Romance on the Afghan Frontier: Desire in the Literature of the Church Missionary Society of Peshawar

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1883, Thomas Patrick Hughes, the director of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Peshawar published a romance novel set along the Afghan frontier of British India. This paper argues that Hughes’s romance novel, Ruhainah, offers an alternative perspective on the role of evangelism in the empire by attending to the importance of affect and desire in the mission’s project. Scholars of Christian missionary work have debated the role of missionaries in projects of empire, but this scholarship is frequently limited by a dichotomous debate: Did missionaries of the British Empire reify imperial control? Or, in the name of Christian universalism, did these missionaries resist the empire’s violence and racism? Through heuristically adopting Ruhainah as a guide to the numerous publications of the CMS in Peshawar and the archives of personal correspondences of CMS officials, this paper cuts across these dichotomies by demonstrating that Hughes used his various writings to train his readers to romanticise and desire the Christianization of the Afghans. While Hughes’s variously resisted and reified imperial policies, his writing used this very tension between Christian universalism and racist particularism to cultivate ‘an affect of empire’ and a desire for the religious encounters possible along the Afghan frontier.