In 1890, Mary Thorn Carpenter, an American writer in her late twenties, decided to spend a winter in India. Travelling and living in luxury, she took a distinct liking to the country, marvelling at the diversity of its cities and the people who inhabited them.
Her 1892 book, A Girl’s Winter in India, offers a rare American woman’s perspective on the subcontinent at a time when the British Empire had an almost complete grip over it. The daughter of the liberal politician Jacob B Carpenter, who served in the Electoral College during the Abraham Lincoln era, she was nonetheless not free of the colonial biases of her time. Today, even liberals in the US would find her casual appreciation of “punkahwallahs” – men who swung a fan all night in ship cabins so their masters could sleep comfortably – deeply problematic.
Her first port of call in India was Bombay, a city she liked from the very beginning.
“Through these streets sweep a variety of types and races, which outrival in colour and brilliancy anything of the kind in the East,” she wrote. “Here and there a European in civilized clothes may be seen, who soon disappears in the ocean of colour, which seems as if the kaleidoscope…
Source: Carriages, bazaars and colonial views: An American woman writer’s visit to 19th-century India
