodating them within reformist constructions of a modern, educated, pativrata (conjugally virtuous) Indian woman. Hardevi's encounter with the queen at the heart of the empire opens up a conceptual space of possibilities for a modern, gendered self. This article examines her deployment of a mode of subjectivity that allows her to be, simultaneously, an obedient and fascinated colonial subject of the imperial spectacle and also a citizen-subject who claims the agency of critique.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 52 , Special Issue 1: Vernacular Victoria , Spring 2024 , pp. 40 - 60
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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