Adam’s escape: Children and the discordant nature of colonial conversions

Abstract

The article traces the fundamental incoherency that structured the Danish Missionary Society’s work at a boarding school for low-caste ‘heathen’ children in South India in the 1860s and 1870s. Through elaborate disciplinary methods, the missionaries set out to Christianize and civilize the Indian children’s morality, social behaviour and bodily comportment. Yet, the missionaries’ perceptions of ‘the Indian child’ also reflected the contemporary bolstering of racial thinking in Indian colonial society, resulting in doubts whether Indian children could in fact become true Christians. This paradoxical endeavour shows how children became a site for the production of difference that sustained colonialism.