ABSTRACT
In a book about Bengali women's perspectives on European women and their societies, Kardoo the Hindu Girl stands apart by virtue of it being penned by an American missionary Harriette G. Brittan, and in its apparent nonconformity to the thematic alignment of the book. Kardoo, a Hindu Brahmin girl, narrates her life from child to adulthood, focusing on particular religious and cultural incidents, which took place in her and her family members' lives. Kardoo the Hindoo Girl reiterates the fictional character of the autobiographical self at a different dimension. Kardoo was not the only endeavor of missionary Brittan to uplift women from non-Christian backgrounds. She wrote Shoshie, the Hindu Zenana Teacher, which was published in 1873 in New York. While the nineteenth-century American missionaries distinguished between race and culture, they rejected the biological determinism characterizing scientific racialism thereby certifying the 'heathen' and other races as fit to embrace Christianity.
