Episode 30 - Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant
Episode 30 -"Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa"

Published on March 8, 2022

Note: This transcript was generated by Otter.ai with light human correction

Kathryn Gehred 

Hello, and welcome to Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant. This is Women's History podcast where we feature eighteenth and early nineteenth century women's letters that don't get as much attention as we think they should. I'm your host, Katherine Gehred. This week I'm very excited to introduce Dr. Megan Robb. She is the Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of South Asian religion at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Robb has been working to create a digital archive of the letters of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa, an eighteenth century Mughal woman from what is now Bihar, India. The name of this born digital archive is called Unstable Archives, and you can learn more about it at unstablearchives.com. I'll put a link in the show notes to that website. I was really excited to see this project because as much as I like to tell different perspectives in my podcast, I usually end up using white women's letters, because that's what I find the most often and most familiar with. This is a unique opportunity to look at a brown woman from eighteenth century in her own words. Sharaf-un-Nisa cohabitated with a white employee of the East India Company, and she moved to England with him and eventually married him. So, Dr. Robb, hello!

Megan Robb

Hi, thank you so much for having me!

Kathryn Gehred 

I'm delighted you're able to talk. Tell me a little bit about these letters. How did you discover them?

Megan Robb

Yes. So in 2014, I was working at the University of Oxford, and a member of the family that was descended from Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa by marriage reached out to me to let me know that there were a number of Persian letters in the family collection that they weren't able to read. And the letter that I'm going to read out loud today, the one in English is one of a series of letters held in the Gloucestershire Archives in England, so they are publicly available if people would like to seek them out and read all of them on their own, but once I went to the family archives of the Palmer family, I realized that they have this massive collection of Persian letters sitting in a private collection, which were in fact letters from Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa's brothers to both Elizabeth but mostly her husband, Gerard Gustavus Gustavus Ducarel. And it's at that point that the family let me know that another branch of the family had previously donated their collection of papers to the Gloucestershire archives. So, I followed up, visited the archive and found several letters written by Elizabeth to her son Philip, who in the letter she calls Philo.

Kathryn Gehred 

When you found these letters, did you have ideas of maybe writing an essay using them or creating like, when did you decide to turn this into a digital archive?

Megan Robb

So initially, I didn't know exactly what I was looking at when seeing the Persian letters because the Persian letters have taken several years to learn how to read properly. I've been working with several people who have helped me with improve my Persian language skills. I took a course at the American Institute of India studies, where they have excellent local Persian instructors, and I've also been working with a couple of excellent graduate research assistants, Alene Newari, and Hally Swanson at the University of Pennsylvania. And, we've been able to dig into those letters in a really neat way and learning that the relationship the correspondence between Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa's brothers was so extensive and deep, I think, additionally, when I was exposed to the letters, I wasn't quite sure what I would find, but I was astonished and excited to see the depth of the family collection because it's not only 22 very rare eighteenth century Persian letters, but also a collection of material artifacts, including textiles, a painting of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa, a seal that she used to seal her Persian letters and her penmanship notebook where she taught herself to write English in correct calligraphy. And this is such a treasure trove of information that I certainly wanted to take a stab at researching her as an individual, and writing about what her archives could offer to historiography of these types of relationships in South Asia. But, I also along with a very important collaborator at the University of Oxford, Sneha Krishnan, we hatched a plan to look at a couple of rare archives of women with connection to South Asia to make the archives of the women cutting across letters as well as material artifacts available to scholars to facilitate being able to work with those archives without displacing the collections from the families, or from the regions ,where the families were located. And, our reasoning here was to give due respect to the affect of power of some of the archives of women that are situated in domestic spaces, and to also explore new ways of creating archives that didn't require uprooting the archival materials from the regions of their origin or the regions where they've been living for the past couple of centuries.

Kathryn Gehred 

I imagine eighteenth century Persian is different the way that eighteenth century English is different. So was that tricky to translate?

