A Cosmopolitics of Conversion: Women's Religious Experience in Victorian British and Colonial Indian Pros

While nineteenth-century cosmopolitan ideals of world citizenship are often painted as a secular replacement for religious commitments, nineteenth-century Indian and British religious discourses could also create transnational solidarities across political, cultural and literary communities. This project, "A Cosmopolitics of Conversion," maintains that women's religious conversion narratives in British and Indian autobiographies and novels nurture a cosmopolitan ethos---an ethos that imagines a moral, social or even political responsibility to an Other that is located beyond the geographically local, the culturally or religiously particular and/or the national. Drawing on their knowledge of multiple religious traditions surrounding Theosophy, Hinduism, Protestantism, Catholicism and even agnosticism or Freethought, these women converts not only make comparisons between traditions but also seek to bridge gaps between them. In stressing similarities in ethical commitments and women's subjective experiences in multiple religious traditions, these converts and their narratives, written in English, Tamil and French, forge political solidarities, advance social reform efforts, or form intellectual or literary friendship ties with those outside their cultural or linguistic local milieus. In particular, women's education reform initiatives in both Britain and India attract female converts who can approach religious differences with sensitivity and empathy. These reformers and authors not only challenge and revise middle-class Victorian and high caste Hindu domestic discourses that would limit women's access to education, but also act as cultural translators between religious communities to establish common ethical ground for promoting women's education.;Each chapter is centered on a case study that contextualizes female conversion narratives within women's educational reform efforts in Britain, India and France. Chapter 1 argues that Annie Besant's 1893 Theosophist revision of her 1885 Autobiographical Sketches challenges the Enlightenment paradigm of religious belief as individual choice. Besant's belief in reincarnation, based on her reading of Hindu and Theosophist texts, subverts the genre of autobiography as an index of linear progressive maturity and suggests that religious "conversion" itself operates as a trans-historical, trans-temporal phenomenon. Chapter 2 examines A. Madhaviah's Satyananda (1909) and Indian Christian Krupabai Satthianadhan's autobiographical English novel Saguna (1889-1890) as revisions of the elite Indian male Protestant conversion narrative. Both authors imagine women's education as a vehicle that will allow Indian Christian coverts to experience conversion as the product of intellectual study and furthermore take on leadership roles within their communities. Chapter 3 argues that colonial Indian and British Victorian women's narratives actively participate in French religious and national literary traditions. Comparing Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) and Toru Dutt's French language novel Le Journal de Mlle d'Arvers (1879), I suggest that exposure to Catholicism in Continental French-language learning contexts allows both these Protestant authors to engage sympathetically with a sentimental, Continental Catholicism that emphasizes compassion and marital companionship. The final chapter examines the rising nineteenth-century interest in comparative ethics among European Orientalists, British missionaries and Indian and British novelists. Both George Eliot's Romola (1863) and A. Madhaviah's English novel Clarinda (1915) are historical novels featuring convert heroines who synthesize ethical values from multiple religious traditions in their marriages and acts of philanthropy, thus demonstrating the similarities between these traditions themselves. In comparing Clarinda with the Hindu heroine of A. Madhaviah's Tamil novel, Padmavati Carittiram (1898,1899), the Hindu wifely ideal of pativrata emerges as a transnational and trans-religious figure that accommodates Protestant and Hindu ideals of femininity in colonial and metropolitan contexts.;In considering colonial Indian participation in British and French literary contexts, and vice versa, this project expands on Margaret Cohen and Carole Dever's call to assess British and French nineteenth-century texts as the product of intersecting, rather than separate, literary traditions and languages. This work moves beyond studies of British influence on Indian literary culture to argue that exchanges centered on religious difference influence metropolitan and colonial cultures and allow European and colonial Indian prose to shape one another.