Constance Prem Nath Dass was my maternal great-grandmother. This academic paper on her maternal grandmother was written in 2010 by my mother, Dr Shobhana Bhattacharji. At the time, information about Constance Dass was really scarce. After that and most likely based on mum’s research there’s a Wikipedia page and Constance Dass’s name comes up in a series on eminent Christians such as Rajkumari Amrit Kaur.

Constance Dass was an amazing woman for her times and even a century on, by our times. She went off abroad to study at Goucher College, Baltimore, USA, at the beginning of the twentieth century. She got married in her late twenties. She was widowed at a very young age. She was a single parent to six children, the youngest being my maternal grandmother who was only six. She was already a professiona, a teacher, before she was married. Later she became the principal of Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, during the Second World War ( 1939-45?). Oh, there is much more. Read on.

With my mother’s permission, I am reproducing the entire article and footnotes.

Preliminary Note

I had intended to write about Christian educators in India in general, focussing on my grandmothers, Mary Chandulal Mukarji and Constance (Mayadas) Dass as representative of an aspect of modernisation in India. Since about the 1990s, colonial studies in India have either denigrated Christian education and its part in modernising India, or removed it altogether even though it was and is a significant aspect of Indian education. When I began to work on this paper, I found that there was very little material about North Indian Protestant Christianity, especially about its women. There are diaries, memoirs, anniversary reports of missions, and so on, stored in libraries across the world but there are barely any recent histories that have used this material to shape our knowledge of North Indian Protestant Christianity. I felt that my grandmothers’ story might offer a way into some of this history. I assumed it would be a single story but I was wrong.  My grandmothers were closely related to each other (Constance was Mary’s niece, her sister’s daughter); they lived in the same general region of north west India (Delhi, Ferozepore, Lahore, Lucknow); and they met often, but their stories diverged radically. Due to editorial constraints, the paper I wrote for the Empire and Education conference in 2010 was about Constance who, as a school and college teacher, was the more ‘conventional’ educator of my two grandmothers. 

Published works about the Methodist Mission in India are either general histories or about a few personnel. Recent research has tended to repeat earlier work uncritically and almost verbatim but with errors added. The unpublished material pertaining to my maternal grandmother Constance comprises some letters and annual reports from Isabella Thoburn College sent to Goucher College, Baltimore, USA. Constance’s newsletters, which she sent to Goucher College, were new to me. They gave me a sense of her professional ‘voice.’ Some sub-narratives are beginning to emerge from this new knowledge I have of her, especially about her nationalism, which I think did not endear her to all her missionary colleagues. The emphasis of this paper was shaped somewhat by the audience at the Galway conference who would be more familiar with mission work than Indian nationalism, but the context and my grandmother Constance were so unfamiliar that I doubt if their significance made an impact on very many listeners. An Indian audience to whom I read the paper on my return from Galway was disappointed that I had not dwelt more on Constance’s nationalism. To me the more alarming reaction was of those who thought it was pleasant nostalgic indulgence and they after the talk, they wandered off chatting about their own, non-Christian, grandmothers. There is some danger of Constance’s story being slotted into the increasingly popular genre of ‘dadi nani ki kahaania’ — tales of grandmothers — but my hope is that it will contribute to a more complete history of Christians in India than is presently available.  

The article opens with Constance’s story. The context of her story is in the  footnotes since it was impossible to include it in the space of a conference paper. I have edited the copious footnotes but left them in to give an idea of how tough it was to extract a coherent story from even the scant available material. When the history of Christians in India is more fully and widely known, focussed and sophisticated papers will become feasible. The second and last part of the paper deals with some issues of the history of north Indian Protestant Christianity.

1.

Constance and Mary

Christians in India run colleges, institutions of professional education, and 33,000 schools. Three of my grandparents were associated with Christian colleges, but since my grandmothers’ lives point to the complexities of Christian education in India, I will start with them.          

Constance and Mary were second and third generation north Indian Protestant Christians. Urban, well connected, educated, emancipated Punjabis married to Bengalis, they were strong women. Mary was motherless; Constance virtually so. They were widows for over 40 years. Both became full-time career women after they were widowed. Mary ran a guest house; Constance was a college teacher. Their friends included Sadhu Sundar Singh, the Jat Sikh convert and evangelist, and British and American missionaries, particularly C.F.Andrews and E.Stanley Jones, who disliked the racism of many missionaries and tried to create Indian forms of Christian work and worship.[2] They also participated in the Indian Independence movement alongside their friends Gandhi, Tagore, and Ambedkar,[3] but my grandmothers were unaffected by their political importance. Their connection with the missionaries was through Christianity. 

Mary (b.1889) didn’t have a formal education. She married Satya Nand Mukarji, a Cambridge Wrangler who taught at and was principal of St.Stephen’s Mission College, Delhi, for about 25 years. Mary was a non-formal educationist, providing sex education to school teachers and health education to prostitutes and the public at large. This sounds odd, but at the time sex and health education were aspects of Christian education. They went along with modernisation, and Christians provided more of it than others through fairs, lectures, and social work in Red Light districts. Mary also taught her brilliant domestic skills to her five sons without any gender related embarrassment to them or their friends.

I discovered that both my grandmothers had hidden histories as well. Mary wrote in her diary that she had a Pentecostal conversion in 1915 which obviously meant a great deal to her, but although she lived with us for over thirty years, we knew nothing about it. Research into what she meant by a Pentecostal conversion led me into a welter of Enthusiastic Christianity, Christian Ashrams, and even the Cold War. It’s a fascinating story but too vast for this paper.

Constance’s story should have been easier to recover considering that she was associated with the well-known Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, India, for nearly seven decades, but it hit a wall of missing and mis-remembered information.[4] Nevertheless, this is her story. Much of it was new even to her daughters. I couldn’t have written it without help from Marilyn Warshawsky and Tara Olivero of Goucher College, Baltimore, and conversations with my mother Premilla and her sister, my aunt Dr.Mohini Dass.  

Constance Prem Nath Dass

Constance Prem Nath Dass[5] was the first Indian principal of Isabella Thoburn College. She was principal from 1939 to 1945 (or 1946 or1947), when she resigned because of ill health or because she felt that independent India needed a younger principal or because her sons asked her to resign. Uncertain data is part of this story. She was on the College Board almost till her death in 1971.

