Abstract
Missionaries working in Mysore, as elsewhere in India, took enthusiastically to the new art of photography from the 1840s, to record their ‘views’ of the society they undertook to transform. Evangelising was, however, early on, allied with education as a way for missionaries to make their way into a complex, hierarchical society with learning traditions of its own. How did the missionary ‘see’ the Indian classroom, and invite the viewer of their photographs to participate in its narrative of ‘improvement’? What was the place of the photograph at a time when meticulous written records were kept of victories and reverses in the mission field of education?
Revealing the work of the photograph in aiding missionary work must perforce begin with the more instrumentalist uses of this new art, as technologies of recording par excellence, before turning to the possible ways of looking at photographs, whether by those contemporaries of the missionaries who were physically distanced from the location, and were yet linked to their work in India, or when they formed part of the contemporary historian’s archive. Here one may exploit photography’s ‘inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’ instead of its truth-telling capacity. I am precisely posing a dynamic and perhaps even antagonistic relationship between the copious written and the sparser visual record of educational changes in Mysore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This investigation of the visual field in the service of education also allows us also to speculate about the specific aesthetic achievements of missionary photography, with its own pedagogic goals.
‘I want a History of Looking.’ 1
In the painting The Opening of the English School in Mysore, 2 the unknown artist appears to be honouring his patron, Krishnaraja Wodeyar III, more than merely recording an important event (Figure 1). 3 The king, at the visual centre of this painting, is slightly elevated over those who flank him. Nearly equal in size and importance are the colonial officials, missionaries, two European women and some members of the Mysore court. Steeply graded images—of a row of men with their backs to the viewer in the main painting and two panels which depict syces and grooms, guards and troops who transported those gathered at this important event, stray gardeners around the building, and the small musical band on the right-hand corner—all emphasize the royal presence. Krishnaraja Wodeyar III has dismounted from his gilded carriage (on the bottom left) to be seated in his gilded chair.
It was clearly a time of transition, but to which transition does the painting—produced just at the moment when photography would make its appearance in colonial India, c. 1840—bear witness? Was the king claiming his place as an improving monarch, in defiance of his reputation as a dissolute relic of another time, by funding a modern educational institution in Mysore?
A second element of the painting coheres it to an iconography of education in Mysore, which is the focus of this article. 4 The king is presiding over the official entry of modern education into the Princely state. The European teacher, poised with a book in hand, is instructing a row of pupils who have their backs to the viewer. On the oval table are further signs of this fateful transition, from palm-leaf manuscripts to paper books. The state is at the threshold of taking on what the Wesleyan and London Missionary Society (LMS) had been engaged, for some time past, within Mysore: bringing education to the general public. 5
In 1840, the Raja’s English School was handed over to the Wesleyans to run. An image from the following year, also of the king’s palace, depicts the Wesleyan missionary Reverend Thomas Hodson examining seven pupils, the king now merely among the spectators lined up alongside the arena (Figure 2). 6 The frontality of the earlier painting has been relinquished, and rules of perspective are adopted in this sketch (also by an unknown artist). 7 Its attention to detail—the interiors of the room, the large gathering of witnesses of this event, as well as the murals on the wall facing the viewer—and the arrested narrative, shorn of its iconicity, anticipates photography’s claim to be the very ‘model of veracity and objectivity’. 8 But above all, it emphasizes the examination as a spectacle, as a rare and—judging from the smile on the Maharaja’s face—even an entertaining event.
We know little about either the commissioning of these works or their intended and actual audiences. A history of ‘looking’ enjoins us to move away from the intentions of the producer of the image and attend more closely to how the image can be read. It would soon be the indexicality 9 of the photograph, rather than these pre-photographic images, that gained centre-stage in the rest of the century. It asserted, as Christopher Pinney suggests, ‘its superiority over other more equivocal signs’; 10 its contiguity with the referent gave it its ‘evidential force’, which, as Barthes reminds us, is derived from the fact that it ‘bears not on the object but on time’. 11
Missionaries in Mysore, like elsewhere, enthusiastically took to using the camera and the photograph’s evidentiary superiority to document, record, celebrate and annotate educational progress, improvement and enlightenment. 12 By exploring a range of photographs focused on their educational endeavours in Mysore, in particular, and southern India, more generally, this article will reveal the multiple levels of this emerging field of power around the camera. It was at once reductive and in excess of documentation in its effects, since it was no mere supplementary to the meticulous labours of recording educational successes and defeats. Of necessity, this history of ‘seeing like the missionary’ involves shuttling between their painstaking record-keeping and their photographs (though far fewer) in order to uncover not only moments when they converged and complemented each other but also when they revealed those gaps and differences or contradictions in the missionary enterprise. To do this, we must part ways from the Barthian refusal ‘to inherit anything from another eye than my own’. 13
What is the missionary photograph? Would they refer to photographs taken by, in the possession of, about or featuring missionaries? I first explore how the existing body of work on the mission photograph has developed this category and my engagement with these definitions. To begin with, why and how was the difference between pre-colonial/indigenous and missionary/colonial educational efforts established and visualized in images? Physical structures and amenities built by missionaries were admittedly impressive and easier purveyed. What of the more ephemeral fruits of missionary education, such as order and discipline, and the emerging (secular) collectivities of the classroom? I then explore the specific ways in which the discourse on women’s education took shape, moving from ‘salvationist’ rhetoric to a rights-based narrative, with consequences for the resocialization of women. Similarly, I explore what visual clues emerge about the approach to, and resolution of, the question of caste in the field of education. Finally, does this investigation of the iconography of education allows us to speculate on its specific aesthetic achievements?
