Save India’s Children : Missionary Periodicals and Colonial Childhoods

Abstract

As part of their global evangelical network, nineteenth century British missionary organisations produced a voluminous amount of periodical literature depicting Indian children. In particular, poor children in orphanages, schools, and those in close proximity with mission workers appeared in prominent missionary periodicals intended for British adults and children. Often, these representations produced racialised and hierarchised constructions of childhood, further differentiated by age and gender, and linked to essentialist notions of Indian culture. Poor Indian children became objects of pity and humanitarian reform in which their bodies and behaviours were scrutinised alongside their cultural contexts. Drawing upon the literature produced by various British missionary organisations, the paper seeks to unravel  politics of the production of knowledge of colonised Indian children during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that resulted in strategies of rescue, control, and reform and the shaping of colonial child welfare projects in the subcontinent.