For 2 weeks in early 1928 more than 200 delegates – theologians, missionaries, church leaders – from around the world gathered on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Organized by the International Missionary Council (IMC), the widely publicized conference talked about the future of global Christianity and its relevance to a modern world facing social and economic issues like industrialization, agricultural development or racial relations. As recent research has emphasized, the early decades of the twentieth century and especially the period between the two World Wars were a heyday of liberal Protestant internationalism.Footnote 1 The 1920s and 30s experienced a sharp increase in debates and activities, many born out of the international missionary sphere, that discussed the nature of the mission, global Christianity and the role of the growing Christian communities outside of Europe and North America. In tandem with the heightened internationalism went a topical shift that moved attention to a number of rather ‘worldly’ and in particular social and socio-economic concerns.Footnote 2 This shift had been fertilized by the emergence of the Social Gospel a few decades earlier, a reinterpretation of Christian ethics – especially prominent in North American Protestantism but influential worldwide – that understood Christian duty not only in a quest for individual salvation but also in social justice, the betterment of human conditions and the building of the Kingdom of God on earth.Footnote 3 In an extended form, many liberal internationalists in the 1920s and 30s added to these concerns an outspoken rejection of imperialism and racism.Footnote 4
These groups considered solving various modern societal problems a Christian task and saw science from early on as a productive partner in their plans. In the USA, key figures of early sociology had strong ties to the Social Gospel movement and the discipline in various ways was tied to and grew out of programmes and debates of religious reform organizations. To Christians interested in social welfare, academic sociology provided tools like surveys and statistical compilations to analyse critical conditions and ideally offer solutions. In applied social work and areas such as the settlement movement, the work of academics and religiously motivated practitioners blended and fuelled each other.Footnote 5 Early leading figures of sociology put much effort into discarding these connections and emancipate as a professionalized, purely academic field.Footnote 6 However, this was not necessarily a mutual separation. The 1910s had seen an ‘internationalization of the Social Gospel’,Footnote 7 which was inherently tied with the missionary and ecumenical movements and their appropriation of social science. As we will see, for the internationalist Protestant discourse confronted with global inequalities of a post-First World War world, a ‘Christian sociology’ promised a way to approach these problems and compete with secular ideologies.
Only recently have scholars started to interpret the interwar Protestant internationalist movement and its discourse not only as a stage in the history of the ecumenical movement or missiology but as an indication of shifts in global constellations in general and – in view of its heavy North American missionary bias – an early expression of the US soft power extension in particular. These studies have provided significant insights into a liberal Protestant and missionary milieu torn between the contradictions of imperialism, nationalism, universalism, liberalism and secularization. Too often, however, their analyses have remained on a mostly discursive level. Seldom have there been attempts to connect the ‘high politics’ debates on the international level with their effects on the ground. Often, the scholarship remained more interested in the repercussions of the debates back in the USA.Footnote 8 Ironically, while the discourse of the internationalists in the early twentieth century shifted slowly from the ‘sending’ to the ‘receiving’ countries and from foreign control to indigenization, the historiography has not followed suit and considered the ‘receiving countries’ only marginally.Footnote 9 As recent global approaches in intellectual history have highlighted the multilaterality and interconnectedness in the flow of ideas, such a distinction seems problematic. Proponents of a global intellectual history have argued for an extension of the scope of actors and regions considered beyond a canonical North Atlantic intellectual milieu.Footnote 10 This extended geographical scope must be supplemented with a shift in analytical scale(s). A ‘decolonisation’ of intellectual history implies looking at how international(ist) discourses were negotiated in diverse local contexts.Footnote 11 Refining the potential of global history after its initial boom, many commenters now agree that a productive analysis acknowledges the dialectic nature between macro- and micro processes, and they emphasize the worth of focusing on individual organizations and persons.Footnote 12 Although not yet sufficiently acknowledged in global intellectual history, religious internationals by the early twentieth century had transformed ‘from communities of believers into communities of opinion’Footnote 13 that should be considered as significant parts of the global public sphere and civil society. In this article, I show how bringing together the analysis of global intellectual discourse with local social programmes and practices benefits the understanding of both Protestant internationalism and the genesis of Indian social work.
There was a considerable tension haunting the interwar Christian internationalist and missionary movement in a world still structured by colonialism and imperialism, between claims to internationalist universalism and nationalist aspirations, between religious purpose and ‘secular’ activities.Footnote 14 This article probes into the repercussions and limitations of the (American-led) liberal internationalist Protestant missionary discourse. As the interwar attempts for a Christian sociology and social work schemes in British India will show, these enterprises faced considerable resistance despite a broad liberal missionary consensus. India was of much importance to internationalist organizations and associated missionary bodies, next to China the biggest field of American missionary activity, and in post-First World War deliberations often considered to be one of the future Asian global players.Footnote 15 In late-colonial British India, imperialist, nationalist, missionary and secular visions and aspirations clashed. South Asia thus constitutes a productive field for integrated macro/micro studies that see considerable analytical potential in shifting between global and local scales.Footnote 16
This article argues that the same Christian internationalist debates and schemes that initially set out to face the threat of ‘secularism’ and to reform and relegitimize Christian mission facilitated the emergence of secularized professional fields of social research and work in India. This process implies both a waning and persistent influence of religious institutions and purpose and complicates global narratives in either direction. Rather ironically, the sympathetic and cooperative, if not anti-imperialist attitude of liberal missionaries towards non-Christian traditions eventually paved the road for an American ‘professional imperialism’. Poignantly framed in the 1980s, the latter concept has been used by authors to describe the problematic and persisting dominant role of Western social work theory and practice in countries of the Global South and is still discussed in international social work today.Footnote 17 The role played by the USA has been emphasized for places like Latin America or the Philippines that experienced significant direct or indirect American influence throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 18 The case of India and the Protestant missionary milieu puts the spotlight on two aspects that refine the historicization of the issue: its missionary roots before the Second World War and a late-colonial culture of cooperation enabled through a shift in missiology necessitated by local dynamics such as nationalism and changing concepts of social service.
