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ABSTRACT
This article explores missions to blind and deaf children in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, Sri Lanka, and China which were established by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. Manly staffed by women, these missions can be seen as innovative in the colonial treatment of disability in South and East Asia, pioneering the use of sign languages, tactile alphabets, and oralism as methods of special education in what they referred to as ‘the East’. In making appeals to British readers, missionaries emphasized the humanity of those with whom they worked. At the same time, their representation of disability, ethnicity, and gender were firmly rooted in longstanding colonial and Orientalist discourses which emphasized difference as much as they did universality. I argue that these representations were ambivalent, encouraging both affective connections between missionaries, their subjects, and their supporters back in Britain and defined by racialized and ableist othering. As such, the article aims to track their development and analyse missionary praxis and discourse in relation to disability and colonialism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 M E Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold: An Account of the Work of the CEZMS Among the Blind and Deaf of India, China and Ceylon, London: CEZMS, 1925, pp 2–3.
2 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England, California: California University Press, 1999.
3 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1880–1860, Cambridge: CUP, 2003; Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. For more on missionaries more generally see Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914, Manchester: MUP, 2004; Emily Manktelow, Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier, Manchester: MUP, 2013.
4 See for example, David Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment, Basingstoke: Routledge, 2012; Ian Hutchison, A History of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.
5 For a discussion of a ‘dense point of transfer’ see Stoler, drawing on Foucault: Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, California: California University Press, 2002, p 49.
6 See Chris Bell as discussed in DisCrit--Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education, edited by David J. Connor et al., New York and London: Teachers College Press, 2015.
7 Aparna Nair, ‘“They Shall See His Face”: Blindness in British India, 1850-1950’, Medical History, 61 (2), April 2017: 181–199; Linda Banks and Robert Banks, They Shall See His Face: The Story of Amy Oxley Wilkinson and her Visionary Blind School in China, Sydney: Acorn Press, 2017. See also Esme Cleall, Colonising Disability: Impairment and Difference in and Across the British Empire, c. 1800–1914, Cambridge: CUP, 2022.
8 Helen Meekosha, ‘What the Hell Are You? An Intercategorical Analysis of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Disability in the Australian Body Politic’, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 8(2-3), 2006: 161–176.
9 Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
10 For the historiography of medical missions, see, for example: Charles M Charles Jnr, The Steamer Parish, The Rise and Fall of Missionary Medicine on an African Frontier, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; David Hardiman (ed), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006; David Hardiman, Missionaries and Their Medicine. A Christian Modernity for Tribal India, Manchester: MUP, 2008; Markku Hokkanen, Medicine and Scottish Missionaries in the Northern Malawi Region, 1875-1930: Quests for Health in a Colonial Society, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007; Amanda Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity, Oxford: OUP, 2005; Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford: OUP, 2005, pp 261–85; Rosemary Fitzgerald, ‘“Clinical Christianity”: The Emergence of Medical Work as a Missionary Strategy in Colonial India, 1800-1914’, in Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds), Health, Medicine and Empire, Perspectives on Colonial India, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001, pp 88–137.
11 I discuss the formation of the CEZMS missions in Cleall, Colonising Disability, pp 78–82.
12 Gladys Bergg, ‘School for the Deaf and Blind, Ceylon’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Aug 1915, p 148.
13 J B and N R Nix James, ‘Twelfth Annual Report of the North India Industrial Home for the Christian Blind’, SOAS IFNSIS/BMMF/Interserve Northern India, Rajpur, Sharp Memorial Blind School/Annual Reports, 1903–1930 (incomplete), np.
14 ‘North India Industrial Home for Christian Blind’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Aug 1915, p 144.
15 Christopher Krentz, Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, Temple University Press, 2022, p 3.
16 Florence Swainson, ‘Work Amongst the Deaf and Dumb in India’, India’s Women, China’s Daughters, April 1915, p 67.
17 For these developments, see, for example, Jan Branson and Don Miller, Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002; Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
18 Swainson, ‘Work Amongst the Deaf and Dumb’, p 67.
19 Miss Miskin, ‘Letters From the Field (Mt Lavinia)’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Sept 1921, p 130.
20 Branson and Miller, Damned for their Difference; Baynton, Forbidden Signs.
21 Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p 29. See also Cleall, Colonising Disability.
22 Miss Hewlett, ‘Work for the Blind’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Nov 1907, p 162.
23 M F Chapman, ‘School for the Deaf and Blind, Ceylon’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Aug 1915, p 147.
24 Mary E Darley, ‘Blind and Crippled Sisters in Kienning’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Nov 1932, p 212.
25 ‘The Braille Missionary Union’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Sept 1917, p 108.
26 D M Turner, K Bohata, S Thompson, ‘Introduction to Special Issue: Disability, Work and Representation: New Perspectives’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 2017; 37 (4): 6101.
27 Sarah F Rose, ‘Work’, in Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin (eds), Keywords for Disability Studies, New York: New York University Press, 2015, pp 187-90, cited in Turner, Bohata and Thompson, ‘Introduction’.
28 David Turner and Daniel Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coal-Mining, 1780–1880, Manchester: MUP, 2018.
29 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, Cambridge: Polity, 2002, pp 347–363.
30 Swainson, ‘Work Amongst the Deaf and Dumb’, p 67.
31 For an articulation of the ‘wrongs’ of such marriages, see archetypically, Alexander Graham Bell ‘On the formation of a deaf variety of the human race’ discussed in Cleall, Colonising Disability, pp 215–247. This did not, of course, mean that such marriages didn’t take place.
