Browse
In the geo-politics of empire from the 1770s to the 1830s, the northeast was undergoing a period of transition, in which a zone of indeterminacy became an edge, and a barrier became incorporated into a known region. Cherrapunji thus became a distinctive landmark, a node in the imperial network. At an intimate and personal level, the Khasi Hills were becoming a domesticated destination and end point as much as a staging post and site of transience. The regional subtleties of climate in India may not have been fully understood either by the London Missionary Society (LMS) or the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS). The Khasi Hills were something altogether different and unexpected. 'The tranquillity of the borders', asserted Francis Jenkins, 'can only be effectually and economically provided for, by maintaining our ascendancy in the Hills'.
After losing sight of the Welsh mountains and Ireland, Thomas and Ann Jones headed for the Cape of Good Hope and on across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. As days became weeks, John Roberts plotted the Jamaica in its imaginary course to Calcutta. Lieutenant-General Hay Macdowall, who had gone down with the Lady Jane Dundas, had been returning to England in the aftermath of rebellion and disaffection in the Madras Presidency. The burial registers at St John's Church in Calcutta had numerous entries for passengers and crew who had sickened and died by the end of their voyage. In a sense, the India they had constructed was unspecific, not anchored to the detail of this particular time or that particular place. At another level, however, the Thomas Jones's voyage of discovery became an expedition that confirmed and validated the real India.
In 1841, the Welsh sent their first missionary, Thomas Jones, to evangelise the tribal peoples of the Khasi Hills of north-east India. This book follows Jones from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth and now one of the most Christianised parts of India. It is about the piety and practices, the perceptions and prejudices of people in early nineteenth century Wales. The book is also about the ways in which the religious ambitions of those same people operated upon the lives and ideas of indigenous societies of the distant Khasi Hills of north-eastern India. It foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. Its themes are universal: crises of authority, the loneliness of geographical isolation, sexual scandal, greed and exploitation, personal and institutional dogma, individual and group morality. In analysing the individual lives that flash in and out of this history, the book is a performance within the effort to break down the many dimensions of distance that the imperial scene prescribes. It pays attention to a 'networked conception of imperial interconnection'. The book discusses Jones's evangelising among the Khasis as well as his conflicts with church and state authority. It also discusses some aspects of the micro-politics of mission and state in the two decades immediately following Thomas Jones's death. While the Welsh missionary impact was significant, its 'success' or indeed its novelty, needs to be measured against the pre-existing activities of British imperialists.
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book. The book expresses that the intimate and the personal should not be obscured by a focus on the public in history, and that mission history can be reshaped by attention to the role of the family therein. Assumptions about the ubiquity of the missionary wife have been dismantled through a close examination of early LMS policy and its utopian vision of racial intermarriage and cultural intermixing. The book demonstrates the undeniable importance of the familial context to a complex and nuanced understanding of mission history. It explores the nature of female involvement in mission, the dynamics of missionary parenting, the bi-cultural, interstitial and semi-professional nature of missionary children, and the role of the missionary himself within a familial framework of understanding.
This chapter considers second-generation missionaries: their utility to the LMS; the encouragement they received from their parents; their unique stance on many missionary issues, including cultural sympathy, linguistic fluency and climactic suitability; and ultimately the informal apprenticeship they received at the hands of their missionary parents. It also includes the response of newer generations of missionaries to the vocational inheritance and replication involved in that apprenticeship, and finally how second-generation missionaries were often just the beginning of long-standing missionary dynasties who spanned the globe as well as the generations. The chapter explores the role of the missionary dynasty in shaping the way mission hagiography and mission history has been written over the last century. The number of official second-generation missionaries, then, is probably insignificant compared to the number of informal second (and third) generation missionaries.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores both the institutional and the intimate history of the missionary family. It argues that situating missionary wives firmly within their familial, as well as their individual, regional and chronological context, allows for greater complexity and nuance in approaching the question of female vocation. Recent work by Esme Cleall has also sought to challenge the historiographical absence of missionary families, using 'families and households as a way in which to explore the intersections between gender, sexuality and race as they developed as discourses of difference'. Throughout its history the London Missionary Society (LMS) was constantly disappointed with the behaviour and function of missionary families. South Seas Mission and South African Mission are the first two missions of the LMS, out on the absolute border of the spiritual frontier.
The London Missionary Society (LMS) found itself embroiled in the intimacies of family life: from regulating and interfering with marriage, to monitoring missionaries' effectiveness as parents, and adopting an institutionally parental stance towards missionary children. This chapter explores the duality of missionary children, how their good and bad behaviour could actively shape the mission experience, and even more profoundly, how parental responses to the presence and absence of their children shaped missionary prejudice. For it was parental anxiety about the moral, spiritual and material prosperity of their children that often elicited the most prejudiced responses from missionary parents, whose concerns increasingly shifted from cultural chauvinism to concerns about racial contamination and contact, and thus ultimately the increased racialisation of missionary discourse. Missionary children's deviancy undermined the moral legitimacy of the mission from within, and powerfully contravened the basic tenets of evangelical respectability.
Missionary families were the building blocks of an enterprise that spanned the globe in the nineteenth (and twentieth) century. This book explores both the institutional and the intimate history of the missionary family. It is anchored in the specificities of the South Seas Mission and South African Mission: the first two missions of the London Missionary Society (LMS), out on the absolute border of the spiritual frontier. The book traces the history of the missionary couple's place within LMS mission objectives in the nineteenth century. Missionary wives became unofficial and unpaid missionaries themselves with carefully delineated gendered roles. The initial ambivalence about their role gave way to their ascendency in mid-century, only to be partially marginalised upon the arrival of single 'lady' missionaries from 1875 onwards. The book shows how the personal and professional lives of male and female missionaries were structured around marriage, and if they were lucky, companionate marriage. Male and female missionaries on the spiritual frontier had to deal with the all the difficulties and delights of parenthood in a state of perceived racial and cultural isolation. The book unpacks the duality of missionary children, how their good and bad behaviour could actively shape the mission experience. Second-generation missionaries were a success story for the LMS, received encouragement from their parents, had cultural sympathy, linguistic fluency and climactic suitability, and were often just the beginning of long-standing missionary dynasties.
This chapter explores the acceptance of the missionary family as the primary means of mission activity within that mission enterprise. Both wife and child became instrumental to mission, and were thereby incorporated into the enterprise. The consolidation of missionary families within LMS policy can be seen as a consistent attempt by the Directors to cushion against this costly and inconvenient possibility, and thus did not reflect a dramatic shift within the upper echelons of the Society, but rather continuity with the earlier financial mores of a humanitarian institution based on private charity. This shift manifested in two main ways: the establishment of regional schools for missionary children and the desire to create a new settler class based on missionary families. The missionary parents were divided in their own minds between wanting their children to be removed from regions of moral and physical contamination, and suffering the emotional consequences of separation.
This chapter expresses that recognising the difficulties missionary women faced in navigating structures of patriarchy and domesticity need not lead us inexorably away from an understanding of their lives as vocational, spiritual and indeed professional. It addresses the follow-up question, what could missionary wife do? What were the parameters of her professional, public or vocational existence? What did it mean for a white missionary woman to be a missionary wife? Mutual spirituality, kindness and love were fundamental to a happy missionary marriage, and a happy missionary marriage was fundamental to a successful mission. On the one hand, domestic normativity meant that correct domestic arrangements were an important part of mission work in itself. On the other, the companionate missionary marriage provided a conceptual space in which missionary women could weave domesticity into vocation, and could fulfil their spiritual agency through domestic action.