The Missionary Housemother and Her ‘Daughters’: Voice and agency in female subaltern spaces in 19th Century Malabar

ABSTRACT

The paper attempts to explore notions of public-private dichotomy with reference to collective agency and inclusion. It looks at a women’s shelter run by a missionary wife Julie Gundert of the Basel Mission in nineteenth-century Malabar. The missionaries played a key role in the introduction of printing and the development of a modern public sphere in the region: a space, nevertheless, restricted to men from the educated elite classes. Julie’s shelter, meanwhile, provides an alternate cultural space where women, especially those from the excluded communities, the disabled, the abandoned and the lowest classes and castes could come together. The shelter is seen as a location of intimate and privatised cultural contact radically different from that practised in the formal, restrictive sites of the emerging public sphere; a space where subaltern cultures challenged the status of the visible public sphere as the key platform for social-cultural inclusion and agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sphere
• private sphere
• subaltern space
• women’s culture
• cultural contact
• missionary

Acknowledgements

We thank Mythri Bangalore, Research Scholar, EFLU Hyderabad, for her contribution to the translation of Hermann Gundert’s German letters.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It must be noted that Spivak’s ‘public sector’ encompasses more than the scope of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’, going on to include ‘private’ enterprises and professional institutions. Meanwhile, Spivak’s private sector would include only Habermas’s private realm, the haunt of the emotional, the sexual and the domestic.

2. Errors are often found in Julie Gundert’s English letters. Julie, who was Swiss French often used English in her letters to her husband as part of her attempts to learn the language.

3. For example, Bhuta worship and related practices in coastal Karnataka were clearly shunned by the Basel Missionaries. ‘[T]he belief in spirits, which they took for demons, together with rituals connected with wild dances, frenzy, loud drumming and other music and blood sacrifices, seemed particularly repugnant to the [Basel] missionaries … ’ Brückner (1996: 195–6). For how these practices came to be attached with the Tulu language itself, and thereby influenced the language policy of the Basel Missionaries, see Koudur (2020).

4. Edward Brennan, an Englishman who lived in Thalassery was a prominent educationist and philanthropist. The Free English school that was founded from the proceeds of his will went on to become the Government Brennen College, the first of its kind in the region and one of its most prominent (Raychaudhuri, 2021, p. 36). Brennen who never married, had an illegitimate daughter Flora through a native woman. The Gundert letters speak of the 10-year-old Flora who was admitted to Julie Gundert’s shelter in 1840 and continued to be under their care till her death in 1847. (H. Gundert, 1840b), (H.Gundert, 1847b).