32 Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p 58.
33 ‘Playmates’, Homes of the East, Jul 1918, p 2.
34 Ibid., p 22.
35 Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference. For racial and gendered hierarchies on the mission station in a different colonial location, see Hall, Civilising Subjects.
36 Miss Campbell, ‘Our Deaf and Dumb School, Palamcottah’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, April 1902, p 89.
37 S Nightingale, ‘A Walk Round Palamcottah’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Feb 1927, p 37.
38 S S Hewlett, They Shall See His Face. Stories of God’s Grace in Work Among the Blind and Others in India, Oxford: Alden and Company, 1898, pp 12, 22.
39 H Tempest Reilly, ‘Foreword’, in Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p iii.
40 Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p 3.
41 Tempest Reilly, ‘Foreword’, in Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p iii.
42 Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p 15.
43 Katharine Watney, ‘The Blind Girls’ School, Foochow’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Oct 1926, p 209.
44 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
45 Magrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self, London: SAGE Publications, 2002.
46 Ibid.
47 The Church Missionary Gleaner, Feb 1863, p 22.
48 India’s Women and China’s Daughters, July 1911, p 122.
49 ‘North India Missionary Institute for the Blind’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Feb 1903, p 40.
50 Hume Griffith, Dust of Gold, p 14.
51 Hewlett, They Shall See His Face, p 7. Quoted in Cleall, Colonising Disability, p 51.
52 Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin [1978], 2003.
53 Cadbury Library, Birmingham, CEZ/G/EA 4/7: Miscellaneous overseas items 1880-1956, School for the Deaf and Blind. Manuscript notebook concerning pupils and staff of the School for the Deaf and Blind.
54 Anita Ghai, ‘Engaging Disability with Postcolonial Theory’, in D Goodley, et al. (eds), Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp 270–287, p 274.
55 ‘Where the Dumb Speak’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, May 1915, p 97.
56 ‘School for the Deaf and Dumb’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Dec 1908, p 179.
57 Miskin, ‘Letters from the Field (Mount Lavinia)’, p 130.
58 Amongst others see Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Colonising Motherhood: Evangelical Social Reformers and Koorie Women in Victoria, Australia, 1880s to the early 1900s’, Women’s History Review, 8 (1999): 329-46; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Hall, Civilising Subjects.
59 Mrs G Wilkinson, ‘The Blind in China’, A Quarterly Token for Juvenile Subscribers, Jul 1904, pp 1–2.
60 ‘Where the Dumb Speak’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, May 1915, p 97.
61 S S Hewlett, ‘Most Blessed for Ever’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Oct 1903, p 227.
62 Hume-Griffith, Dust of Gold, p 24.
63 Miss Sharpe, ‘Light in Darkness’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, May 1898, p 115.
64 C F Gordon-Cumming, Work for the Blind in China. How Blind Beggars May be Transformed Into Useful Scripture Readers, London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1887.
65 Swainson, ‘Work Amongst the Deaf and Dumb’, p 68.
66 Esme Cleall, “‘Deaf to the Word’: Gender, Deafness and Protestantism in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland”, Gender and History, Oct 2013: pp 590–603.
67 Gordon-Cummings, Work for the Blind in China.
68 M Katherine Mace, ‘The Deaf and Dumb School at Mylapore, Madras’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Feb 2021, p 29.
69 Charles Baker, The Blind, London: Sampson Low, 1895, p 11. For a discussion of this, see also Esme Cleall, Colonising Disability, Cambridge: CUP, 2022, pp 123–146.
70 Cleall, ‘“Deaf to the Word”, pp 590–603.
71 ‘With our Deaf and Dumb Children’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Aug 1901, p 178.
72 Gordon-Cumming, Work for the Blind in China.
73 Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: OUP, 2007 [first published 1905].
74 Mrs Wilkinson, ‘An Excursion with Blind Chinese Boys’, Eastern Ho!, May 1922, p 51.
75 For more on the display of indigenous peoples back in Britain, see Sadiah Quereshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empires and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011.
76 Chapman, ‘School for the Deaf and Blind, Ceylon’, p 147.
77 ‘Stephen, One of the “Dummies” at Palamcottah, A Story for the Children’, in India’s Women and China’s Daughters, July 1911, p 134.
78 ‘Our Deaf and Dumb Schools Palamcottah’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, Aug 1902, p 178. Quoted in Cleall, Colonising Disability.
79 Ibid., p 178.
80 Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, ‘Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism’, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2010, 4(3): 219–236; Alice Hall, Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan in 2012; Alice Hall, Literature and Disability: Contemporary Critical Thought, London: Routledge, 2015; Christopher Krentz, Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022.
81 Krentz, Elusive Kinship.
82 See Meekosha, ‘What the Hell are You?’, pp 161–176.
83 ‘Where the Dumb Speak’, India’s Women and China’s Daughters, May 1915, p 96.
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Esme Cleall
Esme Cleall is a senior lecturer in the History of the British Empire, at the University of Sheffield. Her first monograph Missionary Discourses of Difference: negotiating otherness in the British empire, c. 1840–1900 (Palgrave, 2012) explored missionary writing in India and Southern Africa, particularly focussing on the construction of race and gender. Her second monograph, Colonising Disability: impairment and otherness across Britain and its empire, 1800–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explored disability in an imperial framework including looking at immigration, education, language, philanthropy and disabled people’s movements. She has also published on the colonial family and on deafness in Britain. Her current work explores topics such as disability, immigration, mental distress, and reproduction in the nineteenth and twentieth-century British empire.