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Book Review
Asia
| Jeffrey Cox. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 357. $55.00.
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| Behind Jeffrey Cox's text one can almost see Barbie Batchelor, missionary heroine of Paul Scott's fictional Raj Quartet (1976). One of Cox's objectives is to rescue from "multiple levels of exclusion" the role of women missionaries, both European and Indian (by 1906, seventy percent of the United Presbyterian Mission staff in the Punjab were women), as well as the role of Indian Christians (by 1891, eighty-five percent of the Punjab mission staff were Indian. But fifty percent were non-Christian, and here is yet another constituency in need of recognition: by the end of the nineteenth century, seventy percent of all staff in mission schools were non-Christian, teaching scripture like the best of them). |
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Celibacy was seen as more useful for women than men, especially in zenana mission (although this was withdrawn in response to Arya Samaj and Muslim opposition, and women turned instead to orphanages, hospitals, and education). The central theme of the text is the sheer difficulty of fashioning an Indian Christian community within an imperial setting, of realizing any spiritual equality alongside such gross inequalities of status and wealth: "the genteel imperialism of professional advantage and material inequality" (p. 89). A Bengali Christian, Golak Nath, had in 1863 all but accused foreign missionaries of being "active agents in creating the gulf between Europeans and Indians" (p. 222). Could mission build the universal church that would outlast empire? |
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