Ramusack on Singh

Ramusack on Singh Barbara N. Ramusack Maina Chawala Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–1940s). New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Biographies of Christian women missionaries in Asia and Africa, produced since the late nineteenth century, were to inspire young women to emulate pioneer missionaries and to garner financial support for missionary schools and hospitals. With the revival of women’s history since the early 1970s, a trickle of analytical studies of women missionaries, frequently incorporating feminist, postcolonial intellectual frameworks, has raised questions about the relationships between missionaries and their indigenous audiences. Maina Chawala Singh’s Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands” synthesizes these two genres and utilizes biographies to dissect the uneasy coexistence of religious commitment and professional ambition among single women missionaries in colonial India. As in the monograph (1985) of Michelle Maskiell on the alumnae of Kinnaird College in Lahore and an essay (1998) by Jane Haggis on Indian “Bible women” in the south Indian princely state of Travancore, Singh integrates the voices of Indian women into her narrative along with extensive documentation from missionary records. Singh’s focus on women from the United States is a useful complement to Ruth Brouwer’s work on Canadian women and the scholarship on British women. Initially, Singh surveys female missionary activity in India ranging from the frustrations of missionary wives in their dual roles as creators of exemplary Christian families and unpaid and only indirectly acknowledged outreach workers among Indian women to the ways in which women missionaries constructed (through published missionary texts, unpublished private letters home, and oral presentations on fundraising tours during home leaves) Indian women as physically constrained by disease and the spatial boundaries of the zenana and intellectually stifled by ignorance. Research in missionary records as well as secondary works on missionaries in India and China, but not Africa, yields an informative overview. Still, these chapters would have been enhanced with data and insights from the pioneering dissertation of Charlotte Staelin on the American Marathi Mission and women’s education (Michigan, 1977) and the more recent work of Jane Haggis (1991, 1998, 1998). Singh then delineates the shift in goals, during the early twentieth century, from proselytism or conversion to evangelism; missionaries were to provide witness for Christ and personal examples of Christian virtues. Increased indigenization of missionary institutions, interdenominational cooperation, and greater cultural sensitivity characterized this latter phase. Singh’s analysis of developments in the twentieth century complements existing scholarship on the nineteenth century. After two chapters that emphasize how growing access to higher education created a pool of single, professionally trained, women teachers and physicians, biographical chapters on Isabella Thoburn, the founder of the first Christian women’s college in India at Lucknow, and on Ida S. Scudder, who established the Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamilnadu, illustrate how two extraordinary women combined religious faith and professional institution building. The concluding chapter captures the reminiscences of alumni from Isabella Thoburn and Kinnaird, who “recalled their college years as being active and stimulating” (p. 319). These women thought that the missionary colleges and their faculties had both created a sense of family and provided training in leadership skills that their students could utilize in paid careers or in unpaid volunteer activities. Singh speculates that their elite social status might have predisposed these Indian women to respond positively to missionary exhortations to assume responsibilities of leadership. Singh’s work is a useful assessment of how American women carved out constituencies within missionary organizations and initiates an exploration of their engagement with British colonial structures. Future researchers now may broaden our perspectives by expanding the range of sources. Two examples illustrate possibilities. One relates to the influence of professional and political rivalries. Files of the Madras government from the 1910s document the antagonistic attitudes of British male physicians and officials toward American medical education, as well as their misogynist, patriarchal attitude to women physicians, which dogged Ida Scudder’s efforts to establish a Christian medical college for women in Vellore. These sources elucidate the complex ways in which colonial power and professional structures affected intertwined missionary commitments to evangelism and educational institutions. Second, from December 1930 through March 1931, Ruth Woodsmall...

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