Megan Robb

It was and is, and I'll use the present tense because Alene, Hally and I are still working on reading and rereading the letters. So it's not only differences in language use, but it's also differences in calligraphy. And, so there's two forms of calligraphy that are used in these letters in Persian, there's Siyah Mashq, which roughly translates to broken script, but really the characteristic features that it's very cursive, and each of the characters is connected to the other in really unconventional ways. So, it takes a lot of practice to get the eye accustomed to seeing and making legible those words and phrases. And, sometimes, it's that the letters are in a much more legible script, simply Nasta liq script, which which is something that I'm more familiar with, and I'm able to read more easily. So, they're definitely challenges in the calligraphy department as well as in the language department in deciphering the Persian letters.

Kathryn Gehred 

Tell me a little bit about Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa. 

Megan Robb

Right? Yeah, I'd love to tell you more. So Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa, even though there are many absences and erasers that characterize her archive still, we do know that she was taken into the home of an East India Company official named Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. Probably in Pornea when he was the supervisor of that province, when she was a child of 12. It's possible that she began her life as a member of an elite Mughal Muslim family, who brokered the relationship meaning arranged for cohabitation with Ducarel perhaps in exchange for political clout or preferential treatment in acquiring rental rights over local farmlands. After Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa began to cohabitate with Ducarel, she bore several children by him. So, her first child was born in 1771, when as far as we know, she was 13. She had another child, a son in 1778. And that's Philip Ducarel who is the addressee of the letter that we're going to read aloud today. In 1784, so around 14-15 years after she first began to cohabitate with Gerard Gustavus, she made the unusual shift from the place of Bibi living with him in India, and so Bibi was the term that was often used to refer to Indigenous women in South Asia living with white men working for the East India Company, she made a shift to actually moving with him to England in 1784. It was very typical in that era for Indigenous women to live or cohabitate with European men working for the East India Company. But, it was unusual for that partner that cohabited to move back with that European man to Europe. Probably, she wanted to do that because her two eldest children, Elizabeth and Philip had been sent back to England without her in the late 1770s. Unfortunately, we don't have any hints of correspondence that she might have sent them at that time, but certainly, we know she had a very strong reason for wanting to accompany Gerard Gustavus back to England. And, what's interesting about the archive so far, and it's still growing is that right now, we have less information about her archival contours when she was living in India, so she is mostly absent from the archives that we have access to right now. And, I've applied for a grant to go to India and learn more, and I'm hoping also that talking about her story in venues like this might lead to new avenues for understanding her story in India. But right now that the digital archive we're collecting focuses on the record of her life after she arrived in England converted to Christianity received this Christian name Elizabeth do girl and gave birth to not just gave birth but also raised children who were fair skinned, had Christian names, at this point. made her archival contours began to come into focus in the English context. And eventually, in 1787, three years after Elizabeth arrives in England, she becomes Gerard Gustavus's legal life in what seems to have been a secret ceremony, because both of the witnesses are random witnesses that also witnessed every other marriage on the same day. So, seem to have been witnesses for hire, so to speak. And, I think that when she married Gerard Gustavus in 1787, it's not that her it's not necessarily her ability to be independent from Gerard Gustavus increased. Her status then would look similar to many wives of Englishmen of the eighteenth century, whatever rights she possessed would still have depended on her connection to her husband, Gerard Gustavus, and after his death in 1800, her relationship to her son Philip, but what's really fascinating to see in this archive, and also the letters, one of which I'll read out loud today, is that Sharaf-un-Nisa was extremely creative, and original, and refashioning herself into an English woman and navigating those range of movements available to her. And we see her emphasizing both the English aspects of her identity as well as aspects of her Mughal heritage as well. If I were going to describe her in a nutshell, I would say Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa was born as a Persian literate Muslim woman. And, then she became Elizabeth Ducarel, the Christian mother of children who were very deeply embedded in English and British life. The process of becoming English, I think, is one of the more fascinating parts of her story. And the role Christianity, her complexion, the fact that she was extremely fair, her ability and commitment to mastering English and the arts of correspondence, that process of weaving together different aspects of her subjectivity is what's so fascinating about Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa's story.