In the first section, the article looks into the IMC, its Department of Social and Industrial Research (DSIR), as well as the Rockefeller-funded Institute of Social and Religious Research and their work on India. This provides a background into missionary and internationalist discourse and changing approaches and concerns, especially their attention to industrial issues and the appropriation of social scientific methods in response to ‘secularism’. It highlights the complexity of ‘secularization’ as a historical concept and process. ‘Christian sociology’ in the form of research institutes worked not in competition with but alongside and in mutual fertilization of a differentiated, emerging ‘secular’ field of science, characterized by a marked drive for professionalization.
Settlement sociology and social work were both fields and tools developed in tandem with applications of Social Gospel theology around the globe. The article thus examines the application of ‘Christian social science’ in missionary social work in the local context of late-colonial India. Zooming in on Bombay (today’s Mumbai) in two subsequent sections, it engages, first, with the experience of a select participant of the 1928 missionary meeting in Jerusalem, the Indian social worker Tara N. Tilak, and second, the activities of the American Marathi Mission (AMM) and its Nagpada Neighbour House, directed by Clifford Manshardt, in Bombay. Global intellectual historians have argued for shifting historical focus on processes of intermediation.Footnote 19 Both Tilak and Manshardt represented intermediation in different ways; between internationalist debate and local translation, between religious motives and secular purposes. As will become apparent throughout the essay, the intersection of intellectual and social history in the analysis of international Christianity and its local venues provides a productive field for global historical research.
Industrialism and ‘Christian sociology’: The International Missionary Council and religious research departments
The IMC was founded in 1921 and served as a linking body to several interdenominational missionary organizations of ‘sending countries’ as well as, increasingly, national associations outside of Europe and North America such as the National Christian Council of India (NCCI).Footnote 20 The IMC’s 1928 Jerusalem world conference signified and accelerated substantial transformations in missiology, Protestant internationalism and the global ecumenical movement.Footnote 21 The conference recognized ‘secularism’ as a growing threat to the legitimacy and relevance of religion.Footnote 22 Secularism was understood not just as unbelief/irreligiosity but a ‘system of thought and life’Footnote 23 bearing both societal meaning and authority and distinctively based on ‘science’. ‘Anti-secularism’ offered a strategy for the ecumenical (and internationalist missionary) movement to challenge new worldviews emerging from modern industrial civilization.Footnote 24
Simultaneously, the devastating First World War had substantially challenged notions of the moral and cultural superiority of ‘Western’ civilization.Footnote 25 Social, economic and racial concerns and their relation to the Christian mission took on an unprecedented focus in the discussions in Jerusalem in 1928. The turn towards both industrial and rural concerns had its parallels outside of the missionary discourse. The effects of industrialization and labour welfare and legislation concerned many countries not at least in the face of the 1917 October Revolution, while extensive programmes for ‘rural reconstruction’, too, were debated globally.Footnote 26
However, not all missionary bodies and individual missionaries and theologians felt comfortable with this shift in missionary approach and scope. Despite a substantial transformation in the liberal Protestant sphere, these ideas were not hegemonic. There was a rift between what has been called ‘modernists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ views.Footnote 27 Sceptics of the new approach often tied their criticism to a general disregard for American ‘activism’, the Social Gospel and its implications. The rift in missionary views affected also the 1928 Jerusalem conference. Some delegates feared that calls to unite religious traditions against the threat of secularism bordered on syncretism. Further, they felt that advocating social reform programmes as means to redeem society went far beyond the purpose of evangelism and lacked theological–missiological justification.Footnote 28
The conference’s session on ‘Christianity and the Growth of Industrialism’ and its final statement though eventually bore much of the concerns reiterated by social gospellers and Christian socialists, declaring that ‘the Gospel of Christ contain[ed] a message, not only for the individual soul, but for the world of social organization and economic relations in which individuals live.’Footnote 29 Following plans conceived in Jerusalem, the IMC set up a Department of Social and Industrial Research (DSIR) in 1930, headquartered until 1935 in Geneva. Its purpose was to gather and provide social science-based information. It conducted surveys and research projects on concerns considered especially crucial for the working of the ‘younger’ churches, such as industrialism, forced labour, child welfare, education or the trafficking of narcotics.Footnote 30 The department was not undisputed. IMC secretaries like William Paton and John R. Mott had to defend the enterprise against numerous critics that consisted mainly of the same groups that expressed their critique of Social Gospel theology in the working of the Jerusalem conference. They were not happy that through the participation of their regional and national mission boards in the IMC they would co-fund the DSIR and missionary approaches they were not willing to support.Footnote 31
Despite the criticism, the various national councils associated with the IMC made ready use of the department. Headed by the American John Merle Davis, previously a YMCA missionary in Japan and general secretary of the Institute of Pacific Relations in Honolulu, the department produced, often commissioned, material for various institutions. Footnote 32 On many occasions, the department worked closely with the International Labour Office and the League of Nations. In the 1930s, it prepared extensive studies, statistical compilations and directories, and published its findings in reports and regular bulletins. In anticipation of the Jerusalem meeting’s successor, the 1938 IMC conference to be held in Tambaram near the Indian city of Madras (today’s Chennai), the DSIR moved its offices first to Shanghai and later to Nagpur, India. There, Merle and his correspondents produced a series of preparatory studies on the economic and social conditions in Asia, published in 1938 as ‘The Economic Basis of the Church’.Footnote 33
The department’s trajectory was shared by another institution, the Institute of Social and Religious Research, founded in 1921. This institute was financed by the American industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and chaired by John Mott. Its purpose, according to Mott, was ‘to apply to religious phenomena the methods of social research without the distorting influence of ecclesiastical or theological bias.’Footnote 34 Guided by both religious motivation and academic rigour, the institute during its lifetime conducted forty-eight research projects and published seventy-eight reports and surveys addressing matters close to social gospeller concerns such as the church in rural and urban settings, education, race relations or the missionary enterprise.Footnote 35
The institute’s most controversial project was the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, a large-scale survey of the American missionary enterprise in Asia conducted by a lay commission independent of the mission boards. Guided by the Rockefeller Institute, it gathered data in India, Burma, China and Japan. In its conclusive report, Re-Thinking Missions (1932), it painted a rather critical picture of contemporary missionary practices of both its proselytizing theological imperative and the missionaries’ technical and professional expertise. The inquiry, though controversially discussed amongst the missions, was representative of both the attitude of the most liberal circles in (especially American) Protestantism and the contemporary strong connection between social sciences and religion. The inquiry was an example of a ‘missionary social science’Footnote 36 , combining both the experiences and work in everyday mission with forms of academic and professionalized social inquiry. These networks found resonance beyond American sociology in places such as imperial Japan where Japanese Christians with ties to missionary networks conducted related social scientific inquiries and experiments.Footnote 37 Though critics like the Danish theologian Frederik Torm considered it is not ‘the task of the Christian Church and missions to create a Christian sociology’Footnote 38 , organizations like the IMC’s research department or the Rockefeller Institute aspired to exactly that. Richard H. Tawney, economics lecturer at the London School of Economics, in 1928 on the Mount of Olives had called for such a ‘Christian Sociology’, as had others before him.Footnote 39 Indeed, both the Rockefeller Institute of Social and Religious Research and the DSIR linked academic and missionary sociology, introducing American pragmatism, corporate organizational strategies and promoting missionary efficiency.Footnote 40 The persistent entanglements and the missions’ insistence on ‘scientificity’ reveal the difficulty to uphold claims for an institutional and functional separation of the spheres of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ – i.e. here the professionalized academic scientific. The complex intermingling was even more visible in the local reverberations of the missionary debates on industrialism and in their applied form as social work.
