Madras Christian College Research Articles

New record of the antlion Palpares contrarius Walker, 1853 (Insecta: Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae) in Tamil Nadu, India

Neuroptera is a taxon among Insecta, that is distinct with its highly veined transparent wings. The family Myrmeleontidae includes antlions, whose adult forms are occasionally seen, unlike the larval forms that spend most of their life living in small pits in the soil. Madras Christian College (MCC) is a large scrub jungle, harboring a range of flora and fauna, including a diverse range of insect species. An insect, large enough to be mistaken for the large damselfly, was spotted in the Madras Christian College campus. Taxonomic keys were used in literature search and the insect was later identified as Palpares contrarius (Walker, 1853).

Converts, Bible Women, and Girl Graduates: Emerging Visions of Indian Christian Womanhood in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890)

ABSTRACT: Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890) is an autobiographical novel by one of the first Indian women to attend medical school in Madras. Saguna is a New Woman narrative of spiritual and social development for both its protagonist and the emerging Indian Christian community. Written in English, it was serialized in the Madras Christian College Magazine , a periodical reaching British, Anglo-Indian, and Western-educated Indian readerships regionally, nationally, and in Christian missionary networks throughout the Empire. Satthianadhan investigates the origins of Indian Christian womanhood in Indian Christian conversion narratives and professional work, especially the mission-sponsored Bible Woman. Critiquing the ways in which female converts and Bible Women retain limited personal agency or occupy lowly positions in the community, Satthianadhan presents her protagonist as a New Woman who draws on the Bible Woman’s example of bold preaching and her own liberal education to ground her beliefs about society and religion in independent, rational thought. Satthianadhan promotes Indian women’s education reform as a movement to be embraced by the Indian Christian community and as a means through which its women can join theological conversations and champion social reform efforts in the larger, male-dominated, Indian public sphere.

Converts, Bible Women, and Girl Graduates: Emerging Visions of Indian Christian Womanhood in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890)

ABSTRACT: Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890) is an autobiographical novel by one of the first Indian women to attend medical school in Madras. Saguna is a New Woman narrative of spiritual and social development for both its protagonist and the emerging Indian Christian community. Written in English, it was serialized in the Madras Christian College Magazine , a periodical reaching British, Anglo-Indian, and Western-educated Indian readerships regionally, nationally, and in Christian missionary networks throughout the Empire. Satthianadhan investigates the origins of Indian Christian womanhood in Indian Christian conversion narratives and professional work, especially the mission-sponsored Bible Woman. Critiquing the ways in which female converts and Bible Women retain limited personal agency or occupy lowly positions in the community, Satthianadhan presents her protagonist as a New Woman who draws on the Bible Woman’s example of bold preaching and her own liberal education to ground her beliefs about society and religion in independent, rational thought. Satthianadhan promotes Indian women’s education reform as a movement to be embraced by the Indian Christian community and as a means through which its women can join theological conversations and champion social reform efforts in the larger, male-dominated, Indian public sphere.

Tambaram, 1938: Christianity's shift to the Global South

The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 was followed in 1928 by a Conference in Jerusalem. Jerusalem emphasised ‘the younger churches’, the term then used for the churches that had resulted from missionary work. This article examines the International Missionary Council's conference of 1938, held at the Madras Christian College, Tambaram, near Madras. It had over 470 participants from 70 nations. A feature of great significance was that participants from what we now call the Global South were in the majority. This aspect has been noted, but not explored in detail. A book that was produced for the Conference, Evangelism for the World Today, edited by John Mott, which included many contributors from the Global South, has received virtually no coverage. This article examines Mott's neglected book, the role of Africans at Tambaram, the voices of women and the ongoing influence of the Conference.

A CHECKLIST ON THE MOTH DIVERSITY (LEPIDOPTERA: HETEROCERA) AT MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE CAMPUS, TAMBARAM EAST, CHENNAI

Moths are diverse group of insects belonging to the order Lepidoptera and suborder Heterocera.
 They are regarded as one of the indicators of a healthy environment. This study deals with the first checklist of moth species in Madras Christian College campus, Tambaram. The study was carried out from December 2018 to September 2019. In total, 32 species of moths were identified from 29 genera falling under 9 families. The Moths identified belonged to the families of Erebidae, Noctuidae, Crambidae, Sphingidae, Eupterotidae, Uraniidae, Saturniidae, Geometridae and Tineidae of which, family Erebidae was found to be the superior family. The results of this preliminary study sheds light on the unknown biodiversity of moth, which needs to be strengthened through comprehensive future surveys. The objective of this study is to document moth diversity in Madras Christian College, Tambaram.