Kathryn Gehred 

I feel like the relationship between the colonizer and the Native Indian woman is going to be exploitative, like there's going to be exploitation there and the fact that she was 12 years old and all of that, what did that relationship look like?

Megan Robb

Yeah, I mean, cohabitation with Native women was extremely common for men in Gerard Gustavus's position. Past research on these relationships of co-habitation, however, have emphasized the sexual aspect and the domestic aspects of what the white man was getting from the relationship, in other words. There are fewer examples, as far as I'm aware of a specific brokering of this relationship on the part of the woman's family in order to establish political favor, but there are examples. One of the case studies in William Dalrymple's White Mughals is an example of a relationship that seems to have been encouraged by the women of the family in order to establish a useful political connection, for instance. And, so I think there's certainly a good argument to be made that this even though it seems like a very rare story, because it's documented, this could have been a much more common phenomenon than we've previously acknowledged in studies of eighteenth century East India Company relations. It's really the content of the brothers' letters that's giving me a strong sense of patronage links. For brothers clearly, we're so we know the names of the brothers to take a step back, the names of the brothers are clear. So, Mirza 'Alim Beg, Daim Beg are the three names of the brothers, and we also know that her mother was still living as well as a couple of sisters they all pop up in the letters. The father is nowhere to be mentioned in the letters, which makes it more challenging to place her specific lineage I have a few theories, so by tracing land use records around the time Gerard Gustavus entered into Pornea. We know that a family led by a patriarch Muhammad Ali Khan, was benefited significantly when Gerard Gustavus entered into Pornea. And we also know that a very influential figure of the local government at that time Raisa Khan had a brother named Muhammad Ali Khan that lived in Porena, so this is one potential explanation Sharaf-un-Nisa's origins. It's possible that she was linked to an extremely powerful family, in the case if we're thinking about the Muhammad Ali Khan that's related to Reza Khan, but it's also possible that it was simply a local honorable, the word is Ashraf, an honorable local landowning family. It doesn't necessarily have to be a family with an illustrious Is lineage in order to be one that that was able to broker a successful relationship of mutual benefit with Gerard Gustavo Ducarel. The tone of the letters from the brothers after the pair go to England implies that there were clear expectations of continued patronage, and in the each of the letters combines requests for financial support and job access with references very warm to their sister. And, the word used to describe Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa in Persian is an interesting one, the word is "Hum Shira," which can mean "milk sister," this means that it's possible that she was a biological sister to the brothers, but it's also possible that she was a foster sister to the brothers. This is kind of a lively debate that I've been having with people who are more specialist in Mukhal Persian than me that "Hum Shira" has an ambivalence here, we're not really sure whether we're talking about a natal family in the biological sense, or whether we're talking about a family that took Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa. There's still a lot of questions around the specific origins of her and her family. And, I'm optimistic about finding more when I'm able to do a field trip to South Asia in better times. But at least at the moment, it seems clear that there were expectations of Gerard Gustavus looking out for the interests of the brothers. But also what becomes clear, is once they returned to England, those ties that Gerard Gustavus had in the East India Company weakened, and he was less able to look out for the brothers. And, also it seems that he becomes a little less effective or even committed to looking out for the brothers' interests once they returned to England. And, so there also seemed to be real signs that the brothers are suffering, and perhaps Gerard Gustavus isn't really making the effort to do enough to look out for their interests, once he no longer needs them. Perhaps.

Kathryn Gehred 

Tell me a little bit more about her husband, Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. Was this a big scandal when he came back to England? Is this something that everybody just sort of lived with, but didn't talk about? Or was it more common, and that's just something that we've forgotten about over the time.

