In the project of empire, forms of companionship were crucial to the creation of unequal power relations that strengthened empire while simultaneously serving as (spurious) proof of British civility. While white female desire is cast as transgressive in nineteenth-century colonial literature, Philip Meadows Taylor's "Mutiny" novel, Seeta (1872), observes the potential of harnessing colonial desires within the context of an interracial marriage between an Englishman and an Indian woman for the benefit of an imperial project that is seeking a new identity in the wake of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the expulsion of the East India Company as a governing body. In Seeta, an Indian woman's longing to transcend the Hindu widow's segregated sphere in order to satiate her desire for an Englishman and by consuming his English cultural values provides an avenue for cultivating the cultural citizenship of Indian natives in the British colonial regime and a model for interracial cooperation in British India after the brutality of the Rebellion. Meadows Taylor shifts the discourse of colonial desire by arguing for the redemptive quality of (sexual and intellectual) desires in establishing a new prototype of colonial rule based on an ideology of sympathy.

As increasing numbers of British women traveled to India in the nineteenth century, the relationship between the desires that motivated them to leave home and the marriage choices they made once in the colony became a growing concern in relation to debates over the tenor of colonial governance. In literature of the period, desire lies at the center of a gendered matrix of sensibility and consumption. As the privileged signifier of consumer culture, colonial luxury goods are perceived to stimulate the senses and drive consumption. Differentiated from the impassive desires associated with newly empowered classes of mercantilists and colonial adventurers, female desire is understood as the result of a heightened physiological response to an environment saturated with colonial goods as well as the motor force behind increased levels of consumption. In the latter half of the eighteenth-century, debates about consumption in India centered on the figure of the Anglo-Indian nabob, an Englishman whose self-serving desires for colonial goods undercut his ability to effectively govern the colony. Nineteenth-century debates about colonial consumption focused on the Englishwoman, whose feminine nature—theorized as more finely attuned to its surroundings and thus more vulnerable to corruption—made her susceptible to being seduced by the promise of colonial luxury and unable to control her excessive impulses. For example, as I have argued elsewhere, Emma Roberts's travel narrative, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society (1835), and the anonymous Anglo-Indian essay, "English Society in India" (1838), blame women's limitless luxurious desires for ruining their husbands and undermining the consolidation of a middle-class colonial government in India. Both authors seek to curtail colonial desires in order to shape new colonial femininities and masculinities in the service of an effective colonial state. This discourse of colonial desire became so pervasive that William Makepeace Thackeray picks up on its tropes in Vanity Fair (1848) to remark on the corruption of metropolitan social relations by excessive female desires.

Commonwealth Literature Journal, British Civility, British Colonial Regime, East India Company, Colonial Governance, Empathetic Tendencies, British Government, Social Hierarchies, Colonial Relationships, Sympathetic Relationships, Christian Notions.