ABSTRACT
This chapter describes cultural and religious encounters between missionaries and Indians in the nineteenth century. Using the example of the Basel Mission in South India, this chapter asks how gendered norms where established in the mission contact and what happened when they were violated by individual missionaries, for instance by sexual violence against Indian converts. When the Basel Mission began its work in South India in 1834, they sent out only male missionaries. These were soon followed by women who were to become the wives of some of the missionaries. These women had a well-defined double task: to build model families that demonstrated to the Indians what a ‘really Christian’ family looked like and to work amongst Indian girls and women in order both to missionise and to educate them in all practices that were considered necessary for a ‘good’ Christian woman. At the same time, the male missionaries were to educate boys and young men in their ‘Christian’ duties. The ‘Christian’ duties relied on European Christian norms, and these were, at the time, highly gendered. The Indian society the missionaries and their wives met was gendered, too, but in a different way, and not all norms the missionaries sought to convey made sense to the Indians. In a first part, the chapter analyses supposedly Christian norms and the debates concerning them. It can thus demonstrate how the European missionaries came to realise the Europeanness of their norms, in what way they tried to appropriate them to the Indian context, and in what respects they stuck to their European conceptions and thus used discursive violence against the Indians. In a second part, the chapter deals with deviance from the norms on the part of the missionaries, which was, in these first years, always accompanied by violence. One story that caused the highest uproar at the time serves as a case study in this chapter: that of the missionary who had an affair with an Indian woman for several years. When the other missionaries found out about it, the reacted very quickly and sent the misdemeanant away. The arguments between the Basel committee and the missionaries in India about these cases are only one side of the story. More important are the Indian reactions (as far as we can discern them in the sources) and the religious argumentation of the culprits as well as the other missionaries. The story illustrates how religion was used in order to explain deviant behaviour, what influence religion had on sexual practices and violence – and also when religion was misused (and considered to be misused by those who adhered to the norms) in order to excuse personal deficiencies. It also demonstrates the role religion played in the interaction between European missionaries and Indian converts and how each side interpreted it in a way that it strengthened their case. In this way, it demonstrates the constructiveness of religious assumptions as well as gender norms.
