The Baptism of Death Rereading The Life

Mission Studies 28 (2011) 26–53 brill.
nl/mist
The Baptism of Death:

Rereading the Life and Death of Lakshmi Kaundinya
J. Jayakiran Sebastian*
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia
E-mail: jsebastian@ltsp.edu
Abstract
This article re-reads the life and death of a young Brahmin woman, Lakshmi Kaundinya, as
reported in a missionary journal in the middle of the nineteenth century. Using the analytical
tools of postcolonial theory, it raises urgent questions about our unstable present by giving voice
to this woman, who is silenced in a narrative that, though sympathetic, attempts to frame her as
an arrogant Brahmin woman who did not want to give up the ways of her culture and conform
to the expectations of the mission. It provides a sub-text to the more ‘successful’ story of the
conversion of her husband, Anandarao Kaundinya, who is subsequently absorbed into the team
of missionaries from the Basel Mission, by focusing on the challenges posed by gender and cul-
ture in narratives of nineteenth century conversions to Christianity.
Keywords
19th Century Mission History, Baptism, Basel Mission, Conversion, Gendered reading; Hindu-
Christian encounter, Postcolonialism
* This article was presented as the second of the Teape Lectures 2007 delivered at Cambridge
University on 16th October 2007. The Teape Lectures had the overall theme: “Converting
Death: Continuity and Transformation in the Understanding of Death in Indian-Christian
Communities.”
I would like to acknowledge that the work of Mrinalini Sebastian has constantly proved to be
both a source of inspiration and challenge. Her article, M. Sebastian 2003, spurred the process
of revising the original version of this paper, which was presented at the Faculty Research Semi-
nar at the United Theological College, Bangalore, on November 26th, 1997. In addition, another
article, M. Sebastian 2004 carries this story forward, especially regarding the second wife of
Anandarao Kaundinya, Marie Reinhardt. Regarding Lakshmi Kaundinya, she sounds an impor-
tant warning note: “We need to know more about such women, if only to nurture the caution
with which one can even begin to imagine dialouges with people of other faith communities.
Otherwise, there is always the danger of perpetuating the cofusing relationship that theology has
with a community’s ways of being.” (M. Sebastian 2004: 89) A drastically shortened version was
published as Sebastian 1998. I would also like to thank Andreas Feldtkeller for his initial encour-
agement and Kathrin Roller for her perceptive and detailed comments on an earlier draft.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/016897811X572177
J. J. Sebastian / Mission Studies 28 (2011) 26–53 27
. . . doctrine involves the utterances of speakers in the sense that doctrine is, perma-
nently, the sign, the manifestation and the instrument of a prior adherence – adherence
to a class, to a social or racial status, to a nationality or an interest, to a struggle, a
revolt, resistance or acceptance. Doctrine links individuals to certain types of utterance
while consequently barring them from all others. Doctrine effects a dual subjection,
that of speaking subjects to discourse, and that of discourse to the group, at least virtu-
ally, of speakers. (Foucault 1972: 226)
Introduction: Setting the Stage and Staging the Set

