Jemima Kindersley née Wickstead (1741–1809) was an English travel writer, noted for her Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies (1777).
[1] Kindersley wrote an account of her long voyage to India, including five months at the Cape of Good Hope, in the form of 68 letters.
These were published in 1777 by John Nourse under the title of "Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies by Mrs. Kindersley", at the price of 3s 6d.
Kindersley observes all these, and writes them in her letters, providing a historical source to one of the most undocumented periods in Indian literature and history.
About this place, her letters show an eclectic tone: she records the flamboyant Mughal military processions vis-a-vis their decreasing power; a fakir lost in the remembering of his mother beside her burial mound near the Ganges, "refusing to budge even during the torrential rains".
And her epistolary accounts addressed to an unnamed person charts her "astute observations and reflections of the period when the Mughal regime was on the verge of decline".
Kindersley said: "Hindus were superstitious and bound by rigid caste hierarchies",[8] noting also now the merchants were greedy, and the entire mass of people were largely feminine and indolent.
Kindersley's letters also speak of the Rajputs and Marathas as the "fighting castes", and the banias, who performed the role of “intermediaries and interlocutors” given their workable command over the English language.
[8] Speaking about the economic activities she noted how majority of Indians were employed in weaving, and identified the best muslin centres as being located in Dacca, now Dhaka in Bangladesh.
Her letters also speak about the difference in the quality of the muslin and embroidered cloths produced for the Emperor and those made for Europeans, merchants and the common people.
[9] These journeys to Patna from Calcutta and later to Allahabad, were made on "budgerows: long, spacious boats which plied commonly on the Ganges, after the monsoons.