Abstract
This essay examines the unusual evangelical work of Marilla Baker Ingalls, an American Baptist missionary to Burma from 1851–1902. By the time of her death in Burma at the age of 75, Ingalls was known as one of the most successful Baptist evangelists among Burmese Buddhists. To understand the extraordinary dynamic of Ingalls’ expanding Christian community, this essay focuses on two prominent objects at the Baptist mission: A life-sized dog statue that Ingalls kept chained at the edge of her property and a massive banyan tree covered with biblical illustrations and revered by locals as an abode of divine beings. This essay argues that these objects transformed Ingalls’ American Baptist Christianity into a kind of Burmese religion that revolved around revered objects. Through an examination of the particular shrine practices that pulled people into the Baptist mission, this essay reflects on the larger context of religious encounter, conflict, and representation in modernizing Burma.
Highlights
Over three hundred feet tall and covered in gold, Shwedagon Pagoda is the most famous religious monument in Burma
Sir Dietrich Brandis, the renowned German tropical forester who worked with the British Imperial Forestry Service in Burma and elsewhere in colonial India, Rather than posing a threat to the male leadership in the American Baptist mission to Burma, Ingalls’ work as an independent female missionary seems to have served as a model for single women in the field
There certainly remains important work to be done with these documents, but the American Baptist mission to Burma offers a previously unstudied wealth of evidence of other forms of religious activity in the country
Summary
Over three hundred feet tall and covered in gold, Shwedagon Pagoda is the most famous religious monument in Burma. Sir Dietrich Brandis, the renowned German tropical forester who worked with the British Imperial Forestry Service in Burma and elsewhere in colonial India, Rather than posing a threat to the male leadership in the American Baptist mission to Burma, Ingalls’ work as an independent female missionary seems to have served as a model for single women in the field. Brandis concluded that Ingalls was “greatly missed and mourned by the railway servants of Lower Burma” [18] His remarks hint at Ingalls having taken the new British railway and transformed it into a missionary machine with the same evangelical drive and creative approach that reshaped her Thonze mission into a popular center of powerful religious objects
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