Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940Imperial Fault Lines tells the history of Christian missionary encounters with non-Christians in a part of the world where there were no Christians at all until the advent of British imperial rule in the early nineteenth century. As British and American missionaries spread out from Delhi into the heartland of Punjab, their preconceived ideas about Hinduism and Islam broke down rapidly as they established institutions requiring the close cooperation of Indians. Two-thirds of the foreign missionaries who entered the Punjab were women, and issues of gender as well as race were central dilemmas in a cultural encounter that featured numerous irresolvable conflicts. The missionaries' commitment to Christian universalism clashed with the visible realities of their imperial privileges. Although determined to build multiracial institutions based on spiritual equality, missionaries were the beneficiaries of an imperial racial hierarchy. Their social encounters with Indians were exceedingly complex, involving intimacy and affection as well as affronts and betrayals. Missionaries were compelled to react to circumstances not of their own making, and were forced to negotiate and compromise with Indian Christians, government officials, Indian critics of the missionary movement, and the many non-Christian students, patients, and staff at large and influential missionary schools, colleges, and hospitals. In villages, university-educated clergymen who had hoped to convert the Hindu and Muslim elite found themselves in the surprising position of advocating the rights of stigmatized and oppressed rural laborers. The history of elite institution-building took surprising turns during the rise of the national movement, as missionaries struggled with the conflict between their own transparent entanglement with imperialism and their attempts to foster new forms of indigenous Christianity that would outlive British imperial rule. |
Contents
XXXIX | 155 |
XL | 156 |
XLI | 163 |
XLII | 166 |
XLIII | 167 |
XLIV | 171 |
XLV | 175 |
XLVI | 179 |
XLVII | 181 |
XLVIII | 186 |
XLIX | 189 |
L | 190 |
LI | 194 |
LII | 196 |
LIII | 201 |
LIV | 206 |
LV | 208 |
LVI | 209 |
LVII | 211 |
LVIII | 212 |
LIX | 221 |
LX | 223 |
LXI | 224 |
LXII | 226 |
LXIII | 233 |
LXIV | 239 |
LXV | 242 |
LXVI | 246 |
LXVII | 250 |
LXVIII | 253 |
LXIX | 259 |
LXX | 264 |
LXXI | 266 |
LXXII | 271 |
LXXIII | 329 |
LXXIV | 351 |
Common terms and phrases
American Presbyterian Amritsar Anglican Baptist Bhiwani Bible and Medical Bishop of Lahore British C. F. Andrews Calcutta Cambridge Mission catechists Chamar Chris Christ Chuhra Church Missionary Society Church of Scotland Clarkabad clergy conversion culture Delhi dian English European evangelical fakir girls Gospel High School Hindi Hindu History Hospital hymns Ibid imperial Indian Christians Indian church Indian Female Evangelist Indian women Islam Lahore Lefroy London Ludhiana male Medical Mission Miss mission institutions mission schools Mission to Delhi missionaries and Indian Missionary Conference missionary movement Muslim Narowal Native Church Council Nineteenth Century non-Christian North India Oxford Peshawar preaching Princeton Protestant Punjab Punjab Mission religion religious Report rhetoric Robert Clark Rowland Bateman Salvation Army Salvationist Samaj Sialkot Sialkot Mission Sikh sion sionaries social Stephen's Sundar Singh teachers teaching Thomas Valpy French tian tion University Press untouchable Urdu village Christians western women missionaries Zabur Zenana Zenana Bible
Popular passages
Page 39 - We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern ; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
Page 15 - Eyes defines contact zones as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination — like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.
Page 33 - Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity, and acknowledging with gratitude the solace of religion, we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects.
Page 25 - I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
Page 15 - Ethnographers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.
Page 147 - ... when American missionaries visit Mano Majra the sweepers wear khaki sola topees and join their womenfolk in singing hymns to the accompaniment of a harmonium. Sometimes they visit the Sikh temple, too. But there is one object that all Mano Majrans — even Lala Ram Lai — venerate. This is a three-foot slab of sandstone that stands upright under a keekar tree beside the pond. It is the local deity, the deo to which all the villagers — Hindu, Sikh, 10 Muslim or pseudo-Christian — repair secretly...
Page 14 - It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
Page 277 - The Missions of the Church Missionary Society, and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society in the Punjab and Sindh.