dc.contributor.advisor | Daechsel, Markus | en |
dc.contributor.advisor | Bates, Crispin | en |
dc.contributor.advisor | Harding, Christopher | en |
dc.contributor.author | Lewis, Caroline | en |
dc.date.accessioned | 2016-03-08T11:29:35Z | |
dc.date.available | 2016-03-08T11:29:35Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2014-11-26 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15737 | |
dc.description.abstract | Establishing India explores how British Protestant women’s foreign missionary
societies of the mid nineteenth century established and negotiated outreach to the
women and girls of India. The humanitarian claims made about Indian women in the
missionary press did not translate into direct missionary activity by British women.
Instead, India was adopted as a site of missionary activity for more complex and
local reasons: from encounters with opportunistic colonial informants to seeking
inclusion in national organisations.
The prevailing narrative about women’s missionary work in nineteenth-century
India is both distorted and unsatisfactory. British women’s missionary work has
been characterised as focused on seeking to enter and transform the high-caste Hindu
household. This both obscures other important groups of females who were key
historical actors, and it reduces the scope of women’s work to the domestic and
private. In fact, British women missionaries sought inclusion in mainstream
missionary strategies, which afforded them visibility, largely through establishing
schools and orphanages. They also engaged with mainstream discourses of colonial
and missionary education in India.
Establishing India also details how India was established for British missionary
women through texts and magazines. Missionary magazines provided British
women with a continuous record of women’s work in India, reinforcing a belief in
the providential rightfulness of the project. Magazines also both facilitated and
misrepresented various types of work that British women engaged with in India:
orphan sponsorship was established through the magazines and myths of zenana
work were constructed. Missionary magazines were crucial to counteracting male
narratives of white female absence or victimhood in India and they served to keep
the women’s missionary project in India both visible and intact. | en |
dc.language.iso | en | |
dc.publisher | The University of Edinburgh | en |
dc.relation.hasversion | Lewis, Caroline. ‘Captive Women and Manly Missionaries: Narratives of Women’s Work in India’ in Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Volume 2 Britain and the Indian Uprising, edited by Andrea Major and Crispin Bates, New Delhi: Sage, 2013, pp. 95-109. | en |
dc.subject | gender and Empire | en |
dc.subject | nineteenth-century women missionaries | en |
dc.subject | Scottish missions to India | en |
dc.subject | British women in colonial India | en |
dc.subject | missionary magazines | en |
dc.subject | English women's missions | en |
dc.subject | Scottish women's missions | en |
dc.title | Establishing India: British women’s missionary organisations and their outreach to the women and girls of India, 1820-1870 | en |
dc.type | Thesis or Dissertation | en |
dc.type.qualificationlevel | Doctoral | en |
dc.type.qualificationname | PhD Doctor of Philosophy | en |