Post-Colonial Domesticity Amid Diaspora: Home and Family in the Lives of Two English Sisters from India (Josephine and Judy Beck‪)‬

Through oral history, this essay explores the meanings of home and family in the memories and experiences of two sisters, Josephine and Judy Beck, who are part of the post-imperial British diaspora. Testifying to the persistence of empire as a force in the lives of those who were children during the years of decolonization, their stories resonate with some of the most compelling of contemporary historical themes. They illustrate ways in which colonialism has remained seamlessly woven into the British national experience. (1) Illuminating distinctive elements of an "imperial social formation" transcending colony and metropolis, their recollections describe both the restrictions imperialism has placed upon them and the creative possibilities it has offered. (2) The ways in which Josephine and Judy remember their colonial youth and assess its impact on their choices in life draw upon gender and ethnicity to create a sense of history, place, and personal connections integrating--to use ideas developed by John Gillis--the families they live with and those they live by. (3) In constructing an empire of memory and imagination, the women link the circumstances of their lives with larger, global events. Articulating a distinct relationship between public politics and private events, their recollections explain a historical experience in which family and nation are juxtaposed in a singular, problematic sense of feminine belonging. Josephine and Judy grew up with their brother Tim in the 1940s and 1950s in an English family in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province. Their father William had worked as a police official under the British, and he and his wife Marjorie chose to stay on in Pakistan after Partition and independence in 1947. (4) While the Becks' experiences and attitudes are, in many ways, representative of those of many ordinary English families in the late colonial period, age, gender and geography set the sisters apart from the most-frequently studied subjects. (5) Born into a British imperial community that was rapidly disappearing, Josephine and Judy belong to a younger cohort than most end-of-the Raj memoirists. (6) While the sisters' narratives reflect their colonial upbringing, their recollections transcend the genre of late-twentieth-century Raj nostalgia and imperialist apologia. (7) They articulate a sense of liminality particular to their generation and an identification with home, family and community typical of female oral history narrators. (8) Both women recall realizing that they and their family were unlikely to remain permanently in Pakistan, but neither felt "comfortable" in England--to use Josephine's word--where they felt like foreigners when they visited in 1948 and 1958. Their options, even more than those of their parents' generation, were limited by the end of the British Empire in India and constrained by the prevailing social prescriptions glorifying marriage and stay-at-home motherhood for young middle-class women in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (9) In different ways, however, each sister has chosen a marriage allowing her to adapt aspects of what Josephine recalled with pleasure as a "colonial childhood" to an adult life built upon an internationalized, post-imperial sense of home, family and domesticity in which personal relationships and geographical mobility have remained central. (10)