Isabella Thoburn College (IT College) was the first Christian college for women in Asia. Set up by American Methodists, it became the model for subsequent such colleges. It opened in 1886, two years before classes commenced in its sister college in the US, the Woman’s College, Baltimore, later called Goucher College. It is worth repeating the account of how IT College started. In 1886, Lilavati Singh, Shorat Chuckerbutty, and Shorat’s mother Mrs Chuckerbutty, the first graduates of Isabella Thoburn’s school, went to study in Calcutta University. Distressed that there was no specifically Christian hostel for them, Miss Thoburn wrote to her mother: ‘I wish we could open a Christian Women’s College in Lucknow.’ Mrs Chuckerbutty offered her Rs.500 to start one. By summer of 1886, the college had opened. Of the various versions of the Chuckerbutty women, Constance’s is the most moving:

This wonderful Indian mother, a convert from a Brahmin family, had her share in the founding of the college, for which Indian women must forever be grateful. Being a widow, she had come with her only daughter to school and had been taken in by Miss Thoburn and allowed to study with her daughter. When that daughter was ready to for college this courageous mother, the product of two thousand years of downtrodden womanhood, went to Miss Thoburn and begged her to open a college class where her daughter might receive instruction in a Christian atmosphere and she offered Rs.500 as a nucleus for a fund for the new college,’ her ‘“widow’s mite’” as Isabella Thoburn called it.[6]

‘First college for women in Asia,’ ‘first Indian principal’ aren’t unimportant facts yet there is little documentation about Constance. By contrast, my grandfather Satya Nand Mukarji, who was the second Indian principal of St.Stephen’s College, has a presence on the Internet and in the college. Yet Constance was probably the more significant of the two. A century after she graduated from colleges in India and the US, her education remains unusual by Indian standards. To put this in perspective, in 2010, there were only three graduate grandmothers among a class of sixty students of Jesus and Mary College, Delhi.        

Life

Constance was born in 1886 in Ferozepore, Punjab. Her mother was a second generation Christian,[7] probably an Anglican. She may have become a Presbyterian when she married Maya Das, a first generation convert. Marriages across denominations are not unusual in India because, except for the Orthodox-Catholic-Protestant divide, we didn’t inherit the denominational wars of the West.[8]

Maya Das sent one daughter to Mount Holyoke, another to study medicine in Edinburgh, which was a rare thing for an Indian father to do, so why did he send them abroad?[9] ‘To make a clean break with the [Hindu] past; to make them modern women,’ my aunt said. Constance, however, wasn’t a favoured daughter. Like her sisters, she graduated from Lahore’s Kinnaird High School, but for her modern western education, she went to Isabella Thoburn College in 1904. Lucknow was then, ‘from an educational point of view, the chief centre of American Methodism in India.’[10]

Constance was a Presbyterian,[11] but she became an American Methodist, possibly in 1929-30, ‘Because the church was conveniently close,’ according to my aunt, but there were probably multiple reasons for her conversion. The pragmatic Methodists were committed to social change; they were educational pioneers, which Constance admired. Perhaps she hated the British (which is why my mother became an American Methodist). The American Methodists were less racist than the English.[12] As David Hempton puts it, ‘On the whole they believed in forming partnerships with local people and not lording it over them.’[13] They dispensed with formal ritual and went directly to Jesus’ words; they had space for the radical Christianity of people like Constance’s friend Dr.Stanley Jones[14] who believed that Christianity without justice and freedom for all was a sham. Dr.Jones believed that one could not call oneself cleaner or superior to others; one couldn’t be a Christian without being involved in politics, for the Kingdom of God was impossible on earth so long as there was economic injustice; Communism addressed itself to this; capitalism had not done so.[15] Jones was not a communist. He was, however, a twentieth century Christian missionary, intent on breaking barriers between religions, as C.F.Andrews was. Sympathetic to the Indian demand for freedom, their type was rare before about the 1920s.

Reverend John Goucher, the other American Methodist who had a notable impact on Constance’s life, was an older type. Utterly sure of his mission in life, he made this astounding statement at the 1906 Methodist conference in India: ‘“The most important event in the world’s history, next to the death of Jesus Christ, is the development of the United States of America;’ when the ‘veil which had hidden the American continent was drawn aside …some of the choicest of England’s sons went forth to bring to fuller fruition in the new land those truths that God would have us give to the world.”[16] From the evidence of her time as principal of IT College, it is doubtful if Constance endorsed all his views, but she did benefit from his conviction that education was inseparable from Methodist mission. Education was in fact central to the Methodist mission, and Dr.Goucher literally invested in women’s education, founding colleges and endowing scholarships.[17] He either heard of Constance or met her at this time and was impressed because he funded her education at Goucher College.[18] She graduated in 1911 with the Phi Beta Kappa ‘for her all round brilliance.’[19] On her return, she taught for two years at IT College.[20] At the same time, she acquired an MA in English Literature from Allahabad University.

In 1913, she married Prem Nath Dass. He had proposed to her when she was 20 and he 37, but she told him she wanted to study and, surprisingly for those times, he agreed to wait. It was seven years before she married him. There’s more to this than hearts and flowers romance. Even now Indians are surprised that Constance was a ripe 27 when she married. Why did she wait? Of course she wanted to study. Perhaps she wanted to teach at IT College which didn’t hire married teachers. Or perhaps she didn’t want to live like her mother who was seventeen when she married a widower with four young children, had eight children of her own, and was dead at 28 of puerperal fever.

Constance chose an alternative life of education and teaching.[21] She had the choice because she was a Christian. Christian women didn’t have to fight against tradition to be educated. Modernisation came with Christianity. As my then 82 year-old niece, Dr.Eileen Mazumdar, put it some years ago, ‘Yes, oh yes. Emancipation came with Christianity. There was no question about struggling with the family or community to be educated, or wanting to work. There was least this sort of equality.’[22] (Compare the fuss Mahatma Gandhi’s family made about his crossing the seas and losing caste. Gandhi makes a big deal of it in his autobiography because it was a big deal for Hindus.) 

            Having an education and profession helped Constance at every stage of her life. Prem Nath, a matriculate,[23] worked in the Court of Wards. When he had a ward to care for, he had an income. When there was no income, Constance left their home in Gorakhpur on the Nepal border to teach at Lal Bagh School in Lucknow. Prem Nath died of cancer in January 1931. Constance was now a single working mother with six children between the ages of 6 and 15. She put her four sons into church-run boarding schools and, keeping her young daughters with her, she taught at Lal Bagh School for a year.[24] (IT College grew out of Lal Bagh School; both were started by the American Methodist Isabella Thoburn).            

