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Abstract
This article challenges the contention that it is not feasible to trace the agency of subaltern female subjects in colonial documents without at the same time distorting and even violating that very agency. Taking as its prism a letter written by a male Danish missionary chronicling a young Pariah woman’s escape from missionary control in early 20th-century South India, it argues that while a search for authentic, autonomous agency is a highly dubious endeavour, relinquishing attempts to recover the acts and interventions of persons at the bottom of social hierarchies is equally problematic. Suggesting a reading ‘along as well as against the grain’, the article tracks the ways in which the subaltern woman’s agency has been simultaneously recorded and denied, and argues for the necessity of probing both the possibilities and impossibilities presented by this type of a source.
Acknowledgements
I thank Heidi Betts, Søren Rud, Gunvor Simonsen and Signild Vallgårda, as well as editor Rasmus Mariager and two anonymous peer reviewers at the Scandinavian Journal of History for constructively critical comments and suggestions.
Notes
1 Fred paa Jorden [Peace on Earth] was published in the years 1905–1910; Derude fra [From Out There] was published in the years 1910–1924.
2 The following account is based on this letter. Carl Hornbech, Brev Fra Missionær Hornbech.
3 Unfortunately, we do not know the exact age of either Vasakam or Lazarus. Carl Hornbech refers to Vasakam as a ‘young girl’ and to Lazarus as a ‘young man’. However, the missionary also mentions that Lazarus’s wife had run away eight or nine years earlier. Based on this it seems plausible that Vasakam was in her late teens, while Lazarus was probably in his (late) twenties. Hornbech, Brev Fra Missionær Hornbech [Letter from Missionary Hornbech], 259.
4 The term Pariah (in Danish, Paria) is most likely an Anglicization of the term Parayiar, which was the name of one of the largest Dalit castes in colonial South India. The Danish missionaries, however, seem to have used the term rather indiscriminately to refer to various stigmatized social groups and not just those who were Paraiyar of origin. See also Viswanath, ‘Spiritual Slavery’, 125.
5 On the condition of the Pariahs in the Danish mission field, see e.g. Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society.
6 Hornbech, ‘Fra Sjerien’, 74. All translations are by the author.
7 Hornbech, ‘Fra Sjerien’, 74–5. On the notion of the interconnectedness of domesticity and morality in the Danish missionary community, see chapter 4 in my Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission. As Eliza Kent has shown, late 19th-century British missionaries operated with similar ideas of Indian low-caste domesticity. See Kent, Converting Women, 127–64.
8 Referring to the biblical figure Lazarus of Bethany who according to the Gospel of John 11: 1–44 was miraculously brought back to life by Jesus after having been dead for four days; the name Lazarus was not uncommon among Christian converts in South India.
9 Hornbech, Brev Fra Missionær Hornbech, 259.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 260.
12 Ibid., 261.
13 Ibid., 263.
14 Ibid., 263.
15 For more on the Danish mission, see my Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission.
16 Ann Laura Stoler introduced the concept of reading ‘along the grain’ in her article, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’. See also Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
17 Currently, the term ‘subaltern’ is used broadly to refer to marginalized groups in society. Deriving from military language, ‘subalterns’ originally referred to subordinates in the soldierly hierarchies. The Subaltern Studies School borrowed and developed the term from Antonio Gramsci who used it to refer to marginalized and oppressed social groups outside traditional and formal political structures.
18 Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, 1481.
19 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 296. In her analysis of the debates on sati (widow self-immolation) in the 1820s India, Lata Mani shows that these debates allowed no space for a female voice. Women, she argues, were ‘neither subject, nor object, but ground’ for a power battle between different groups of men. Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, 153. Their subjecthood is, in other words, appropriated for other purposes when in this discourse they are spoken of (rather than for, to, or with).
20 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 306. See also Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’ for a brilliant discussion of the ways in which the discipline of history, even when it aims at critically interrogating colonial power, tends to reinforce the epistemological and teleological conditions that enabled colonial rule.
21 Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’.
22 Spivak has certainly also suggested ways of navigating the difficult politics of representation. One of her best-known concepts, ‘strategic essentialism’ names a methodology or a form of activism which temporarily and strategically accepts identities as essential. In doing this, the scholar or activist must however constantly recognize the danger of fixation and reactionary politics inherent in the strategy. For a discussion of this concept and the misunderstandings of it, see Ray, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 107–38
23 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 196.
24 Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, 1482.
25 See footnote 12.
26 Bundgaard, Det danske Missionssellskabs Historie, vols. 1–2. See also Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society.
27 Bundgaard, Det danske Missionssellskabs Historie, vols. 1–2. See also Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission.
28 For a discussion of the ways in which the missionaries sought to produce such true Christians out of Indian children on the model of the ideal bourgeois European Christian, see Vallgårda, ‘Adam’s Escape’. For a discussion of the missionary understanding of conversion as always implying more than mere baptism, see e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1; Hall, Civilising Subjects.
29 Etherington, ‘Introduction’, 7. For a similar point, see Doran, ‘A Fine Sphere for Female Usefulness’, 104.
30 The relationship between Christian mission and colonialism is a deeply contentious one with scholars such as Robert Frykenberg and Andrew Maxwell arguing that there were more conflicts than commonalities between colonial and missionary projects. See Frykenberg, ‘Christians in India’; Frykenberg, ‘Christian Missions and the Raj’; see also Maxwell, ‘Decolonisation’. However, while there were often concrete conflicts and disagreements between the Christian missionaries and the different colonial governments, overall the missionaries participated in the production and perpetuation of hierarchical differences that undergirded colonial rule.
31 See Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission.
32 On the transnationalism and global scope of the mission movement, see e.g. Nielssen, Okkenhaug, and Skeie, ‘Introduction’ and Elbourne, ‘Religion in the British Empire’, 144.
33 See the Introduction from Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission.
34 Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, 6.
35 Hornbech, Brev Fra Missionær Hornbech, 260.
36 Priyam illai is Tamil and means as Carl Hornbech wrote, ‘I do not wish to go.’ Amma is Tamil for ‘Mother’.
37 Hornbech, Brev Fra Missionær Hornbech, 261.
38 Ibid., 261.
39 Ibid., 261–2.
40 For an interesting analysis of missionary patriarchal models of power, see also Thomas, ‘Colonial Conversions’.
41 See my Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission, particularly ch. 4. Other missions had different policies, however. Lisa Curtis-Wendtland has thus argued that the German Lutheran missionaries in the Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia around the same time operated with a vision of the male missionary as a father to the adult congregation members, and that this notion helped legitimize the use of corporal punishment. Curtis-Wendlandt, ‘Corporal Punishment and Moral Reform’.
42 Hornbech, Brev Fra Missionær Hornbech, 263.
43 One could also make similar assertions about Lazarus.
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Karen Vallgårda
Karen A.A. Vallgårda, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of history at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission. Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark, which is due to be published with Palgrave Macmillan in late 2014.