Prior to the 1928 IMC conference, the NCCI (with the help of the Institute of Social and Religious Research) had commissioned a ‘comprehensive survey of the industrial field’Footnote 41 to inform discussions in Jerusalem. Led by Marie Cécile Matheson, a British social work expert and former warden of the Birmingham Settlement, the survey resulted in a quantitative and qualitative study covering ‘industrialism’ through myriad topics, from workers’ conditions, labour legislation, employment and income statistics to India’s social structure.Footnote 42 While Matheson’s observations and recommendations mostly did not reference religion, she accorded missions a contributory role in social work as long as they were willing to employ secular, professionally trained personnel. Further, she urged Indians to pursue professional courses in Britain and North America and considered India ‘ripe for a settlement movement’.Footnote 43 Shortly after the Jerusalem conference, the IMC secretaries Mott and Paton participated in a meeting of the NCCI on industrial problems in Pune. The NCCI was well entangled with the IMC, as William Paton himself had been a secretary of the Indian Council for many years before working for the IMC and had contributed heavily to setting up the Jerusalem conference.Footnote 44 Following the opinion of Matheson, the meeting advocated for missions to look for specifically qualified staff for whose acquisition the meeting envisioned the IMC to have a consulting role in. Two of its resolutions called for an emulation of two recently started, promising missionary enterprises in Bombay: the Nagpada Neighbourhood House, directed by Clifford Manshardt and the Social Work Training Centre, directed by Tara Tilak.Footnote 45 Both these schemes had already been singled out in the Jerusalem meeting’s report.Footnote 46 A close look at them will shed light on the local realization of missionary social science and social work in a late-colonial Indian context. It highlights the value of a global micro perspective – refining our view of both idealist internationalist discourse and the genesis of a professional field by juxtaposing broader developments and connections with thick description and local contextualization.Footnote 47
The American Marathi Mission, Indian Christianity and social work in Bombay
While figures like John Mott and William Paton dominate most accounts of the 1928 IMC meeting in Jerusalem, other attendants have received little attention. Amongst these ‘low profile’ participants was Tara N. Tilak, a social worker from Bombay associated with the AMM. The case of Tilak and the Marathi Mission’s activities in its community centre in Byculla show the implications but also limitations of the missionary discourse on industrialism, sociology and social work, and the relation of the mission in the field to the internationalist discourse. While a liberal pluralist attitude eroded convictions in Christian exceptionality and encouraged cooperation, many felt that Indian Christianity was not sufficiently involved in the Indian national project.
The AMM intensively debated the major topics of Jerusalem. The Mission and its Congregationalist parent organization, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), headquartered in Boston, discussed matters like indigenization and social work in the 1920s. The Marathi Mission from early on participated in the NCCI and its tie in with the IMC and the internationalist and ecumenical movement.Footnote 48 In a report to the ABCFM’s prudential committee in 1926, the AMM committed the mission to the Social Gospel, and called for a synthesis of intellectual–physical and spiritual well-being in order to establish an ideal social order on earth and build ‘a Christian (Christ like) civilization in India.’Footnote 49 However, the report also acknowledged that in many ways the Social Gospel resulted more from practical necessities in the field than a coherent theory and urged the mission not completely to renounce the ‘aim of winning individual souls for the Kingdom [of God]’.Footnote 50 Around the 1928 Jerusalem conference, the AMM drafted similar statements devoted to both the Social Gospel and indigenization, claiming the strong belief that missionary agencies ‘should ultimately be controlled and administered primarily by Indians.’Footnote 51 Still, while missions such as the AMM repeatedly asserted their willingness for indigenization, they often hesitated to realize that goal. An exception to this was Tara Tilak who in 1927 became director of a small social work training class in Bombay.
Bombay, the port city at the Western coast of British India, had experienced a rapid growth in the nineteenth century and become India’s commercial and industrial centre.Footnote 52 By the early twentieth century, cotton trade and a quickly industrializing textile production had given the city a growing population of labourers and factory workers employed in the city’s many textile mills. These working poor and, often migrant, labourers and their families lived in crowded neighbourhoods, such as Byculla in Southern Bombay, often in chawls, high-density residential buildings that were built en masse in the early twentieth century. Often, these impoverished neighbourhoods in Bombay were characterized by the co-existence of different religious and ethnic communities.Footnote 53
As in other places around the world shaped by rapid urbanization and industrialization, both government and private actors addressed labour welfare, legislation and relief measures for the poor. In addition to the global moment attentive of the problems of industrialization, the first decades of the twentieth century in Bombay and other places in India also saw a transformation in the national culture. Early Indian organizations engaged in socio-religious reform were superseded by a newer understanding of social activity as a middle-class enterprise of nation building.Footnote 54 One of these organizations was the Servants of India Society, founded in 1905 by the educationist and early Indian nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale. The society was invested in a wide array of welfare and other activities.Footnote 55 Prior to the Jerusalem IMC conference, the Servants of India had helped in the realization of the industrial survey prepared by the NCCI and the Institute of Social and Religious Research.Footnote 56 In Bombay, a member of the society established in 1911 the Social Service League, a non-denominational middle-class association. Already in the 1910s, the league started small social work centres that were inspired by the concept of settlement houses such as Toynbee Hall in London or similar institutions in the USA developed at the turn of the century.Footnote 57 As the director of the Social Work Training Centre in Bombay, Tara Tilak took a pioneering part in an interconnected milieu of Indian social service, Christian transnational networks and internationalized American social gospel visions.