Constance joined IT College as assistant professor of English in 1932; she became vice-principal in 1933.[25] When her furlough fell due in 1938, she put her daughters into Lahore’s ‘horrible Lady MacLagen School,’[26] as my mother always calls it, and went to Teacher’s College, Columbia University, for an MA in Comparative Education and the teaching of English Literature. Mark Van Doren was one of her teachers. Her study was funded by the Van Meter Fellowship from Goucher College which also conferred an LL.D. on her ‘For her persistently high scholarship … for her skill as a teacher, and … administrator … [and] for her exemplary character as shown … by her … contributions to the welfare of [India] .…’[27] Just before she returned to India, Boston University awarded her an honorary doctorate in pedagogy. She said it was their ‘gracious way of recognising the first Methodist college in Asia, which [she had] the honour to serve.’[28] In July 1939, she became principal of IT College. She was the first IT College alumna to become its principal. She was also its first married (though widowed) principal in spite of the rule whereby ‘Marriage automatically ended any woman teacher’s contract at Isabella Thoburn’ [29]

Constance as principal

‘The need of India today is for leadership from among her own people; leadership not of impulsive enthusiasm, or of prejudice, but of matured judgement and conviction. Part of our work as missionaries is to educate and train the character that can lead, and it is to accomplish this that we formed our first woman’s college in the Eastern world.’  (Isabella Thoburn, 1888.)[30]

As a teacher, Constance ‘was loved by her students for her patience with the slow;’ she passed on her enjoyment of her work and subject to them; she was ‘never satisfied with less than the best her classes [could] do, and [gave] of herself without stint to make their best very good indeed.’[31] I have not found much more about her teaching.

Her administration was both simpler and more difficult to know. Although in Marjorie Dimmitt, in her Diamond Jubilee history of the College, has described Constance’s time as principal, Constance herself seems absent from it. I suspect she asked Miss Dimmitt to underplay her role. But she must have had to be quick, wise and decisive for she headed the college in extraordinary times.

Constance was principal during World War II and India’s intensifying demand for Independence. The Japanese invasion of Burma, the retreat of the ragged British Indian army into the hinterland, the influx of refugees from Burma, the drying up of remittances from the ‘Far East’ to the United Provinces, the infamous Bengal famine, rioting students, hijacked trains, trains that brought wounded soldiers in from Burma after the fall of Rangoon and carried food away from famine ridden India to the east, and the Quit India movement[32] made her students restless. The girls must have felt the prevailing distress, and Constance must have had to deal with it yet we have no record of it in the Dimmit Jubilee history. Constance ensured that her students remained in touch with public affairs. She invited national leaders to the college (Sarojini Naidu, Nehru, Sir C.V.Raman); she admitted the daughter of Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister and a Congress minister then in prison ‘for her attitude towards the participation of India in the War,’ for she hoped that coming from a family ‘that has sacrificed much for the country,’ the daughter would make ‘a real contribution to the College.’[33] IT College students worked in the understaffed military hospitals,[34] and they helped with famine relief in Bengal. Financially, Constance did not allow the college to go into debt despite wartime prices increasing fourfold between 1941 and 1943 (by 100% in 1942, and double that in 1943).[35] In 1943, she told Goucher College that ‘a very real [problem] is the feeding of our two hundred girls. We laid in wheat and rice early in May for the needs of the first few months, but even then when the harvest had only recently come in prices were at least twice as high as last year. All staple commodities have trebled at least in price, and it is impossible to raise our fees for board correspondingly. We are cutting down some of the extras which we were able to give in other years. Meat the tables will have only once a day now; and one cannot yet say what other one-time necessities will have to be eliminated from out menus. However, we shall take care that the food is wholesome and enough, so that the health of the girls does not suffer. . .. The servants on low wages are finding it difficult to get two meals a day, in spite of our having raised their wages 50% on some cases. One has to … provide grain where necessary.’[36] There was a shortage of teachers. Married teachers could not live in residence,[37] suitable unmarried Indian teachers were scarce. Europeans and Americans were leaving India in shoals at this time. Several missionaries went on furlough and stayed away. ‘Five of our missionary teachers are going home on furlough,’ Constance told Goucher College in 1940. The official Jubilee history says they went on prolonged study leave.[38]

Constance didn’t just cope, she broke new ground to make the College more relevant to Indians.[39] There were new financial arrangements, for example. Miss Thoburn had charged fees ‘to encourage a genuine feeling of independence,’[40] but Jesus’s word guided Constance’s daily life, and he had instructed his disciples to care for the needy. From her own experience, she knew what it meant to want money for educating one’s children. She had never asked for charity but paid full fees for her children from her monthly salary of Rs.200.[41] When a Depression-related decision reduced her salary to Rs.170, she found a cheaper school for her daughters. Three of her sons were already in a church school for ‘children who [were] least well off.’[42] Now, despite the war economy, Constance helped poor students by getting grants and donations for scholarships from the board of directors and others, including the Ramabai Association.[43]

There was a change in the student profile. Constance admitted more non-Christians. In 1904, 20 of out IT College’s 22 students were Christians. By 1907, more students of other religions had joined. The ‘eagerness for education among women’ was so great that the college couldn’t accommodate all who applied. Among those who joined were two ‘veiled Muslims’ from Kashmir.’[44] In the 1940s, there was pressure to admit yet more non-Christians. All the while IT College was scrutinised by a small but hostile group within Lucknow University. It was not an easy time to head the college.

There was an adjustment in courses offered by the college. Hindi and Urdu were added to the curriculum, and Urdu was to become be the medium of instruction for the intermediate classes in the near future.[45] Miss Thoburn had added teachers’ training and kindergarten training to the curriculum towards making her students earning professionals if possible. Constance, too, was forward looking and wished to add professional courses but she was also realistic. During her tenure as principal, IT College girls debated issues concerning marriage, including whether married women should have professions outside the home.[46] But she knew most students would marry. Some were already married. In the 1920s, the prejudice against women’s education was strong and it was ‘hard for an educated girl to find a husband;’ two decades later, they were educated to enhance their value in the marriage market.[47] In 1933, about one-third of the students were married. A decade later, Constance wrote in her newsletter to Goucher College: ‘Several of our girls were withdrawn last spring because they were married. Some who were married have come back to finish, living in the city. One married woman fell out for a year to have her baby, and has come back to finish. What problems these young women face we cannot always know, but teachers try and meet students in small groups outside of classes, to become acquainted with them and help them if possible.’[48] How else could the College assist them? Constance wanted to pioneer a course in domestic science to teach them modern domestic management and scientific, healthy ways to bring up their children, but it was a new discipline even in the US from where she got the idea, and she couldn’t find the teachers for it.[49] 

Constance’s second furlough was delayed by a year because of my parents’ marriage on 27 December 1945. She left for the US immediately after the wedding and was away in 1946-47.[50] Family lore simply says that when my mother had her first child in September 1946, Constance was in the US. In India, even today, a woman’s mother is expected to be by her side when she has her babies, especially the first child. So Constance’s absence has been noted, mostly with slight amusement tinged with surprise, faintly implying that she had somehow failed in her maternal duty. We didn’t know and we were not told what she was doing in the US because, apparently, the family did not know nor—it seems – was it interested at the time or after. What was Constance doing in the US? Till April of 2010, her daughters didn’t know that Goucher College had invited her to deliver the commencement address for 1946,[51] or that she had represented India at the first post-war conference of the International Missionary Council, an ecumenical think tank spearheaded by the Methodist Nobel Laureate, John Mott, at Whitby, Ontario, Canada.[52] She was the only woman in the Indian delegation.[53]

These details of her life have been allowed to fade from family lore and histories of Indian Christianity. The scant documents about Constance praise her motherhood more frequently than her teaching or administration, as if it needed to be said that in spite of her teaching, she was a good mother.