In attempting to answer these questions, one may exploit photography’s ‘inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’ 14 instead of its truth-telling capacity. Rather than using the photographic image as the prism to construct a history of a little researched region, as Joy Pachuau and Willem van Schendel have successfully done for Mizoram, 15 I pose a dynamic and perhaps even antagonistic relationship between the copious written and the sparser visual record of educational changes in Mysore in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. 16
The Missionary Eye on Education
The principal educational missions in Mysore in the nineteenth century were the Wesleyan Methodist Missionaries Society and the LMS. School-building activities in the Kannada-speaking region began as early as 1812, the LMS establishing their presence in Belgaum, Bellary, Bangalore and Mysore and the Wesleyans working in Bangalore, Mysore and Gubbe. 17 In 1840, two missionary wives, Mrs Sewell and Mrs Rice, started a school for ‘Hindu’ girls in Bangalore, the first in Mysore state. 18
Missionary societies admittedly placed greater value on the written word than on the sketch or the photograph, particularly in the period up to 1914. 19 Portraits in writing were produced with ‘the speed and truth of the photograph’. 20 Judging from the illustrations in Old Daniel, the sketch continued to flourish well after the arts of photography were better known. 21
Significantly, photographs were not used in one of the most important missionary journals, Harvest Field, even well into the 1920s. 22 There are no clear indications of whether there was indeed an ‘organized supply’ of photographs to supporters in England, though for the most part, the collections are more plentiful after the third quarter of the nineteenth century. 23 There was no programmatic deployment of photography in these missions or designated photographers of the kind studied by Jenkins in Africa. This article references an assortment of personal photograph albums, postcards 24 and some souvenirs, particularly from the early twentieth century, which made liberal use of earlier photographs. Finally, there are also profusely illustrated books, of which Amy Carmichael’s are a good example, which did employ professional photographers. There is no doubt that many of the photographs came to be used for propagandistic work in the metropole, of which the missionary postcard and the souvenir are good examples, often coming much later than when the image was first produced. 25
Little is known of the relationship between those who posed for or depicted in the photographs and their role in their framing; no series of the chiefs or ‘big-men’ as in Africa or New Britain in Oceania is available. 26 Missionary knowledge production was unlike the ethnographic survey and report and the mission photograph was rarely displayed in exhibitions or museums. Christraud M. Geary reminds us that only a proportion of photographs were intended for stylized or public circulation (notoriously the postcard), though researchers today have access to many personal photographs that were never intended for more widespread viewing. 27 The relationship of power between photographer and the photographed subject could, therefore, be profoundly unidirectional, as in the former case, or more of a negotiation, less posed or stylistic, even affective, 28 as in the personal album. 29
The technological advances made in photography are part of a history that I do not engage with here. 30 Scholars have been able to track the work of a single photographer 31 or a significant body of photographs, lantern slides and postcards that was generated around a single iconic missionary, such as John Paton in the New Hebrides. 32 My preferred methodology, given the frailty of this source, is to juxtapose the textual and the visual (not necessarily both from missionary sources) to see what the photographs do to corroborate or disturb the better-known narrative of the ‘progress’ of education in Mysore. I emphasize less the representativeness ofthe photographs, and instead, rely on illuminating specific historical moments of this brief period. Therefore, I do not distinguish between the indistinct, unfocused or otherwise less than a perfect photograph (or the ‘commonplace and the unexceptional’) 33 and the more technically perfect ones as a historical source. Their very heterogeneity could reveal an interest in preservation, forms and sources of manipulation of the image, and also the circumstances under which such photographs were taken. 34
Visualizing Pre-Colonial Difference
As the Wesleyan Missionaries, looking back on a century of work in Mysore, would say, education commended itself to the purveyors of Christianity as a vital step towards tackling the problem of the ‘original ignorance’ to which most Indians were born. 35 ‘Evangelism, education and literature’ were the three great methods of bringing Christ to Mysore in those early days. 36 After opening an English school in the Bangalore cantonment in 1826 and a self-supporting Tamil-English school in 1835, a Wesleyan Kanarese–English school was opened in Bangalore Peta (old city). By 1849, this had grown to three Kanarese schools (with sixty-two boys and seven girls), one Tamil school (with eight boys and two girls) and one English school (forty-one boys). The Wesleyans also took over the running of the English school supported by Mysore ‘raja’ from 1840 until 1854. 37 The LMS too began its work in Mysore in 1840, soon gaining visibility for its work with girl students.
A focus on the place of photographs in the missionary education enterprise offers contradictory opportunities, since it usefully narrows the field while making speculation an imperative, since the copious writing on missionary experience rarely paralleled the production of images. Still, visualizing educational success, and communicating what was achievable to a home audience, was equally a visualization of difference, for which a photograph could be indispensable in asserting the ‘before-after’ narrative. 38 A sketch of the Bangalore school in 1836 proclaimed the importance of a modern physical infrastructure for education: 39 Not only were the ‘school and the school [sic: mission] house’ stand-alone structures, set in an open space, they communicated stability, order and a singular dedication to education. The simpler pitched roof that used thatch (in rural areas) or pot tiles gave way, by the turn of the century, especially in Bangalore, to impressive granite structures.
Yet missionaries learned of modes and styles of education which pre-dated the colonial rule and formed the contrast to new styles of education that they introduced. The Wesleyan Gubbi Mission, which ran five schools, within three years of the circuit being established (1837), recognized, even in 1842, the presence of at least seven indigenous schools in the area—‘But they must have been what are called pial [verandah] schools, in which practically all that was taught was committed to memory’. 40 The pial school represented a ‘past’, of doubtful educational value, that was disorderly and destined to become a quaint relic of the bygone age. By the late nineteenth century, its vintage value was turned into a postcard (Figure 3). The multi-age class of boys, some equipped with a book but many without any such aid, are above all the embodiment of ‘distraction’, a point to which we shall return a little later.
Another postcard showed a group of Vaishnava Brahmin boys with their teacher, some of them scantily clothed and others quite naked, and yet bearing the marks of their caste quite prominently both in the form of the caste mark on the forehead (which appears to have been enhanced after the photograph was taken) and, in the case of one boy (perhaps the oldest), the sacred thread (Figure 4). Their bare bodies exaggerate the caste markers. Here, there is no confusion about the motley crowd at the pial school; instead, despite its hyper-stylized setting, we see some pupils hold the palm-leaf manuscripts in their hands, though more as a sacred object of worship than as a source of knowledge. Their master, curiously of the unmarked forehead and clothed in a way that cannot reveal any sacred thread, holds to his chest the faintly outlined printed book (which was also probably enhanced for the postcard).
