GENDERING (ANGLO) INDIA 13 replications instead complicated by the famous narrative ambivalences of his early colonial writings? Indeed, how his literary constructs both reinforce current colonial gender paradigms and also often undermine or contest them is what we seek to unravel in this paper. RENTS IN THE IMPERIAL FABRIC: THE WHITE WOMAN AND THE GREAT 'BROTHERHOOD' OF COLONISERS During the entire colonial period there was a numerical sex imbalance among the white population in India so that even at its highest point men outnumbered women 3 to I.3 This sex-imbalance sometimes created a critical stress as well as a curious inversion of gender power-relations in the Anglo-Indian stations and female sexuality often came to be anxiously perceived as exercising unusual psycho-sexual power and posing a potential threat to undermining masculine domination or even male unity in the colony. Possibly arising out of this and other related factors, during this period (1880s to 1900) there was a generally negative invention of gender in Anglo-Indian non-literary discursive writings - in memoirs, letters, newspapers, journals and other printed matter. These myths pertained to the moral laxity of the Anglo-Indian female, which was contrasted with the moral superiority of the metropolitan Englishwoman. These writings also constructed myths about the materialism, idleness and frivolity of the white woman in the colony. However, intermingling with these negative gender constructions there also existed another, contrary, strand that located the colonial woman as a 'tragic exile', as a kind of victim of the colonial enterprise subjected to enforced idleness, the harsh climate, disease and the familiar sorrows of colonial motherhood, such as the scattered family and the frequent loss of children.4 It has, of course, long been a critical commonplace that Kipling's writings are anti-woman and are especially scathing about the memsahib.5 Certainly, there is an indictment in his earlier writings of all women, Anglo-Indian as well as metropolitan English, (although the allocation of blame is not always made simplistically along the axis of gender).6 But in order to examine Kipling's constructions of gender we need to first locate him in his ideological context and try to map the prevailing web of contemporary gender attitudes. For his literary productions should really be seen not in isolation but in the larger context of Anglo-Indian ideologies and discursive practice, the aim being to explore how he negotiated with these ideological currents.