She was indeed a good mother but she was also a new type of Indian woman — an educated working mother and grandmother whose professional life as an educator mattered more to her than hanging about while her daughter had a baby. She and other Christian women professionals (doctors, lawyers) broke a mould. There were no role models for them among traditional Indians, even among most Indian Christians. The Methodist women missionaries, however, did offer a model, which Constance adopted. I am guessing this was it.[54]

But why didn’t Constance’s second furlough register with the family? 1946-47 was the bitter run-up to the Partition of India. In those years, my father was City Magistrate in Lahore which was literally in flames. He’d be out for seventeen hours a day. It was never certain if he’d come home alive. Just before Partition in August 1947, he was transferred, first to Simla, then to Jullundur while my mother remained in Simla, bed-ridden with her second pregnancy. All this was in Punjab which experienced the worst of the violence that accompanied Partition. What Constance did in the US and Canada during this time was (to put it crudely) irrelevant. Perhaps that is why she didn’t talk about her year in the US.[55]

2.

Locating Constance-1

Locating Constance was a two-part problem of biographical detail and existing histories of Christians in India.

Lack of biographical information

The IT College website, Boston University, Columbia University, even Google and Wikipedia, are silent about Constance. Some gaps may never be filled because those who could have filled them are dead. Why did her story disappear? Perhaps she was too self-effacing for the good of history. There’s little new research.[56] Some evidence has been erased, not necessarily out of malice. For example, in 1932, the new science block of IT College was named the Goucher College Wing. The name disappeared decades ago and with it memory of any links between the two colleges.[57] Documents have probably been lost out of disregard for their importance, such as the weekly ‘home letters’ between IT College faculty and the US, which Marjorie Dimmitt used for her history of the college. If such letters have not been archived, it’s a historical loss.

Histories of Christians in India

Most histories of Christianity in India are from within the church. Some are hagiographical, others partial because Catholics tend to ignore Protestants and vice versa, and denominations ignore each other. Excellent histories of the church in North India, e.g. by James Alter and Ernest Campbell, are too few. The virtual binary opposite of histories from within the church are secular academic histories which often ignore the place of conviction and belief among Christians or misrepresent the complexity of Indian Christians. Christians are not an undifferentiated monolith. All missionaries in India were not foreigners, nor were they were all Anglicans serving the East India Company and then the British Indian government, and all western education didn’t turn Indians into clerks. As Constance said, ‘The history of women’s education, through the [nineteenth] century, is limited almost entirely to the efforts of Christians from England and America.’[58] I doubt if many (or any) of them became government clerks. All missionary work wasn’t alike but was shaped by the missionaries’ denominations, and American Methodists were pioneers in women’s education. IT College alone produced the first Indian women college professor, Muslim doctor, dentist, professionally trained teachers, and Legislative Councillor. Constance was a part of its pioneering history.[59] Some recent work, such as the excellent Studies in the History of Christian Missions, is beginning to fill gaps. It also shows up how much more needs to be done.

Locating Constance-2

In his preface to the life of his sister Isabella written shortly after she died, Bishop James Thoburn said that ‘The material needed was widely scattered on both sides of the globe, and in many cases it was difficult to trace the course of events long past, and connected with parties of whom but slight traces could be found. Miss Thoburn kept no diary, and was averse to keeping anything in manuscript. Only her most intimate friends will understand how it has happened that the full story of her truly noble life can not now be told except in meager outline.’[60]

            This is more or less true of Constance, who also didn’t keep a diary. But her friends are long gone and her family has not really understood the significance of her life. As for her papers, the few that have been preserved are in the Isabella Thoburn Goucher College archive. There is no collection devoted to Constance alone. Isabella Thoburn’s brother wrote about her shortly after her death with the insight of a brother and a bishop of the American Methodist Mission in India whereas Constance’s story has dimmed and been all but lost. It is almost forty years since she died, and her life has splintered into largely unverified and often contradictory anecdotes. About a decade ago, when I began to research north Indian Protestants and noticed that Dr.Goucher’s visit to India almost exactly coincided with Constance’s joining Goucher college, I wondered whether perhaps her conversion to Methodism and her studying abroad were linked. Who had paid for Constance’s education at Goucher? My aunt was sure it was Constance’s father, for ‘he was well off.’ Years later, in 2010, Marilyn Warshawsky and Tara Olivero of Goucher College sent me documents about Constance’s Goucher scholarship. Memory is useful but not always reliable.

There is a more general problem with the history of modern India which I encountered. Secular academic historians of modern India have only recently begun to acknowledge that they have left out the history of Christian missions to India. A genuine challenge for historians is how the complex and varied missionary activity can be accommodated in secular academic histories. How can it be theorised? What analytical categories can it be tidied away into? The discussions are on but as far as I can tell, the work is at the very early stage of recording data and deriving possible analytical categories from it. It has not reached the point where basic data has been agreed upon and fruitful disagreements about analyses can begin.

One fact that has been agreed upon is that from the 1880s there were more, often single, sometimes strong-minded, women missionaries.[61] As the circumstances of Isabella Thoburn’s coming to India show, it was not always easy for women to become independent missionaries, nor was their work appreciated as Bishop Thoburn appreciated Isabella Thoburn, and even he had been surprised at his sister’s quick response to his casual question whether she would like to come and teach Indian women. Strong-minded women were often considered a problem for their parent missions. They became the hubs of their establishments and would not submit to Mission discipline.[62] The real mystery was not that there were many more women missionaries at this time but a prior factor, namely, the falling birth rate. Why this happened had not been figured out when E.J.Hobsbawm wrote about the New Woman in 1987, but one consequence of it was that it gave women ‘the chance of social and professional improvement.’[63] This locates Isabella Thoburn within a wider history but it does not explain why Constance has been ignored.

Her gender is part of the reason. To repeat a point made earlier, even though she was the first Indian principal of Isabella Thoburn College, she is not as visible in anecdote and history as S.N.Mukarji, who was the second Indian principal of St Stephens College, Delhi, which was on the whole a college for men. Crudely put, women do not generally celebrate social and public achievements in print, nor even notice the significance of a woman’s life within wider contexts in the way men have noticed the life of Principal Mukarji. I do not discount this but it is not my focus. Like others working in this field, I am trying to see how we can have a fuller, more nuanced history of the role of Christians in modern India. From my difficult reconstruction of Constance’s life, I believe that some redress is needed in the construction of the two kinds of history of missions in India – the longstanding histories from within the church and the more recent secular academic histories. Histories of the church and missions by western missionaries barely mention the contribution of ‘native’ Christians, unless — like Lilavati Singh — they were close to a prominent missionary and were considered good enough to inherit the mantle of the western missionary, or – like C.F.Andrews – they figured in the non-missionary life of modern India. Constance was not C.F.Andrews and she was not unimportant in the history of Christians in modern India, but where is she to be placed in existing histories?