Pre-colonial schooling could also be pictured in a third way (Figure 5). Taken from a painting rather than a photograph, the itinerant scholar and singer, again clearly marked as a Vaishnavite, with a book and some meagre belongings appears to isolate the scholar as a ‘representative’ of the kinds of ‘types and classes’ profiled in company paintings. All three postcards are ‘representative’ of Indian society’s pre-colonial educational norms. 41
A more systematic display of the pre-colonial order was made by the Mysore Department of Public Instruction at the International Exhibition at Kensington in 1871, about fifteen years after the systematic government engagement with education began:
…a series of colored drawings were prepared, representing the interiors of native schools, their rude appliances, the modes of punishment practiced & c, with other drawings and photographs to exhibit the improvement visible in the Government and Mission schools, from the elementary vernacular ones to the middle and highest class English Institutions; with copies of the apparatus and text books used in the various classes of schools, specimens of writing, ciphering, vernacular maps &c, …
42
Some indigenous schools were ‘in mere sheds, without maps, chairs, forms, tables, desks, globes or other apparatus; and representing in place of these their rude appliances, the curious modes of punishment &c.’ 43 Alongside, this was a picture of the hobli school, or village school, which B. Lewis Rice, as Director of Public Instruction (DPI), had pioneered in 1867. The hobli school, ‘with its textbooks and apparatus, exhibited the superiority of even the lowest class of our schools, over the rural indigenous ones’. The list of thirty-one exhibits included a pencil drawing of an indigenous school, a school run in a temple verandah, boys ‘tracing letters on sand’ and images of both reward and punishment in indigenous schools.
In contrast were photographs of government and mission schools, including girls receiving instruction in a gallery class, drawings by the students of the engineering school in Bangalore, and textbooks, wall maps and other accouterments of the modern classroom. 44 It is another matter that, even in 1927, a convert would recall the hierarchies of early missionary education from the 1870s, when ‘only a rich man had a pencil’. 45
Hayavadana Rao, compiling the Mysore State Gazetteer in the late 1920s, would remark that education in Mysore had never been regarded as a duty of the state and was largely left to religious leaders and priests. 46 At the time of Charles Wood’s 1854 dispatch, there was no other system than that of the missionaries. 47 Though a large number of ‘indigenous (or private)’ schools were being reported well into the twentieth century, 48 the memory of indigenous education was devalued even among village school teachers, as it was in both the state and missionary imaginations. 49
The Missionary Classroom and its New Collectivities
Missionaries took great pride in the impressive structures they built from mission funds and government grants. They also showed off the spacious grounds that surrounded the schools, allowing play and exercise (Figure 6). Rural schoolhouses with teachers and students standing outside, town schools built of granite, and children performing a drill in the open were among the staple features of missionary photos on education. Rupa Viswanath, in her study of ‘alliance with the missionaries’ of the Tamil ‘Pariahs’, suggests quite rightly that ‘a built structure was a particular privilege, and in the late nineteenth century, a school would be anomalous anywhere’. 50
But the school photograph equally displayed other achievements of missionary education; for instance, the dawn of a new collectivity, which would refigure individual students, particularly the members of the boarding school. These photographs drew attention away from the formal learning in the classroom, and focused instead on forms of resocialization that were enabled in mission schools.
An iconic image, which probably became a postcard (and is featured in other photograph collections), is of the Wesleyan Mission Boarding School in Bangalore (Figure 7). It is a severely stylized photograph with the English teacher, probably a missionary wife, in leg-of-mutton sleeves standing to attention at a table which sports the symbol of academic time-keeping, the bell. In the courtyard, before her are two arrayed rows of young women, well clothed and with shining, oil-slicked hair, about to partake of their meal of ragimudde (balls of cooked local millet flour) over which the curry would be poured. Both on and off the deep verandah is a row of older women, probably assistants at the school. An identical photograph depicts the same space and arrangement—of English teacher and adult helpers—but with much younger students poised to begin their midday meal. Every head without exception in both the pictures is turned to face the camera. 51 The arrangement was echoed in another postcard of the turn of the century, this time of boys of the Wesleyan Mission at Secundarabad, about to begin their special midday repast on the occasion of Reverend B. Pratt’s departure on furlough. Though Pratt is the visual focus of the postcard, he is seated on the ground along with his students. 52
No greater contrast with the pre-colonial school could be made. Education and conversion had combined to provide the young women with dignified clothes, timely meals and an adherence to punctuality and neatness. 53 No books or aids of study are introduced into these photographs; instead, the emphasis is on discipline and order, which would become a prized attraction of the missionary school by the turn of the century. 54
A New Personhood for Women
There are two elements of the Wesleyan image of boarders assembled at lunch that demand our attention. From the time when wives became active along with their husbands on the missionary circuit, missionaries had persistently complained of how young women were forbidden the fruits of learning in India.
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Mrs (John) Hutcheon spoke at length of the entrenched hostility to bringing women into the classroom:
‘Ignorance is a woman’s jewel.’ ‘Educate a woman and you put a knife into the hands of a monkey.’ ‘Teach a girl to read and write, and you are giving milk to a serpent.’ Such were some of the favourite proverbs that met our ears on entering upon the duties of our new station, Mysore, in 1861. At that time, there were no girls’ schools in or near the city. Female education had made but little progress then in India.
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Speaking of the difficulties of renting usable spaces in the ‘inhospitable’ pettah (town), Hutcheon complained that owners refused to rent their properties once they knew it was for running a girls’ school. ‘The people were evidently resolved that so long as they could prevent it, female education should find no footing among them. We were equally resolute, for we had God on our side …’ 57 Hutcheon described her labours aimed at ‘elevating seven pariah girls who had scarcely had a single idea beyond what they should eat and what they should have to drink …’ 58
The LMS, which had focused on its labours in Bangalore, looked back on nearly a century of work among the girls of the city in a 1912 souvenir Things Past and Present. A Kanarese Girls’ Home begun in 1825, alongside the Christian village near St Mark’s Square was closed twelve years later. Mrs Sewell, the missionary wife, persisted in her endeavours and opened a school in 1842, ‘those early days when photography had not become the cheap and popular art that it has become’. 59 Only a very hazy image remains of a ‘fair-sized barn, whitewashed and roofed with pot tiles, containing doors and four windows of the most primitive woodwork’. 60 The figures are too small to distinguish; the stress is on the neat, brick and mortar structure and the grounds around.
Mrs Sewell presided over this boarding school, which included ‘famine orphans’, followed by Mrs Benjamin Rice until 1887; a dedicated teacher (rather than a missionary wife), Miss Muller, elevated the standard of the school between 1887 and 1911. 61 It became known as the first to provide higher education to women in Mysore, attracting as many as seventy day scholars by 1912.
Things Past and Present—a photo essay of sorts—tells a tale of slow and incremental change, an increase in the size of buildings, the steady growth of pupils in both boarding and day schools, and growing acclaim for its academic achievements. The photographic record was not merely illustrative, it referenced almost a century of complaint about the low priority given to women’s education, their near-total exclusion from the school system and the painstaking efforts of missionaries to bring them into the fold. 62 The act of recapitulating missionary effort over the century also allowed for a different kind of referencing to which we now turn.
