| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Eliza F. Kent. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 315. $47.50.

This book by Eliza F. Kent is an important addition to the growing corpus on conversion to Christianity in colonial South Asia. It is not concerned with belief, or the mystique of individual conversion where analytically elusive promptings of conscience are supposed to inspire a leap from one faith to another. Rather, it probes the dynamics and the substance of the changes that the leap occasions in the converts' behavior as a group or community. Focusing on an upwardly mobile caste, the Nadars of Tamilnadu, the book "examines the formation of and negotiation over ideals of femininity and masculinity in Indian Christian culture" (p. 12) in three specific areas: marriage, domesticity, and sartorial style. It also examines the social, institutional, and ideological backgrounds of the Western missionaries who labored to effect conversions and tried, with varying success, to shape the emerging Indian Christian culture(s). Kent selects for close examination two successful Western single women missionaries, Amy Carmichael and Eva Swift, who arrived in India "in the midst of a vast influx of women into the mission field" (p. 102).

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