She wasn’t a Frykenberg Trophy of Grace. In Frykenberg’s admittedly arbitrary definition, Trophies of Grace were Christians of ‘high birth and high class’ who had a ‘celebrated status due to personal accomplishments, that stretched far and wide across the world during their own lifetimes, if not later,’ but did not grow out of or represent some existing Christian community. Although Constance’s father was a Punjabi Khatri before he became a Christian, and her maternal grandfather Chandulal had been a Delhi Kaistha, she herself belonged to ‘an already existing Christian community,’ which disqualifies her as a Trophy of Grace. Had she been a favourite child, she could have benefited from her father’s enlightened educational goals for his daughters and she did benefit to an extent (she went to Kinnaird school), but eventually she made her own way by converting from her father’s denomination to American Methodism which encouraged women’s education. Converts from one Christian denomination to another do not qualify as Trophies of Grace, but Constance’s ‘high caste, high born’ status was mentioned by the missionaries and may have helped her get the Goucher scholarship.

Jeffrey Cox points out that the documentation of missionary activity in India is ‘heavily denominational.’[64] The pioneer missionary Robert Clark’s contribution to the archive of CMS activity in Punjab is huge, for example, but

In his stories of western religion abroad, and in the stories of other pioneer missionaries as well, ordained male missionaries appear to be operating in a kind of a vacuum, interacting with each other but not with other people – many of them female Europeans and female and male Indian—who were known to be on the scene.  (Imperial Fault Lines 3).

Such vacuums continue to pop up in academic histories of Christians. Because records have been lost or imperfectly maintained, the stories too are imperfect. A relatively recent account of Master Ram Chandar as an example of a Delhi Kaistha convert does not mention two other high caste Hindus, Pandit Jankinath Gaur and Lala Chandulal, who became Christians at about the same time.[65] After their almost simultaneous conversion to Christianity, the three men were soon connected by marriage as well. My father Nirmal Mukarji’s painstakingly documented record of this – the three men were his ancestors (and mine) — is in the Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi, as part of its oral history project. These lesser known histories can help to adjust and correct more sweeping narratives about missions in north India.

I grew up with stories of conversions of my ancestors and thought I knew them well until I began to write about my maternal grandmother Constance and discovered not omissions so much as a black hole where her story should have been. I put together this scant account of Constance with some difficulty and a lot of astonishment. How could the college where she taught and of which she became the first Indian principal not have a record of her? How could the church that was her life not include her in its otherwise detailed history of its growth in India published in the mid-twentieth century?  How could we, her family, not know so many details about her? How could institutions and family alike not have sufficiently registered her struggle to be an Indian principal during the most volcanic period of India’s history in the last century? Lengthy and deficient information emerged slowly from conversations, emails, letters, diaries, and personal and public libraries, from which I carved out this bare, brief account of Constance, which is a significant part of modern India and could contribute to a more nuanced history of missions in India. It is one of many ‘lost’ biographies and first-time case histories that can help to bridge church and secular histories of missionary work in India.

I want to end by mentioning a hurdle in writing about Christians like my grandmothers. I had wanted to write about them as Christians who bore witness, to use the vocabulary of the church. Trying to understand the Christian aspect of Constance’s professional life brought me to a vast and unknown territory of denominations, gender, and race, but I still wanted to focus on this aspect of her life because her Christian faith and her personal and professional life were all one. I have not found a way to do this. Crudely again, I think the seamlessness of Christian faith and material manifestations of this faith in, for instance, Christian education, should be acknowledged in academic histories rather than being ghettoised in Church and family histories. I look forward to historians like R.E.Frykenberg, Robert Fox Young, and Jeffrey Cox building this particular bridge between Christian and academic histories.

© Shobhana Bhattacharji                                                                                            3 March 2011

    New Delhi

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[1] [Presented in a shorter form at the Education and Empire Conference, NUI Galway, in 2010]

[2] The Christian Ashrams attempted to institutionalise this effort. See e.g. Robert Smith Wilson, The Indirect Effect of Missions in India: Being the Sir Peregrine Maitland Prize Essay in Cambridge University, 1927 (London: James Clarke & Co. Ltd, 1928). See also E.Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925)and Christ at the Round Table (1928; rpt. Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 2007). Christian Ashrams were founded by E.Stanley Jones.

[3] See e.g. Susan Visvanathan, ‘S. K. Rudra, C. F. Andrews and M. K. Gandhi: Friendship, Dialogue and Interiority in the Question of Indian Nationalism,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 34 (Aug. 24-30, 2002): 3532-3541. Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have been influenced by Gandhi’s non-violence after reading E.Stanley Jones’ Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation (1938; rpt.  Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 2009).

[4] Founded by Isabella Thoburn and named after her after she died. James Thoburn asked his sister Isabella to come and educate Indian women for ‘there could never be a vigorous church in India . . . if women remained ignorant’ (Marjorie A. Dimmit, Isabella Thoburn College: A Record from its Beginnings to its Diamond Jubilee (Cincinnati: World outlook Press, Board of Missions, The Methodist Church, n.d. but c.1961), 9). The mission needed women missionaries since the men were not allowed into the zenana; but the men virtually ignored the women missionaries. Incensed at the way they were sidelined in mission work, Isabella Thoburn and seven other women founded the WFMC in 1869; its first act was to send Isabella Thoburn and Dr.Clara Swain to India.

[5] She is also down in documents and signed herself variously as Constance/Chandrama/ Constance Chandrama Mayadas/Maya Das/Maya Das Dass/ Maya-Das Dass and Chandrama P.N.Dass. She called herself Chandrama when she was in the US, though she occasionally used the name in India as well.

[6] Mrs.Prem Nath Dass, `Fifty Years of Isabella Thoburn College,’ Indian Witness Nov.5 (1936), 709.

[7] On her father’s side. Not much is known about her mother, but see Nirmal Mukarji, Family History (Unpublished MSS, Oral History Project, Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi; cited as Mukarji, Family History).

[8] Ian Weathrall, Brotherhood of the Ascended Christ (originally the Cambridge Mission to Delhi), in private conversation, 2004. However, in 1927 Smith Wilson noted: ‘Toleration—religious toleration is needed. Unfortunately, with some 160 different Christian denominations and sects working in India at the present time this is an aspect needing emphasis. Of these numerous denominations it is the smaller and more modern ones that need to learn this lesson. There are some few that go about the country with wandering commissions feeling that they and they alone own the seal which is to frank the passports for heaven. They cause much annoyance to their brethren and set up independent and exclusive churches. India has a great sense that truth is many-sided, and that no one religion or sect can claim to have apprehended the whole truth. This accounts for the fact that there has been little or not religious persecution in India as compared with Western countries. The recent Hindu-Muslim quarrels are not religious persecution, they are communal quarrels’ (70). There was also a view that the situation derived from ‘the absence to-day of the embittered antagonism against denominational religion which marked the powerful renascence of science, rationalism, and agnosticism between, roughly, 1860 and 1900’ (Sir Charles Grant Robertson, ‘Religion in Modern Universities,’ The Life of a Modern University, ed. Hugh Martin (London: Student Christian Movement, 1930), 61-82, 75).

