Humanitarian Horrors: Caste, Whiteness, and the Emotional Geographies of Settlement

Christian humanitarianism in India is widely studied mainly as an Anglo-American project directed by missionaries. However, by the early 20th century, the substantial community of Indian Christians – particularly in Southern India – played a growing role in shaping the terms of humanitarianism as a lived ethic, materialised in emotional response. In this paper, I focus in particular on the education of the senses as key to young Christian women’s inculcation in this humanitarian culture in the early 20th century. From a reading of papers pertaining to the Young Women’s Christian Association, and to Christian educational institutions for women in erstwhile Madras (now called Chennai), the paper explores projects that took respectable, and non-untouchable Indian Christians from middle-class families to slums, orphanages and other sites of charity as part of their general education. This immersion in a context of poverty and suffering was meant to incite in young middle-class Christian women the desire for humanitarian work. As such, the publications of these institutions are full of descriptions of such encounters between educated Christian women and the subjects of their social work that focus on the smells, sights, and sensory feeling. Building from this, I argue further that this focus on subjects of charity as figures who incited sensory horror in the charitable works to articulate distinctions between upper-caste middle-class educated Indian women as agents of humanitarian labour, and slum-dwellers and formally uneducated women (many of whom were also Christian) as objects and recipients of charity. In the context of late colonial India, where many Christian families – themselves converts from the lowest castes who had gained social mobility through their connections with missionaries – struggled to articulate positions of power in a predominantly Hindu society, this distinction was key to their self-definition as respectable.

Foremothers, Othermothers, and College Girls

This paper draws on the final chapter of my book-in-progress to discuss a common trope in histories of girlhood and education: that of leaving home, of leaving our mothers behind so that we might become otherwise. Stories of first-generation college education are often told - in coming of age novels, in autobiographies, and in other forms of self-writing and life-writing, as much as in the moral panic literature of cautionary tales published in periodicals and novels - as stories of a break from generational continuity. Daughters leave home, and become somewhat alien to their families as the are educated, become involved in new social circles, come into contact with political collectivities beyond their families’ reach, and come to belong to communities more expansive than that of their families. Foremothers in the new educational institution - women who lived life outside the norm of heteronormative family-making, who became teachers and founded colleges - come to figure significantly in these new kin arrangements in young women’s lives. This paper draws on letters, and other writing of Indian women in the early 20th century to argue that young women who went to university did not so much experience a radical break from their lives enfolded within their families but instead traveled back and forth between different domestic arrangements - the caste conjugality of their families on the one hand, and the more experimental living community of the women’s college on the other. In doing so, they reimagined community beyond its centring on the family, but remained connected in complex ways to webs of familial relation and social reproduction.