Editor's Pick A Lady's Dressing Room In Calcutta. Deal Alert: 30% Off [qYszkZQV]

An excellent example of this scarce print, commonly misread in the past. British Museum Satires describes the print thus: “An Eurasian, Portuguese, or English lady, sallow, with black hair, sits on a stool in profile to the right in the centre of a bare room, attended by six Indian women …”

However, Satyasikha Chakraborty notes that the figures attending the European lady are, in fact, men. “In William Holland’s satirical print of A Lady’s Dressing Room in Calcutta (1813), six black menservants are shown preparing the Anglo-Indian lady’s toilette, fanning her, caressing her child and smoking a pipe. The presence of menservants, particularly black menservants, in a lady’s dressing room insinuated the Anglo-Indian family’s lack of domestic propriety. The constant presence of black/brown menservants not only posed an imagined sexual threat to white women, but also indicated (to metropolitan audiences) the lack of Anglo-Indian sexual morals, and underlined the proverbial sexual promiscuity of Anglo-Indian wives—ridiculed as the ‘fishing-fleet’” (Chakraborty, 53).

Furthermore, she adds, “The Yale University catalogue erroneously describes the Indian servants as maidservants. The attire of the servants (when compared with early nineteenth-century visuals) clearly reveal they are all menservants, and that is precisely where the satirical aspect of the print lies” (ibid).

OCLC locates a copy at Yale only. We add another at the British Museum.

BM Satires, 12164; Chakraborty, S., “From Bibis to Ayahs: Sexual Labour, Domestic Labour, and the Moral Politics of Empire” in Servants’ Pasts: late-eighteenth to twentieth-century South Asia, Vol II (London, Orient Blackswan, 2019).