[9] He wanted them to have an ‘English’ education. He hired an English governess to teach them ‘the classics.’ In India, the lay understanding of ‘The Classics’ means a smattering of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens, but not Greek and Latin literature.

[10] ‘Educationally, politically, and socially Lucknow is the first city of the Province . . . one of the chief inland cities of India . . . of ready access from any part of Northern India – the territory from which the college most naturally draws its student body. The Isabella Thoburn College likewise found a home in the same city, and Lucknow is today, from an educational point of view, the chief centre of American Methodism in India’ (Brenton Thoburn Bradley (1876-1949), The Making of a Christian College in India: Being a history of Reid Christian College, Lucknow (Lucknow: Methodist Publishing House, 1906; rpt. Bibliolife, 2009), 22. Also at <books.google.co.in>[22. 5. 2010].

[11] According to her application for admission to Goucher College in September 1909. My aunt thought Constance joined the Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1929 or 1930 (telephone conversation, 25. 5. 2010). According to Hemolina Roy, ‘We both joined the Central Methodist Church the same day—both of us had belonged to the A. P. Mission [American Presbyterian Mission] ’ (H[emolina] Roy, ‘A Gracious Friend,’ The Chand Bagh Chronicle, Special Alumnae Issue, Constance Prem Nath Dass Memorial, cited as CBC Memorial Issue (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, n.d.), n.p., but p.14 in my numbering).

[12] They inducted local talent into their work and established independent churches and institutions. Although they followed money and went wherever English was spoken, it didn’t make them complicit with the British. In fact, the British in Lucknow were hostile to the earliest Methodists. The American Methodists came to north India in 1856 with the idea of starting a mission in Lucknow, but because of the hostile British reception, they settled in Bareilly. After the 1857 uprising, however, the British were friendlier towards the Americans, which is how Lucknow became a major American Methodist centre for education. The Methodists set up colleges and a press (now called Lucknow Publishing House). Committed to education, the Methodists set up schools in rural areas and colleges for the urban middle class in Lucknow. The influx of single women missionaries began about this time. 

[13] David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 168. The view that Methodists were less racist is debatable.

[14] Stanley Jones was sent ‘with foresight and great-heartedness [by] the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church [as] “evangelist-at-large” to India and to wherever else he might feel led.’ <http://sites.google.com/site/whoisthisjesus/jones>[16. 4. 2010].

[15] See E.Stanley Jones, Christ and Communism. Jones also said that capitalism’s greatest weakness is its aggressive competition; Adam Smith’s laissez faire has not worked—it has only given us a world divided between the over-stuffed and the starving; God has created enough for all of us but until these resources are no longer in the hands of private individuals, these can be no economic justice, no kingdom of God on earth. Communism was the great hope of the future in the mid-1930s. See E.J.Hobsbawm’s memoir, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (New York: Random House, 2002).

[16] “India mission jubilee of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Southern Asia: story of celebration held at Bareilly, India, from December 28^th, 1906, to January 1^st, 1907, inclusive.”

<http://www.archive.org/stream/indiamissionjubi00pric/indiamissionjubi00pric_djvu.txt>[1. 3. 2010]. A similar view was expressed in ‘the London Spa Fields tabernacle hymn from 1742 that proclaimed “great things in England, Wales and Scotland wrought / And in America to pass are brought”” (Eliga H.Gould, ‘The Christianizing of British America,’ Missions and Empire, ed., Norman Etherington, in Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, 31. For the state of mission schools in 1933, see J.Waskom Prickett, Mass Movements in India: A Study With Recommendations (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing house, 1933), Chapter XII, ‘Schools,’ 265-293. Dr.Goucher was a friend of John Mott, a layman and the moving spirit behind the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh, 1910. John R.Mott received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, and was first honorary president of the World Council of Churches. See <http://www.oikoumene.org/en/programmes/the-wcc-and-the-ecumenical-movement-in-the-21st-century/relationships-with-member-churches/60th-anniversary/photo-galleries/faces.html> [22. 5. 2010].

[17] He used the money his wealthy wife brought to the marriage (Marilyn Warshawsky, via email). Marilyn Warshawsky emailed me a list of schools endowed or funded by Rev.Goucher.

[18] In her application for admission to the Woman’s College of Baltimore, Constance put down Dr.Goucher as her guardian to whom bills were to be sent (see Constance Maya Das, ‘Application for Admission: To the Woman’s College of Baltimore, 24 September 1909’).

[19] Registrar [Goucher College], ‘Subjective report for Constance Maya-Das (Mrs.Prem Nath Dass), Goucher 1911,’ March 7, 1939; citation. She used to wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key with pride.

[20] My mother was a little uncertain about this, but an Alumnae Association questionnaire in the Goucher College archive filled in by Constance says that between in 1911-13, she taught at IT College.

[21] Constance reported the following: ‘One of my pupils told me a few years ago that her mother was forced into marriage at the age of fourteen although she longed to continue her studies with her tutor at home. That mother sent her two daughters to school and college until one of them because of her brilliant university career became a lecturer in Lucknow University, and at the age of 27 refuses to be married because she, a Hindu woman, prefers a career’ (Constance Maya-Das Dass, ‘The Changing Face of Educationfor Women in India,’ Goucher Alumnae Quarterly (1946): 9-12, cited as Changing Face of Education, 11).

[22] Dr.Eileen Mazumdar, in private conversation, 24. 4. 2004.

[23] The information about his education is uncertain. I think I was told as a child that he was a matriculate, but a Goucher College document about Constance says he ‘had attended St.John’s College, Agra, India, and Bishop’s College, Calcutta’ (Registrar [Goucher College], ‘Subjective report for Constance Maya-Das,’ 1937), but even Goucher College has made mistakes in its record of Constance (e.g. dating her installation as principal as1941 instead of 1940).

[24] Mohini was 8; Premilla was 6.

[25] ‘Our new Vice Principal, Mrs.Das, is also one of our old students. . . . A few years ago her husband died, and I asked her to come on our faculty. I really didn’t know where I could use her; but I knew her personality and her example would be worth having. She has not disappointed us in anything, and I was very happy when last January she was made Vice Principal’ (Mary E.Shannon [Principal], Bulletin Letter No.8 (August 1, 1933), received by the Dean’s Office, Goucher College, on August 30, 1933.

