Abstract
This book is a refreshingly original work that fills the analytic void in the existing literature dealing with the relationship between British imperialism in India and Christian evangelism. While much has been written about the proselytising and evangelising activities of British male missionaries in ‘mission civilisatrice’, women missionaries’ activities and experiences have hardly been explored. Deploying a nuanced methodological prism, Dutta locates her study of British women missionaries in Bengal at interdisciplinary interstices to ask and answer certain fundamental questions. She argues that British women’s missionary activities formed the exploratory site for understanding wider issues relating to race, religion, imperial exigencies, social transformation and ‘Western’ feminism. As argued in existing studies, investigations of British women missionaries’ careers in India contribute “to overlapping historiographies not only to the history of Church and mission, but also that of gender, the British Empire, Indian nationalism and decolonisation”. Within such contexts, Dutta tracks the shifting dynamics of British women missionaries’ roles during 1793–1861. The transition of British female missionaries from ‘helpmeets’ to women having conscious agency in educating and uplifting native women was connected to imperial strategies and interfaces between the ruler and the ruled. Dutta’s explorative focus has a clear rationale. Assertions of ‘female agency’ in British India formed a foil to (a) convictions about ‘colonial masculinity’ subjugating ‘effeminate’ Indians and (b) female empowerment back home (in Britain).
Lucid and well crafted, the book thematically subsumes its six chapters under three main rubrics: (a) ‘On a Double Mission’; (b) Female Agency; and (c) Intertwined Images. The book is written from the perspective of British women missionaries’ own voices/agencies rather than what was thought/written about them. This analytic oeuvre is located within a wider locus of sharply opposed ways of looking at missionary activity: (a) denigration or (b) valorisation (representing a benevolent, civilising endeavour). Women’s agencies were especially significant at a time when female missionary activity was neither spontaneous nor an acceptable career decision. Such agencies included those of wives/helpmeets such as Hannah Marshman and single women such as Mary Ann Cooke. Through skilful readings of primary sources (epistles, memoirs, tracts) by British women, Dutta illuminates their own experiences, ideas and the significance of their work. Interestingly, she draws attention to silences, gaps and ‘multiple levels of exclusion’ in male missionary narratives to piece together a compelling story of British women missionary activities.
The first and second chapters delve into the dynamics of merchant activities and genealogies of representing India by early British travellers, administrators and missionaries. These accounts express mesmeric wonder in regard to India’s fabulous wealth, its commercial potential and its strange ‘otherness’. The chapters provide rich detail about missionary activity (by William Carey, for instance) from the closing years of the eighteenth century. Remarkably, the story of missionary-initiated educational enterprises having religious foundations is connected with wider transnational movements in Britain and Europe. The second chapter makes a compelling case for the centrality of missionary activity in forging crucial links between empire and information. This was integral to the ‘psychology of colonialism’ based on a clear disjunction between India’s past and its present. The intellectual and ideological conjunction of evangelism and governance reflected intersections between politics and piety. What is left out of such analytic/epistemic frames is indigenous historicism. What were the levels and degrees of interaction, collaboration and combat between imperial evangelisation and indigenous actors? Moreover, the connection between representation and domination could have been delved into more deeply. The trope of British imperial control was contingent upon a host of factors, which varied widely across time, region and mentalities. The third chapter studies the roles of helpmeets such as Mrs Carey and H. Marshman. An original highlight here is the connection between individuals and institutions such as the Baptist Missionary Society. This reflected interpenetrations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres. The fourth chapter considers how ‘female agency’ took on more strident and assertive forms during 1820–1840. Single-women missionaries’ activities reflected a major transition. There was a shift from ‘woman’ to ‘womankind’, bridging the distance between a moral, progressive, liberal West on the one hand and a ‘low’, ‘heathenish’, ‘amoral’ social structure which oppressed its own womenfolk. The chapter slants heavily towards British women missionaries’ struggle for an ‘equal’ place alongside male missionaries through ‘negotiations’, within narrow, patriarchal frameworks. It reads more like a quasi-hagiographic account of a distinct phase of British feminism than a critical valorisation of a multi-stranded feminist movement in British India in which Indian-Bengali women grappled with age-old patriarchal strictures on their own terms. The chapter does not underscore how the ideal of universal sisterhood between white women and native bhadramahilas was ridden with contradictions as their agencies/endeavours were very different in nature. Even as the author underlines ‘mutual control and influence in cultural identity of native and British missionary women’ in the fifth chapter, Bengali feminist agencies remain, at best, subtexts to the dominant metanarrative. Questions that leap to the mind are the following: how and why were native women’s agencies different from and independent of British missionary women? How did their attitude come away from the Bengali-Indian male ‘nationalist resolution of the woman’s question’? These questions are only partially answered in the author’s exploration of ‘the conflict and contestations of gender identity in the period from 1840 to 1860’. British women missionaries’ forays into the zenana marked it out as a means of muting and diluting the combat between imperialism and Indian subjugation ‘through collaborations and mediations’. The paradigm of ‘intertwined images’ is stunningly original, but it could have been more fully explicated through explorations of interdependence, consonance and dissonance between British women missionaries’ and Bengali women-writers’ agencies. The latter’s voices and needs are sought by Dutta in works of British men and women (such as H. Cullens) and Indian men (including Rammohun Roy and Peary Chand Mitra). Autonomous assertions by Bengali women writers and reformers such as Jnanadanandini Devi, reflected in works such as Ingrajninda O Deshanurag written from feminist-patriotic perspectives, remain unexplored. Such sources are indispensable if we are to move beyond universalising Eurocentric/Western discourses on feminism which forms a key aim of this book. Glimpsing the difference between British feminist discourses and the search for models of ‘perfect’ or ideal femininity in Bengal, the author points to the creation of ‘radical’ heroines in Bengali fiction. These heroines represented an ideal of female empowerment which was liminal in nature. Simultaneously moored to tradition and being emancipated, such heroines personified the nation as the mother, defining as well as defying canons of femininity. This conceptualisation of the nationalist imaginary drew as much on progressive, socially transformative ideas emanating from British women missionaries’ activities as from indigenous, pre-colonial socio-cultural value systems and new modernities in late-colonial Bengal. By looking at pre-1793 and post-1861 historical conditions, we can enrich our understanding of the central theme of the book.