Graduate Student, History
Magdalen College
Thesis Title: British women missionaries in India, c.1917-1950
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Professor Judith Brown
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About
I have just completed my D.Phil. at Magdalen College, Oxford. My thesis is on 'British women missionaries in India, c.1917-1950.' It focuses upon the women missionaries of the two leading Anglican societies: the high-Church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the evangelical Church Missionary Society. It draws on women's reports and letters from the archives of the SPG at Rhodes House in Oxford and the CMS at the University of Birmingham, as well as research carried out at the United Theological College in Bangalore and amongst St Stephen’s Community in Delhi. The first chapter of the thesis will investigate these women’s backgrounds, how they were recruited and trained, and how much they knew about India before departing for the Mission Field. I then examine the difficulties which confronted missionaries in the field: tensions between their sense of religious vocation, their status as professional women, and the rules imposed upon them by the missionary society. I also explore the types of work carried out by women missionaries of the SPG and CMS in India – educational, medical and evangelistic. I assess the extent to which this work altered between 1917 and 1950 due to new strategies of Mission, developments in the Anglican Church at home and in the field, especially the formation of the Church of South India in 1947, and rising Indian nationalism, Independence and Partition. Throughout, I am seeking to highlight women missionaries’ complex and ambiguous position in imperial India. Commonly portrayed as marginalised figures ‘out beyond the slaughterhouses’ (as Forster put it), they were nevertheless linked to the Raj due to their race, cultural mores, and nationality. Their loyalties and priorities, however, lay with the Empire of Christ, not of Britain. I hope my thesis will illuminate important issues in the history of the Anglican Church and Mission, gender, Empire, Indian nationalism, and decolonisation.