[26] Seventy years later, my mother still calls it ‘the horrible’ and ‘the dirty’ Lady McLagen School.

[27] On 14 October, 1938, according to a hand written note attached to a photograph of Constance taken at Goucher College and captioned, ‘Newly elected President of Goucher’s sister college in Lucknow, India, Isabella Thoburn; holder of the Dean Van Meter Alumnae Fellowship for 1938-39.’ President Robertson of Goucher said, as he awarded her the LL.D, ‘Constance Maya Das Dass. The democratic world of learning maintains an unforced friendliness across political frontiers. Goucher College, in Baltimore, and Isabella Thoburn College, in Lucknow, were the first to announce themselves as sister colleges. Again a Goucher graduate accedes to leadership of our distant sister and to leadership of Indian women.’ Among seven others honoured on this occasion of 50th anniversary celebrations of the college were the presidents of Radcliffe and Wellesley.

[28] Constance Prem Nath Dass, ‘Report of the Dean Van Meter Fellow,’ Goucher College Alumnae Quarterly, (July 1939), 15.

[29] Dimmit 142. Lilavati Singh was to take over from Isabella Thoburn, but she died in 1909. Thirty years later, Constance became the first Indian head of the college.

[30] Quoted in Mrs.Prem Nath Dass, Vice-Principal, ‘Fifty Years of Isabella Thoburn College,’ Woman’s Missionary Friend (October 1936): 326-329, 328-29.

[31] Nora Roy, Tribute (CBC Memorial Issue, 13, 14, my p.n.); ‘She is a student in the real sense of the word, never having lost her eagerness to learn’ (Mary Shannon, Principal, IT College, letter recommending Constance for a fellowship, 1937, Isabella Thoburn Archive, Goucher College) Dr.Shannon resigned in order that Constance could take over. Motherhood was the third aspect of Constance that was often admired. Even E.Stanley Jones’s mentioned it in his letter recommending her for a fellowship. (E.Stanley Jones, Letter of recommendation, April 6, 1937, Isabella Thoburn College Archive, Goucher College). Of course, she was a good mother. She educated her children well, and they did well in life on the whole: one was in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), another the Indian Police (IP), a third the Royal Indian Air force, a fourth lived in UK; one daughter became a doctor; the other married an ICS officer. But she was also an unconventional mother. See the account of her second furlough later in this paper.

[32] Constance didn’t just keep the college going through war and rising political tension with ‘grace and dignity without compromising on its Indian and national character,’ she fell ill in 1942, according to Dimmitt. My mother remembers that when some students wished to join an anti-British Quit India March in 1942, Constance called them to her and told them it was their time to study; there would be time for politics later. I was a bit shocked: ‘Did she stop all of them from joining the march?’ ‘O no. I think some girls went.’ My cousin, Dr. Amrita Dass, says Constance often told her about this, ‘The British were quelling protestors violently; it was dangerous for the girls to go on the march. Their safety was her responsibility.’ Miss Dimmit, who doesn’t mention the Quit India Movement by name in her Jubilee history of the college, says that IT College girls felt they were a part of the war when they fed soldiers meals at the Lucknow railway station. For an excellent account of the United Provinces in 1942, see Indivar Kamtekar, ‘The Shiver of 1942,’ Studies in History, 18, 1, n.s. (2002): 81-102.

[33] Chandrama Premnath Dass, Newsletter to Goucher College (January 10, 1941).

[34] General Slim was appalled by what he saw in Ranchi: “‘The hospital provision was inadequate. Inadequate in amount, in accommodation, staff, equipment, and in basic amenities’” (quoted in Kamtekar 85).

[35] Dimmitt 142.

[36] Chandrama P.N.Dass, Newsletter to Goucher College (July 28, 1943); received by the office of the President, Goucher College, December 29, 1943. Constance ‘had a King Midas touch, but she never used it selfishly. She advised young people starting out in life how to invest their money most gainfully. She told people of modest means how to buy and get the best value for their money’ (Nora Roy, CBC Memorial Issue).

[37] Dimmitt 142.

[38] Chandrama Premnath Dass, News letter to Goucher College (April 15, 1940); see Dimmitt 142. For political and financial problems faced by the college in the 1930s, see Dimmitt 130-131, 132.  ‘An antagonistic spirit pervaded general life even more than educational institutions. The revolt was more social than political, not particularly anti-foreign, but anti-everything, a seething, childish demand for exemption from all law and order. Men students would invade cinema houses and demand free shows; flood into first-class train coaches—having purchased only third-class tickets; pull the automatic brakes to stop trains. As a mob of them trailed past the Chand Bagh campus after one rowdy train incident, teachers speculated on how long their own students would remain uninfected. One faculty member wrote gratefully: “Within our campus the girls are steady and studious as ever in the past; they fairly gobble at knowledge…’” (130-131). Dr.Shannon, the principal, wrote: ‘“The men students of this province have distinguished themselves by the number and destructiveness of the strikes, boycotts, and non-cooperation movements they have engaged in during the year . . . . But Isabella Thoburn College has been as steady as Gibraltar. The communal tension of the political world has not penetrated our campus … .’” She asked the Lucknow University Vice Chancellor ‘if it would help the position of the college if an Indian principal were appointed after her retirement. “Undoubtedly, and very greatly,” was his answer’ (132, 135).

[39] In 1883, the Board of Education in India noted the ‘great good’ Rev.Goucher had done ‘to a class of people for whom Government is doing nothing educationally.’ It is not clear from the report whether this was a Methodist Mission Board or a British Indian government board.

[40] She was pleased she had no scholarship students. See Dimmitt 14.

[41] Did she avail of concessions for her children? My mother says that Constance paid full fees. In 1934, Indian teachers’ salaries were cut ‘to match the cut sustained by the missionaries at the beginning of the previous year;’ Dr.Shannon said that if there were complaints she hadn’t heard them (Dimmitt 131). Constance’s salary was cut by Rs.30, radically affecting her domestic arrangements. She had to bring her daughters away from Wyneburg Allen School in Mussoorie to Lal Bagh School, Lucknow. Until I began to write this paper, the reason for the shift in my aunt and mother’s schooling was vague. On being pressed to explain why they changed schools, my mother, who was 10 years old in 1934,  said that her sister wanted to leave the Mussoorie school, and she didn’t want to stay without her sister. But in 2008, she had told me that she had wanted to join the hostel. Constance told the head of the school how much she could afford to pay. It was insufficient, which was why she put her daughters into the cheaper Lal Bagh School, where my mother didn’t do well because the medium of instruction was Urdu, which she did not then know. Constance then sent her two daughters to Lady MacLagen School, Lahore, which had a hostel; instruction was in English; Urdu wasn’t compulsory; and Constance’s cousin and niece Honey, who taught at the school, could keep an eye on the girls while Constance herself was away in the US on furlough.