Referencing Feminist Utopias
The text and photographs of the LMS souvenir provide some clues to the kinds of shifts taking place in the conceptualization of women’s education over a century. It was written by Marguerite Butler, and the full appellation of the writer signals no small change after decades of missionary wives whose public identity had been subordinated to that of their husbands. 63
Yet the souvenir forces us to observe the gap between photograph and caption. Was the work of the caption a ‘substantiation of experience through a doubling of evidence’, as Christopher Pinney suggests? 64 Or could it be, as Susan Sontag puts it, ‘the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth’, though she warns ‘… even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached’? 65 We have been cautioned by Peter Pels against ‘reading’ the photograph without the aid of the caption; as he amply demonstrates, photographs of the Dutch colonial Mission in Africa were often deployed in multiple settings and put to multiple uses, for which the only, and therefore crucial, difference would lie in the caption’s claims. 66
I would like to suggest another kind of use to which the caption was put by our thoughtful ‘curator’: Captions opened up an opportunity for referencing another history. They could invade the narrative of steady progress, speak of unknown futures rather than the prosaic present. There were glimpses of the need to claim education as a right for those who had long been kept out of these institutions—Mrs Hutcheon wrote of the Brahmin and Panchama students that ‘[t]hey studied side by side, and enjoyed the same rights and privileges’ within the missionary classroom. 67 In 1873, the deputy Inspector of Education spoke of the Gottagara school in similar terms of ‘education percolating to the lowest strata of society; and of the just participation of the rights of the citizen…’ 68
But Butler importantly gestures to the mid-nineteenth-century English feminist campaigns for a rightful place in the world of higher education. Resting on the shoulders of the poet Alfred Tennyson, she inserts a call to arms for women to build a utopian future:
Oh I wish that I were some great princess! I would build, far off from men, a college like a man’s! And I would teach them all that men are taught! We are twice as quick!
The lines are taken from the Prelude to Tennyson’s long poem entitled The Princess in which an impassioned plea is made by Lilia for a women’s-only college. Tennyson seems to have recognized the pressing need of the hour (the mid-nineteenth century) for the education of the poor man and the woman and acknowledged the feminist campaigns for the same—Queen’s College, London, the first college for women, was started in 1847, the same year that Tennyson’s poem was published; Girton College came into being only in 1869.
That Tennyson’s poetic ‘resolution’ of the women’s demand for this feminist utopia was distinctly anti-feminist—the poem ends by celebrating companionate marriage, while the women’s university makes a quiet disappearance—did not deter Butler’s use of these four lines, in the early twentieth century, in an Indian setting which was witnessing the first stirrings of similar demands. Indeed, it may even be that feminist utopias of the early twentieth century—such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain’s Sultana’s Dream, of which Butler may have been unaware—borrowed their structures from the failed utopian feminist educational enterprise of Tennyson’s Princess.
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Was the citation of the poem a recognition of the many unresolved aspects of women’s lives in the metropole, which more or less remained unmentioned in voluminous missionary tracts and writings? Miss E. McDougall, principal of the Women’s Christian College, Madras, in her letter to the DPI, Madras, in 1916 marked a sharp shift from the missionary discourse of the nineteenth century, saying
…even those who are the supporters of the higher education of women seem unable to contemplate for women any wider life that has been theirs in the past … Education will not make much progress if a woman is to be confined to such learning as the men of her locality think suitable for her.
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It would be tempting to suggest that the LMS souvenir signals the birth of a new female solidarity that dissolved the difference between missionary and Indian. Despite the mission field having long defined a separate sphere for European women, if only to reach women in segregated societies like India, 71 this must remain only a speculation in the absence of a dialogic archive which allows us an access to the thoughts and formulations of the legions of women who had been educated in the mission schools. However, colonial cultural hegemony only exacerbated the ‘system of asymmetry’ in access to education in Indian society; the colonial state, in the final analysis, was a coercive power. 72 The missionaries were not exempt from this field of power and even, in some instances, replicated it.
Though missionaries sowed the seeds of women’s education in Mysore, opportunities, particularly in government institutions, were most vigorously reaped by the Brahmanical upper castes, in ironic contrast to the long century of missionary striving among the lower castes. For this educational outcome, the missionaries were far from blameless as becomes evident in the discourse on caste.
‘There Is No Caste in the Mission Institution’: Inclusion and Apartness
Missionary education was aimed not merely at introducing the pupils to the systematic study of reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and history, it was equally aimed, especially in the early years, at thorough resocialization. 73 But there were many hurdles in realizing this project. The missionary photograph was therefore poised between portraying, on the one hand, the great unity of humankind in the benevolent presence of the white missionary and, on the other, depicting difference, forms of material and social life that had to be transformed. The changes that were demonstrable, predictably, were not merely sturdy and well-tended structures, which were easier to depict in sketches and photographs. The transformations involved changes in styles of eating, sartorial habits and indeed an attitudinal shift itself. A different kind of knowledge was being produced of the ‘before’ to which the effects of missionary intervention were, in the absence of sequencing or sometimes even captioning, to be read as ‘after’. Why would the missionary photograph ‘Hindus sleeping’ or ‘Hindus eating’? (Figure 10). Apart from the exotic value of its radical alterity, it was perhaps only in order to emphasize what missionary work had accomplished among the very poor. It is far from clear whether the captions used were intended to amuse, rather than educate, since neither are all the Hindus eating in the left-hand picture, nor are they all sleeping in the right-hand one. But what is emphasized here is the individuated nature of eating, the stark absence of furniture and, therefore, the absence of not just a sense of community but also of notions of discipline and order, and above all, privacy. Things Past and Present, in contrast, would proudly include photographs of individual bedsteads and mattresses, though no young women are seen lounging about on the beds in these images as a commitment to new norms of privacy. Instead, as the caption had it: ‘My bed is waiting cool and fresh, with linen smooth and fair’. ‘They live in a modified European style’, Miss Butler would write many years later in 1918, ‘and do not observe caste, whereas government schools are mostly under Brahmin management.’ 74
The most persistent missionary fantasy was their optimism about schooling’s challenge to the hierarchies of caste. Mrs Hutcheon recalled early days in the Bangalore Mission School:
By far the greater number of the students in our Institution were Brahmans, but within its walls all such distinctions were unknown. Here, if never before or again, the down trodden paraiah stood on equal ground with the wealthy Brahman. They studied side by side, and enjoyed the same rights and privileges …
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Citing the ‘innovations’ made by missionaries in ignoring ritual impurity, Hutcheon quoted a remark of a young Brahman that ‘there is no caste in the Mission Institution’.