“I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”1 (Greenblatt 1988: 1, quoted
in Veeser 1989: ix) In my case, in this paper, it is with Lakshmi Kaundinya, the
wife of Hermann Kaundinya. The text that contains the account of the “bap-
tism of death” experienced through the conversion and baptism of her hus-
band by Lakshmi Kaundinya is found in the monthly magazine of the Basel
Mission called Der evangelische Heidenbote (roughly “The Protestant Messenger
to the Heathen”) entitled “Der Sterbebette einer Braminenfrau” (“The Deathbed
of a Brahmin Lady”), which appeared in March 1854.2
The account3 begins by attempting to situate the issue in relation to Lak-
shmi Kaundinya’s husband Hermann Kaundinya, who, as a 19-year old young
man, then named Anandaraj Kaundinya, around Christmas, 1844, along with
two other Brahmin youth, convinced by the word of the Cross, moved out of
“the darkness of heathenism” into Christ. This conversion event and its conse-
quences have been summarized as follows:
1
Commenting on this Veeser writes: “Personal, even autobiographical, the sentence chal-
lenges the norm of disembodied objectivity to which humanists have increasingly aspired. Far
from invisible, this writer’s desires and interests openly preside: the investigative project proceeds
from an unabashed passion. Nor is that passion bland or banal.” (Veeser 1989: ix)
2
I thank Bishop Dr Christopher L. Furtado for sending me a photocopy of this text.
(“Der Sterbebette einer Braminenfrau” in Der evangelische Heidenbote, March 1854: 20–26). All
subsequent quotations or summaries are from this text in my translation.
The Basel Mission came into existence in 1815, and the first missionaries to India came to
Mangalore in 1834. For background, bibliography, and extracts from documents that attempt to
define the purpose and self-understanding of the Basel Mission, see the section “Basler Mission”
in Raupp 1990: 243–250.
For ongoing analysis, see the many articles in Shiri 1985. Several articles in this provide back-
ground and analysis, especially Bieder 1985; Rossel 1985; and Samartha 1985.
3
The name of the narrator is not mentioned in the text that we have. Der evangelische Heiden-
bote appeared between 1828 and 1859. After 1859 the magazine was called Der Auftrag. It was
published keeping in mind the need for publicity and fund-raising. I thank Rudolf von Sinner
and Veit Arlt for sending me this information from Basel.
28 J. J. Sebastian / Mission Studies 28 (2011) 26–53
There were a handful of Brahmin conversions to Christianity. The first of these took
place in 1844 when the Brahmin trio – Ananda Rao Kaundinya, Mukunda Rao and
Bhagavantha Rao (Christian names Hermann, Christian, Jacob) took baptism in
Mangalore. On the same day a Brahmin by name Subbaraya, who was a mission
school teacher, was baptised at Kadike by Ammann. These Brahmin conversions were
considered as a great victory in the Mission work and created hopes among the mis-
sionaries of more Brahmin conversions. Kaundinya’s conversion had created an uproar
in Mangalore among the Brahmins and Muslims. The military and police had to be
alerted to avoid any violent incidents. It was the Anglo-Vernacular School of Manga-
lore which was instrumental in the conversion of Kaundinya and the other two Brah-
mins. Kaundinya was particularly a find of Dr. Moegling. He was sent to Basel for
theological training and after his ordination he returned to India in 1851 and worked
for many years in the Mangalore Seminary as a teacher and later as a pioneer mission-
ary in Coorg.4 (Shiri 1985: 185)
The conversion also resulted in legal issues and a near-riot. It is quite possible
that Hermann was taken to Basel not only for this task but also to put as much
distance between him and the legal implications and complications of the
conversion, Kaundinya’s parents alleged that the 18-year old “had been
‘abducted’ by his missionary-teachers and forcibly converted to Protestantism.
What brought a ‘reluctant’ British administration into this case was the part
played by the local English magistrate who, according to the parents of the
boy, had abetted the missionaries by turning a blind eye on their activities. The
sole redress that the family sought, they repeatedly asserted in a phrase that
would have sounded ominous were it not for the pathetic transparency of the
euphemism, was to have the boy returned home so that ‘he could be brought
to reason.’ The magistrate rebutted in his turn that, as a result of his refusal to
intervene, the family had staged an ambush on the mission house to reclaim
Ananda Row, and when that failed, (again according to the magistrate’s testi-
mony) they had concocted a macabre plot to implicate Christians in the des-
ecration of a nearby mosque, so that in the ensuing melee the family would be
able to whisk the boy away, undetected” (Viswanathan 1995:195).5
4
There are references to this incident in another article in the same book by David 1985: 169,
and note 14:177), where he refers to reports in the Oriental Christian Spectator, Bombay, and
writes, “Missionaries of the Basel Mission seem to have achieved reasonable success in their work
among the higher castes from the very beginning. In 1844, for instance, they reported that four
Brahmins had boldly confessed Christ at Mangalore which enraged the entire Brahmin com-
munity. There was such excitement in the town that they had to resort to military and police
assistance for safety.” Both articles (David 1985 and Shiri 1985) do not address the issue of the
wider family of the converts.