Tara Tilak was the daughter of the Christian converts Laxmibai and Narayan Vaman Tilak. Both Laxmibai and N.V. Tilak had been prestigious ‘trophies of grace’Footnote 58 for the Christian mission in India; they came from well-respected Hindu families and were born as high-caste Chitpavan Brahmins. N.V. was renowned as a great Marathi poet even before his conversion to Christianity. The Tilaks were closely associated with the AMM. N.V. Tilak wrote extensively for the Dnaynodaya, the mission’s newspaper widely read not only amongst Christians. He was considered a pioneer in developing indigenous expressions of Christianity deeply rooted in Indian culture.Footnote 59
The attitudes of Indian Christians towards the Indian national movement since the late nineteenth century had been ambivalent and ranged ‘from outright support through suspicious anxiety to reactionary opposition.’Footnote 60 For a long time, more political compatriots had accused Indian Christians of having an uncomfortably close relationship with their imperialist Western co-religionists. Maintaining social relations for Indian Christians, especially recently converted ones, often proved to be difficult. Attitudes amongst Indian Christians shifted somewhat after the First World War. A more outspoken identification with the national cause emerged due to the work of figures such as N.V. Tilak as well as changing convictions amongst younger, second-generation Indian Christians. Further, the general national movement had assumed a more both integrative and secular character after figures like Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had taken leadership, which to some extent transcended earlier Hindu-centric conceptions.Footnote 61
N.V. Tilak died in 1919 but the family retained its association with the mission. Tara, after attending a non-Christian high school in Pune and the mission’s Wilson College in Bombay, went to England where she completed a B.A. degree in Social Work in the University of Birmingham’s Selly Oaks Colleges. Upon returning to Bombay in 1927, Tara Tilak started working for the AMM in its social service committee.Footnote 62 Further, she became the directress of the Social Work Training Centre for Women, a small joint project of the AMM, the YWCA, the United Free Church Mission and the Women’s University Settlement in Bombay. The Training Centre, the first of its kind in India, offered a systematic programme for Indian women to study social work, both theoretical and practical. The course’s small group of students was made up of women from all of Bombay’s communities with an educated, urban middle-class background. Apart from classroom teaching of topics such as (social) history, economics, psychology or public administration, the 10 months programme included a multitude of practical activities like work in play centres, nursery schools for factory women’s children, visit labourers’ families at home, etc.Footnote 63 It featured also cooperative programmes with other institutions such as a sewing class in the women’s block of the local jail.Footnote 64 In her work for the Training Centre, Tara Tilak emphasized the necessity of a professionalization of women’s social work, as she had enjoyed it herself in Birmingham. The function of the trained social worker, according to Tilak, would be ‘not just a health visitor or a nurse or teacher or organizer but something of each.’Footnote 65 Tilak’s engagement in Bombay was widely acknowledged by contemporaries and peers, both from social work and the mission field.Footnote 66 In 1931, she was presented as the face of Asian Christian women in The Orient Steps Out, a publication intended for American Sunday schools and showcasing the progress and success of Christianity in Asia.Footnote 67 Next to Tilak, the book portrayed two other prominent non-Western Christian leaders, the Chinese YMCA secretary, educationist and rural reconstruction advocate Y. C. James ‘Jimmy’ Yen, and the Japanese convert, social reformer and labour activist Toyohiko Kagawa, both Princeton graduates.Footnote 68
Since the late nineteenth century, there had been a growing presence of women in American Protestant missions around the world, from the Middle East to India, China and Japan.Footnote 69 This development coincided with the rise of the Social Gospel and the shift in priorities. Often excluded from preaching, new generations of college-educated women found opportunities to work in missionary areas like education, medical work or social service.Footnote 70 For long, crucial to the mission’s rationale had been a narrative of missionaries ‘rescuing’ native women from heathen oppression. By the 1920s, more pluralist understandings led many missionary women to work on women issues together with native, non-Christian female activists and reform organizations.Footnote 71 Consequently, viewed with particular interest were indigenous Christian women. Women like the activist and educationist Pandita Ramabai, a generation before Tilak, rose to prominence as they participated in transnational networks and were celebrated by contemporary missions and their supporters in the West.Footnote 72
Figures like Ramabai and Tara Tilak had to face many challenges in shifting environments as they navigated between tensions of faith, imperialism, gender and nationalism. Internationalist vision and missionary experience did not always comply smoothly. The Social Gospel and similar social theologies resonated well with Christians in the Global South. Asian ecumenists like the South Indian M.M. Thomas developed anti- and postcolonial visions and networks suited for an emancipation of the ‘younger’ churches in a de-colonizing and polarizing early Cold War environment.Footnote 73 In Catholic Latin America, Liberation Theology emerged in the late 1960s and shared much of the socio-economic and emancipatory trajectory Protestant liberal internationalists and ecumenists pursued.Footnote 74 During the transitional 1920s and 30s, there was much contestation in still heavily mission-dominated non-Western Christian communities. The indigenization of mission agencies was a complicated issue, as has been shown, for instance, also in regard to Africa.Footnote 75 While her education in Birmingham enabled Tara Tilak to take a leading role, other young Indian Christians were not considered actual alternatives to take responsibility. While some internationalist visions remained unfulfilled, others had unexpected side effects.