[42] She had put them into the Church Missionary Society School, Lucknow, in 1931. I have not been able to find out very much more about this school, but it was possibly the McConaghey School, set up ‘to supply the requirements of the children who [were] least well off’ (Eyre Chatterton, Bishop of Nagpur, ‘The Diocese of Lucknow. The Land of Historic Cities,’ A History of the Church of England in India Since the Early Days of the East India Company, in Project Canterbury (London: SPCK, 1924); also at <http://anglicanhistory.org/india/chatterton1924/22.html> [22. 5. 2010]).

[43] Constance received a letter from a poor pastor who was willing to pay for his daughter, but it would have cost him his entire month’s salary. She got money for the college the Presbyterian Mission, Clementine Butler (daughter of the first Methodist missionaries), and Rs.10, 000 from the Pandita Ramabai Association (see Dimmit 146-147). Constance’s brother-in-law, Maharaj Singh, donated an open air swimming pool. I am not sure how this helped the war effort or the national movement, but I think the point was to keep the college going, upgrading it all the time in spite of road blocks. Constance must have done more; there must have been a record of her work as an administrator. For example, she must have written to the board of directors which sat in New York. Where is the correspondence? I have not been able to locate it, an example of documentation lost or not easily available.

[44] Changing Face of Education 10.

[45] Dimmitt 145.

[46] See Dimmitt 148.

[47] Changing Face of Education 11.

[48] See Mary E.Shannon, Bulletin Letter No.8 (August 1, 1933), to Goucher College, received by the Dean’s Office on August 30, 1933; Chandrama P.N.Dass, Newsletter to Goucher College (July 28, 1943), received by the office of the President, Goucher College, December 29, 1943).

[49] Euthenics did become a part of the curriculum in 1948 based on a similar course at Vassar (Dimmitt 161). The Woman’s Christian College, Madras, was the first in India to run the domestic science course (see Dimmit 146).

[50] The furlough was due in 1945; my parents were married in the McDowell Memorial Chapel, IT College, on 27 December 1945. My mother thinks Constance left for the US early in January 1946.

[51] Constance Maya Das Dass, ‘Unlit Lamps,’ (Goucher Alumnae Quarterly Vol.XXIV No.4 (August, 1946): 3-7. In her commencement address at Goucher College, Constance spoke of the misery of famine and poverty resulting from ‘this cataclysmic war.’

[52] 82-year-old John Mott was at the 1947 Whitby conference, which conference focussed on a world recovering from the War. Altogether there were 4 0or 5 women from the younger churches. See Guide to the International Missionary Council Archives – Part 3…From originals held at World Council of Churches, Geneva, at  <http://www.library.yale.edu/div/fa/imcpart3.htm>[5. 6. 2010].  For a report of the 1947 Whitby Conference, see Kenneth Scott Latourette And William Eichey Hogg, Tomorrow Is Here: The Mission And Work Of The Church As Seen From The Meeting Of The International Missionary Council At Whitby, Ontario, July 5-29(?), 1947 (New York: Friendship Press For The International Missionary Council). Also at <http://www.archive.org/stream/tomorrowishere013333mbp/tomorrowishere013333mbp_djvu.txt>[1. 3. 2010].

[53] My mother didn’t know she’d ever visited Canada.

[54] Of course her sisters were working women, too. The doctor was with the British Army and in France during WWI

[55] The long Indian silence about World War II had started, but WWII and the struggle for Independence were inextricably connected. See e.g. Kamtekar passim.

[56] Also, contradictory information has not yet been sorted out, e.g. When did Constance resign from the College? Discrepancies have been ignored, e.g. Did Isabella Thoburn’s first students need protection from or not?

[57] At Dr.Goucher’s suggestion, Baltimore College students collected $25,000 for IT College, which was used to add a new wing in 1932, which is no longer called Goucher Wing, nor does anyone in the college seem to remember it was ever called that. My 86-year old mother told me about it; Goucher College records corroborated her memory. See also Mrs.Prem Nath Dass, ‘Fifty Years of Isabella Thoburn College,’ The Indian Witness (November 5, 1936), 709. For decades, there also were exchanges of faculty and students between ITC and Goucher College, even up to the early 1970s.

[58] ‘. . . the primary and secondary schools and later high schools were almost exclusively established by Christian bodies’ (Changing Face of Education, 10).

[59] For a list of IT College firsts, see Mary E.Shannon, ‘Isabella Thoburn College Golden Jubilee,’ Woman’s Missionary Friend (October 1936), 325. At Constance’s installation as Principal on 26 January 1940, the Methodist Bishop Robinson listed some other firsts: ‘As was fitting in the first college for women in the land with a full staff of women instructors and boarding accommodation, our records show that at one time or another in its history it presented many “first things” in India. It is not a complete list that notes: the first kindergarten; the first Intermediate Science course; the first graduate of which became the first B.Sc. graduate; the Intermediate Science graduate who later took her course in the foremost medical school of Upper India, and who went out as the first qualified Mohammadan woman doctor in India, and probably the first in the world; the first B.A. and the first normal school graduate from Rajputana; the first woman to receive her M.A. in Upper India; the first to have on its staff an Indian woman; the first woman from the orient to serve on a duly organised world’s commission. . . . the first woman to become a dentist, the first to become a ? agriculturalist, and the first to be placed in charge of a boys’ high school came through this institution;’ The earlier principals were in charge of the College ‘in its period of pioneering. New paths were broken and new records were made;’ now Constance would ‘open the door of education’ to ‘excellencies’ (‘Dr.Chandrama Prem Nath Dass Installed as Principal,’ Address delivered by Bishop J.W.Robinson, President of the Board of Governors of Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, at the installation service, January 26, (The Indian Witness (February 1, 1940), 69-70, Goucher College Lovely Lane Museum and Archive, Baltimore, Maryland). The Methodists set up the first woman’s hospital in Asia; Dr.Swain was the first lady doctor in India.

[60] James Mills Thoburn, Preface, Life of Isabella Thoburn (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham; New York: Eaton &Mains, 1904). Also at <http://www.archive.org/details/lifeofthoburn00thobuoft>[1. 3. 2011].

[61] The increase began after the 1840s and ‘eventually’ two thirds of missionaries were women (R.E. Frykenberg, Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500 (OUP, 2003), 338). See also Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford UP, 2002), 155. Also at <http://books.google.co.in>[26. 2. 2011].

[62] Father Ian Weathrall, Cambridge Brotherhood, Delhi, in private conversation, 2004.

[63] E.J.Hobsbawm, ‘The New Woman,’ The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987; rpt. London: Sphere Books, 1989), 192-218, 195.

[64] Imperial Fault Lines 3.

[65] See Avril Powell, ‘Processes of Conversion to Christianity in Nineteenth-century North Western India’, in G. Oddie (ed.), Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia (Routledge, 1997).

13 May 2025