Competencies and Skill Sets: A Prerequisite of Library Professionals in the New Normal

COVID-19 has traumatized every area libraries are no exception. This article aims at suggesting how such challenges could be overcome by suitable competencies and skill sets in the new normal. Undoubtedly, the year 2020 witnessed the resilience of majority of library professionals and library associations as a community to support each other care and share the expertise. Now to look back, it is evident that the competencies and skill sets that have helped in organizing online events, virtual faculty development programs, webinars on various relevant topics have helped enormously to connect the users of the libraries. Based on the experience at Women’s Christian College (WCC) and Madras Christian College (MCC), competencies and skills sets that need to be a prerequisite to every library professional to meet the users’ needs in the era of new normal have been suggested.

(079) Proposal to convert Recommendation 41A.1 into an Article

Recommendation 41A.1 of the Shenzhen Code (Turland & al. in Regnum Veg. 159. 2018) states that “The full and direct reference to the place of publication of the basionym or replaced synonym should immediately follow a proposed new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name. It should not be provided by mere cross-reference to a bibliography at the end of the publication or to other parts of the same publication, e.g. by use of the abbreviations ‘loc. cit.’ or ‘op. cit.’” However, this Recommendation has not been followed by some authors in their publications owing to strict adherence to the format required by some journals, i.e. “Author(s) (year: page/plate number(s))” with full bibliographic details given in the References section of the paper. This is especially apparent in the journal Phytotaxa, but not in all cases (e.g. Kanokorn & al. in Phytotaxa 162: 120. 2014). Furthermore, there are a few other taxonomic journals such as Blumea and Telopea that follow this format for bibliographic/nomenclatural citation. However, when it comes to new combination, name at new rank or replacement name, a full and direct reference to the place of publication is also given immediately after the basionym or replacement name. As pointed out by Turland (Code Decoded, ed. 2: 39. 2019), we strongly feel that this method of citation is against what the Code recommends, even though it technically complies with what the Code rules. To bring uniformity to such citations, we would like to make Rec. 41A.1 mandatory by upgrading it to an Article by means of an amendment to the existing Art. 41.5, as follows. “41.5. On or after 1 January 1953, a new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name is not validly published unless its basionym or replaced synonym is clearly indicated and a full and direct reference given to its author and place of valid publication, with page or plate reference and date (but see Art. 41.6 and 41.8). On or after 1 January 2007, a new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name is not validly published unless its basionym or replaced synonym is cited. On or after 1 January 2025, a new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name is not validly published unless it is immediately followed by the full and direct reference to the author and place of publication of its basionym or replaced synonym.” We thank the Principal and the Head of the Department of Botany, Madras Christian College (Autonomous), Chennai and the Director, Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata for providing facilities. We also thank Dr. John McNeill, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh and Nicholas J. Turland, Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin for their comments.

1920 Problems of marriage and sexual morality: the Lambeth Conference

This article by Dame Mary Scharlieb (1845–1930) addresses issues on marriage and sexuality raised at the 1920 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops. It is likely that she had a strong influence on the Bishop of London on medical issues, and, through him, on the resolutions on marriage and sexuality at this Conference. Her article, published in Theology in November 1920, is clearly a piece of its time and reflects a fascinating mixture of pro-women and conservative ethical views, tempered by her understanding of medical science as it was then: for example, she and the bishops at the Conference strongly opposed the use of contraception even within marriage (ten years later the Lambeth Conference dropped this opposition). Mary Scharlieb was a pioneer female gynaecologist. Raised as an Evangelical, she became an Anglo-Catholic after her marriage to a British lawyer who was employed in Madras. Her medical training, prompted by the lack of medical help for Indian women, began at the Madras Christian College but was completed at Mrs Garrett Anderson’s London School of Medicine for Women, leading to her appointment at the Royal Free Hospital in 1902. Her husband stayed working in India until his death, while she worked as a gynaecologist in London. She was created a Dame two years before her death. Editor.

