ABSTRACT
In recent decades, social and cultural historians have identified the nineteenth century as an era of momentous socioreligious reform in India. The reformers tended to belong to different religions, most notably Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian movements, who used various forms of religious authority to legitimize their programmes for religious and social change. Whether indigenous in origin or Western influenced, all attempted to address a key issue-namely, the position of women. Standard social histories have traditionally treated the subject as an interaction between missionaries, indigenous men and modernizing forces under colonialism.1 What compelled socioreligious movements to address the issue of women’s status and why the image of Indian womanhood was recast during the nineteenth century by Indian male reformers and conservatives has now received attention from feminist scholars.2 However, despite the increased focus on the status and image of women in these studies, scant attention has been paid to the central subject of the social reform movements, the women themselves.3 Issues, such as the motivations of Indian women in participating in the socioreligious reform movements and movements of religious conversion, their views on the male reformist and conservative discourses and their acceptance or rejection of representations of Indian womanhood, are all areas that have not yet received the attention from scholars in the
field that their significance merits. By examining the way in which women participated in these programmes of socioreligious reform, this book aims to redress this balance by placing women at the centre of their own narrative. The early feminist movement in western India was intrinsically linked to a gendered approach to issues of faith and belief systems. It seems to be a universal phenomenon that the definition and discourse on the ‘nature’ of ‘woman’ originated in commentaries on religious texts, which authorize patriarchal customs. The assumed ‘inferiority’ of women in the Western tradition, for instance, stemmed from the oldest Biblical stories of the creation of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man. Contesting negative representations of womanhood has therefore been a preoccupation of Western women, generating a thousand years of feminist Bible criticism.4 The significance to Western women of their relationship to religion is not unique and particular to them alone, but similar patterns are observable in all parts of the world; for instance, the Bhakti movements in medieval India demonstrate religious revisionism by women.5 Religion has therefore been the principal arena in which women have fashioned their weapons of opposition, providing them with their chief passage to feminist consciousness. This chapter not only analyzes the participation of Indian Christian women in the era of social and religious reform movements but also aims to develop a better understanding of the motivations of a certain section of Indian women who became Christians by looking at why Christian doctrines and ‘mission Christianity’ were so attractive to them.6 In tracing the growth of feminist consciousness, it will be shown that their feminist critiques came through a process of questioning the ‘position of women’ in the dominant religion of their birth and time, Hinduism, before rejecting it in favour of Christianity. Neither were their actions, like their male counterparts, prompted by mere intellectual abstractions. Indian Christian women pioneered both nonsegregated educational schemes and the Indian philanthropic enterprise of the nineteenth century through their organizational work in the provision of homes for widows and prostitutes, as well as participating in schemes for famine and plague relief. Most of the women studied here were involved in indigenizing Christianity to suit Indian women’s needs and their nondenominational Christian work, although frowned upon and attacked by missionaries, gained national and international recognition. These pioneers were not only significant in their own right but were of
great importance in influencing a far larger number of Maharashtrian women, who were inspired to continue the search for an identity and pursue programmes of welfare work specifically for women.7 As well as examining how and why Christianity proved so attractive to some Indian women, this chapter has also been prompted by the need to remove the misconceptions of some historians of Indian Christianity, in particular, the idea that converts were mainly recruits from the lowest castes of India or the presumption that female converts were merely following the lead of the menfolk of their households.8 In fact, Indian Christian women who had formerly been Brahmins, the highest in the caste hierarchy, produced some of the finest feminist critiques of Hinduism, and far from following their men folk, women exhibited a remarkable independence of judgement, whether in resisting or choosing Christianity. Their response to missions and missionary activity are not only important in demonstrating their agency, but hold potential for assessing the degree of social change brought by American and European missions in Asian countries, a question that contemporary scholarship has recognized can only be satisfactorily answered by studying the Asian response.9 By treating Indian Christian women as active rather than passive agents, it is also hoped that another serious gap in Indian historiography is redressed-the exclusion of Indian Christians from mainstream histories of India. Discussing the various approaches to the study of Western religion (Christianity) and imperialism, Jeffrey Cox has argued persuasively that South-Asian Christians have become victims of the historical critiques of imperialism and colonialism,10 demonstrating that, within historical scholarship, missionaries have been portrayed as ‘imperialists’, reducing Indian Christians to the status of ‘collaborators’ and Pakistani Christians to ‘heretics’. By treating Indian Christian women as agents of their own history, it will be established that rendering Indian Christians as mere ‘by-products’ of mission
Christianity is an untenable proposition. As this chapter will demonstrate, their attitudes towards Christianity were much more complex and their rethinking of Christian rhetoric far more than simply ‘derivative’ phenomena.11
