Making a life in India: American missionary households in nineteenth-century Madurai

Melissa Lewis Heim, Boston College

Abstract

This study describes the lives of two generations of American missionaries in South India. It analyzes how missionaries constructed their lives in terms of American and Indian interactions characterized by shifting relations of power. Based on official mission correspondence and records, as well as personal letters and journals of missionaries and Indians, the study operates on several levels. As the only scholarly treatment of the American Madura Mission, it presents a chronological account of mission organization and work, interweaving missionary family histories involving marriage, childbirth, children's education and trips to the United States with a story of mission policy development over time. In addition to this diachronic perspective, the study also analyzes synchronic issues of American missionary life in South India. It demonstrates how missionaries formed identities within the context of a complex network of American and Indian relationships influenced by constructions of race, class, gender and age. Chapter One briefly surveys western traditions of writing about other parts of the world and places American missionary writing within that tradition. It argues that both missionaries themselves and historians writing about missionary activity have, to varying degrees, ignored the agency of indigenous people. Missionaries and many historians have constructed an essential identity for Indians, for example, which has left Indian autonomy and resistance unacknowledged. The chapter proposes an alternative approach to writing a history about missionaries, one which presupposes the agency of all actors, American and Indian, in the mission network. Chapters Two and Three interweave the life stories of five American missionary families with an account of the development of mission work in Madurai. Chapters Four through Seven present a close analysis of activities in missionary households and within the Indian-American mission network, revealing dimensions of dependency in missionary lives, as well as positions of power assumed by missionaries. The final chapter traces the experiences of missionary children from their birth in India, their formal education in the U.S. and their return to mission life in India as adults.

Recommended Citation

Melissa Lewis Heim, "Making a life in India: American missionary households in nineteenth-century Madurai" (January 1, 1994). Boston College Dissertations and Theses. Paper AAI9504318.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI9504318