Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission

Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark

K. Vallgårda

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137432995
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Making an important addition to the highly Britain-dominated field of imperial studies, this book shows that, like numerous other evangelicals operating throughout the colonized world at this time, Danish missionaries invested remarkable resources in the education of different categories children in both India and Denmark.

1

Children and the Discordance of Colonial Conversions

Late at night on Saturday, March 12, 1865, an Indian boy, who had been named Adam, sneaked out of the dorm where he was supposed to be sleeping at the boarding school run by the Danish Missionary Society (DMS). If any of the other boys noticed his whereabouts, they did not stop him from going, but neither did they follow him. Adam found his way out of the compound and into the adjacent village of Pattambakkam. A loud rhythmic drumbeat mixed with screams and roars broke the silence of the night. It was the time of the full moon celebration, and in the village people were outside talking and laughing. A comedy was being performed, and there was dance, probably the specific South Indian trance dancing performed by the Pariahs. Adam soon found a spot among the applauding spectators.¹

Adam was one of about 40 children attending the boarding school in 1865. The school had been founded a few years earlier on the DMS’s first mission station, Betanien, in Pattambakkam. Like many other contemporary evangelicals, missionary Carl Ochs, who was in charge of the mission station, believed that caring for heathen children was his Christian duty.² The DMS missionaries aimed to save the souls of these little humans while, at the same time, instigating changes on a larger scale. Like missionaries elsewhere, they were ‘conscious agents of cultural transformation,’³ who sought to fundamentally rearrange the social and moral order of South Indian society. Intervening in the processes through which Indian children acquired social knowledge made up a central part of this project, and as a ‘total institution’ the boarding school in Pattambakkam was an important tool in this endeavor.⁴

Using archival and published sources from the DMS, this chapter traces the story of Adam and discusses the educational regimen at the boarding school in Pattambakkam from which he escaped on that March night. Focusing on the years 1864–1874 when Carl Ochs and his wife Sara Ochs ran the school,⁵ I investigate why the missionaries invested so much effort in raising the children, how they perceived the children, what they considered to be an ideal man or woman, and what means they employed to produce such individuals.

The work with children in Pattambakkam, I point out, was inherently paradoxical. On the one hand, the missionaries invested great resources in educating mostly Pariah girls and boys to become what they perceived to be good Christians, who acted in accordance with appropriate gendered and classed codes of conduct. On the other hand, the missionaries harbored deep doubts about the children’s potential to develop the kind of Christian subjectivity they were aiming at. This paradox was, however, a productive one, since it helped produce the fundamental differences that sustained colonial rule.

Shaping the next generation

Aside from a sense of Christian duty to bring the children to the Lord, the missionaries had a number of reasons to engage in the education of heathen children like Adam. The fact that the missionary attempts to reach adult heathens met considerable resistance was an important factor. As the following account illustrates, on his tours around the local villages, missionary Carl Ochs mostly encountered open defiance and mockery:

In a village, a group of people had gathered around me to listen. One of them in particular paid attention and showed interest so I hoped that the Word would make an impression on him. To his question about what he should live off, I read Matthew 6, 24–34 [which states that one cannot both serve God and mammon, that one should not worry about one’s material life, but if one seeks the heavenly Kingdom, one will be provided for]. Suddenly, he jumped up and exclaimed: ‘I’ll become Christian, if you give me 3,000 rupees.’ The others laughed, and the sermon had to end. Such instances are not seldom.⁶

Carl Ochs interpreted such expressions of indifference, contradiction, and ridicule as signs of the deep heathenism of the natives. The heathen adults, he noted, were generally more concerned with optimizing their material situation than with saving their souls.⁷

Although it is unlikely that economic considerations were the only reason why Pariahs were apparently indifferent or hostile to the missionary efforts, poverty very probably played a role. As noted in Introduction, the majority of these people had to live on extremely limited economic resources, working as landless laborers or getting by on a small piece of land.⁸ As I will discuss further in Chapter 2, making a livelihood could in fact become even more difficult following conversion to Christianity, which could result in stigmatization and persecution. However, in explaining the response of adult heathens, Carl Ochs pointed to pure greed. Like other contemporaries, he thus represented resistance to the missionary efforts as an indication of ‘moral decay.’⁹