Megan Robb

We know that that relationships were very common, but certainly in the 19th century, they became it became completely unacceptable to talk about them in public and even in the 18th century, the women who were cohabitating with the European men wouldn't be included in official functions, they wouldn't be explicitly acknowledged in formal correspondence. One of the hints of this, you can see is, the genre of official correspondence never mentions the "Bibis" quote, unquote, they never mentioned the women who are cohabiting with white men, but the private correspondence will mention them on the margins, friends will be sending greetings to the women who they're clearly friendly wit. That division between letters that would acknowledge European wives but not acknowledge the indigenous concubines maybe is one possible word or Bibis, and on the other hand, the private correspondence that talks very freely about these relationships, because it's not official correspondence is a strong hint that one, these relationships were extremely common, maybe even ubiquitous, but also there was a very strong taboo against acknowledging them in formal or official contexts. It was very unusual as far as I can tell, for a European men to bring back his consort or unmarried partner to England and marry her officially under English law. We have a few case studies that have emerged over the years of women who were brought back but placed into a separate home and kept as a mistress, while the East India Company official married a white woman instead in order to ensure a formal lineage of sons that could inherit the property. So even though the origins of Gerard Gustavus and Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa relationship were very common for the period. The latter part of the relationship seems to be uncommon. We also know once they arrive back in England, Gerard Gustavus gets a few very shocked letters from his friends, showing that they are very surprised that he's taken her back and even offering to receive her if she wants to return back to India or if Gerard Gustavus wants to ship her back to India. One of these letters even says to Gerard Gustavus that "I expect you will soon find a European wife to marry" and then Mrs. Ducarel will no longer want to stay in England and will wish to return to India. And this letter also seems to be an offer to take Elizabeth Ducarel on as his own concubine, and Gerard Gustavus seems to have either not responded to that letter or responded with a very firmly negative response, because this correspondent never brings up the issue again, and actually seems quite apologetic in his next letter. All this context is a hint about how it was unusual the decision that Gerard Gustavus and Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa were making, but we don't know is what the motivations were between them this point, because there's a decade of correspondence that's missing, between 1770 and 1780, when Gerard Gustavus would have had to explain the birth of his children would have had to explain the presence of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa to his family, and I believe that that erasure was very intentional, probably occurred during Gerard Gustavus's his lifetime in order to protect the respectability of the family, but it also means it's much harder for us to understand how they went about negotiating this unusual move.

Kathryn Gehred 

We don't have a lot of letters from Elizabeth, but we have some from Elizabeth. So we actually are able to see a little bit more of her perspective. So, from what we know from Elizabeth's correspondence, was she able to keep mother much of our culture when she moved to England, or where she expected to sort of assimilate completely in English society. And, do you know how she was accepted into English society,

Megan Robb

Sharaf-un-Nisa did refashion herself into an English woman but also simultaneously emphasized aspects of her Mughal identity. We have a letter from a woman named Anne Kali who is the friend of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa in India, who hints at the efforts that Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa have made to gain skills necessary to function and English society of this this woman named Anne Kali says that she admires the great efforts that Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa has gone to, implying efforts in perhaps language, perhaps calligraphy, perhaps even conversion to become accustomed to the type of life she would need to live in England. But I also see, even though she made efforts to, quote unquote, become English, she was also very clearly also a Mughal woman. Her conversion to Anglicanism would certainly have helped her gain kind of legal status in important ways that she wouldn't have had access to before. Her conversion might also ease the process of gaining permission to travel to England, and stay there, and be with her children. But she also, I don't mean to represent her conversion is something that was merely strategic either. It's clear that she's weaving material and discursive vocabulary of Anglican Christianity into her life. Her children were baptized, they were raised Christian, her son Philip ended up being a local magistrate and even published a very well received translation of the Psalms. When Elizabeth Ducarel was buried her gravestone, that's located in a town called Newland, gives no hint of her origins in South Asia, but there are other sources that complicates the picture. So quite literally, there is a picture or a painting of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa. It's gouache on ivory  one of those miniature paintings that were so popular in the period. And in this painting, Elizabeth Sharif and his clothing is very distinctively British and matronly, her hair it's brown and curly is almost completely covered with a lace cap. She has an empire waist dress on, and that's clearly in the British style, but she is wearing very distinctively Mughal style jewelry. In the portrait, she is wearing a set of pearl earrings in two necklaces that were composed of pearls very clearly in a distinctive Mughal style, and this portrait is very much in contrast with the only other portrait I am aware of, at the moment, of another fair skinned indigenous woman of the period named Zoffany, who moves to France and became princess de talerant whenever she was painted even though she was of mixed heritage and was born in South Asia. She was always painted wearing completely European styles, but Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa is painting displays really clear indications of her origins outside of England. But that there are other aspects of the painting that are also interesting to note the fact that this painting isn't signed, and the portraits of all of the other paintings of other family members were signed by very prominent artists suggest that the family may have commissioned her painting on a budget. But so so the way that she appears in this painting, at least, show that there's the balancing of cultural influences here, assuming that she was in control of how she was being presented in the painting, we can maybe think about this mix of influences as a creative combination of influences, or even perhaps evidence of a conditional belonging. In some ways, it seems she was forced to erase parts of herself, but in other contexts, she seems to have been able to maintain the ability to weave in local strands to her identity.

