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Paper short abstract:

Histories of education are often enfolded in national histories of development and modernisation. My work draws attention to Tamil Bible women, who engaged in education as an intimate practice of transformation within their own communities, rather than as a site for development ideology.

Paper long abstract:

Histories of education are often unproblematically enfolded in national histories of development and modernisation. In Indian history, the study of women's education is typically also the scholarship on national womanhood: the complex making of subjectivity tethered to the geopolitical fantasy of a modern nation-state in the making. Whilst the role of missionaries has, to some extent, been studied in this context, my work draws attention to a class of women who engaged in education as an intimate practice of transformation within their own communities: Tamil Bible women. By centring them, I draw attention to a history of education that underlies Indian Christian subjectivity as simultaneously critical of missiological discourse, and of the tethering of educated womanhood to the nation-state. In particular, I focus on the work of Annal Satthianadhan in the late 19th century, whose work centred on educating women in Madras (now Chennai), often in their homes, and in a neighbourhood school. Satthianadhan's work centred on domestic transformation, driven by a Tamil Christian theology that centred on women's experience of family life. The work of Bible women like Satthianadhan, I argue, shaped projects of feminist community in early 20th century the South India that centre community-building practices, centred on anti-caste work, rather than iterating education as a key site for the enactment of development ideologies.