“Gendering” Religious Conversions in Colonial India: Christianity, Clothing, and Cartoons
by Charu Gupta
Chand (literally meaning Moon), one of the most famous Hindi magazines of early twentieth century north India, published a series of cartoons in the 1920s, cataloging the supposed “alarming” results of religious conversions to Christianity by Dalit women. These images displayed the upper-caste reformists’ own moral dilemmas, perceived insecurities, and sexual unease. At the same time, they implicitly and unintentionally offered a counter-politics of sartorial desires from a Dalit perspective.
Clothing hierarchically distinguished women from one another. Dalit women had to endure humiliating dress restrictions, which were also ways to mark their bodies as inferior and sexually promiscuous. For example, among the sweepers of north India, women traditionally could not wear the bodice, gold ornaments, silver anklets, or a nose ring (William Crooke). Clothing became an indicator to distinguish Dalit Christian women from their unconverted counterparts, and a way to garner dignity.
When studying religious conversions to Christianity from a gendered angle, students of North America are inundated with scholarly works on missionary women’s perspectives, and their positions, agency, and work in other parts of the world. These works underscore how foreign missionaries in India showcased conversions as attempts to save “natives” from “heathen” religions. While deeply perceptive, this scholarship addresses mainly one side of the story: it discusses the opportunities and contradictions faced by women missionaries, Christian organizations, and charities in negotiating the new spaces created by colonial and mission activity. It rarely gives adequate space to the possible implications and impact on women at the receiving end, and their reception in the popular vernacular
The Christian community in India is drawn largely from converts of the “depressed classes,” for whom religious conversions, among other things, were symbolic acts and material markers to transcend systems of inequality; signal upward mobility; reconfigure social boundaries; acquire some education, employment, or political representation; register protest; and put the ignominy of their past status behind (Gauri Vishwanathan, Sathianathan Clarke). For example, it was reported in the 1921 Census of north India that some ‘outcaste’ converts entered occupations under the stimulus of cooperative credit societies linked to the Christian Central Bank in Lucknow. In Saharanpur, some sweepers baptized by the American Presbyterian Mission were employed as preachers. Many converted Dalits refused to do begar (unpaid labour) in the households and fields of landlords.
While most studies on Dalit conversions have been male-centric, some recent works, for example by Eliza Kent and Chad Bauman have attempted to see them through a gendered lens, arguing that discourses of respectability that emerged among Dalit Christian communities had contradictory implications for women. The “mission of domesticity” schooled Dalit women into becoming not just “good,” “clean” Christian wives and mothers but also ‘good domestic servants’, through training in education, household work, child care, and cleanliness. However, while strong impulses towards “disciplining” were discernible, conversion also proved to be an enabling discourse, at times improving the condition of Dalit women in comparison to the drudgery in which they were living before. They saw education, even if limited to sewing, embroidery, hygiene and Bible training, as more appropriate and respectable than manual work or unpaid labor for landlords.
Most converted women also contested their association with sexual availability and degraded female value. Some became Bible women, whom the missions employed to teach and evangelize. Mrs. Mohini Das, a Dalit Christian convert, speaking at the All India Depressed Classes Association in Lucknow, north India, in May 1936 gave a speech titled “What Womanhood Owes to Christ,” where she argued that Christianity opened a new door of opportunity for depressed class women: “Wherever His (Jesus) teachings took root the condition of women began to alter. She became not just a glorified courtesan and housekeeper, but a homemaker, a companion to her husband and a fit mother for bringing up his children.” Stated a Dalit woman, whose ancestors had converted at this time, “My grandmother converted to Christianity because the missionaries gave her hope that her children could receive education and get health facilities.” Dalit women were seeking to appropriate the intellectual and political tools of Christianity, less to mimic missionary culture and more to vernacularize and mold it to their needs and desires.
SARTORIAL DESIRES
Conversions were acts of stubborn materialities, which also embodied sartorial desires. Clothing became a way for Dalit Christian women to express dignity, as well as a way to differentiate themselves from unconverted women.
For missionaries, notions of care and presentation of the body were also key components of their work. In the close environment of educational institutions, missionaries were able to regulate the dress of Dalit Christian women. Sewing and stitching was particularly important, as missionaries were keen to see the “seminude” outcaste women neatly clad in “decent” clothes, fit for clean Christian souls. Pictures appeared in popular literature portraying on the one hand a naked, “dirty” and unkempt outcaste women and on the other a sari clad, “clean” and smiling Christian Dalit woman (Figure 1). Dalit women collaborated on this project, for overlapping and different reasons.