Kathryn Gehred 

That's fascinating. What do you hope people will be able to learn from these letters?

Megan Robb

Well, I really hope that scholars will be able to ask new questions that I haven't thought of interaction with this archive. I know what I think is interesting and useful about them, but I'm looking forward to seeing what others think. I do think that the letters in the context of this born digital archive that we're releasing at the end of this year, tell us something extremely important about how women like Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa, who cohabited with white European men in the subcontinent, may have drawn upon different aspects of their identity to cultivate a disposition that suited their place in the world. I can see in Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa's archive that her process of becoming Elizabeth was influenced by religious identity, it was inflected by her fair skin, which made certain possibilities open to her that were not open to other consorts of European men. Her ability to give birth to a son, who is also fair skinned, also enabled some of the new possibilities that she experienced in England. I think that we don't know enough about women like Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa, who lives at the intersection of cultural influences in the age of empire. And I think that alone is an argument for paying close attention to the sources that we are able to highlight, but I'm also hoping that in studies and treatment of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa archive, that we're also paying very close attention to the silences, to the erasers, to the ways that the stories of these women were very consciously cultivated and edited over time, in order to protect imperial respectability ,to protect the respectability of the family, or the children that were born of these women. So, I'm hoping that we also can keep in mind that it is not possible to recover, you know, quote, unquote, recover these women, there are certain erasers that are irrevocable, that I think acknowledging that in itself is a very productive place to start scholarship

Kathryn Gehred 

Just to sort of set up the context of this particular letter, what was going on in as much as we know about Jonathan misses life when she wrote this letter? Who is she writing to? Where is she writing from? Just to give some background of what we're going to hear?

Megan Robb

I do happen to know a good amount about the context of this letter. I will say before I talk about the letter, specifically, Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa wrote this ten years after the death of her husband, Gerard Gustavus, and I recently benefited from some feedback in a workshop on an article on writing on this topic. Someone very insightfully suggested that her capability of crafting a new identity might have been enabled by her widowhood after her husband's death. And of course, this makes a lot of sense to me when she became the matriarch, she lived with her son for the rest of her life following the death of Gerard Gustavus. It certainly makes sense to me that widowhood might have afforded some new opportunities for self expression. So, this letter that I'm about to read was written in the summer of 1810, and I know that I've been referring to Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa by both of her names, and I'm doing that in order to remind myself and also remind your listeners that it's not that she stopped being one person when she took on a new name, you know, she, she was constantly drawing on aspects of both identities, but I do want to note, by 1810, she had long since dropped any reference to the name Sharaf-un-Nisa in English society. She was going by the name Elizabeth Ducarel and this is how she was signing her English language letters in 1810. So, Summer 1810, she was staying in Gunby Hall in Lincolnshire with several members of her family. She was living that Summer with her unmarried daughters, Mary and Jane and her married daughter Harriet, who had married a man named Charles March Phillips, I think just a couple of years earlier, and Harriet and Charles had a one year old son named Ambrose. So, basically Elizabeth Ducarel was spending the Summer with her daughter, son-in-law, and her new grandson, alongside her two unmarried children. Her son, Phillip, who she's writing the letter to, was spending the summer splitting his time between Pulteney Street and Bath a very fashionable area and Launde Abbey and Liecestershire. Philip do Carell was married to a woman named Lucy who was very sickly. Eventually she would die at a young age and you'll hear Elizabeth talking about Lucy's health in the letter I think. During the summer of 1810, Elizabeth wrote several letters to Philip who she calls Philo while he was in Launde in Leicestershire, and you can actually look up pictures of all of these stately homes that still exist in Leicestershire. The Launde Abbey at Leicestershire, is still functioning as I think a conference center for clergy today.

