Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (review)

Eliza Kent traverses a number of intellectual minefields in her book about gender and Christian conversion in South India. The political situation of Indian Christians is a precarious one in the wake of a resurgence of Hindu nationalist politics. In the worlds of politics and scholarship alike, there are competing and irreconcilable interpretations of the relationship between Western imperialism and the missionary movement. Anti-imperialist and postcolonial scholars often treat the missionary movement as little more than a cultural extension of Western imperial expansion, colonizing the minds as well as the bodies of colonial subjects. In mainstream imperial history, which has seen a resurgence recently, missionaries normally appear—if at all—as marginal figures, as explorers, or troublemaking social reformers. In Christian history circles, missionaries are now treated as little more than detonators of those indigenous, non-Western Christian religions that are growing rapidly around the world and whose members do not want to be associated with a colonialist or imperialist past. Kent also has to decide how to talk about gender in imperial history, where women have only recently been noticed, and in missionary history, where the foundational narratives of male clerical heroism still obscure the fact that the missionary movement has been predominantly female.

Mrinalini Sinha opened up the topic of gender and imperialism in colonial India in her influential Colonial Masculinity (1995). Kent moves the discussion forward by going beyond the colonial state and focusing instead on the gendered nature of conversion and the working out of distinctive forms of South Indian Christian marriage. Gauri Viswanathan discussed the legal ramifications of conversion to Christianity for some Indian women in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998), but Kent takes the discussion beyond the handful of legal cases studied by Viswanathan by providing a thorough social and religious history of the varying and often agonizing legal dilemmas faced by Christian women and by the non-Christian wives of Indian Christian converts.

Kent combines social history and anthropology, using field work and historical documents alike in order to create a narrative in which the history of an emerging Indian community is described and analyzed in fascinating detail. She does not make the mistake of treating Indian Christians as passive absorbers of Western cultural styles. Nor does she assume that missionaries were marginal figures among Indian Christians. Although she does not use these terms, it is evident from her analysis that the relationship between missionaries and Indian Christians was dialectical, producing hybrid religious forms and unexpected compromises in social relationships.

Christian converts in South India came mostly from stigmatized social groups, sometimes referred to as untouchable, and it is obvious that one of the major attractions of Christianity lay in its ability to raise the level of respectability of their communities in the eyes of their neighbors. One benefit of Christianity was the creation of a literate, argumentative class of Indian Christian leaders who battled missionaries, the colonial state, and their neighbors alike in vigorous book and pamphlet wars over the historical origins of caste and marriage customs. Another benefit of conversion came from the adoption of various forms of marriage (not just one form, which is itself interesting) that conveyed greater respectability to the Christian community. The best known battle occurred over women's clothing in the "breast cloth controversy" of South India, when Indian Christian women supported by missionary advocates insisted on the legal right to cover their breasts in public. Kent contributes to this argument by putting it in the context of other struggles to raise the level of respectability among Christians and protect women from the danger of sexual violence.

Kent loses her way at times in her discussion of the theology of American and British women missionaries in India, conflating evangelicals and High Church Anglicans and placing too much stress on millenarian expectations and anxiety about hell. The majority of missionaries in South India were women who...