GENDERING MISSION, ENGENDERING MUTUALITY

                                      GENDERING MISSION, ENGENDERING MUTUALITY

                                                        (REVIEW 15) 

MODE OF MUTUALITY IN THE MARGINS OF MISSION: HERMANNSBURG WOMEN’S MISSIONS IN INDIA Gladson Jathanna (Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2015)

“The many glaring gaps, wounds, and omissions of encounters in mission call out to be minded, remembered, lamented, and transformed” (Marion Grau, 2011). Marion Grau identifies one of the manifestations of such ‘gap’ in the account of mission history is the absence of the stories of women as missionaries. Following Marion Grau, Gladson Jathanna de-archivize Hermannsburg mission documents and invokes us to listen to the stories of the native Bible Women. As he is explaining in the foreword, this search is nothing but his theological desire to speak with the dead. Of course, speaking to the dead is not an easy job! Listening to the dead ones, especially the subaltern dead ones is a disturbing experience since it is an invitation to re-live in the buried memories of marginalization and discrimination. Jathanna offers a counter-listening method in the theological research. Of course, theology is always hauntology—listening to the Holy Ghost!

Problematizing the ‘omission’ involved in the practices of the ‘Great Commission,’ Jathanna reclaims the spaces of women bodies and emotions in the ‘masculine’ act of mission. Gendering the mission is to problematize the unproblematized locations of historiography and missiology. Bringing native Bible women into the contemporary discourses of mission, Jathanna aims a counter-narration of history of church where the subalterns become the subjects not just the actors. In reclaiming the role of women in a historical paradigm, Jathanna makes a contribution to the unspoken gendered space of the mission history. By exploring the encounter between women missionaries and their native women co-workers in India, the researcher tries to attend the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the colonial narrations of mission and church history. 

Jathanna defines the site of the encounter between women missionaries and the native Bible women as the margins of mission where the ‘white subalterns’ meet Indian subalterns. Whatever it may be, it is a site of subalternity which is embodied in mutuality and hospitality. At this marginal site, the ‘other,’ ‘heathen’ is reconstructed and the ‘subjectivity’ of the subject (of mission) is re-negotiated. Modern mission was a ‘civilizing mission’ to redeem the ‘heathen,’ the dirt. The Zenana mission was also started as ‘redeeming programme’‘to reach out’ ‘the unreached Indian women (the gendered subaltern) who were enclosed in the dark rooms (Zenana means inner rooms). In contradiction to the narrations of the subaltern historians, Jathanna argues, there were some ‘intermediary spaces’ of negotiations between women missionaries and the native subaltern women in the Zenana mission through which both of them reconstituted their self-ness and the otherness and moved on to a mode of mutuality. 

Jathanna brings to us the multiple subjectivity locations within the women missionaries. There were wives of missionaries and single women missionaries involved in the mission programmes whose emotions and perceptions were neglected and misrepresented in the mission documents. Masculine mission discourses denied their subjectivities and envisioned them as ‘God chosen bodies’ for mission. Jathanna demonstrates this objectification of the bodies/ lives of women missionaries in the mission documents by highlighting the narration of a male missionary about his wife: “she is a very weak and sick woman. When she was lying on her bed during her first pregnancy, I shot a dog behind her window. And she was stricken with terror that she became slightly insane. Later she became a little better” (p. 60). It is their life ‘in between’ motherhood and mission, ‘wife’ and ‘missionary’, ‘home’ and ‘field’ reconstructed their subjectivity in association with the subalternity of the native Bible women. Thus, Jathanna argues that the site of the margins of faith is reclaimed as the threshold of fraternities in those mission paradigms which was never attended by the male historiographers. 

In line with the postcolonial theoretical framework, but affirming the multiple locations within the missional encounters, Jathanna offers a radical methodology of church historiography—the mode of mutuality. The mode of mutuality as research methodology denies the notion that the interplay between the women missionaries and the native Bible women was monolithic in constructing the self and the other. On the other hand, in the mode of mutuality the identities were constructed in fluidity and flexibility. ‘Mission field’ was the site of affirming their gendered subalterness; rather than a project of salvation or force of repression. Jathanna writes: “They stood, walked, sang, laughed, cried and lived in a mutual relationship where they negotiated a defined and designed subjectivity and demanded a mutual subjectivity” (p.136-7). Of course, mission is an invocation to live in this mode of mutuality through which we find our ‘own’ subjectivities as ‘inter-subjectivities’ and ourselves as ‘inter-beings.’

Jathanna offers us a tour—a theological journey, intruding into the mission archives to listen to the silenced (gendered) subalterns and to think about our own missiologies, church histories, theologies, Christianities and of course our ontologies. This book comes to us as a gift to re-articulate ourselves through the mode of mutuality in the world of distance, discrimination and destitution. Thank you my friend Jathanna for this incredible gift!

Y.T. Vinayaraj                                                                                                               29.07.2016