Making Faces: Tattooed Women and Colonial Regimes

This article explores a criminal case in late-nineteenth-century Upper Burma, in which a British police officer named Chisholm was accused of forcibly tattooing the face of his Burmese mistress, Mah Gnee. The case is discussed with regard to the histories of punitive and decorative tattooing in pre-colonial and colonial South Asia, as well as British anxieties about the occupation of Burma. The article then analyzes the links between the body politics of tattooed women in Britain and Burma in the aftermath of the Chisholm case. From the 1880s to the 1920s, a period of severe economic and political strain for the British aristocracy, upper-class women of the metropole began to adopt the tattoo. This fad greatly disturbed continental scholars such as Cesare Lombroso, who associated tattoos with savage or criminal populations. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British interpretations focused instead on the tattoo as a gendered marker of aristocratic crisis, a material sign of whether British aristocrats were fundamentally ‘primitive’ or ‘modern’. The ‘problem’ of tattooed women, articulated both in the unstable territories of Upper Burma and in London's fashionable circles, underscored the complex (and uniquely British) historical connection between the downward spirals of aristocracy and empire.