Not unlike many parts of South Asia, foot-pedal-powered Singer sewing machines are ubiquitous in Sri Lanka's Jaffna Peninsula, as much an inheritance of missionary and colonial domestic education as an implication of the island's recent war. The social history of sewing and other needle arts extends deep into the Peninsula's early modern history, at least as far back as the Portuguese period. At the centre of this article sit a circle of young Tamil embroidering women who, in the mid-1840s, helped transform what it meant to be a modern Jaffna Tamil woman. This article reads the samplers of this set, the Oodooville Group, as source material into the pedagogical and devotional worlds in which they lived. The article argues that the works, each characterised by a riot of colour, constitute an experiment in mission pedagogy revealing an encounter and momentary negotiation of both aesthetics and devotion between missionaries and the students they sought to convert.

Emma Willard's map-drawing geographic pedagogy revolutionized early nineteenth-century American education, turning students into participants in the crafting of the new nation. This essay explores the conditions under which map drawing was transported to American missionary schools in South Asia and helped instigate a Tamil nation in British Ceylon. What did the missionaries intend the teaching method to impart? What were the consequences of this pedagogical form on dominant Tamil portrayals of space and identity in Ceylon? To answer these questions and to track the foreign career of American didactic mapmaking, this essay draws on print and manuscript archival materials, including two maps by a Tamil student at the American Ceylon Mission named Robert Breckenridge. The essay argues that the use of map-drawing pedagogy in Ceylon partially transmitted American ways of being in the world, which were consequential for local spatial knowledges and the crafting of a Tamil national identity on the island.

This microhistory of the early nineteenth-century school-building efforts of a Tamil preacher in British Ceylon tracks an intersection between missionary education, British colonialism, and South Asian modernity. Christian David (1771–1852) was born into a Tamil Christian family with deep connections to the Royal Danish-Halle Mission at Tranquebar and educated by German missionaries Christian Friedrich Schwartz and Christoph Samuel John, like his more famous contemporaries King Serfoji ii of Tanjore and the celebrated Christian poet Vētanāyakam Cāstiriyār. In the year 1801, after declining employment in Serfoji’s court, David accepted an offer to become ‘Preacher in the Malabar Language in the District of Jafnapatam’. Drawing upon his extensive, albeit little-known writings, this essay argues that David expanded upon the mixed Tamil-German education of his childhood and the pedagogical experimentation of his missionary mentors to propose and construct a pioneering and consequential state-funded boarding school explicitly seeking to cultivate governable subjects.

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In 1832, a woman named Caṅkari Nāki died in Ceylon, and her descendants have been haunted by a curse ever since. One of the first converts of the American Ceylon Mission, Nāki was part of an enslaved caste community unique to the island, and one of the few oppressed-caste members of the mission. The circumstances of her death are unclear; the missionary archive is silent on an event that one can presume would have affected the small Christian community, while the family narrative passed through generations is that Nāki was murdered by members of the locally dominant Vellalar caste after marrying one of their own. In response to this archival erasure, this essay draws on historical methods developed by Saidiya Hartman and Gaiutra Bahadur to be accountable to enslaved and indentured lives and, in Hartman’s words, to “make visible the production of disposable lives.” These methods actively question what we can know from the archives of an oppressor, and for this essay, enable a reading of Nāki’s life at the center of a mission struggling over how to approach caste. Nāki’s story, I argue, helps reveal an underexplored aspect of the interrelationship between caste and slavery in South Asia, and underlines the value of considering South Asian slave narratives as source material into historiographically- and archivally-obscured aspects of dominant caste identity.