East India Company

This paper examines the experiences of Anglo-Indian women teaching in Bengaluru’s English medium private schools to understand how they negotiate professional constraints by drawing on Diane Reay’s feminist extension of Pierre Bourdieu’s “forms of capital.” It argues that her concept of “emotional capital” can be used to explain how interviewees attempt to overcome their limited cultural and social capital. We also suggest that Arlie Hochschild’s notion of “emotional labour,” distinct from Reay’s emotional capital, when deployed alongside the latter, highlights the complex negotiations that interviewees undertake. In doing so, this work attempts to contribute a minority perspective to research on schoolteachers’ lives. In the process, it also seeks to extend emotional capital (a concept Reay deployed to explain mothers’ investment in their children) to understand women’s professional experiences.

The lone surviving member of an ill-fated Danish expedition to Arabia, Carsten Niebuhr, wrote one of the earliest accounts of the two entwined trade cities—Bombay and Surat—by a western traveller.

When the Europeans began to trade in India, their commerce was completely dependent on the services of the Indian mercantile class who served as the conduits to the primary producers and local markets. This relationship did not change materially after the European enclaves of Madras and Pondicherry were established. It was, however, redefined, since the indigenous merchants in these early colonial port cities were, at least formally, subservient to the authority of the Europeans. At the same time, the growing importance of the local merchants in these commercial centres created an opening and a space for them in indigenous society through which they could create a new identity for themselves as the new social elite and patrons of local institutions, arts and culture.