Another reason why the missionaries sought out the children was their skepticism toward adults’ capacity for true conversion. Even when adult Indians did accept baptism, the missionaries often mistrusted the authenticity of their conversions. Suspicious of Indian cultural customs, Carl Ochs insisted that in order for Indians to become true Christians, their spiritual rebirth had to go hand in hand with a transformation of beliefs, desires, inclinations, and what one might call embodied social practices. As for so many other evangelical missionaries, true conversion involved a radical metamorphosis of the soul and mind as well as changed ways of living.¹⁰ Carl Ochs frequently expressed anxieties about the sincerity of adult conversions in letters to mission friends in Denmark.¹¹ Indeed, he wrote, ‘Awakenings, as one finds them among Christians, can not be expected among the heathen where there is not a spiritual sleep, but a spiritual death.’¹²

Ascertaining the difficulty of attracting adults and effecting true conversion among them, the missionaries directed their attention to children as more viable recipients of the gospel. As Carl Ochs stated:

One is inclined to return to the circle of people among whom one finds more fruit of one’s work, less evil, hypocrisy and deception than among the old, namely to the children. [With respect to] the generation which has grown up and has become old in heathenism, there is but little to do and in order for the following generations not also to become like it, the youth must be educated and properly raised.¹³

By targeting children, the missionaries tried to reach the heathen before they had become fully corrupted in their souls. The earlier they could begin to shape individuals into civilized Christian beings, the greater the chance that the conversion would be thorough, that the evil of the ‘dark depths of the rotten human heart’ would be eradicated,¹⁴ and that the proper sensibilities could be nurtured. Educating children was a future-oriented strategy and a natural step in ensuring the growth of a prosperous and properly organized Christian society. Yet, as I will argue, the missionaries doubted even children’s capacity to develop a true Christian subjectivity.

Subtle coercion

Like most of the children, Adam probably had Pariah background. But whether or not his family was from the local ceri, he had no daily contact with them. As in many other mission schools across the colonized world, the DMS missionaries deliberately sought to minimize contact between the children and their parents, whom they perceived to have a bad influence on their children. As Carl Ochs phrased it, ‘The boarding schools have the advantage over day schools in that they make the children complete and utter strangers to heathenism.’¹⁵ In the boarding schools in the Danish mission field, the children spent most of their time under the surveillance of Indian schoolteachers, the missionaries, or the missionary wives who were often in charge of the schools for children.¹⁶

The missionary texts in this period are not uniformly disapproving of Indian parents. The image of an apparently universal ‘mother’s heart’ was, for example, invoked as a commendable element in Indian parenting.¹⁷ Nevertheless, Indian parents were more frequently described not only as inadequate, but also as directly harmful to their children. At once too careless, exposing their children to all kinds of sinful talk and behavior, and too strict, for example in forcing girls to marry at an early age, the Indian parents got the education of their children all wrong. Native parents figured as emotionally cold and egoistic, willing to abuse and even kill their children for the sake of their heathen religion or to extract their children’s labor at the expense of their well-being.¹⁸ Or as too indulgent, comforting their children in situations where they ought to have admonished them for inappropriate behavior.¹⁹ Displaying distorted affective dispositions, in other words, they either loved too much or too little, and they certainly expressed their affection in problematic ways.²⁰

Unsuitability for parenthood was not just represented as a matter of religious affiliation. Rather, the missionaries implicitly connected it to the racial or national character of Indians. They noted that even Indian Christians, whom they tellingly referred to with the apparent oxymoron ‘heathen Christians’ (Hedningechristne),²¹ often neglected their duties of ensuring their children’s proper moral, religious, and intellectual education. Sara Ochs deplored the fact that many Christian children did not have access to schools, and that their parents often made them watch cattle all day wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Children and the Discordance of Colonial Conversions
• 2. Controversy and Collapse: On Christian Day Schools
• 3. Raising Two Categories of Children
• 4. Tying Children to God with Love
• 5. Science, Morality, Care, and Control
• 6. Emotional Labor of Loss
• 7. Planting Seeds in Young Hearts
• Epilogue: The Productive Figure of the Universal Child
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Bibliography: Unpublished Sources
• Bibliography: Published Sources
• Bibliography: Works Cited
• Index