Spider (Arachnida: Araneae) fauna of the scrub jungle in the Madras Christian College campus, Chennai, India

A total of 108 species of spider species belonging to 84 genera and 25 families were identified from the scrub jungle of the Madras Christian College campus. Pagida salticiformis (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1883) is recorded for the first time from India. Langona tigrina (Simon, 1885) is rediscovered 135 years since its first description and the unknown male is described and illustrated. A new combination, Langona davidi (Caleb, Mungkung & Mathai, 2015) comb. nov. is proposed for the species previously placed in Phlegra. Three new synonymys have been recognized: Clubiona foliata Keswani & Vankhede, 2014 and Clubiona pashabhaii Patel & Patel, 1973 are junior synonyms of Clubiona filicata O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1874 and Myrmarachne megachelae Kumar & Mohanasundaram, 1998 is a junior synonym of Myrmaplata plataleoides (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1869). Distribution records of several species have been updated and as many as 31 species are recorded for the first time from Tamil Nadu State. The family Salticidae is the most diverse with 28 species belonging to 22 genera followed by Araneidae with 19 species in 11 genera. Guild structure analysis revealed seven feeding guilds of which, stalkers and orb-web weavers are the dominant feeding guilds followed by ground runners, ambushers, and scattered line weavers, respectively.

John Robertson Henderson (1863–1925): Scotland, India and anomuran taxonomy

John Robertson Henderson was born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he qualified as a doctor. His interest in marine natural history was fostered at the Scottish Marine Station for Scientific Research at Granton (near Edinburgh) where his focus on anomuran crustaceans emerged, to the extent that he was eventually invited to compile the anomuran volume of the Challenger expedition reports. He left Scotland for India in autumn 1885 to take up the Chair of Zoology at Madras Christian College, shortly after its establishment. He continued working on crustacean taxonomy, producing substantial contributions to the field; returning to Scotland in retirement in 1919. The apparent absence of communication with Alfred William Alcock, a surgeon-naturalist with overlapping interests in India, is highlighted but not resolved.

Indian Christian Spiritual Autobiography

Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1887–88), initially serialised in the Madras Christian College magazine is rightfully regarded as the first Indian spiritual autobiographical novel. Any study of this narrative compels one to explore the influence of the Evangelical autobiography on this genre in nineteenth century India as well as to engage with the distinctive aspects of an Indian Christian woman’s spiritual quest in British India. This study also argues for focus on the spiritual life of Indian Christianity as a valid way of according recognition to the experiences and struggles of the life of a religion that is outside of mainstream religious discourse in contemporary India.

SYNTHESIZING HINDU AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN A. MADHAVIAH'S INDIAN ENGLISH NOVELCLARINDA(1915)

The novels of Indian writerA. Madhaviah (1872–1925) are deeply ambivalent toward British Protestant missions in the Madras Presidency. The son of a Brahmin family from the Tirunelveli District in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu, Madhaviah had the opportunity to form close intellectual relationships with British missionaries and Indian Christian converts while studying for his B.A. at the Madras Christian College, completing his degree in 1892. Although he remained a Hindu throughout his life, Madhaviah's first English novel,Thillai Govindan(1903), praises some missionaries for their moral characters, naming in particular the Madras Christian College's principal, William Miller (1838–1923); however, the same novel also criticizes other unnamed Madras missionaries for extravagant lifestyles that squandered the money of unsuspecting supporters in Britain (64). Madhaviah's deep commitment to late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Indian women's reform movements, including widow remarriage, the abolition of child marriage, and women's education, meant that he often agreed with British missionaries championing similar reforms in Indian society. However, his early novels also criticize the proselytizing activities of missionaries, particularly in educational settings. In his Tamil novelPadmavati Carittiram(1898, 1899) and English novelSatyananda(1909), Madhaviah exposes missionary attempts to take advantage of a young pupil's inexperience in an educational setting or to exploit a quarrel between pupil and family members to secure a conversion. Yet in contrast, Madhaviah's final English novel,Clarinda: A Historical Novel(1915), offers perhaps the most positive depiction of an Indian Christian conversion in his fiction. A historical novel that reimagines the life of a renowned eighteenth-century Marathi Brahmin woman convert living in Thanjavur, Madhaviah'sClarindaoffers Christian conversion as a liberating decision for the young Clarinda. Her conversion allows her as a widow to escape the patriarchal control of her abusive husband's family and to contribute to her community as a philanthropist and an early social reformer. While Madhaviah remained critical of certain conversion tactics, which could transgress ethical boundaries, Madhaviah also acknowledged that missionary goals for women's improved lot within society often intersected with his own convictions.

