A Little Princess

India is an important motif throughout A Little Princess as a place of heat in contrast to the cold, dark, foggy London streets and as a location where Sara was treated with respect by servants, in opposition to her later mistreatment as a drudge in Miss Minchin’s school. India, under English colonial rule, is also exoticized and presented by the colonizers as the country of tiger hunting and of diamond mines that potentially produce incredible wealth.

The sight of the statue of Buddha and other Indian furniture being moved into the new neighbor’s house evokes homesickness in Sara for the land of her birth. Sara surprises Ram Dass by speaking to him in an Indian language, and she is initially drawn to the mysterious new gentleman next door and his monkey because they remind her of the years she spent with her father. The romantic, magical plan of making Sara’s vision come true while she is asleep in the attic is repeatedly attributed to Ram Dass’s imagination and graceful lightness of movement, traits that reflect the “Orientalism” described by author Edward Said as a Western means of presenting Asia in an exotic, mystical, “othered” fashion. Mr. Carrisford’s secretary congratulates Ram Dass on his fanciful plan: “It will be like a story from the ‘Arabian Nights’ […] It does not belong to London fogs” (180).