Female Medical Missionaries and Gendered Authority in Colonial North India

Abstract

Female medical missions have been considered pivotal to missionary enterprise in colonized lands. In colonial North India health missions by and for women helped Christian missions to breach the indigenous social structure and reach women secluded under purdah. Moreover, they also provided professional opportunities to newly trained female doctors and provided legitimacy to the medical training of women in the West. This research paper argues that female medical missions in colonial North India provided on the one hand, professional opportunity for Western women in colonized territory and on the other, these missions acted as a tool of cultural domination where healing became a tool of conversion as well as negotiation. Drawing on missionary publications, memoirs and institutional archives, I look at the evolution of women led medical missions in colonial North India as well as the moral contradictions between evangelism and medicine as the success of these missions was gauged on parameters of not just how many people were treated medically but also the number of converts it yielded. Finally, the role of Indian women as cultural and religious intermediaries within mission hospitals as ‘bible women’ is also explored to understand the complex power dynamics which shaped female medical missions in colonial North India.