Hindu upper-class reformists also recognized dress as a terrain for contesting social relations and articulating new religious identities. Many reformist publications in Hindi depicted two outcaste women (or men) together, one of whom had converted to Christianity. However, even while lamenting conversions, they could not help but acknowledge the change in demeanor and elevation of stature that it brought about in Dalits—in their mode of dressing, walking style, gait, status, and prestige. One cartoon, for example, visualized the converted outcaste woman walking ahead royally, carrying an umbrella, a purse, wearing a hat, skirt, and high-heeled shoes, all sartorial items that had been denied to Dalits by the upper-caste Hindus, thus reflecting an elevated status. The unconverted woman walked behind, head bent, bare-footed, carrying the child of the converted Dalit woman (figure 2). Yet another image lamented the loss of Dalit women to Christianity, showing the converted woman again in shoes, hat, and umbrella (figure 4). The cartoons were meant to warn the magazine’s upper-caste Hindu readership that if Dalit women were not treated well they might convert and acquire a better status. Thus, it was better to treat Dalits more humanely and bring about reforms from within Hindu society.
Another had the Christian Dalit woman carefully sitting on a chair looking down, while the untouchable looked up and took care of her dog (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Christian-Hindu Untouchable Woman. The Christian woman is the master of the dog, while the outcaste woman her servant. But they both were of the same caste, Hindus please see carefully. Source: Vyanga Chitravali.
Figure 4: Madam Lady and Fish Seller. One has become a madam lady, the other a fish seller. Blessed be the religion of Christ, which is all powerful. Source: Chand, May 1929: 77.
Such banal, everyday cartoons and popular embodied communications can function as pivotal documents for recording attitudes to conversions. Cartoons could make a significant impression on a functionally literate population. While encompassing the everyday life of Dalit women at home and on the streets, they did not represent the truths of conversions, as hardly any converted Dalit women dressed in ways illustrated here. In fact, the dress for Dalit Christian women in missionary schools was very modest, with a sari and a blouse. Further, it was not that missionaries tried to impose western clothes on converted outcaste women. Rather, a good deal of subtle jostling went on between missionaries and women converts, where desires and ambitions were bound with dilemmas over what to wear. As Emma Tarlo remarks, because of its proximity to the body, clothing is particularly susceptible to symbolic elaboration. The very depiction of Dalit women in Western clothes signified an inversion of norms. The powerful language in the captions accompanying the cartoons made explicit the perceptions and anxieties of caste Hindus, while also hinting at Dalit women’s desires (Charu Gupta).
For Dalits, clothing representations became a symbol of dignity, as they were in a sense translating and appropriating such images to make them their own. Discarding demeaning dress became a form of dissent against caste discipline, marking the right to inhabit unmarked bodies. For women from stigmatized communities, sartorial changes, even if sometimes mythical, symbolically associated women’s clothing with community dignity. Good clothing, footwear and bodily comportment—standing erect while speaking, refusing to contort the body in a submissive fashion—were critical to Dalit self-fashioning. As Anupama Rao states, it was a statement of rights to display unmarked caste bodies, and it questioned the religious and symbolic monopolies and policing of intimate and public spheres by upper castes.
To conclude, Hindu reformers’ sartorial cartoons of converted Christian Dalit women exposed contradictory impulses at the heart of their project. In this regard, Foucault’s notion of how bodies, and the ways they are dressed and managed through both self-discipline and surveillance, is relevant. However, clothing’s disciplinary strength was often diluted as it also became a performative tool for Dalits to adorn dignity and wear themselves into colonial modernity. Dalit women’s sartorial desires declared an altered relationship with the world through the transformed disposition of caste marked bodies. It implied a language of intimate rights, and metaphors for new vocabularies of the body, creating ripples in codified definitions. Conversion by Dalit women thus creates an opening to explore body history, where everyday life is a site for the social reproduction of a hegemonic caste order as well as an enabling ground for practices of dissent.
Charu Gupta teaches in the Department of History, University of Delhi. She has been a Visiting Professor and ICCR Chair at the University of Vienna, a Visiting Faculty at the Yale University, the Washington University and the University of Hawaii. She has also been a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, the Social Science Research Council, New York, the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand, the Wellcome Institute, London, and the University of Oxford. She is the author of Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Permanent Black, Delhi, 2001 & Palgrave, New York, 2002) (paperbacks 2005, 2008, 2012; kindle e-book 2013), and The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Permanent Black, India & University of Washington Press, 2016; paperback 2017). She is also the editor of Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2012) and co-editor of Caste and Life Narratives (Primus, Delhi, 2019). She has published several papers in national-international journals on themes of sexualities, masculinities, print cultures, caste and religious identities. She is presently working on life narratives in Hindi in early twentieth century north India.