Kathryn Gehred 

And now let's just go ahead and read the letter.

Megan Robb

"My Dearest Philo,
I was very sorry to hearing in Luzy’s letter you had had one of your buminable sick
head-aches but I dare say every one took good care of you Lucy hold your head
and Mary hold the bason and three children looking on to see this curiosity. No
room for Nova and myself. I hope this will be the last exertiony I shall make to
sending you one of my paltry pissilier to Launde Abbey but that I shall soon have
the pleasure of seeing you at home and Lucy grown much fatter than when she
left Walford I looking forward with great satisfaction to that time but you all so
happy at Launde that I hope you will not hurry your selves on my account. Great
exertion for Old Lady to dine out three times last week and yesterday we had a
party at home some Brickdales not my Beau for he gone to Bristol to do his business
Bowers and two Buchannans so now all jobs over I able to writing few lines to you.
I saw Simon in the kitchen he looking very well only he not all able to move
his arm. Today he gone to Taryton tell Lucy with my love George is beginning to
grow fat and look as well as usual he is very impatient for your return—no news to
tell you except your beautiful Black pig is brought to bed of thirteen children all
likely to do well will be make plenty of bacon—good many peaches we got I hope
will not be all gone before you return—but that nasty thieves will leave some—my
affectionate love to all your party and kisses to the dear grandchildren. God bless
you my Dear Boy I remain your affectionate mother, Elizabeth Ducarel."

Kathryn Gehred 

That's just the cutest. I've loved this letter when you send it to me. I think it definitely paints a picture. What's something that strikes you about this letter when you read this? What does it tell you about Elizabeth? 

Megan Rob

There are a few things that are interesting in the letter. One of them is, I mentioned before I read out loud letter, this sense of playfulness, the fact that she's teasing. You know she's she's sorry that her son has a headache, but she's also painting this picture of him being sick being surrounded by his family, the children not knowing what to do everyone crowding around him so there's not even room for her to get in the mix. Even if she were there. She has a flair for words. I also know from some of her other letters that it was a lot of effort to write a letter to Phillip each day in one of her other letters which I haven't read out loud she she talks about how her her duty of writing is a very heavy burden, but she does it because she loves her son so much and this is why she's saying I hope this will be the last exertion I shall make to send you one of my paltry poecilia. So, she's very self conscious about her writing, but also clearly has a sense of obligation which would be very typical for the period women were expected to correspond with family members to keep the ties of maternal and filial love arrive alive over time and space through their letters. And we see also from the penmanship notebook that she was writing in the 1790s how seriously she took this responsibility of being able to write a successful letter, and so I'm very interested also in the letters talk about how what hard work it is, as someone who works in languages that are not in English myself, I have great empathy for the momentous task that Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa completed in developing fluency in English and being able to correspond with such fluency in the language. So that's one thing that comes from the letter as well. You also can see here a hint of anxiety about Lucy. So, she said she hopes that she'll see Lucy much fatter, so fatter means healthy, right? So she's worried that Lucy is a little too skinny. Yeah, a little too skinny, she needs to come back a little fatter, showing that she's healthier, and you can also see that George one of her I think is her grandchild, George is beginning to grow fat. And this is a good thing to fatness is healthy, and I think that the detail about the pig and the peaches just gives you a sense of the domestic life. It also tells you that she's come very far from her Muslim origins. If we're thinking about bringing a black pig to auction, discussing with relish the prospect of bacon, this also is a sign that she has come very far from her origins in Bihar where pigs, I mean, regardless of cultural or religious background, weren't being consumed. So, she's definitely acclimated to that British context there as well, and also it just dripping with affection. She seems like a very warm person with very close relationships with her children.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, and hearing you read it out loud. Something that I noticed is it's very common for women, at this time, to not necessarily use the correct spellings or grammar or anything, but you get a little bit of the flow of her writing. And, there's definitely unusual choices and spelling in here. I love "buminable" instead of "abominable", she writes, it is abominable, sick headache. But I think you can really get a feel for sort of her cadence. She's definitely matching the sort of witty 18th century English style of writing, but and it's got that little humor in there. But then there's a little bit of the fact that this is her second language.

