This paper intends to contextualise the life of Christianity in British India through the developments in military theology in the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century that put forth the image of the ‘soldier saint’- a true Christian soldier, British in blood and in faith. This discourse intensified after the military turned civilian Indian rebellion of 1857 which was immediately coloured in Christian vs heathen terms, and following which, the spiritual needs of Christian soldiers came into focus with the East India Company. The deaths, rituals and continued traditions of burial of the Christian soldiers, officers, and civilians have been marked through some prominent cemeteries and war memorials in India. While studies of these sites of memory have focused on the graves, tombs, and memorials in parts of north, west and south India, the frontier region of northeast India has remained outside the focus of most studies. This paper has chosen the eastern Himalayan territories comprising Sikkim and Kalimpong that fall on or near the Silk route to bring attention to the history of territorial aggression and the resulting material memory of lesser-known cemeteries and memorials Further. This paper analyses lesser discussed fiction to bring into focus the region’s human geography. This paper recognises the need to study inter-religious relations through materiality and afterlives of Christianity in India that was shaped to a large extent by the soldiers-both British and native, and the chaplains, gravediggers, priests and nurses and caregivers whose lives are recorded in the memory of death. By doing so, this study hopes to bring new dimensions to the study of Christianity in India with the inclusion of the materiality of religion, the postcolonial gothic imaginary and military theology.
This paper is a close study of early modern women’s poetry on childbirth and the imminent circumstances of maternal and foetal/infantile mortality in seventeenth century England. In tracing the development of women’s post-partum mental health from the medieval to the early modern period, this paper argues for a serious investment in literature composed as memoirs, poetry, diaries and funeral sermons as a means of understanding the trajectories and lacunae in women’s mental health in the early modern period. This study also argues for including the religious experience into any consideration of women’s post-partum health and therapeutic interventions. Lastly, it shows how affect studies have proved the recuperative potential in literature of consolation and mourning so that women’s writing begins to get recognized for its interventionist potential rather than a fossilized historical treatment as it has often received.
Abstract:William Butler Yeats's poem "Among School Children" is a meditation on love, essence, and change. This paper attempts to relate the Buddhist theories of essence and change to the core philosophical premises of the poem itself. Furthermore, through two specific Buddhist texts, Milindapanho by Nàgasena and Mūlamādhyamikakārikā by Nagarjuna, the paper illustrates similarities in terms of imagery and philosophical ideas in the specific stanzas of the poem, highlighting a philosophical foundation in musings on love and essence as they emerge in the poem.
Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1887–88), initially serialised in the Madras Christian College magazine is rightfully regarded as the first Indian spiritual autobiographical novel. Any study of this narrative compels one to explore the influence of the Evangelical autobiography on this genre in nineteenth century India as well as to engage with the distinctive aspects of an Indian Christian woman’s spiritual quest in British India. This study also argues for focus on the spiritual life of Indian Christianity as a valid way of according recognition to the experiences and struggles of the life of a religion that is outside of mainstream religious discourse in contemporary India.
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