Hindu Widows as Religious Subjects: The Politics of Christian Conversion and Revival in Colonial India

Mondal, Sharleen

doi:10.1353/jowh.2017.0035

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…This patriarchal perception continued during the early modern and colonial periods particularly, until the first half of the nineteenth century India where majority of the women hardly had access to education (Sarasvati 1888, pp. 50-60;Mondal 2017).…”

Section: Revisiting the Binarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Religions, Women and Discourse of Modernity in Colonial South India

Doss

2022

Religions

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Colonial education and missionary discourse of modernity intensified struggles for continuity and change among the followers of Hinduism and Christianity in nineteenth century India. While missionary modernity was characterised by an emphasis on sociocultural changes among the marginalized women through Christian norms of decency, orthodox Hindus used traditional cultural practices to confront missionary modernization endeavours. This article posits that the discourse of missionary modernity needs to be understood through the principles of Western secular modernity that impelled missionaries to employ decent clothing as a symbol of Christian femininity. It argues that missionary modernity not only emboldened the marginalized women to challenge their ascribed sociocultural standing but also solidified communitarian consciousness among the followers of Hinduism and Christianity substantially. Even though Travancore state defended the entrenched customary practices, including women’s attire patterns, with all its potency through authoritative proclamations, it could not dissuade missionaries from converting the marginalized women to missionary modernity.

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Section: Revisiting the Binarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Religions, Women and Discourse of Modernity in Colonial South India

Doss

2022

Religions

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Baptising Pandita Ramabai: Faith and religiosity in the nineteenth-century social reform movements of colonial India

Bhagabati

Sinha

Garg

2021

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

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This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai’s reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity—a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity—provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fall-out with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy’s oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women’s movement.

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Hindu Widows as Religious Subjects: The Politics of Christian Conversion and Revival in Colonial India

Cited by 2 publications

References 22 publications

Religions, Women and Discourse of Modernity in Colonial South India

Religions, Women and Discourse of Modernity in Colonial South India

Baptising Pandita Ramabai: Faith and religiosity in the nineteenth-century social reform movements of colonial India

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