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Despite this little triumph, the worrisome barriers of caste repeatedly erupted in mission reports. A centenary review of Wesleyan Missionary work in 1922 recalled:
From the first it was seen that caste is the negation of all that is most characteristic of Christianity. … in the report of the Raja’s school, it is clearly stated that ‘it is open to all classes without distinction of caste’.
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However, while government reports repeatedly acknowledged that missionary schools were more inclusive than government schools, 78 there was ample photographic and written evidence of missionary compromises on the caste question in the building of ‘inclusive’ schools. Why else would a school at Gooty be captioned a ‘mixed school’ (Figure 11)? To what mixing, other than caste, did the photograph attest? Several photographs in Mysore were captioned ‘a school for outcastes’ or ‘a Pariah village’ which institutionalized separation as the norm (Figure 12).
Active opposition was expressed by those whose local power was threatened by education of the unlettered peasant attending the government hobli school; in 1869,
[T]he Shanbhog (village accountant) objected strongly to the instruction of ryot boys in arithmetic, and especially land measuring; and in order to deter parents from sending their children to school, he circulated a tale to the effect that Government intended to make the boys turn Christians.
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Missionary reports were themselves replete with the travails of the multi-caste classroom: not just students but teachers protested against the multi-caste classroom, as Mrs Paine reported in 1844.
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The very next year,
[T]he school which had been established for the Pariah girls has been discontinued, on account of the children withdrawing their attendance; this was caused partly by the distance at which they lived from the school, and partly by their being very poor, and the elder girls being obliged, when work offered, to labour in the fields.
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In the early stages, LMS missionaries were baffled by the unanticipated consequences of their avowed commitment to the outcaste pupil. The most benevolent of intentions could not counter the strength of rumour in a largely illiterate society, which led in 1844 to the alarming drop in attendance from 300 pupils to 50 in Bangalore, according to the report of Reverend B. Rice.
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Such formidable hurdles notwithstanding, even the separate mission schools for lower castes recorded great success where the government had made no such provision; about the LMS Gottagara school it was reported in 1873 that
[it] is indeed a novel institution, and perhaps a subject of horror in the eye of an orthodox Hindu. But there it stands, a living and noble testimony to the rapid strides of education percolating to the lowest strata of society; and of the just participation of the rights of the citizen, the blessing of our present benign rule. The London Mission may be no more; nay, the all-pervading British rule, which God forbid, may cease; the seeds of freedom and enlightenment that will have been implanted in the heart of the now degraded Madiga, will never cease to be remembered with grateful feelings ….
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The Salvationist tone notwithstanding, there is conviction about the educability of the Madiga, who nevertheless continued to be vulnerable to re-conversion or could lapse into the abjection from which he had been saved. The report on the new ‘inclusivity’ of the school—‘a commodious and substantial shed built for the purpose in the midst of the houses and huts of the Madigas’—added that ‘… There were at my inspection 39 pupils on the register, of these 2 were girls. This latter item only puts the forgoing statement in stronger relief’. 85 Lower castes and girls: the achievements of the missionaries in bringing these two marginal categories into schools was difficult to ignore. 86
Missionary work was not without several setbacks. Panic about even a single conversion could lead not only to an immediate fall in the number of children attending school but to the establishment of rival schools, as happened in Bangalore in 1889, forcing missionaries to give up all holidays except Christmas and New Year.
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Yet, the sociology of caste required detailed and graphic description; not even the best photograph could capture the circumstances that invariably led the missionaries to establish separate schools even in the late nineteenth century. Of the school established for Holeyas and Madigas at Anekal in 1888, Reverend E. P. Rice said,
…the school for outcastes, which appears for the first time in our list, requires a word or two of explanation. On the outskirts of Hindu towns in this part of India, may be seen two groups of thatched huts, inhabited respectively by Holeyas and Madigas … The children of these outcastes are never allowed inside a school. Occasionally, a poor boy belonging to this class may be seated in the road outside
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the school door trying to pick up such scraps of learning as he can. They are of course welcome to mission schools, but their admission would be strongly resented by all non-Christian teachers and pupils, and the school would be immediately emptied … in towns like Bangalore and Madras … boys are seated on the same benches.
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But the difficulty still exists in full force in district towns.
90
At the time of Rice’s report, the Mysore government was yet to establish separate Panchama schools; the lower-caste demand for schooling could only be made to the missionaries.
Both inter- and intra-caste rivalry could put an end to missionary efforts; missionary survival rested on their respectful negotiations of these differences. But there was an identifiable shift in the attitude to the Mission school in the last decade of the nineteenth century when not just Brahmins and upper castes were willing to put away their prejudices and attend the mission schools which guaranteed them the government job. Hosannas were sung, not to Jesus, but to the English education provided in the mission schools. A growing querulousness about Christianity did not diminish the enthusiasm of the missionaries who detected an interest, even if hostile, in religious questions. 91 Lower castes and women were undeterred by possible objections to their presence in the classroom and were strengthened by the missionaries, as happened for instance in the Kottagara village school in Bellary, run by the LMS in 1890, where a Christian convert was retained risking the departure of the other children. 92
Clearly, the most important shift that was made in the eight decades of the nineteenth century from the time missionary activity began in Mysore was the movement away from missionary paternalism and benevolence to a widespread recognition of mission schools and the boarding homes as spaces of resocialization. There was a new individuation of the Indian in both image and text though in far from unambiguous ways. 93 There were curious ways in which the strength of character of the convert could be portrayed leading to a new hybridity. For example, why was the Reverend W. Arthur’s ‘Canarese [Vaishnavite] teacher’ honoured on both the cover and in the frontispiece when he was not the author of the book, and the book itself was about Chickka-turned-Daniel? Of what importance is it that the teacher remains unnamed, in contrast to the detailed biography of the convert Daniel, although he exudes dignified respectability? 94 Such ambiguities were signs of a visual field in flux and of shifts away from earlier framings of the Indian, whether upper or lower caste, and of the woman, whether missionary or ‘native’.
An important example of the dilemmas faced by the early missionaries about the composition of the classroom comes (once more) from the memoirs of Mrs Hutcheon. Recounting her experience of setting up the school in the Mysore pettah in 1861 where she ‘engaged a Brahman teacher and also a peon to collect the children’, she said many left the school due to rumours spread by the peon himself:
A few pretty little girls, however, refused to leave us, and they were learning so much more rapidly than our first full pariah scholars, that I felt quite encouraged. But a bitter disappointment was in store for us. A native gentleman, who had become much attached to my husband, came to him, and asked if we knew that most of our nice sprightly pupils were being educated for dancing girls!
