A colonizer or an anthropologist?: Locating the Identity of the Christian Missionary vis-à-vis the tea garden ‘Coolie’ in Colonial Assam
By: Bordoloi, Anisha
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: Social Change and Development Description: 16(2), Jul, 2019: p. 20-40.Subject(s): Christian missionaries, Tea plantation, Labourers - Assam
In:
Social Change and DevelopmentSummary: This paper is an attempt to study the role played by Christian missionaries in carrying out Mission work among the tea plantation labourers of Assam during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how politics of power can function through multiple identities apart from the one that seems more visible revealing the non-monolithic identity of a colonizer. It also argues how the world of the general (the tea garden coolies) is constructed through perspectives emanating from the particular (individual Christian missionaries). Missionaries performed a political role in the way they carried out mission work in the tea gardens while simultaneously producing information and knowledge like an anthropologist about the tea garden migrant labourers amidst whom they set out to preach.Especially significant is the search for the ‘heathen’ that became a prime requisite for mission work, the construction of the tea garden as a ‘field’ through mission tours and visits, missionary interests in the plantations and the usage of print culture in the form of a newspaper such as the “The Indian Churchman” where debates between Charles Dowding, a missionary and colonial officials entrenched the idea of the subject and the colonizer further.- Reproduced
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 16(2), Jul, 2019: p. 20-40 | Available | AR123303 |
This paper is an attempt to study the role played by Christian missionaries in carrying out Mission work among the tea plantation labourers of Assam during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how politics of power can function through multiple identities apart from the one that seems more visible revealing the non-monolithic identity of a colonizer. It also argues how the world of the general (the tea garden coolies) is constructed through perspectives emanating from the particular (individual Christian missionaries). Missionaries performed a political role in the way they carried out mission work in the tea gardens while simultaneously producing information and knowledge like an anthropologist about the tea garden migrant labourers amidst whom they set out to preach.Especially significant is the search for the ‘heathen’ that became a prime requisite for mission work, the construction of the tea garden as a ‘field’ through mission tours and visits, missionary interests in the plantations and the usage of print culture in the form of a newspaper such as the “The Indian Churchman” where debates between Charles Dowding, a missionary and colonial officials entrenched the idea of the subject and the colonizer further.- Reproduced
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