In 1931, Tilak’s success story of Protestant internationalism and Christian social work took a turn. On June 24, the AMM missionary and Dnaynodaya editor James F. Edwards received a letter from Tilak in which she announced: ‘I am no longer a member of any organized Christian Church. I am a Hindu and belong to the whole of India. My religion is love and service of the whole humanity.’Footnote 76 Tilak had married a Hindu ‘according to Aryan rites’ and went now by the name Mrs. Hemangini Joshi. Tilak’s (re-)conversion caused a big fuss in the AMM and her marriage was considered ‘a great blow to the Christian movement in Western India and indeed all over India.’Footnote 77 In view of Tara’s family’s exalted social position, her decision bore the potential of considerable embarrassment for the mission and the latter was anxious that the Hindu press would get wind of Tilak’s ‘relapse’. This fear was accelerated by the fact that the 1920s and 30s in India saw a peak in religious rivalry marked by heated debates about the conversion of religious communities, revolving around Hindu (re-)conversion campaigns, Muslim reactions and Christian mass conversion schemes.Footnote 78
Tara Tilak’s conversion shows both the contradictions inherent in liberal Protestant internationalist and missionary thought and its limitations when faced with local dynamics. In a letter to his missionary colleagues in Bombay and Boston, J.F. Edwards provided a detailed analysis of Tilak’s decision.Footnote 79 As he wrote, he had noted for a few years that Tilak ‘was deeply ashamed of the aloofness of so many of the Indian Christians from India’s national aspirations’Footnote 80 and that her social work had brought her into close contact with many non-Christian activists. Indeed, co-operation had been a key element in her approach to social work. Tara Tilak urged the ‘women of the Christian Church [to] seek close co-operation with non-Christians’,Footnote 81 and she and her class were involved with numerous other agents for social welfare such as the Servants of India.
Indian Christians’ relationship to Indian nationalism remained a complicated issue. While Gandhi’s earlier receptive stance towards Christianity had facilitated the inclusion of Indian Christians into the mainstream national movement, he became more confrontational towards Christianity and Christian missions in the late 1920s and early 30s. Criticizing missionary strategies of mass conversion that he deemed predatory and imperialistic, Gandhi was engaged in discussions with Indian Christian leaders as well as non-Indian missionaries, amongst them John Mott who met Gandhi while touring India in 1928/29.Footnote 82 At the same time, the national movement reached a new phase of radicalization and activity in Gandhi’s Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930. Younger generations of Indian Christians too participated in these movements, amongst them the Byculla Christian community.Footnote 83 Tara Tilak was involved in a leading role in these activities in early 1930. She held speeches in rallies of the young Christian Nationalist Party, where she appealed to Indian Christians to support the Indian National Congress and the Swadeshi movement.Footnote 84 She participated also in other, non-Christian groups such as the Bombay Youth League or the Desh Sevika Sangh.
It was shortly after the Civil Disobedience Movement in mid-1930 when Tilak apparently first turned her back at Christianity and the mission.Footnote 85 J.F. Edwards speculated that Tara Tilak had been influenced by recent writings of Manilal Parekh and Gandhi who criticized missionaries and the organized and proselytizing church. Manilal Parekh had learned about Christianity through the Brahmo Samaj and the writings of Keshab Chandra Sen and was baptized in 1918 into the Anglican Church. He developed a Christo-centric theology, attacked institutionalized and organized church, condemned Western churches and missionaries as imperialist, materialist as well as racist. During his lifetime, he oscillated between Christian and Hindu traditions, advocating for a universal religion containing elements from various religious traditions.Footnote 86 It does not seem like a stretch that Tara Tilak might indeed have been attracted to similar positions. At the Jerusalem conference in 1928, during a discussion on the value of non-Christian religions and their relationship to Christianity, Tilak had opinionated against voices that expected from converts a complete break with their earlier faith.Footnote 87 Instead, she pointed to the devotional Hindu tradition of bhakti and its parallels to Christian devotion to Christ and a personal God. Tilak’s reference to bhakti was a common trope that had many followers amongst more vocal, indigenizing Indian Christians – amongst them Manilal Parekh and Tara’s own father N.V. Tilak – as well as liberal Western authors and missionaries.
Tara Tilak was fully aware of the hurdles that non-Western Christianity faced despite internationalist assertions of indigenization and equality. In Jerusalem, she spoke out against racial prejudice and lamented that some Indian Christians felt more at home amongst Hindus than in the church and that Indian Christianity would not sufficiently cherish its Indian heritage.Footnote 88 Tara Tilak’s (/Hemangini Joshi’s) new husband, Hem Chandra Joshi, had a similar background as her. He came from a Brahmin family and had been a Christian convert of the Church Missionary Society who had reconverted to Hinduism. Joshi, too, had spent time in England for studies where he and Tara Tilak probably first met.Footnote 89 Tara and Hem Chandra’s relationship was further complicated by the fact that Joshi was already married. The fact that Tilak’s husband too was a ‘relapsed’ Christian convert added another layer to the mission’s anxiety, as it fuelled the ongoing debate about the indigenization of mission agencies and the role of Indian Christians therein.
Tilak’s decision was shaped by her personal situation as well as the convergence of social and political dynamics of late-colonial British India and the possibilities the internationalist Christian discourse provided. Her (re-)conversion confirmed the fears fundamentalist theologians and missionaries were expressing in response to the liberals and Social Gospellers. Tilak’s estrangement from the mission’s work came through professionalization and a cooperative outlook based on both pluralist religious discourse and nationalist inclinations. Her story speaks to the benefits of a micro-analytical approach: With her departure from the missionary milieu, Tara Tilak, unfortunately (and suspiciously) vanished from historiography. Despite her contemporary prominence, Tilak has been omitted in later missionary and secular historiography and not much is known about her post-Bombay work.
Better documented is the life of Clifford Manshardt, a colleague of Tilak who directed the Nagpada Neighbourhood Centre in Bombay. Manshardt shared many of Tilak’s attitudes that caused anxieties amongst other missionaries. His understanding of Christian mission had almost completely abandoned the necessity for individual conversion. As American sociology and social work ripened as professionalized science, Manshardt grew out of missionary work to tackle the socio-economic problems of India in secularizing and irreligious contexts.
