Hanging on British coat-tails: women's pleas, cultural difference and liminal worlds

This article uses petitions from two separate periods to discuss the ways in which French and Eurasian women who were widowed or abandoned in early colonial India used the rhetoric of paternalism and benevolence in their pleas to claim financial support from British colonial authorities. The experiences of these women are placed within the recent Orientalism versus Ornamentalism debate in order to demonstrate the limitations of binary interpretations of colonial identity and of the monolithic conception of the 'British' in the public sphere.