American missions and Sunday Schools in Victorian India

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, Christian missions in colonial India viewed day schools as a potential source of securing converts. But the Education Despatch of 1854 mandated that all educational institutions desirous of government recognition and financial aid should follow a strictly non-religious, government-prescribed syllabus. Inspections were set up to ensure compliance. As a consequence, mission schools in Victorian India (1858--1901) had to choose between forsaking government recognition and money and competing with day schools run by non-Christians or by the government itself. Also, faced with poor responses to direct proselytization methods, Christian missions began to explore alternative ways of attracting converts. By the mid-1870s, some Protestant missions, American ones prominent among them, began to look upon Sunday Schools as institutions that could produce converts. The present work describes the efforts of American missions in designing and operating Sunday Schools in Victorian India. The dissertation first presents a detailed background on Indian educational practices in the eighteenth century, focusing on missionary work. Next, American missionaries are situated in the social context of mid-nineteenth century India. The following three chapters describe American missionary reasoning in founding Sunday Schools, their collaboration with other missions, organizational methods, efforts in assembling students, their work on syllabus design, their use and promotion of classroom realia and activities, including visual material, music, and festivities. In their professional approach to institution-building, they mimicked both Western secular educators and their upper-caste Hindu rivals, thereby compromising on fundamental religious-educational principles. At the same time, they set off rivalries between various Indian social groups. The Sunday School thus became a site of cultural contestation---between Euro-American Christians and the Hindu 'upper castes', and between the 'upper-caste' Hindus and 'lower-caste' converts to Christianity. It is argued that from this competition emerged universalist educational ideals that transcended the religious and ethno-cultural limits within which American missionaries originally designed the institution. Conceptualized as educational institutional history, the focus throughout is on education as practice rather than as abstract ideological debate. This work is the first full-length study on the subject and is addressed to historians of education and colonialism.