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.