The Rev. James Long was one of the most remarkable Protestant missionaries working in India in the nineteenth century. Sent to Calcutta at the age of 22 in 1840, he devoted his life to representing what he passionately believed were the best interests of the forgotten poor and oppressed among the Bengali population. Long was a central figure in the indigo planting controversy of 1861 and suffered imprisonment as a result. His memory is revered even today in modern India, where his contribution to the development of Bengali vernacular education, literature, history, and sociology is highly regarded. Dr Oddie has produced the first full-length biography of Rev Long, examining his work and activities in the context of his own background, philosophy and motivation as well as the political and cultural climate of the day. This book will add significantly to our knowledge of social movements in nineteenth century India and the colonial responses to them.

Missionary Discourse examines missionary writings from India and southern Africa to explore colonial discourses about race, religion, gender and culture. The book is organised around three themes: family, sickness and violence, which were key areas of missionary concern, and important axes around which colonial difference was forged.

With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has become a volatile issue, erupting in violence against converts and missionaries. At the height of British colonialism, however, conversion was a path to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. In this book, Eliza F. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. Kent argues that the creation of a new, "respectable" community identity was central to the conversion process for the agricultural laborers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity under British rule. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. By the creation of a "discourse of respectability," says Kent, Tamil Christians hoped to counter the cultural justifications for their social, economic, and sexual exploitation at the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.