Megan Robb

I mean, that the fact that she calls herself old lady, she's like great exertion for older lady to dine out three times last week, but this also is telling you one thing I didn't mention is that she wasn't a social out...she wasn't a social outcast, so to speak. Some of the other women who were indigenous to South Asia and came back with their white European cohabitants or consorts were not accepted in social circles. But, we see here that she has a very packed social calendar. So, maybe because of her children's ability to become so deeply immersed in English society, she is able herself to have a very active social life.

Kathryn Gehred 

Was she well to do for most of her life after after moving here, her family?

Megan Robb

That's a good question, Gerard Gustavus Ducarel was the grandson of French Huguenot refugees. So Gerard Gustavus was descended from a wealthy French family that had fallen on hard times in the late 18th century. And that was a big source of the motivation for Gerard Gustavus, to be sent by the family to India to make the family fortune, and it's very clear that the fortune he made in India helped establish the family's place in England after his return. It's not until after Gerard Gustavus his death that his son Philip buys a country estate in the town of Newland. But Philip's ability to buy that house and to become the big family of the Newland village is definitely linked to Gerard Gustavus's ability to make money from his mercantile activities in India. So Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa would certainly have lived very comfortably because of her links to Gerard Gustavus and because of the financial success of her son Philip. Interestingly, Philip does not have a surviving heir. So after Philips death, the family property gets shifted to another branch of the family, but until from 1800 until 1822, Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa lived in a small town called Newland, in a very comfortable, very large House just a few steps from the chapel where she would later be buried. You can actually visit the chapel in Newland to see a wing dedicated to the Ducarel family where Elizabeth Ducare's memorial stone is placed.

Kathryn Gehred 

That's really cool. This is maybe a silly point that I, that occurred to me as I was learning more about Elizabeth. But I think it's interesting how this is a woman of 18th century England, who, while she was light skinned, she wasn't actually white, and I think when in the American imagination of this time period, we sort of have a very white Jane Austen film view of the time, and that just wasn't historically the way things always necessarily work. So I thought in, it made me think of the Show of Shows like "Bridgerton", that sort of invented a more racially diverse, which I love watching and was fun and fantastic. But I think it would be cool. If more media talked about the women and the people who actually existed at this time, I think it would change the way that sort of the public thinks of the 18th century.

Megan Robb

Exactly. And, I think that there's a good amount of evidence from Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa's life to demonstrate that what she was doing was not so unusual. What may have enabled her ability to do this, where others did not make this choice is the fact that her husband was French, they, they dressed in the French style, they very clearly associated themselves with French influences. In fact, one of the outfits of Gerard Gustavus Ducarel was eventually auctioned off by the family, and until recently was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as an example of French costumes of 18th century, and so that that gives an indication of how French they may have seemed to to the English. And, this also may have allowed them a little bit more flexibility in the norms and practices that they displayed. But it certainly also points to the fact that we really haven't come close to understanding the true range of possibilities available to women like Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa in the18th century.

