In her new book She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen , British travel writer and novelist Katie Hickman traces the history of the first British women to travel to India starting in the early 17th century and how they worked as traders, writers, governesses, maids, teachers, midwives, nurses and missionaries. Hickman spoke to Sonam Joshi about the challenges of writing women’s history during a visit to India

What are the challenges of recovering the voices of women from the past?

It can be difficult. The reason I do it is because women’s voices are so often not listened to, their stories are not told, their experiences are thought to be less important than that of men. Their stories have been forgotten or pushed under the carpet. People think they don't have the same weight as those of men. You read any history book and you wonder whether there were even any women alive because men tended to be politicians so they have had the lion share of the story. It is very skewed but it is now changing.

The difficulty with trying to find sources is the same reason people thought they were not important. They tend to not have been kept in the same ways. Often the documents that have survived were domestic, letters and journals, which were only meant to be within the family. There is a lot of human warmth and human detail in the records that women left. The sources that have a personality are the ones where women are writing about their daily lives. These are really fascinating to us because they show us how people really live, the what-they-had-for-breakfast factor.

You start the book in the 17th century and end it in 1900. How did the lives of British women in India change in this period?

It changed so much. in the 17th century, the the British weren’t even the most important European power. The Portuguese and Dutch were more successful. Later, the English and the French always fought one with another for ascendancy. The first Britons to come to India were lowly immigrants. It was tough for them. There were few women because the early Britishers were merchants and sailors -- they drank and swore and gambled.

Initially, the East India Company banned the entry of women to India because it was expensive to support people in these factories in India. Women were seen as a drain on the finances of those little settlements and a distraction for men. The reason it changed was after Britain acquired Bombay, suddenly they had these islands that was the first colony in the subcontinent. In order to have a colony, you needed people. They needed women to come and marry and produce children. They then put out these ads for single women to travel to India. They didn't get many takers, so they even went to an orphanage in London and asked if there were young orphans aged between 12 and 13 who would go to Bombay. But women came despite the ban. I think they just wanted an adventure. We’re used to thinking they came because they just wanted to find husbands. Their experiences are much more varied and complicated.

The more power Britain had in India, the more arrogant the British women became and the more it changed the relationship between British and Indians. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a flowering of British interest in Indian culture which was highly regarded and admired. Women such as Mary Impey were patrons of the arts. Another woman called Henrietta Clive collected specimens of plants and trees, rocks and minerals.

It is not that it stopped but it was contaminated by the Evangelical movement. After 1857, they were also more afraid. They became much more racist after the uprisings. There were many more women and they became more sealed off in their own little communities.

One of the interesting arguments you make is that British women were not just visiting India to follow or look for husbands but to work in their own independent right. Were these working women exceptions or more common than we think?

They are much more common than we think. Women have always worked. For example, I found a British woman Eliza Fay who went to India in the 18th century with a husband who was a lawyer. But when he left her, she was on her own and began trading in cloth. She also started a millinery business to make hats, and was offered a chance to start a school for English girls. She also had business with a boarding house. So she did four jobs. Often these women’s husbands died and they had to do whatever they could to make ends meet. So they traded in spices and cloth, did dressmaking, made cakes and sweets, and were proprietors of boarding houses. It really surprised me how much women worked and what a variety of things they did. They came over as actresses and opened their own theatres. They were governesses and opened schools. Women were always entrepreneurial.

While unions between British men and Indian women have been written about, do you also find instances of liaisons between English women and Indian women?

Yes, there are but much fewer because it was culturally less acceptable. The best example I could find was a woman whose Indian name was Mrs Meer Hasan Ali, but her real name was Biddy Timms . She lived in Lucknow with her husband with his family members for nearly ten years. She wrote this memoir published in 1832 and was sympathetic to her fellow sisters and came to understand their way of life. Moreover, British men often had an Indian companion but it was often not a marriage. They exploited Indian women, did not marry them properly and left them when they went back to England with no means of support.

You begin the book with the story of a courtesan who left London in 1783 and transformed into a ‘respectable’ lady by the time she arrived in India. How common were such transformations?

They were common. They came from a not good social level and as soon as they got to India they pretended to be much grander than they were. The contrast was more obvious in women because marriage was such a career move for a woman, they definitely hoped that they would go up and improve their social condition. They were able to disguise their origins like Mrs. William Hickey was able to disguise where she came from. In England, as Charlotte Barry , she was a complete social pariah. No respectful woman would have been in the same room as her, no one would have spoken to her. But when she arrived in India, she was a married lady and went to all the social gatherings. She wasn't the only one. There were other courtesans.

Did the move to India free these British women from the social mores and etiquette that they would have had to follow back home in the UK?

With some it did. Fanny Parkes is a good example. She lived in India between 1822 and 1846 and she liberated herself completely from what was expected of her. People were critical of her for travelling on her own even if it was with a lot of servants, for having so many Indian friends -- both men and women. She was a free spirit in an era when women were not able to be free spirits in a way that we understand as women of the 21st century. Her contemporaries were puzzled by her.

The British were a very socially stratified country with a snobbish hierarchy. She just didn't care about that and was herself. She was able to make these wonderful friendships. Her writing contains descriptions of her Indian women friends, which was unusual but because most British women didn't have the access. They didn't speak the language, they may have met Indian women, but never able to become friends and Fanny Parkes could do that. She was a very energetic person. She changed a lot in her first five years in Kolkata, when she didn't meet a single Indian woman who wasn't a servant.

How do you address the role of these women in colonial enterprise in India?

It wasn't without some trepidation because you are writing about a group of over-privileged women. I acknowledged those problems straight away and that the conversation has changed and we need to face up to the truth in our past. I don't think that because overall they were part of that imperial endeavours, individual stories shouldn't be told. The women's aspect helps to make it a richer, broader and more nuanced history. Some of them were outspoken against racism and the bad treatment of Indians. But from the political point of view, they were also women of their time. It is striking how few say we shouldn't be taking this land.