Cooperation and beyond: The Nagpada Neighbourhood House and the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work
The AMM’s Neighbourhood House was started in 1926 in Byculla’s small neighbourhood of Nagpada in South Bombay. Clifford Manshardt, a graduate from the University of Chicago’s Theological Seminary had been chosen for the task of directing the centre.Footnote 90 Manshardt had joined the army during the First World War and his experiences in Europe shook his religious outlook and questioned earlier convictions of Christian superiority and morality. Though unorthodox in many of his views, he was ordained as a minister of the Congregational Church after finishing his studies. Shortly after, he applied for missionary service.Footnote 91
The Neighbourhood House, set in an impressive four-storey building, featured numerous recreational opportunities, offered various classes for adults, provided medical aid with a dispensary and an infant welfare centre, and supported local labourers.Footnote 92 Since 1929, Tara Tilak held her classes in the Neighbourhood House, while Manshardt was also chairman at her Social Work Training Centre. The Centre’s practical activities supported the House’s efforts in women’s work. Tilak and her students helped in the House’s infant welfare centre and run numerous clubs for women. As Manshardt noted, this was a very satisfactory arrangement. In the Neighbourhood House, Tilak’s activities could attract social groups who would otherwise probably not go to more explicitly missionary agencies such as the AMM’s women’s hostel.Footnote 93 Indeed, the Neighbourhood House had a marked non-denominational outlook. Since its inception the institution presented itself decidedly open in its reach, claiming that ‘[t]he only creed of the House is a genuine respect for the best that is found in all creeds.’Footnote 94
The AMM’s Bombay mission station initially had not favoured the idea of transferring Tilak’s training centre to the Neighbourhood House. When they eventually agreed, they wanted one of the American (female) missionaries engaged in the mission’s women’s hostel to help at the new location. Manshardt vehemently rejected this suggestion. Rather bluntly he expressed his doubt that the proposed missionary would have the skills necessary for social work, because she – in contrast to Tilak – was not a trained social worker.Footnote 95 Further, he referred to the ‘Christian tradition’ behind the main mission’s work that he felt might conflict with the decidedly non-denominational outlook of the Neighbourhood House. A few years later, Manshardt confirmed his position that an evangelistic approach would not suit a social settlement, assuring that ‘you cannot be evangelistic worker in one block, and a social worker in the next.’Footnote 96
Manshardt’s position was radical but did find support amongst liberal missionaries and observers. Both the Neighbourhood House and the Social Work Training Centre were addressed in the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry’s Re-Thinking Missions amongst a shortlist of existing social work enterprises, mostly social settlements by mission agencies in China and Japan.Footnote 97 The inquiry acknowledged the controversy around the question of whether an evangelistic emphasis should be given to missionary social work and, in view of the experiences in the field and growing Asian nationalisms, considered it ‘exceedingly inexpedient, if not actually impossible, to combine aggressive evangelistic efforts with welfare work.’Footnote 98
The cultivation of professional social work and the development of sociological methods were close to Manshardt’s heart. Shortly after arriving in Bombay, he published Facing Facts in Nagpada: An Illustration of The Technique of the Social Survey (1928). The book served as a preparatory study for his further work in Nagpada. Further, as its title implies, the booklet was supposed to ‘help to illustrate the use of the social survey.’Footnote 99 Three years later, Manshardt wrote The Social Settlement as an Educational Factor in India. There, Manshardt presented to the reader the sociological ideas underlying the work of the Neighbourhood House and how they were to be adapted to the Indian environment.Footnote 100 Amongst his colleagues of the Marathi Mission, however, the book was received with mixed feelings. In a letter to his missionary colleague Alden Clark, J.F. Edwards noted that he felt uncomfortable that Manshardt had left out in his book all ‘the dynamic of Jesus on social work’.Footnote 101 Alden Clark complained about a ‘considerable group of social workers in India who ha[d] reacted against religion, and hence would naturally tend to overemphasize the modern trends in the world against religion.’Footnote 102 At Manshardt’s study, Clark consequently looked with some anxiety: Manshardt had ‘gone further than was necessary in applying to his work in India the principle that seems to be recognized in most settlement work both in England and America’Footnote 103 , namely, that in view of religious differences social settlements should keep away from religious activities and influences. In his approach Manshardt had, in Clark’s eyes, even departed from other, initially similar progressive examples such as the influential social-religious work of the Wesleyan Church in London’s East Ham. The concept of the social settlement, a social meeting place in an impoverished urban area open to persons of all classes, races and genders, was the guiding model of the Nagpada Neighbourhood House.
The settlement method had been developed in the late nineteenth century in England, institutionalized in the founding of Toynbee Hall in London’s East End in 1884. The movement quickly spread to the USA where social reformers started settlements first in New York and Chicago. In the latter city, where Jane Addams had founded the famous Hull House for women in 1889, the concept also took hold in the University’s Theological Seminary where Manshardt received his education.Footnote 104 Tara Tilak, too, had been a disciple of the ideal of the social settlement.Footnote 105 This was no surprise; the University of Birmingham and its social work class in the Selly Oaks Colleges that Tilak had attended had strong ties to the Birmingham Settlement established in 1899.Footnote 106 Since its early days, the settlement movement had provided a venue for a growing number of educated women. This was not restricted to the early centres of the movement in Britain and the USA,Footnote 107 but, especially through missionary networks, extended into countries like JapanFootnote 108 or, as Tara Tilak’s involvement shows, India.
While settlement sociology turned into ‘social work’ sometimes distinguished from academic sociology, later on, there had been a constitutive and continuing intersection between Protestantism and early sociology, especially in the American context.Footnote 109 A ‘drive for factual data that could be put to use in alleviating social problems’Footnote 110 linked the Social Gospel, the settlement, as well as early academic sociology. Not surprisingly, ABCFM missions had set up settlement experiments in Asia – though much smaller in scale than the Bombay enterprise – even before the Nagpada Neighbourhood House, for example, in China or, as early as 1891, in Japan.Footnote 111 Concurrently, however, a major drive behind the professionalization and maturation of the field was the emphasis given by its proponents in separating it from these religious ties. By the 1920s, this demarcation had reached a particular vehemence in American sociology. It would seem natural to interpret the ‘secular’ work of Tilak and Manshardt – and as such the origins of Indian social work – simply as an extension of these processes. However, it was as much the result of the specific local circumstances of late-colonial India and a changing missiology necessitated by shifting global constellations as an expression of field-immanent differentiation processes.
