‘Rise, and Take the Gospel Message […] Far away to India’s Daughters’

Abstract

This essay discusses the life and writings of Ellen Lakshmi Goreh (1853-1937), an ethnic Indian who was adopted by British missionaries in infancy, educated in Victorian England as child, and who returned to India as a Christian missionary in adulthood. Examining her poetical works as unusual examples of Indian-English Christian writings during the late nineteenth century, the essay seeks to establish Goreh’s reputation as a Victorian-era transracial adoptee author, and, thereby, extend research on the history of transracial adoptee writing (which has to date been confined to the writings of the last fifty years) to the nineteenth century. To this end, Goreh’s personal story is traced from her origins; adoption; negotiations with her personal and cultural identities in England; entry into print culture; return to India as a Christian missionary; revisions in the representations of Indian peoples; and conceptualisation of God as the faithful mother in her mature poetry. Her poetic developments are explored from her replication of English ethnocentric imperialist views in “From India’s Coral Strand” (1883), her first volume of poetry published in England, which depicts Indians as helpless heathens damned to ignorance and hell without the intervention of salvific English missionaries, to her second collection of verse, Poems (1899), published some sixteen years later in Madras which inscribes her radically transformed understandings about Indian subjectivity and corresponding belief in the pre-existing immanence of the Christian God in India’s innocents. The role of Goreh’s religion as the agent through which she re-engaged with, returned to, and re-assimilated into Indian culture is explored, and it is demonstrated how her identification of a special work for herself among the Anglo-Indian community, a group which reflected her own dual identity, resulted in the production of a more sensitive, organic and indigenous form of Indian-Christian writing.