‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India¹

Abstract

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its rst missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the rst of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission elds in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of 'the colonial girl' and 'the Australian girl' played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they af rmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British.In rethinking histories of empire, scholars have turned to explore the interrelationships between the metropole and the colony. Thus Catherine Hall has written of the need to understand the ways in which 'the histories of Britain and empire have been mutually dependent'. She comments:It was the colonial encounter that made both colonisers and colonised, all of whom are subjects of the erstwhile British empire, sharing a common history, all post-colonial subjects, made by the relations of empire, with identities constituted through different relations to colonial and imperial hierarchies of power. (Hall, 1995: 49)

Histories of teachers in Australia and New Zealand from the 1970s to the present

“…Godden (1997, p. 78) states that "the first Australian woman missionary, apart from missionary wives, left to work in China [in 1888] and in 1892 two women began in New Guinea". Australian women missionaries were also teaching in India (Allen, 2000(Allen, , 2010. Few historians of education have inquired into Protestant women missionaries' careers but their work has been debated by postcolonial and mission historians.…”

Antipodeans Abroad: Trends and Issues in the Writing of New Zealand Mission History

“…As a result she argues that Australian women missionaries constructed a set of identities "affirming the gender and race hierarchies of the British Empire," and accentuating the fact that they were "white and Christian." 40 For New Zealand this discussion has taken place in the specific missionary contexts of India, China, and the Melanesian archipelagos of Vanuatu (the New Hebrides) and the Solomon Islands. 41 As a result there is a relative lack of consensus as to the relationship between New Zealand missions and imperialism/ journal of religious history © 2006 Association for the Journal of Religious History colonialism.…”

“…3 (1992" 'Cultural Imperialism' and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780-1914," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, No. 3 (1997 [39][40]" 'Cannibals for Christ,' " iii,14. 45. Early, " 'If we Win the Women,' " 129.…”

Gender and Empire: Intimacies, Bodies, Detritus

“…Australian women missionaries in the late nineteenth century converted Indian women whose intimate spaces only they could access; together they claimed membership in an international community of Baptists, an alternative to British hegemony. 35 The modernization of Islam is also broadening the range of regions and thematic emphases in gender and empire scholarship. Studies of Islamic Feminism extend our ability to trace its global reach.…”