The integrative and cooperative trajectory of settlement work fitted well with Clifford Manshardt views. He was an advocate of the indigenization of missions, not only in terms of staff but also finances. His experience in the Neighbourhood House (whose budget was raised mostly through non-Christian, Indian sources) had convinced him that there was no reason to not have Indians themselves administer the funds. The keyword in Manshardt’s approach was cooperation. Already in its first year, the Neighbourhood House could report to receive funds from three institutions: Manshardt’s friends from the Union Church of Hinsdale, Illinois, as well as from two Indian trusts, the N.M. Wadia Charities and the Sir Ratan Tata Trust.Footnote 112 The Nagpada Neighbourhood House regularly and eagerly reported that the building, its venues and activities were used by a variety of local associations – Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Parsi, non-denominational.Footnote 113 In Manshardt’s eyes, Indian society’s deficiencies lay in illiteracy and poverty. Both these problems he – in contrast to many of his missionary colleagues – considered not rooted in Hinduism or other Indian religions and hence he opted to work together with educated, non-Christian Indians. The consequence of this for Manshardt was the following: ‘Under the co-operative conception of missions the function of the church ceases to be that of proselytism. It becomes the bolstering up of Indian life. Converts will come.’ To Manshardt, ‘the missionary issue ha[d] shifted from converts to co-operation.’Footnote 114
Manshardt assured his readers that he was a Christian, that cooperation would not necessarily mean syncretism, and that he agreed with the 1928 Jerusalem conference that ‘in Jesus Christ the Christian religion does have a pearl of price’.Footnote 115 But for him, the missionary had to be less of a proselytizer but instead ‘preach the gospel of peace, of self-reliance, of the worth of man, of the dignity of labor, of truth, of beauty, and of goodness.’Footnote 116 Manshardt’s conceptions of the mission went to a point where he discarded proselytization almost completely but provided his own interpretation of ‘conversion’: as – in reference to Gandhi – ‘self-purification’ and ‘self-realization’, convinced that conversion would not ‘of necessity involve[…] a change of religion’.Footnote 117 Manshardt questioned the supremacy of Christianity, criticized much of the previous mission enterprise as ‘religious imperialism’, and deemed the ‘findings of the recent Jerusalem Conference […] a stirring call to advance.’Footnote 118 However, only a few years after the 1928 conference, he already confessed disillusionment with its results and afterlife. He felt that little had actually changed in regard to the ‘imperialistic missionary message’.Footnote 119 Such views mirrored the statements of Mahatma Gandhi of whom Manshardt was an admirer.Footnote 120 Many American missionaries in the field sympathized profoundly with Indian nationalism. At the same time, they were fully aware that their presence in India to a large extent was subject to the toleration of the British Indian government, and hence usually shied away from openly confronting colonial rule.Footnote 121
The Nagpada Neighbourhood House quickly grew into an institution well respected in Bombay. While its success could hardly be denied, Manshardt’s approach was far from uncontested. The ‘irreligious’ character of the schemes gained some suspicion. As Manshardt himself recalled, already when he was chosen to go to Bombay, some voices on the mission board in Boston had questioned his personal religiosity.Footnote 122 Clifford Manshardt’s cooperation with other organizations went beyond the Neighbourhood House and he was on the boards of numerous of Bombay’s social institutions. His most far-reaching cooperation, however, was born out of the social work education programmes in Byculla.
In addition to Tara Tilak’s centre for women, the Neighbourhood House had started in 1930 its own small training class for social workers, an annual 1 month course.Footnote 123 In 1933, Clifford Manshardt approached the trustees of the estate of the late Dorabji Tata, an Indian industrialist and philanthropist from the wealthy Tata family, who had left his estate for charitable purposes. To Manshardt’s surprise, the trust engaged him as an adviser and commissioned him to produce an assessment of how to use the fund’s money.Footnote 124 At first, Manshardt’s suggested the establishment of a ‘Bureau of Social and Industrial Research’. Reminiscent not only in name of other endeavours like the IMC’s Department for Industrial and Social Research or the Rockefeller Institute for Social, it was to be ‘engaged in continuous and organised fact-finding’, and Manshardt compared the Tatas’ role to enterprises like the New York’s based Russell Sage Foundation that supported social scientific research.Footnote 125 Indeed, the Tata family’s work paralleled in many ways the influential large American foundations. Simultaneously, it represented both industrialist-capitalist concerns and a shift in British-India from community-based charity to organized philanthropy responding to an emerging public sphere and nationalist sentiment. By the 1930s, reluctant support from the British Indian government had pushed the Tatas towards Swadeshi ideas and a cosmopolitan outlook tapping transnational expert networks provided opportunities beyond imperial collaboration.Footnote 126
The cooperation between Manshardt and the Tata trust eventually resulted in the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work, the first institution of its kind in India, since 1944 known as the Tata Institute of Social Studies (TISS). In its first couple of years, the Graduate School, directed by Manshardt, was housed in the building of the Neighbourhood House and the two institutions worked in close cooperation.Footnote 127 In reviewing the Graduate School’s programme in 1941, Manshardt himself diagnosed two broad traditions of social work, a British and an American one, the former more occupied with the theoretical and philosophical background of social welfare, the latter more practical in its approach and concerned with applied matters. The Tata School in Manshardt’s early conception featured elements from both these traditions, though the director considered it slightly more on the American side, seeking it ‘to be eminently practical and to apply the best of modern social thought to the solution of our present-day social problems.’Footnote 128 Following American models, the Graduate School was a postgraduate course that demanded a college degree as a prerequisite. This, however, proved difficult in India. Most of the applicants had a literary collegiate background and less so one in social sciences which were still in a miniscule state in Indian higher education. The research drive as Manshardt initially imagined it, did not get lost at the Tata School. The school’s teaching faculty pursued original research on Indian social conditions and problems and started the Indian Journal of Social Work. Footnote 129 There was a delicate balancing between social research and practical social work in the School’s first couple of decades. The Graduate School was a final step in Manshardt’s quest for social work’s professionalization and disentanglement from semi-professional religious schemes. It was supposed to ‘put charity organization on a scientific basis and thus to eliminate the tremendous waste of much of present so called charity’ and to ‘make people who are at present willing to do social work, actually competent to do social work.’Footnote 130
As later authors have noted, the influence of the USA on the development of professional social work in India – as in other parts of the world – was substantial.Footnote 131 This link continued at the Graduate School beyond Manshardt’s departure in 1941. In the following years, American specialists regularly visited the institution, and its Indian faculty went to the USA for training.Footnote 132 This was a trend not exclusive to the influential Tata Institute. In the 1950s, these connections were extended through intergovernmental exchange programmes (e.g. the Technical Cooperation Mission and the Council of Social Work Education Exchange Programme) that had a great impact on the growing number of social work institutions and their curricula in India after the country’s independence in 1947.
