Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
The Unknown Women of India
By Maya Jasanoff
Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India
by Margaret MacMillan
Random House, 334 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire
by Durba Ghosh
Cambridge University Press, 277 pp., $95.00; $32.99 (paper)
The baby arrived early one April morning, guided into the world by a Bengali midwife while the doctor waited in the next room. It was a boy: Sophia Elizabeth and Richard Plowden's seventh child, born, like the others, in India. The infant drew his first milk from the breast of an Indian nurse, or dai, 'mine not being come,' noted Sophia in her diary—though within a few days she 'did not let the Dye suckle him.... Determined to do it entirely myself.' Toward the end of June 1787, the boy was baptized William, in the first ceremony ever performed at Calcutta's newly consecrated St. John's Church. Friends would compliment Sophia 'upon the good looks of my little William and his rosey appearance which they attributed to my Nursing him.'[1]
Review, 3782 words
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