Kathryn Gehred 

And in contrast to a woman we've discussed about on the podcast before is Martha Washington's granddaughter, Elizabeth Parke Custis Law, her husband, worked for the East India Company and had three sons that he brought back to United States with him from a relationship with a woman who was most likely a Bibi, but there's a complete, as you mentioned, the silences in the archives, complete silence in the archive about the mother of his children, we really don't know anything about her. So, this situation is both similar and different in that he came back and actually acknowledges the woman and eventually marries her. So the variety of different experiences, but I think it's important to remember that the women in these situations are full human beings, and have full experiences of life. And it's a story that we don't talk about very much if you're not in this area of study. I think most people weren't really aware about this, this period.

Megan Robb

Yes. And I think that the case of Martha Washington's grandchildren is a good example of what was much more typical in the period of having children by indigenous women in South Asia, and then shipping the children back to England before or America, in the case of Martha Washington's grandchildren, before they had a chance to imbibe too much of a negative influence from their biological mothers. I think there was a lot of anxiety about the negative, quote unquote, "negative impact" that the Bibis could have on their own children, and this is one reason why both Elizabeth's daughter Elizabeth and Elizabeth's son Philip are sent very quickly back to England when they're very young, and so that they can be become a culturious to the English way of life. Oh, and I there was one more thing I wanted to mention about how this story was basically presented to the rest of society as a story of respectability. In the late 18th century, in 1798, a traveler from India named Mirza Abu Taleb Khan had gone travelling through Europe through the Middle East and into England, and written an account of his travels in Persia. During his travels in England, he sought out the women that he was aware of who had been born in India and accompanied their white consorts back to England, and this is how we know about the few women of this type that were living in England at the time. So Mirza Abu Taleb Khan met Elizabeth Ducarel. He calls his her Mrs. Ducarel, and he writes an account of the visit, in which he says and this in Persian, he says that she was a woman that seemed very European, and her children seemed very European. And, she spoke and acted in such a way that that meant he it took him a while to be convinced that she was actually from the Indian subcontinent. But he learned from her that she was from a noble family that had been taken, and she had been taken under the protection of Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. And he also says Gerard Gustavus seemed absolutely insane, and so he didn't want to stay there anymore. And then he left. So, this is the Persian account. It's translated into English by a man named Charles Grant in the early 1800s. So the early 19th century, and the English account is entirely different. In the English translation of this travelogue, this is the story that emerges of Mrs. Ducarel that she had been a Hindu widow about to be burned on a funeral pyre in the act of Sati. And had been rescued from the funeral pyre by her husband, Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. And she was the daughter of the Hindu Maharaja. So, someone who is part of Hindu royalty, and so a part of my research has also been tracking down the Persian version and realizing that the translation was actually to a great extent, fabulation. And, what it does is it presents Gerard Gustavus in the light of a hero, someone who's protecting the interests of this vulnerable woman who is also a princess, and so both the combination of the elite status in this invention and the heroic role of Gerard Gustavus helped consolidate that respectability, but in fact that the Persian account tells a very different story. And that's also a hint about how erasers have shaped the accounts of women like Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa .

Kathryn Gehred 

That's, that is just a fantastic example of Orientalism, like from beginning to end. Wow. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was absolutely delightful. I've loved learning about Elizabeth and your research, and I'm very excited about the archive.

Megan Robb

Thank you so much for having me to talk about this project. The only thing I would add is we're looking forward to releasing the Bourne digital archive of Elizabeth Sharaf-un-Nisa at the end of this year. And, so if anyone is interested in learning more about the project and keeping an eye out for the archive when it's released, you can find out more at unstable-archives.com

Kathryn Gehred 

Fantastic. All right, so I will put the link in the show notes. As for my listeners, thank you very much. I am as ever your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you.