95
Hutcheon had no option but to close the school since she realized that
…these hapless ones are only taught to read, that they may become proficient in learning the abominable and immoral songs contained in their own books …. Need we wonder then, that the very name of female education was an offence in virtuous families?
96
She concluded that ‘our only alternative was to dismiss all the dear little girls….’ 97
The expulsion of the Devadasi’s daughter from the missionary classroom disturbed the twin narratives of the attempt, on the one hand, to obliterate the debilitating hierarchies of caste and, on the other, to extend the education of girl children. The deliberate exclusion of those who were well equipped and indeed were a leaven of sorts in the colonial classroom was matched by the pride taken in those who replaced them. The place of the Devadasi child in the classroom repeatedly surfaced in governmental discussions in the late 1870s: Should the children of prostitutes be admitted to government-aided schools? The DPI in 1879 said that since girls were brought up to see singing and dancing ‘as their legitimate and hereditary calling and profession from the earliest age’, it would only be fair to view ‘the little girls of this class … not as the children of outcastes from society… but as the children belonging to one among the recognized classes of the community’. 98
He found that no objection was raised by the fifty to sixty girl students in a school where two Devadasi girls were pupils; on the contrary,
… the master, a very respectable and highly esteemed man, stated that he had found their presence useful, when the school was new, in stimulating the other girls to learn as the latter were half afraid to go on with their lessons owing to shyness and the novelty of the whole thing.
99
Despite proof of the positive role played by the bright young children, the DPI’s morality came in the way of allowing ‘dancing girls’ children’ into girls’ schools run by the state. He concluded by absolving the government of any responsibility for the education of these girls ‘as the parents or guardians of these girls do as a rule make their own arrangements to give them due education’.
The DPI chose to rely on the decision of the London Mission in its entirety, by quoting:
We have made it our unvarying rule not to receive dancing girls, as we believe their presence injurious both in lowering the moral tone of the schools and also in prejudicing respectable Hindus against them. At the same time, we find it most difficult to exclude them, as teachers and peons can get these girls more easily than others, and indeed are probably pressed by interested parties to receive them.
100
The government’s decision to keep the Devadasi children out of girls’ schools prevailed. 101 Neither the missionaries nor the government officials recognized the ironies of this foundational ‘brain drain’. Only within the realm of the aesthetic could the Devadasi now stage her return.
The Making of a Missionary Aesthetic?
Missionary iconographies of education, which had moved distinctly away from paternalism and benevolence to a language of rights, were shifting and changing, no doubt in part as a response to growing assertions of different groups of people in Mysore for the fruits of education. If we consider that the technologies of image making had vastly improved by the late nineteenth century, and became available to a wider group of people, what opportunities did it offer the missionary to self-consciously pursue and develop a distinctive aesthetic?
A remarkable set of images from the album of Edith A. Lamb dated 7 August 1901 provides a useful starting point. Lamb was briefly the principal with overall charge of the day schools run by the Wesleyans in Bangalore. The 1901 photograph series features various Wesleyan schools in the Bangalore Pettah (or old city), 102 usually of young girls with their teachers in schools set up at Bangalore and Mysore (Figure 7 is from this collection). Apart from one image of a school building, most of the other pictures were images of students and teachers. In a photograph of the senior girls arranged under a tree with their teacher (Figure 13), the sheer proximity of the teacher to the students, the ‘missionary touch’ as it were, was in striking contrast to the ‘apartness’ of the Indian teachers at the schools for outcastes (refer to Figure 12).
In a more relaxed portrait of a class of ‘elder girls’ wrapped in their saris, great attention has been paid to the display of their jewellery, even on their ankles. The European teacher is barely visible and not all the girls are focused on the camera’s lens; there is almost a purposeful attempt to soften the image of the girls’ transformation. Another image of younger girls displays even greater distraction among the poseurs; whether it is their relative youth or something that is happening off camera to their left, only one girl in the top row engages the camera’s eye (Figure 14). A girl in the front row even looks the other way, while another looks down; in this image, it is the teacher who is blurred and unrecognizable (perhaps because she moved), though the arms that clasp the young girl on her lap are vividly evident. Only a photograph of a ‘nature study class’ in Madras would attempt, though unsuccessfully, to capture an important goal of missionary learning: It portrays a class of young boys out in the open, with their drawing books, fulfilling the task of learning from the observation of nature. 103
The tension between attention and distraction continues in the highly stylized photograph of the Brahmin masters of the school, with each of them almost deliberately looking away from the camera. The theatricality of the image could indicate that posing for the camera was not yet a well-learned convention, though, in dress and demeanour, they fulfil the task of ‘representing’ a class of Brahmin teachers. They are not portrayed with students, unlike the previous pictures that emphasize the relationship between the missionary teacher and her pupils. Though all the photographs are taken in the chairman’s compound, in the same spot under the spreading branches of the same tree using the same carpet, one cannot miss the symmetricality of this photograph, which has deliberately arranged the men to look off camera, though in one case this has ended in only an eye roll. Gone are the prominent caste marks on the forehead, their place taken by no more than a discreet dot. Instead, it is turbans and coats that dominate the setting; one man even boasts a modern watch chain, but there is no additional prop—books, globes and maps—to establish their status as teachers, apart from the caption.
We have come a long way from the hazy images of the 1842 LMS school or other outcaste schools in different parts of Mysore. There is a strong sense that the aesthetics of the arrangement in the Lamb’s photographs have overtaken the pedagogic or communicative value of the earlier images. By 1901, the missionaries were assured of their importance within the educational field and widely recognized for their contributions to education, far in excess of their numbers or the numbers of schools that they ran. The mission school, despite petulant suggestions to the contrary, was the preferred school in the early twentieth-century Mysore.
So assured were the missionaries of their place in the educational field that, at least in a photograph, they could ‘readmit’ the devadasis they had expelled from the classroom from the 1860s. In what is perhaps the most stylized of the Lamb’s photographs is one captioned ‘Dancing Girls, Bangalore, 1900’. There is no suggestion that these are students of a mission school. Since they are not shown dancing, it is the caption that builds the ‘aura of believability’ enjoyed by the photograph. Seven young women and their instruments are arranged in a strictly symmetrical order: the two dancers flanked by the two violinists stand above three other veena players seated on the floor. The standing four offer themselves to the camera, combining frankness, solemnity and disclosure; two of the veena players are arranged to look inwards, at the one who may be senior-most in the group.
