Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark by Karen Vallgårda (review)

In this informative monograph, Karen Vallgårda takes on the subject of Danish mission education among subaltern children in southern India between 1864 and the First World War. At the broadest level, the author argues that whereas the early stage of this encounter between European missionaries and “native” children was premised on assumptions of fundamental racial difference, the later period evidenced the growing influence of universalist notions of the child, which was deployed in an effort to detach orphaned and surrendered children rhetorically and socially from the racial circle of their parents. The protracted engagement with Indian children became a crucial source of European knowledge about childhood, family, and the moral value of whiteness.

Central to Vallgårda’s analysis is the concept of “emotional labor,” or the management of emotions for publicly and politically relevant purposes. This labor, she argues, not only allowed the missionaries to define themselves, but also served to destabilize and reorder the social configurations with reference to which they operated: family units, the mission communities, and ultimately, the colonial world of race and power. She draws attention to the failure of early attempts to imprint native children with the physical and behavioral markers of a superior discipline: a productive failure that drew upon and reinforced narratives of a racial gap that justified colonial relations of power. She skillfully situates the mission schools within the politics of their localities, in which different groups of native parents had their own priorities and prejudices that the missionaries were compelled to negotiate. In the final years of the Victorian era, however, the Danes were increasingly implicated in discourses and practices that sought to infantilize Indian adults, undermining their parental fitness, excluding them from the mission community, and widening the emotional—and racial—distance between them and their children. For many children, that meant an alienation for which there was no satisfactory compensation. Vallgårda goes on to explore the intersections of science, morality, and well-being in this reformulated emotional space, where native reproduction and childcare were pathologized and marked for colonization by an expertise that was simultaneously universal and exclusive. She also shows how these imageries of pathological native familiality and recuperative mission life were presented to children of all classes in Denmark, normalizing their childhoods as well as their understandings of race and religious identity.

One of the strong points of the study is the examination of the missionaries’ own families, which, Vallgårda points out, were also sites of emotional labor. Missionaries who sought to “take over” the children of natives also had children of their own, who were often exiled to Denmark or lost to illness and death, forcing the parents into wrenching exercises of managing loss and grief. While this “sentimental” aspect of the colonial experience is well known to readers of Victorian literature, Vallgårda enriches it by connecting it not only to tropes of sacrifice and fortitude in empire, but to the project of forging new bonds of affect in which race remains an abiding preoccupation.

There are some “missing pieces” in the analysis. There should be a fuller unpacking of how Danes were colonizers in a British colony: i.e., of how their distance from the military and administrative work of empire may have shaped their emotional work as teachers and parents, differentiating their project not only from those of the British, but also from those of modernizing Indians. Overall, however, this is a rich, sensitive, and welcome contribution to the history of colonialism and childhood.