Projects of internationalism in the early twentieth century often emerged within, and in complex negotiation with, colonial cultures. This essay traces the history of a self-consciously internationalist educational institution in late colonial India in the inter-war years of the 1920s and 1930s. These years were pivotal: while dissent against the British empire on the Indian subcontinent was widespread, the geopolitical form that would succeed it was not determined. In this context, missionary institutions like Women’s Christian College, which I focus on below, were central loci for the articulation of internationalist imaginaries, within what historian Mrinalini Sinha has called an ‘imperial social formation’. In erstwhile Madras (now Chennai), where my research is located, there was a particularly strong internationalist sentiment among members of India’s Christian minority, who overwhelmingly attended and taught at missionary institutions.
This stemmed from concerns that the Indian nationalist movement was fundamentally Hindu and upper-caste in character, as well as from Indian Christian women’s encounters with other oppressed Christian communities through transnational humanitarian networks. These included encounters with Black Christians from North America, and indigenous and colonised Christians elsewhere in the world. Imaginaries of a Christian internationalist world, knit together with liberation theologies, shaped the ways that Indian Christian women saw the world to come. This history of struggle, negotiation, and dreaming however is not immediately apparent in the college’s archive, which instead tells a liberal imperialist story of internationalism as a miraculous occurrence. In this essay, I draw attention to the friction in this story to demonstrate the significant, overlooked work of colonised women in shaping the terms of the institution’s commitment to internationalism.
The story of Women’s Christian College’s founding is well rehearsed. It appears again and again as ‘a wonderful happening’ in the pamphlets and books that the college produced in its early years for circulation to its benefactors. The writers of these materials tell the story as a scrappy adventure, led by a motley and international crew of women, triumphing against all odds. It typically begins with a chance meeting between a British missionary and an American philanthropist who discuss the need for a college offering degree-level education for women in Southern India. They call on their networks and by 1915, the first group of staff and the founding Principal, Eleanor McDougall, have set sail to establish the college in Madras.
But not everything is happy. The decidedly modern college is running out of what McDougall, calls a former ‘harem’, its cloister rooms now gloriously converted into dormitories for students. Still, the sense of the harem continues to assert itself: the building has no high enclosing walls, the neighbours peer in; the porosity of its windows and verandas lets insects and plants wend their way in. The wind and rain will not stay out. McDougall and her staff grow desperate, searching in the tropical morass of Madras for a home where the college might do the work of cultivating appropriate emotional and ethical dispositions in young women.
In this moment of crisis, Doveton House appears to the college like a Madonna in a storm. The stately English East India Company home on the prophetically named ‘College Road’ is a glimmering miracle of hope on the riverbank in the heart of the city. When McDougall visits Doveton, she finds that it is not only large enough to accommodate living quarters, lecture halls, libraries and laboratories but that it is surrounded by vast plots of land. She can already see the English gardens, tennis courts, staff cottages, and ponds: a utopia behind forbidding walls that will keep the unruly city away and allow for Indian girls to become modern women. But how could they possibly afford such a grand house? ‘Suddenly, dramatically, like a miracle’, that very evening, by the late post, the college receives the twenty-five thousand dollars it needs to buy its dream home. In the next year, the college moves to Doveton, building on their new campus an oasis of beauty and emotional containment in the heart of the colonial metropolis. The story is neat – it has the cadence of a can-do musical.
This miracle of WCC’s establishment is a lot messier in the college’s own less public-facing archive. From these materials, it transpires that the reason the college couldn’t remain in its initial ‘harem’ was really that the owner – a wealthy Muslim landlord in Madras – would not agree to extensions, and the college was under pressure to buy a permanent building to house its growing community. The Orientalist narrative found in the college’s published materials – of frail, young, Indian women, easily given to sexual excess, and needing to be shielded from the deleterious emotional influence of the tropical climate and the temptations of neighbours alike – though, was useful for fundraising.
Indeed, Eleanor McDougall toured the US before she went to Madras to establish WCC, meeting with women’s missionary societies, college alumnae associations, and members of America’s philanthropic elite. Lucy Peabody – a former Baptist missionary in India, and member of a wealthy Massachusetts family – met with McDougall in this time and actively campaigned over at least a year for the college’s inclusion in the then-new Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation’s grant programme. By the early 1920s, Ida Scudder, whose elite Bostonian family had long been missionaries in India, was actively raising funds for the college.
The ‘prophesy’ of WCC is really a microcosm of a transnational history of American humanitarian capital and its investment in the civilising mission of Britain’s colonial project. WCC’s founding was preceded by years of work by the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Young Women’s Christian Association, which had firmly established American missionary presence in the region. The YWCA of Madras was a close ally of the college in its early years, allowing students to play sports on its campus, accommodating visitors and staff who could not be housed in the college, and offering its rooms for college events. Indeed, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller foundation too performed its miracles well beyond WCC, funding institutions in China, Iran, and in the American South.
