True Friends or False? the Changing Nature of Relationships between Indian and British Missionary Women in the Imperial Contact Zone of India, C1880-1940

Echoes from PastIn twenty-first century, feminists still struggle to find a vocabulary sufficient to describe their sense of connectedness with each other across distinctions of diversity based on class, culture, race, religion and sexualities. The second wave clarion call of 'sisterhood' papered over such cracks, denying rather than acknowledging lack of coherence in category 'woman' or ways in which power circulated through politics of feminism and feminists. Women of colour, indigenous and majority world feminists resisted and dismantled universal claims embedded in western, white, middle class feminist theory and politics, successfully pluralizing feminism(s) and a unitary category of 'woman'. In 2010s, despite an ever intensifying global connectedness, ways of thinking about, building and naming cross-cultural and cross-racial feminist connections remains a fraught and difficult area of scholarship and politics. As feminist scholars of gender and imperialism, we find uncanny echoes of this contemporary dilemma in history of women, missions and empire.In this paper, we look back to a transitional moment in this history - itself part of longue duree of globalization - when new relational configurations were emerging that presaged a post-empire (if not post-colonial) global imaginary figured around relations of friendship rather than relations of ruling. We begin by sketching changing dynamic within missionary movement that inspired a push to conceive of missionary enterprise in terms of friendship and mutuality rather than of mastery, and locating women's missionary movement in relation to this. One of questions our paper seeks to explore is degree to which this shiftin vocabulary involved a re-working of notion of 'sisterhood' underpinning relationships between women in mission field and nature of such changes.We explore this through a micro-history of changing nature of relationships between Indian and British missionary women in South India, against backdrop of Indian nationalist and anti-colonial movements and later inevitability of Indian independence and departure of British authorities and British power. We discuss two case studies drawn from lives of three women: Indian Christian writer, Krupabai Satthyanadhan; Eleanor Rivett, an Australian missionary; and her British counterpart, Eleanor McDougall, both of whom served as principal of Women's Christian College in Madras (now Chennai). We attempt to tease out from available (fragmentary) sources some idea of range of relational possibilities between Indian and British women in missionary movement. The paper seeks to address this question from both sides of colonial relationship; how did Indian and western notions of friendship differ? To what extent were they culturally specific? How did British and Indian Christian women understand nature of relationships they built with each other in mission of sisterhood? Furthermore what understandings can be reached from an archive dominated by western accounts? In particular, we focus on how word 'friendship' operates in these texts in ultimately ambiguous and complex ways to connote a range of connections rather than a singular notion of friendship.What we need are friendsAt World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910i, first Indian Anglican Bishop, V. S. Azariah, issued an historic call for western missionaries to position themselves as friends to their Indian Christian colleagues, rather than as lords and masters, fathers and sons. have given your goods to feed poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS! (315 emphasis in original). His plea was a direct appeal against the problem of race relationships, a problem he saw as among most serious confronting Church (306). Self-sufficiency and independence on part of Indian Christian pastors and catechists was often frowned upon, indicative of a reluctance by missionaries to make themselves unnecessary. …