Missionaries and Their Medicine: A Christian Modernity for Tribal India

Abstract

In a novel written in 1958, the Bengali literary critic Pramathanath Bishi suggested that there was a meeting of the medieval and modern ages in late eighteenth-century Bengal in the persons of the British Baptist missionary William Carey and his Bengali munshi, Ramram Basu. In Bishi's view, Carey belonged to the Christian medieval age, seeking all explanations in religion, while Basu belonged to the modern age, determined to replace God with knowledge (Pramathanath Bishi, Carey Saheber Munshi, Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 2002, first published 1958). Bishi's tongue-in-cheek reversal of the usual narratives of colonial modernity (and of the role played by Christian missions in it) has not proved popular with scholars of South Asia. Christian missions therefore remain secure as pilots of modernity, especially in its imperial form, and implicated in all its coercive and contradictory aspects. With or without the analytical framework of ‘Christian modernity’ that Hardiman deploys, this rich and meticulously connected historical study of a Church Missionary Society (CMS) medical mission to the Bhil ‘tribes’ of western India, which stretches over a period of about 80 years (1880–c. 1960), would have been an important contribution to Indian history. To begin with, although education and medical service have historically been the two principal ‘specializations’ of Christian public works in India, only the former has received significant attention from historians, and in recent times mostly in order to reveal the allegedly hegemonic political functions of such education. Hardiman does propose a similar project of transformation and legitimation for medical missions, but by presenting a complex story involving a variety of agents over a sustained period of time, he achieves something quite different.

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