Exhibiting localized Christianity: Missionary exhibitions and knowledge production in colonial India (1880-1950)

Abstract

Missionary produced journals presented life in India as absolute misery throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These discourses were presented with dramatic effect at exhibitions organised by missionary societies in Britain. At exhibitions, audiences could walk through streets constructed to look like India, feel household objects brought from India, and view plays and performances scripted by missionaries. The range of missionary produced discourses appear to create an ‘other’, desperate to be saved by European Christianity and civilisation. Scholarship on nineteenth century missionary work has emphasised this point about knowledge production. In this paper, I ask why missionaries produced certain discourses about dire poverty for exhibitions when their work in India often involved close collaboration with elite Indians. I will compare discourses produced in exhibitions about life in India with the work done by missionaries including setting up schools and hospitals. This work happened through the support of elite Indians and colonial government officials. Through this examination, I will argue that overseas missionary work incorporated different cultural elements to create a localized form of Christianity. Missionary societies presented elements of this local Christianity at exhibitions. Missionary exhibitions, therefore, were not merely about presenting Christianity and civilization as a distinctly European characteristic against a homogenous ‘other’.