Roman Catholic female missions in colonial and postcolonial India: transitional awakenings and NGO outreach after Partition in 1947

Female Roman Catholic mission outreach in India began with dangerous work in Lock hospitals for sexually diseased women. They hid in church steeples during the Revolt of 1857. They reinforced once powerful Raj-created ethnicities and exclusions of Indians. Yet, internal to this, by the twentieth century their idiomatic contrarian approaches eventually built direct connections to Indian girls and young women - today the focus of their educational endeavours and their outreach. 

My paper considers the postcolonial period with this background in mind. UNESCO currently oversees impressive, but broad template-based, initiatives to counter gender-related violence towards university-level women. Yet having sufficient local knowledge about school children and their situs - including those in slavery and domestic abuse situations - is another matter. Female Roman Catholic orders who ‘stayed on’ after Independence (unlike many Protestant missionaries) contribute at this level of schooling benefaction. 

Drawing on their bona fides as providers of genuine philanthropy over some six generations, they have since adapted deep knowledge of Indian communities to build new economies of scale, by working with other NGOs - even anticipating India’s Right to Education Act in 2009 and providing cost effective Rainbow Schooling models which government has since also taken up.      

 
Tim Allender is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum at the University of Sydney. His newly published book is entitled Empire Religiosity: Covent Habits in Colonial and Postcolonial India (MUP: Studies in Imperialism, 2024). It focuses on female Roman Catholic missionary work and its complex interaction with the British colonial imperium and its aftermath in India. Some of the book’s findings, (based on extensive fieldwork in India and interviews with some 18 women religious who have long histories of outreach there) form the basis for this paper.