SUMMARY AND FINDINGS
TITLE OF THE PROJECT: Envisioning Female Agency:Tracing The History of the Local Women Co-Workers of the CMS Mission in Central Travancore-19th And 20th Centuries.
NAME OF THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR : Juby John, Assistant Professor, Department of History, U.C. College Aluva.
The growth of Women’s history and Gender studies has sought to transform historical knowledge and practice by centering women’s viewpoints and experiences and features gender as the category of difference.. With the development of the Annales School there developed new approaches in biographical and anthropological research and these developments also promoted the turn to the so called intermediary groups in history and their agency. It is within this feminist scholarship of empire and the agency of the indigenous mission women worker including prayer leaders, bible women, assistants, teachers, catechists in central Travancore in the colonial period during the 19th& 20th Centuries that this project is situated.
Existing historiographies of the CMS mission is linked to the prevailing gender relations that govern the structure of European missions. The history of women in British India was recounted as a slow but progressive march towards “modernity” following a long period of stagnation and decline. Indian women were depicted as “enslaved, degraded, lost in darkness, and in need of salvation” and reduced to the status of victims and objects without any agency..Therefore this study argues that the Mission archives often presented a distorted and monolithic construction of native women.
The study also identified that the indigenous women workers actively functioned as a bridge between the European mission and the native women and girls in the mission region. In the process they helped shape the missionary cultural encounter as they constantly crossed religious and social boundaries and created new social and religious identities and as active agents sowed seeds of religious and social change in their own little ways, as they asserted their rights, addressed social inequalities and rejected or adapted tradition in an engagement with the world around them. Bible women were the early agents of literacy. The bible women thus became agents of change towards respectability.
This study argues that the spread of Christianity in Travancore was the result of the collaboration of native women with Western missionaries. The interactions of the local women evangelists, the Biblewomen with Western missionaries influenced the way they construed home and perceived family and public life. The women’s mission was an agency which was emancipatory for the western women as it gave them an opportunity to transcend the domestic boundaries at home and to establish a professional identity in the field. The long contacts with the native women and continued collaboration with the bible women resulted in changing some of their rigid, orientalist beliefs regarding the degradation of native women.This study also identified the Heterogeneity among the European women missionaries.
The Bible women’s association with the Christian mission gave them an opportunity to craft ‘a new self’ through developing skills and a degree of economic and social independence unusual for women at that time.The establishment of training institutions by the Missionaries paved the way for opening new space for women in the teaching profession thus providing an opening to express their inborn talents.It specially..Vocational education was beneficial to girls belonging to poor and backward families.also led to a greater degree of financial independence and silently inaugurated social change. The education imparted by these missionaries transmited a ’culture of values’, inculcated in annual celebrations, sports activities, as well as in classroom learning, that gave rise both to a heightened sense of individuality and self-confidence among the students..
The Bible women maintained a delicate balance between domestic responsibilities and professional needs. They sought social respect, even while challenging some of the cultural norms. The entry of women and members of the lower castes into new workplaces like the colonial administrative offices, schools and hospitals questioned the legitimacy of such demarcations within spaces like temples and homes, which were seen as maintaining and perpetuating the traditions of religion, caste and gender discrimination. Their empowering location and functions within these institutions unsettled and weakened the hold of caste and gender, through which they had been circumscribed.
This study identified that CMS missionaries used the gloomy representation of Indian women as the fundamental factor of an agency of women’s mission in India. Alternative sources from oral histories, autobiographies present an alternative version of the women in Travancore. They were not passive recipients but actively choose what they wanted to accept or ignore. Education enabled the native Bible women to gain an upward social mobility breaking away from traditional social practices and gender stereotypes and initiating social change.