By 1900, the ‘dancing girls’ had become so irresistible to the building of a new aesthetic that their strong association with immorality was overlooked. 104 It is the aesthetic and not its ‘pedagogical’ or documentary aspects that determine the composition of this photograph; it restored to them a certain professionalism that they had in practice earlier been denied. Their representativeness, of a group or type, and their quiet air of accomplishment, rather than any individualistic qualities, was underscored in this attempt to aestheticize. Shyly peeping out in the foreground where the veena player to the right is seated are her toe rings, an index of her marital status—but she is married to the God. In a few years, the Mysore Government would deprive the devadasi not only of her dance but also of her property, in a late adaptation to the Victorian morals that had so vigorously been propagated by the missionaries. 105
What were the circumstances under which they had been ‘assembled’? Did the move towards aestheticizing the missionary photograph places a reduced emphasise on caste and religious difference? The photographs of all the girls, whether dancing girl, day scholar or boarder, played on some common elements. Thus, if the photograph of day scholars in the Siddhi Katte school revels in their heavy jewellery (Figure 13), the Wesleyan boarders (all Protestant Christian), in keeping with the abstemious codes of the new religion, are bereft of any such adornment (Figure 7). But both sets of images were intended to convey the emergence of a new collectivity of being students/boarders in ways that indicated that their former selves had been partially or completely relinquished.
The move towards the new aesthetic, which at first portrayed the human material to be worked on through education, was gradually exoticized and portrayed as the upper-caste girls began entering the missionary classroom from the last decade of the nineteenth century. An image of Miss Muller’s gallery class in the Bangalore LMS school, which brings together more than a hundred day scholars, illustrates the new interest of the photographer in disturbing the old morality of the missionary class (Figure 17). Two bejewelled young women appear as an accidental detail, the ‘punctum’ that jumps out of an otherwise prosaic collectivity (fourth row from the top). In a sea of faces, most of whom are bereft of jewellery and sometimes even out of focus, the two girls who have been placed at the centre of the photograph puncture the norm, and present themselves and their adornments, if a little demurely, to the camera.
Unlike the groups of students in the gallery class, the ‘dancing girls’ take their place in this school series as representatives of a particular type and class, but only on the basis of the caption. Nothing from within the frame of the photograph suggests that they are anything more than musically accomplished young women. The move towards a more aesthetic presentation of the achievements of education clearly effaced some kinds of difference while producing others. An 1892 image of a group of ‘pupils of Maharani’s Girls’ School’ at first sight appears to be startlingly similar in composition to the photograph of the ‘dancing girls’ (Figure 18). Here, too, some of the women are weighed down in jewellery and are holding musical instruments. How is their composure, their intelligence and musical acumen to be distinguished from that of the ‘dancing girls’ except by the caption that guides our eyes to see fading professionalism in one image and educated but unencashable cultural talent in another? The distinction between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ of the photograph, to which Barthes and Mitchell drew our attention, does little to resolve this ‘photographic paradox’. However, here it helps us to be guided by the text rather than the image.
Well into the twentieth century, missionary endeavours among the outcaste poor were disparaged as a founding ‘defect’. M. Shama Rao, writing his history of Modern Mysore in 1936, recalled the history of women’s education in Mysore that was at first dominated by
a few schools managed by religious bodies. But these were not generally popular as they paid little regard to the religious beliefs and social habits of the people. As a consequence, the attendance in these schools was very limited and the girls attending mostly belonged to the lower strata of society ….
This ‘defect’, he continues, was recognized only when the direct rule of the Wodeyars was restored in the 1880s, ‘and a school at Mysore was started under the designation of the Maharani’s Girls’ School where caste prejudices were consulted and teachers drawn from respectable communities were appointed.’ 106
The photograph of the Maharani’s Girl’s School restores virtue to the classroom, a virtue which, in some (upper caste) views, had been missing in the missionary class. Yet the expulsion of the devadasis from the classroom, and their reinstatement as aesthetic value, shared at least some things in common with the hierarchies that the missionaries had so longed to disturb. The theme of the ‘dancing girls’ was too tempting to be ignored by missionaries who were enthusiastically expanding their photographic repertoire. Mission albums had begun to include local sights, memorials, local dignitaries such as the Sringeri Guru or royalty such as Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, and places of historical importance such as Srirangapatna or Halebid. 107 By the turn of the century, social and political changes made it difficult, if not impossible, for the missionary to stand triumphantly next to the ruins of a shrine that had been destroyed as a sign of the expanding Kingdom of Christ. 108
Yet no series of photographs perfected the art of being visually redemptive of the ‘temple girls’ in the twentieth century as the images in Amy Carmichael’s books. 109 Carmichael (1867–1951), described lovingly in at least one biography as God’s Madcap, 110 was a missionary who arrived in Bangalore in 1895 but later went to Dohnavur in the Tinneveli District where she began a life of ‘rescuing temple girls’ from being dedicated to the temple until she died in 1951. She was also engaged in copious productions of books for the consumption of readers in Britain—Lotus Buds, referring to the rescued girls, which ran into at least three editions. 111 The illustrations for Lotus Buds were by ‘Mr Penn of Ootacamund [a landscape photographer] ….’ 112 Jo-Ann Wallace has described the portraits of the girls who were saved as the ‘highly aestheticized after’ of rescue from depraved Hindu practices; the ‘naming and individuation’ of the rescued girls marks a distinct shift away from the ‘typicality and substitutability’ of Carmichael’s previous writings. 113 Carmichael’s work surely represents the acme of aestheticization and it includes carefully arranged portraits of carefree play by four young girls, the loving care of young girls by the older ones, idyllic surroundings and structures and charming individual portraits including a portrait of a child over the shoulder of a woman whose enigmatic back alone is visible to us. 114 Combined with the text, which is disparaging of everything Indian, Carmichael continued confidently to speak about India and Indians in ways that most long-serving missionaries had already forsaken.
