14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Indeed, negative gender-myth-making was a common feature of colonial literary discourse as a whole - to the extent that in 1888 a woman reader complained in a letter to The Pioneer that "the typical memsahib is not the gay, irresponsible creature of the novelists imagination" and declared that "the Anglo-Indian woman of fiction ... is altogether different from the reality".7 Thus, rather like the literary works of his colonial contemporaries Kipling's Plain Tales too demonise the memsahib, feeding into numerous Anglo-Indian myths. Female relationships are an embattled terrain where fierce sexual competition over males may be "fought out inch by inch on both sides".8 Such a struggle for mastery over males exists between wife and adulterous flirt or between sisters or even between mother and daughter.9 With the ironic remark that "Anglo-Indian ladies are in every way as nice as their sisters at home" Kipling clearly perpetuates the cultural privileging of the virtuous metropolitan woman over the apocryphal morally obliquitous white woman in the colony.10 Moreover, time and again, colonial mothers are shown driven by mercenary social aspirations, into coercing their daughters into rejecting the penniless youths whom they really love and accepting marriage with middle-aged men, high up in the Indian bureaucracy.11 By Kipling's time the counter- myth of the white woman as 'tragic exile' too had a great deal of currency and was especially foregrounded in discursive writings towards the 1880s — with The Pioneer, for instance, sympathising in 1888 that the memsahib "sees life in its sterner aspect and knows too much of its tragedies".12 However, Kipling deploys this very construct of the 'tragic exile' - but with a twist - in order to prove precisely the point that such females are a misfit in the colony and eventually become an impediment to masculine commitment to empire. This happens in The Story Of the Gadsbys, where the young bride is shown to go through the inevitable stages of loneliness, boredom, idleness, the loss of a baby and her own nearly-fatal illness in the tropics. Eventually, when the husband, a former daredevil cavalry officer decides to bid India goodbye because of anxieties about the health of his wife and "butcha" marriage in the colony is held responsible, for it "hampers a man's work, it cripples his sword-arm and oh, it plays Hell with his notions of duty!" 13 The core argument then is to deplore the ruination of a good, committed mililtary man brought about by a woman and by marriage. Indeed, serving as a counterpoint to the negative stereotypes about women is Kipling's valorisation of the male coloniser, mainly through