The substantial shaping of Indian social work curricula by American methods and approaches has been criticized retrospectively as having hindered the development of a social work theory and practice adequate for the problems and needs of India. Critics in India have deemed insufficient an approach that was mostly concerned with individual casework rather than community work and invested in curative measures and the adjustment of the individual to its social environment and less with changing the environment itself.Footnote 133 Manshardt himself had been aware of these problems and initially imagined the Graduate School to reflect ‘that the cultural, economic and social conditions of India differ from those of the West and mak[e] every effort to adapt its materials to Indian conditions[…].’Footnote 134 In consequence, for instance, the class’ orientation courses included material on the rural and village environment reflecting India’s predominantly rural composition. Throughout his work in Bombay and India, Manshardt was stressing the need for social legislation and substantial reform policies, which set him apart from more strictly curative trajectories.Footnote 135
In the chronology of the global development of professional social work from the late nineteenth century to today, Tilak and Manshardt’s stories are ones of transition. They fit in between what has been identified as a pioneering phase influenced by dynamics such as the social settlement that saw an exchange mainly from Europe/UK to North America, and the subsequent phase characterized by US leadership and the centrifugal global expansion of its sway over professionalized social work.Footnote 136 As we have seen, the Protestant internationalist movement and the search for a Christian sociology were tied to these same historical processes, both in regard to sociological research and applied social work. The consideration of their intersection adds a view outside of the mostly unilateral UK–USA axis, showing that the development of the field – subject to colonial, post- and neocolonial constellations – was substantially affected by the experiences of both Western and ‘indigenous’ actors. This complicates the narrative of a purely centrifugal post-Second World War spread and acknowledges the role of indigenous aspirations, global networks and local dynamics.
Conclusion
In the milieu of liberal missionaries and internationalists, Clifford Manshardt stands in contrast to figures like E. Stanley Jones, the famous founder of the Christian ashram movement in India, who walked a distinctively spiritual path and figured in certain ways as ‘religio-cultural ambassadors’.Footnote 137 Manshardt, who rarely spoke about his own spirituality, quickly stepped out of traditional missionary work and pursued a distinctive route towards secular and non-denominational concerns, methods and partners.
While Manshardt’s experience in Nagpada had made him aware of the need to contextualize and ‘localize’ social work, his own role can be interpreted as a harbinger of later American professional dominance and the neocolonial tendency inherent in the provision of and dependency on the USA technical aid during the early Cold War.Footnote 138 It was a universalist understanding of humanity and human social needs motivating liberal theology and missiology that led Protestant mission workers like Manshardt to develop their ‘secularized’ social work in distinction to earlier ‘imperialist’ interpretations of the mission. Ironically, it is the assumed universalism in globalized implementations of Anglo-American social work that postcolonial critics from the Global South since the 1970s have recognized as a hindrance in developing adequate ‘indigenous’ forms.Footnote 139
Already Manshardt’s contemporaries interpreted his efforts as a form of ‘Americanism’.Footnote 140 Manshardt himself considered the shift in mission and the consequential new approach part of changing global configurations and he perceived the end of the ‘isolationist theory’ in missions as a parallel to an end of American political isolationism.Footnote 141 Missionary research institutes such as the DSIR or the ISRR as well as individual figures like Manshardt took part in a ‘consultancy game’Footnote 142 that later would evolve into Cold War development politics. As the US government in the early phase of the Cold War set up extensive networks of technical and expert exchange not only in social work but also other areas such as agriculture, so did Manshardt’s own career take a turn further away from his missionary origins towards government agency – a route from mission to intelligence and diplomacy taken by numerous individuals and organizations, as has been shown recently.Footnote 143 After directing the Bethlehem Community Center in Chicago since departing from India, in 1951 Manshardt became an officer in the United States Foreign Service and was deployed until 1963 again to both India and Pakistan.Footnote 144
The ‘anti-imperialism for Jesus’Footnote 145 displayed by parts of the interwar internationalist liberal, missionary milieu found expression in a close cooperation with non-Christian Indian groups and organizations to whom especially the USA often promised scientific modernity beyond the British Empire. In the case of social work this – ironically – led back to an American dominance in the field close to a ‘professional imperialism’. The Indian case confirms this latter historical phenomenon but also complicates it. It dates back the origin story of American social work influence in India to both internationalist and missionary debates. Further, it shows that the dependency was not just indebted to a unilateral expansion of Anglo-American professional ideas, methods and networks, but grew out of local interests and cooperation inevitable in a late-colonial environment. Liberal social Christianity and its ramifications had an appeal to Indians, especially in a US modernist version tied to cutting-edge science and social research.
As missionary ‘secular’ schemes show, religious groups continued to be significant historical agents far into the twentieth century. Indian forms of secularism similarly were diverse and deeply intertwined with mechanisms of nationalism and late colonialism in a multireligious area.Footnote 146 Still, people like Mott, Tilak, Manshardt or the Tatas – their personal religiosity notwithstanding – represented an increasingly secular outlook that made use of science as an institutional and epistemic vessel disentangled from religion. The simultaneously global and localized case of missionary social work thus points to the multiplicity of historical ‘secularizations’ and ‘secularisms’ in different geographical, political and cultural constellations.Footnote 147
Michael Philipp Brunner is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Religion, Tufts University, Medford, USA. He completed his PhD at the Institute of History at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
