Paper short abstract:

This paper, through a missionary text called Kardoo the Hindu Girl (1869), addresses the strife between a claim of biographical facticity and performativity of the autobiographical self which lies in the heart of autobiography. In this text the author performs the ‘I’ and narrates the life story.

Paper long abstract:

At the heart of autobiography lies a claim of biographical facticity which is in constant conflict with performativity of the biographical self. This paper addresses the climax of such strife where the author performs the 'I' or the biographical self of the autobiography. Kardoo the Hindu Girl (1869) is a missionary text by Hariette G. Brittan. In the book, the author imagines herself as a Hindu woman and narrates her life story from childhood till Christian missionaries save her from the burning pyre of her dead husband. True to the nature of an autobiography, the text creates an imagined, unnatural self—that of a Hindu lady, and through exoticizing the tragedies in her Hindu life, brews up a Hindu society and culture which in turn serves the missionary aim: to highlight the horror of heathendom.

The author's Victorian gender ideas rarely match her concern for the Hindu girl Kardoo and it is apparent in the anathema of the protagonist/narrator towards the Hindu goddess Kali who could otherwise have been the epitome of female empowerment.

The analysis takes into account the following points: the assumed authenticity of autobiography and the missionary politics behind choosing it as a form of narration; how power is yielded through performance of powerlessness in a missionary text; how self is invented for consumption of the selected audience of the text; and how the process of this invention asserts and destabilizes identity, thereby creating a rift between the author and the narrator.