I enjoyed reading this book, though as local histories go, it is extremely dense and detailed. Missionary history is a specialist domain, because it chronicles 19th century lifeworlds, very far removed from present circumstances. For those who have an interest, as supporters or antagonists to missionary lives, the narratives are infused with a specific subjectivity. Kumaradoss is able to transcend this boundary, being a well trained historian, who knows that subjectivity in method is about reading faults, as much as it is about valorizing contributions. While looking at a story about ‘good works’, the mission historian is someone who also knows that the history of colonialism is incomplete without reading the careful nature of chronicling, that went into the telling of that story. Narrative ‘reconstruction’ is what the mission archives provide for us. It is interesting for me, as a reader and writer of mission history, that Kumaradoss who is Professor at Madras Christian College, Tambaram (which is such a significant historical site for mission conclaves as described by Gerald Studdert) should rework his own commitment, to historical reconstruction and faith, as interweaving facets of a narrative.
It follows the tradition set by Geoffrey Oddie who believed, very early, that travellers’ and missionary accounts were important documentary sources. It supports M.S.S. Pandian’s view that colonialism and lower caste conversions should not be wished away as problems of a nefarious interpretation that it was all ‘rice Christianity.’ People have a right to the faith of their choice.
Mission history is thus an important tool towards reading one’s identity in modern India, which understands well the comforts of Anglicization, if one happened to be within the circle of benefits, whether of commerce and or education. Such subjects concede the benefits of colonialism, (like school textbooks of the 1960s, which listed communication and print for instance), which is an honest thing to do, if it has benefited one. Kumaradoss forages not only amongst his family memories for several generations within the dynamic tools of oral tradition, letters and memorabilia such as photographs and household mnemonics, including village layout and buildings, but also believes, as so many of us do, that archives abroad can help in this retelling. Twenty-two individuals and organizations provided the money required for his travels to distant libraries which made this work possible. I am sure the trustees who gave so generously will be pleased with the result that Professor Kumaradoss has made available to a general reading public. It may be noted that during the last five years, Kumaradoss and his colleagues in Chennai and Halle, were involved in a major collaboration on archivalizing writing on the Halle Mission in Tranquebar, which resulted in the monumental 3 volume collection, published by Franckesche Stiftungen in 2006, and consisting of 1,574 pages! To have concurrently worked on the manuscript on Caldwell must have been intellectually very strenuous scholarship.
The idea of a good life is valuable record for everyone. Exemplary figures have existed in every religion and every culture. The locale of this study is Idaiyungudi. Most of us have never heard of either Caldwell or this particular village, but what the writer brings to us is the concentrated and focused attention that one man gave … in short Caldwell gave his life to this village, as did his wife Eliza and his daughter Mary Ellen.
Robert Caldwell was born in Clady, in 1814, very close to Belfast. When his father who was an artisan moved from Ireland back to Glasglow, Robert discovered his love for reading. His brothers took him to Dublin to study as an artist when he was sixteen. He won many prizes, but when he was 19 years old he received his calling, specifically to work in India. Then followed years of preparation, which included theological and liberal training in Logic, Latin and Greek. Kumaradass believes that it was this patient scholarship that led to his writing Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages which was published in 1856.
Caldwell’s life was full of complications, dissent and struggle for personal autonomy in the question of faith. It was this rationality of his mission that made him many enemies, but he stood by his quest, and his utter faith in God and people. I find this chronicling of dissent by Kumaradass very important, as an ingredient of organizational history. By using letters and missionary records, he shows us the frail nature of human desires, and the opposition to them from many quarters. But are these desires to create community, to be transparent, to bring about change, to be erudite and scholarly, while wishing to educate the poor ‘man’s frail trivial desires’? Clearly, history always brings to light why a charismatic figure can bring about change. Why one man can root himself in an obscure village, and make it his life. He becomes the subject of much organizational censure, and of course when he has the total support of his wife and his friends, things get even more dramatic. Kumaradoss is not afraid of taking sides, and a century later, the witnesses appear again to show us why the archives hold for us a breathtaking array of arsenal—the power of words to bring about social change. Maybe that is why archives are so often vulnerable, because when we read from history, we know we are not alone.
As a study of caste and conversion, we have interesting insights which pertain to questions of status within rice cultivating and palmyra farming communities. For a generation of social scientists who grew up on Hardgrave’s work on the Nadars, this particular work will be of specific interest with regard to how faith and status are matrixed closely. As I have communicated earlier in this review, Andreas Gross, Vincent Kumaradass and Heike Liebau have co-ordinated an army of writers on mission history (myself included) in their fifteen hundred and more page work Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India. Kumaradoss may wish to upset the subalternist applecart, by communicating that subalterns do not always see themselves as subalterns. Writers like myself find ‘people’s history’ a much more evocative methodological tool. He quotes Caldwell,
It cannot be alleged of the Shanars … that they were fenced round by priestcraft and prejudice, and apparently inaccessible to Christian influence. On the contrary, they are peculiarly free from prejudice, and peculiarly accessible. Without priests; without a written religious code; without sacred traditions; without historical selections; without that aversion to Christianity as a foreign religion which other classes evince… They have always been found more willing to embrace Christianity, and after they have embraced it more willing to be guided, controlled, and moulded by its principles, than any other class. (p. 185)
Eliza Caldwell’s support to her husband has been well documented, and to anyone interested in the academic reading of village life among the poor in South India, including education for women, lace making, village landscaping,and dictionary compiling, will find Kumaradoss’s work an important source book.
Susan Visvanathan teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and is the author of Christians of Kerala, ( OUP1993) and An Ethnography Of Mysticism ( IIAS1998). Her latest book is called Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (Orient Longman 2007). She is the editor of Structure and Transformation (OUP 2000). She has written several novels, Seine at Noon and Phosphorus and Stone being the latest.