Guest Post

Dr. Deepra Dandekar
Researcher, Center for the History of Emotions
Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Baba Padmanji was a prolific Marathi writer, who espoused women’s education, empowerment, the need for spiritual reform, and Christian conversion in mid-nineteenth century Maharashtra. Educated in convents and influenced by the Scottish Free Church Institution of India, and especially by charismatic Christian reformists such as Rev. Narayan Sheshadri, Padmanji went on to stay in Bombay as a missionary of the Scottish Free Church and became well-known for his vociferous Marathi Christian texts.

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The CTLA team are involved in a series of cultural events throughout 2016, starting with a reading by theatre artist Annie George at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Thursday 26 May. Battle for the Soul – Hidden Voices from India’s Past explores questions of faith and culture in colonial India. This storytelling event invites the audience to step into the world of nineteenth-century India, with music, images and readings from accounts written by men and women.

We have planned a series of three poetry writing workshops, Self-Transformations: Writing Faith Journeys in Verse,

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In my first blog post on ‘fact and fiction’ I mentioned three groups of authors for whom fictitious conversion narratives seem to have been particularly productive: Christian Missionaries, Europeans residing in India and – perhaps this may come across as a surprise – the Indian Hindu elite. I want to compare the novels Mimosa and The outcaste which I blogged on in previous entries to a novel composed by an Indian writer, who intellectually engaged with Christianity but never gave up his Hindu religion:

Clarinda, A historical novel, written by A.

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In the last post I wrote about fictitious conversion accounts and their potential vis-à-vis factual report. But as I mentioned there, many of these fictional accounts were based on ‘real’ lives. At our Delhi workshop I presented autobiographical accounts of the Mangalore-born Brahmin Anandrao who joined Christianity and, under his Christian name Herrman Anandrao Kaundinya, became the first ordained pastor in the ranks of the Protestant Basel Mission in India. His conversion in 1844 stirred up a controversy between his family, the missionaries and the British administration. While preparing this paper, I came across a novel that seems to be based on this story.

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Life stories of religious conversion appear in many shapes and are told from various perspectives. You might wonder why authors favour imaginative literature over factual reports. Perhaps this has to do with the potential of literary texts to draw vivid scenes, develop multiple plots and lines of argument, map out social environments and reflect inner motions that are inaccessible to external observation. Fictional texts – such as a well-composed novel with a set of characters, suspense, emotions etc. – open a whole universe to the reader that will surpass most plots one can experience in real life. In short, literature has the potential to be “more than real”,

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After a successful New Delhi workshop in December 2015 the project team have a panel at the 24th ECSAS (European Conference on South Asian Studies)  at the University of Warsaw from 27 to 30 July 2016.

Keep up to date with all our conference news here.

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