I focus here on just one of these images, which was an argument for skilling the ‘rescued’ child differently. Carmichael had concluded her book on the enigmatic note of leaving it to ‘India’ to decide to follow the more admirable path of England in amending the Industrial Schools Act of 1880 to instruct the whole population in morally acceptable skills. 115 In homes for girls, such as the one at Donhavur, nothing better embodied the new morality and docility of the missionary girls’ schools than the arts of sewing. 116 Though most agreed that the temple woman was a skilled, indeed highly educated woman, 117 the introduction of young girls to sewing, a hyper-feminized, domestic art, was a feature of missionary schools and was later adopted by the government. To the extent that education was linked to notions of industriousness in the Victorian period, certain skills and knowledge that pupils acquired at school were presumed to lead to a higher morality. As Richard Sennett points out, ‘the needle as a remedy for female idleness’ can be traced to deeply Christian roots. 118 In the colony, this overlapped with the civilizing discourse and notions of disciplining the body of the native through industrious activity.
The Dohnavur girls are seated in the courtyard, the very picture of diligence as they are engaged in their sewing class (Figure 19). A sewing basket is thrown open in the foreground in a seemingly careless manner. The white clothes, dark sewing material, well-combed hair and the focused attention of the girls seated on the ground convey the purposive work of education in a rescue mission.
The image bears resemblance to the Basel Mission photograph of a similar class in the courtyard of a mission school in Dharwar in 1907 (Figure 20). Here the missionary, Mrs Bommer, is seated in a chair before a table strewn with sewing materials; the young girls are seated on the ground, but looking directly back at the camera. The structuring of the photograph, despite some differences, speaks of the hold that the new aesthetic had over missionary photography as a whole. Although the Basel Mission’s commitment to teaching (manual) skills on the west coast and in Mysore was well known, the domestic arts were preferred for girls. Though these are not students who have been rescued from other kinds of immoral futures, as the Dohnavur girls were, both photographs communicate not only the remoralizing mission of sewing and needlework but such qualities as industriousness and focused attention.
Such a conclusion would deny the missionary educational effort its rightful place in enabling new forms of personhood and a capacity for learning among castes who had long been denied such a chance. An image of the LMS school in Bangalore Mitralaya, taken in the 1930s, reveals the fruits of the long-term efforts of teachers such as Lamb, Muller or Butler (Figure 21). Twelve young women are ranged symmetrically on either side of a board towards which one of the young women is facing to begin working out the first stage of a sum. The others, some of whom look at the camera and others at their open books, reveal a quiet, even amused, air of confidence as they have taken their ‘rightful’ place in the colonial classroom.
Conclusion
As we have seen, not even the missionary photograph could claim to represent an unvarnished truth about the mission field. My analysis of the photographs reveals that the missionary photograph was no mere supplement to writing and indeed could serve social uses and purposes that exaggerated missionary achievements, even fantasized about how the Indian society had been transformed. John Tagg had reminded us of the links between the modern state, capitalism and forms of representation, in order to counter the notion of photography as undeniable realistic; he says that ‘the so-called medium of photography has no meaning outside its historical specifications’.
119
A similar argument was made by Pierre Bourdieu, who emphatically underlined that, despite commonsensical understandings of photography’s capacity to objectively document, certain conventions undergirded photography’s claims to realism. He said,
Photography is considered to be a perfectly realistic and objective recording of the visible world because (from its origin) it has been assigned social uses that are held to be ‘realistic’ and ‘objective’.
120
Tagg’s concern was with the more coercive aspects of photography as a field of power in which state and representational practice are related. I have attempted an interpretation of select missionary photographs to demonstrate that they occupy a slightly different space, sharing some attributes with the imaging practices of the colonial state but also raising unexpected opportunities for visionary futures. The image as it was related to the text, whether as caption or in mission diaries and journals, leave us in no doubt of the social uses to which photographs were put, particularly in dramatically portraying the ‘salvation’ of those who had for long remained at the margins of both the traditional and the modern education systems.
As we have seen throughout, missionaries inaugurated their unique ways of looking, whether at pre-colonial systems of learning, gender and caste difference, or their material and immaterial achievements within the rubric of education. The missionaries ‘saw’ discrimination within Indian society and yet portrayed the valiant missionary effort not to ‘recognize caste’ in its classrooms. J. Cummings’ graphic ‘picture’ of the Indian classroom of the 1860s thus says:
Let us look at the sight. The first feeling perhaps may be, as it was with us the first time we saw them ‘how grotesque!’ In a moment you perceive by the turbaned head and loose flowing garments that you are among Orientals. There is the Vishnuite, with his trident, the Shivite with his horizontal lines. Here is the Brahman with his proud bearing, the Shudra with his self important mien, and the Parian too, for here at least, he seems to say, I am on an equal footing with the Brahman. We do not recognize caste…
121
Such optimism about the achievements of the missionary classroom and its visible attempt at secular integration in a deeply divided society could not be sustained for too long and made a quiet disappearance by the end of the century.
Still, even the Government of Mysore would frankly admit the long-standing disinterest of government in lower-caste education, which was largely left to the missionaries. 122 Missionaries could therefore proudly portray in a single image three generations of women who had been touched by missionary activity, a coevalness produced in part by missionary education (Figure 22).
Missionary iconography of education was not unambiguously celebratory; as we have seen, there were moments when the photo referenced histories and events from which they were temporally and spatially distanced. Just as I have pointed to the significant pre-occupations of the missionaries in communicating stability, order and discipline, as well as attestations to new forms of personhood, especially among women and lower castes, there were striking absences both in the written and visual records. For instance, neither the madrasa nor its pupils were foregrounded in the missionary discourse on education in Mysore, though there were such schools in existence well into the twentieth century. Clearly, both in what the missionaries chose to record, compare, contrast and celebrate, and in their significant absences, the photographs were reductive of the more complex processes that could not be freeze-framed.
The optimism and frankness of the Salvationist discourse of the mid-nineteenth century, which had fervently hoped to invisibilize caste and install a more recognizable class difference, yielded way by the twentieth century to a more sober pragmatism and a fuller embrace of the ‘secular’ ideal in the classroom that we may detect in the more measured, even aestheticized, photographs of the early twentieth century. As I have shown throughout, we may know something of the ‘missionary way of seeing’ only when we bring both texts and visual archives into the conversation. I have taken some inaugural steps towards producing the dialogue that will yield such a history of ‘looking’.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
To the two reviewers, who have greatly improved the article and to G. Arunima, Akash Bhattacharya and Divya Kannan for their thoughtful and encouraging suggestions, I am very grateful. I also thank the Transnational Research Group on Poverty and Education, German Historical Institute, London, for the Senior Research Grant that enabled this research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received the Senior Research Grant from Transnational Research Group on Poverty and Education, German Historical Institute, London, that enabled this research.