Hindu Students and Their Missionary Teachers: Debating the Relevance of Rebirth in the Colonial Indian Academy

This essay provides a meta-narrative for the philosophical dialogues that took place in colonial India between Scottish missionary philosophers and philosophers of Vedānta on the topic of karma and rebirth. In particular, it offers a reconstruction and analysis of the context and strategy that shaped the content of discussions that were initiated in the pages of the Madras Christian College Magazine in 1909 between Subrahmanya Sastri and AG Hogg and that inspired Radhakrishnan’s response in his dissertation entitled “The Ethics of Vedanta and its Metaphysical Suppositions”. The broad context is provided by a history of missionary presence in India. The context is further circumscribed by the ‘hybrid’ character of the position of the missionaries as teachers in departments of philosophy, teaching students of “upper-caste Hindus” in the English medium universities set up by the British in the late nineteenth century. The hermeneutics of form and context is essential to understanding the content of these debates about the ethics and metaphysics of Christianity and Hinduism, where the meaning and significance of the notion of rebirth took center stage. Importantly, these debates in turn shed light on the broader social and political context in which these debates took place.

Hersilia aadi Pravalikha, Srinivasulu & Srinivasulu, 2014 a junior synonym of Hersilia savignyi Lucas, 1836 (Araneae: Hersiliidae).

The genus Hersilia was established by Audouin in 1826 with H. caudata Audouin, 1826 as the type species. It is the most speciose hersiliid genus presently comprising 79 described species worldwide (World Spider Catalog 2017, version 18). There are seven species known from India: H. aadi Pravalikha, Srinivasulu & Srinivasulu, 2014, H. longivulva Sen et al., 2010, H. orvakalensis Javed et al., 2010, H. savignyi Lucas, 1836, H. striata Wang & Yin, 1985, H. sumatrana (Thorell, 1890), H. tibialis Baehr & Baehr, 1993. This paper is based on fresh material collected from the patches of scrub jungle enclosed within the Madras Christian College campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Both sexes of H. savignyi are illustrated. H. aadi Pravalikha, Srinivasulu & Srinivasulu, 2014 is synonymized with H. savignyi Lucas, 1836.

A new jumping spider of the genus Stenaelurillus Simon, 1886 from India (Araneae: Salticidae: Aelurillina).

The genus Stenaelurillus Simon, 1886 is known from 35 species worldwide, including 27 species from Africa and eight from Asia (four species known from India, one from Iran, one from China, one from Tibet and one from Vietnam) (World Spider Catalog 2016). The four species known from India are S. albus Sebastian et al., 2015, S. jagannathae Das, Malik & Vidhel, 2015, S. lesserti Reimoser, 1934 and S. sarojinae Caleb & Mathai, 2014 (Prószyński 2015; World Spider Catalog 2016). The present paper contains description of Stenaelurillus metallicus sp. nov., discovered from scrub jungle remnants of tropical dry evergreen forests, a unique habitat found in Madras Christian College campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

A Stochastic Model of Tumorigenesis with Defects of Spindle Geometry and Chromosome Segregation Errors

Bala Srinivasan, Udayabaskaran Swaminathan& Zahir Hussain Buhari Department of Statistics, Madras Christian College (Autonomous), Tambaram, Chennai 600059, Tamil Nadu, India. Department of Mathematics, Vel Tech Dr. RR & Dr. SR Technical University, Avadi, Chennai 600062, India. Department of General Studies, Yanbu Industrial College, P.O. Box 30436, Yanbu Al Sinaiyah, Yanbu, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Mona Hensman: An Indian Woman at the World Missionary Conference in Tambaram (1938)

ABSTRACT The World Missionary Conference in Tambaram 1938 is one of the most important ecumenical conferences. It was the first such meeting that took place in India (at the Madras Christian College). Representatives of the so-called younger churches made up the majority of the 471 delegates. Although a number of publications analyzed “Tambaram,” most of them did not focus on the experiences of these participants from the global South. This article will introduce Mona Hensman, one of the seventy female delegates and a member of the Indian delegation. Originally from Bengal, she was an Anglican, but her family background was transconfessional. Hensman became involved in feminist as well as in Christian organizations and brought her ideas and visions to the Tambaram conference. The concrete outcome of this meeting did not live up to her expectations, but many fundamental questions discussed there for the first time later became critically important for the ecumenical movement.

Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India by Nicholas B. Dirks

Nicholas B. Dirks, Autobiography of Archive: A Scholar's Passage to India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 400 pp.Through this collection of essays, most of them published previously over the last 25 years, the current Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, who is also professor of history and of anthropology, offers the reader both intellectual biography and, by the end, powerful defense of liberal arts education. The book, too, bears reading as study of historical method. Following brief introduction about his own passage to India, first as the not-quite teenage son of Yale Divinity professor who received Fulbright to teach at Madras Christian College for year in the early 1960s, the collection is organized in five sections, each relating to particular part of Dirks's career. The first three of these sections include articles about the concerns of his three major monographs, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of Indian Kingdom (1987); Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001); and The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (2006). The last two sections refer to his work building the academic enterprise of historical and as university administrator.In his doctoral and post-doctoral research on south Indian kingship, Dirks made crucial intervention in the of India. At the time of its publication, The Hollow Crown (1987) was recognized as probably the most important single work to have been published since Dumont's (1970) analysis of the system in Homo Hierarchicus, which had, for two decades, set the terms of scholarly engagement among anthropologists of India. Dumont had argued that in Indian the hierarchical supremacy of the Brahman is reflection of the way in which power is encompassed by religion. Through analysis of kingship that is rich both historically and ethnographically (and challenging to read), Dirks brought power back in to the understanding of Indian society, stressing its logic. He shows-as he puts it in his Preface to the Second Edition of the book, reproduced here-that caste neither marks out the fundamental units of Indian nor defines the essence of Indian being. Rather, social relations were defined in terms of political processes and political referents, the ultimate referent...being the king himself (74). The three essays in the first section of Autobiography, however, including the one from which the book takes its title and which is the story of the Mackenzie archive on which Dirks has drawn extensively, are not so much about the argument of his work on kingship, as about his early efforts to write history of pre-colonial India and the dilemmas posed by the historical nature of archives themselves, reflecting as they do, an archaeology of the state.These first explorations thus furthered Dirks's determination to interrogate colonial constructions of knowledge about Indian society, which have influenced the understandings of historians and anthropologists in ways which, for long, many failed to recognize. This is the subject of his second major book, the argument of which is outlined in article with the same title, first published in 1992 and reproduced here. The arguments of both-by now well known-are that the colonial sociology of India elevated as being at the heart of Indian society, ignoring many other referents of identity and establishing it as a specifically colonial form of civil society (87). For anthropologists it is likely that the second section of Autobiography will be the most rewarding, including as it does essay drawing on ethnography of what turned out to be the nonevent of festival in south Indian village, in which the author discusses arguments on ritual and resistance, as well as classic article showing the way in which anthropology in India began its career in India as colonial judgment (163). …

Service Learning Approach to Recycling

Integrating curriculum-based service learning program into chemistry courses yields many benefits for the students such as improved cognition and practical skills. Additionally the community partner benefits from both the expertise and the services of the class. This paper describes the success story of one such program conducted by students at Madras Christian College. It involves the interaction with informal recyclers and the chemical recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste. The stakeholders of the project were the students, informal recyclers, residential population, and an NGO. The marginalized informal recyclers were brought into mainstream society through formal solid waste collection system. This approach views the recyclers as catalysts to tackle climate change instead of viewing them as a social burden. The public was taught waste segregation and collection methods. On the whole the program resulted in improving the immediate environment and saving a wetland where dumping of waste was carried out.

The Effect of Organic and Inorganic Fertilizers on the Growth of Radish

A field experiment was conducted at the Madras Christian College Farm during FebruaryMarch 2011 to study the effect of various compositions of organic, inorganic fertilizers and their interactions on the growth of white radish plant. A 2 factorial experiment was conducted as a Randomised Completely Block Design in four replications. Four unique combinations of organic and inorganic fertilizers were applied for each replicate. The parameters measured to study the growth are weight, number of leaves and the length of the bulb. The study reveals that inorganic fertilizer had significant impact on the weight and number of leaves but not on the length of the bulb of the radish plant. The interaction of the fertilizers had a significant effect on the length of the bulb of the radish plant.