Crucially, however, this myth of WCC’s miraculous founding also erases a substantial history of Indian Christian women’s struggle for formal education, for domestic reform, and for an internationalist world that centred colonised Christians and their political critique of colonialism and nationalism alike. Far from hapless figures in need of saving, by the early 20th century, Christian women in Southern India were members of an increasingly politically vocal, and socially upwardly mobile community. Many among them had organised to establish formal schools for girls, and to teach in government and missionary institutions, serving also young women from non-Christian communities. This included Annal Satthianadhan, whose daughter-in-law, Krupabai is perhaps best known in the Anglophone sphere for her autobiographical bildungsroman novels, Saguna and Kamala. The elder Satthianadhan published ‘Nalla Tāy’ or ‘The Good Mother’ in which she elaborated on an ethic of motherhood oriented not inward to a nuclear family and biological children, but towards a community in need of education and upbringing. Satthianadhan’s schools laid the foundation for the idea of the educational community as a place of political vision and intimate care alike: ‘open homes’, as the historian Nivedita Louis writes, simultaneously domestic and political in their openness to the world.
Similarly, Elizabeth Sornam Appasamy, who founded Vidyodaya School in Madras in 1923, felt strongly that marriage and motherhood were not necessarily ideal futures for all women. Vidyodaya saw itself as a microcosm of the nation-to-be. Its purpose was to create a syncretistic domestic space within which girls might come to imagine living in communities together with members of various castes and religious faiths, whilst also tethered to an international humanitarian world. This positioning explicitly positions the domestic as an endeavour that is necessarily political and engaged in struggles over geopolitical questions of nation, internationalism, and empire.
This history of Christian women’s demand for public participation through education emerges in substantial part from Pandita Ramabai’s critiques of Hindu caste patriarchy and eventual conversion to Christianity. Ramabai was an influential figure in WCC and donated to the institution while she was still alive. Ramabai crucially offered a radical resolution of the so-called woman question in British colonial India: the question of how women might participate in colonial modern publics and shape an emergent nationalist culture. Ramabai departed in this from nationalist figures by refusing to locate the modern woman within the caste patriarchal home, even as the educated, companionate wife and mother. Rather, for Ramabai, women’s public role emerged from a political critique of both nationalist caste patriarchy and British colonial rule. At the hostels she established, Ramabai sought to build communities of women apart from the caste-conjugal family: a project that drew substantial social disapproval. For her, an internationalist vision of women’s community stood as a bulwark against the normativising pressures of the nationalist imaginary. Ramabai’s worldview significantly shaped the work of many Indian teachers at WCC, as well as Tamil Christian educators like Elizabeth Sornam Appasamy. Appasamy’s internationalism was not one of Indian women’s miraculous saving at the hands of a scrappy group of missionaries. Rather, it was a politics of hard-won negotiation: solidarity achieved through the friction of moving through the imperial social formation against the grain of colonial logics.
Finally, this dislocation into mythos and its erasure of Indian Christian women’s complex refusals finds its mirror in the location of the archive. WCC’s archive is almost entirely in the India Office and European Manuscripts collections in the British Library, and the ‘Associated Schools’ Collection at Mount Holyoke college in the US. Mount Holyoke, whose principal in the early twentieth century, Mary Woolley, held strong internationalist commitments, has been WCC’s ‘sister college’ since its founding. However, like all colonial sisterhoods, this one too is riven by race and the politics of imperialism.
The answer to why WCC’s materials are largely held elsewhere has to do with whom its materials were overwhelmingly produced for – donors large and small, most located in Europe and North America, and the missionary societies who collaborated initially to found the college. These missionary societies eventually formed the British and American boards that governed the college until the 1970s: all retaining meticulous records of the institution’s functioning but also overwhelmingly telling a story of hapless Indian women saved. The very real political battles in the college over imperialism, nationhood, Indian Christianity’s liberation theology, and its commitments to anti-caste politics all only emerge out of the sparse letters and diaries that remain. So, for instance, we have very little material written by Elizabeth George, the college’s enigmatic first Indian principal, who stepped down after only a year in 1948, and was replaced by a race scientist, Eleanor Mason.
Overwhelmingly, then, WCC’s story is one of struggle – epistemic and material alike. In his 2012 work on internationalism and geographies of solidarity, David Featherstone draws on the work of Stuart Hall to characterise solidarity as a project ‘without guarantees’, i.e., without the promise of a particular political future. The archive of WCC shows also that the work of building internationalist solidarity within an imperial social formation is the work of epistemic and affective claim-making: the embrace of friction, struggle, and labour without the promise of a given futurity, as the work of building community beyond the nation-state.