Mary Carpenter and the Brahmo Samaj of India: a transnational perspective on social reform in the age of empire

Abstract

This article, offering a transnational perspective on Mary Carpenter's promotion of female education in colonial India, seeks to foster the writing of new histories of social reform in the nineteenth-century world and fresh analyses of global women's history in the age of empire. It roots Carpenter's engagement with India in her involvement in a transoceanic web of British, Indian and American religious liberals and social reformers and explores the ways in which her promotion of Indian women's education was shaped in interaction with members of an influential Bengali socio-religious reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj. Presenting the resultant push to found training schools for women teachers as a project of cross-cultural collaboration, it argues that this cannot be adequately subsumed under the rubric of colonial reform, and did not simply relegate Indian women to the position of silent victims who needed to be saved.