As we read UK-based writer and historian Katie Hickman's new non-fiction, She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen (Hachette India), we chance upon a woman called Poll Puff, a familiar figure on the streets of Calcutta in the 1760s, who was named so, because of the light apple puffs for which she was famous. "Each day Poll would take up her position at the gateway to one of the English schools in Calcutta, an overflowing basket on her arm. She would sell her puffs for three halfpence, a trade she was to follow 'for upwards of thirty years, growing grey in the service'," Hickman writes in the book.

Poll is just one among the many enterprising British women, who braved the perilous sea voyage to India "for exactly the same reasons that men did — to carve out a better life for themselves" and who, as Hickman says, bore no resemblance to the languid Edwardian ladies. Yet, for some reason, their stories never made it to the history books or either got clubbed with the clichéd tales of "memsahibs", often blamed for the widening cultural divide between the British and Indians.