Hindu Widows as Religious Subjects: The Politics of Christian Conversion and Revival in Colonial India

This article examines how the Maharashtrian Hindu widow and convert to Christianity, Ramabai Dongre Medhavi (1858–1922), and the students at her widows’ school, Mukti Mission, contributed to early twentieth-century social reform in colonial India. This article specifically examines the 1905–1907 religious revival at Mukti Mission and poses two main arguments. First, the revival constituted a rejection of the constraints prescribed to Hindu widows under an oppressive orthodox Brahmin patriarchy. Second, despite its contestation of patriarchy, the revival narrative adopted by the Mukti women was fraught with imperial and racial hierarchies, limiting the gains wrought by the revival’s resistance of patriarchal constraints. These limitations are evident in Ramabai’s critique of the US and British missionary discourses that questioned the legitimacy of the Mukti revival in imperial and sexist terms. These two arguments provide deeper insight into the role of the religious practices and identities of Hindu widows who converted to Christianity in the emergence of Indian feminism.