5
This article includes an analysis of the legal implications and fall-out of the “Ananda Row”
In fact, in the narrative that we are looking at, the five years that Hermann
spent in Basel are passed over in silence, and the writer states that the purpose
in writing the article was to provide an illustration to a speaker in Leipzig who
had spoken about the “power of heathenism” and to record the sad history of
the wife of “our beloved, [and] to many of us well-known, brother Hermann
Kaundinya, the converted Brahmin, who lived as a pupil for five years in the
Mission-House in Basel.”6 In this discrete silence we perceive a process of
hegemonisation at work, where the former Anandaraja and now Hermann is
in the process of being moulded and defined so that he may speak for the “us”
but appear as the “you.”
The writer goes on to say in a rather self-defensive tone: “I would not have
ventured to openly describe the story of his poor wife had she not, through the
closing by death, found an irrevocable end; and my only wish now is that I
would be able to depict her life and death through a long collection of letters
of her husband, so that [I] could stand, with total engagement, for the unlucky
women of India in a priestly capacity before God, to be truly strengthened and
augmented.” What is offered here is a portrayal and depiction through the
case which is discussed. She informs us that this is “[o]ne of the most thoroughly documented
conversion cases in the British records.” (195). In footnote 11: 208, she identifies the relevant
sections in the India Office Library and Records, Board’s Collections, Judicial Department and
in the Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras Judicial Consultations. Here she writes that the “case was
thought important enough to be forwarded to London, along with all the relevant minutes,
depositions, and petitions, which included an extraordinary letter written by Ananda Row’s young
wife, in which she pleads that if her husband’s conversion were not reversed and he failed to
return home, she would henceforth be considered a widow by her community and would have
to suffer another version of civil death as alienating and horrifying as the one endured by her
young husband.” (emphasis mine). I find it interesting that in this article none of the mission
accounts are taken into consideration. See M. Sebastian 2004: 78–79.
In this paper I do not try to account for seeming discrepancies in the date (of the baptism) and
original name (of Hermann Kaundinya) in the different accounts.
6
References to Hermann Kaundinya can also be found in the more or less “official” account
of the history of the Basel Mission in India where it is recorded that on 6th January, 1844, three
young Brahmins were baptised, two Konkani Brahmins (Bhagavantrao and Mukundrao) and
one Sarasvata Brahmin – Anandrao Kaundinya. Following an account of the commotion and
unrest among the Brahmins and also the Muslims, and of the British intervention, the account
goes on to say that “Kaundinya, who was trained as a missionary in Basel, worked as such for
many years in India. His first wife, died as a heathen, while calling on her God Rama; after that
he married a lady from Württemberg.” It goes on to record that he engaged himself in helping
unemployed converts through his work on the plantation in Anandapur in Coorg, which proved
to be a financial drag. In spite of this “he remained active for the Basel Mission till the end
(1st February, 1893). The hope that many Brahmins would enter the Christian congregation
because of their fellow caste-persons, was not fulfilled.” Translated from Schlatter 1916: 30.
“informant” who here happens to be the husband of the one being portrayed.
However, “[i]f we then drag our reluctant eyes away from the offered spectacle
and focus them instead upon the spectator, our vision doubles.”(Leyerle 1993:
174)7 What is being presented for “consumption” here is the female-in-
relation-to-the-informant, who is then sought to be understood, not as she is
in herself, but as she is perceived through the eyes of the ones doing the gazing.
Hence my speaking and reading is guided by the directions set by the cultural
critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who writes:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the

figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent
shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between
tradition and modernization.8 (Spivak 1993: 102)
From the Narration to the Narrated

My reading of Lakshmi Kaundinya will be restricted to this text for the simple
reason that at this point in time this is the only text immediately available to
me, although other accounts and perspectives are available in different locales,
which my present location, financial situation, and other, mainly imposed,
limitations prevent me from accessing. There is no need to be apologetic about
this – one can only protest, for as Mary E. John rather wryly comments:
. . . only a tiny percentage of crucial archival materials remain in, or have been brought
back to, non-first-world centres – knowledges are overwhelmingly stored in Western
libraries. This also effectively prevents those who are unable to gain access to the
financial resources and cultural credentials necessary for travel to first-world institu-
tions from believing that they could be undertaking first-rate academic research.
( John 1996: 25)
Although I mentioned a “simple” reason above, I also believe that the text that
I read as a self-contained text, ought to be accorded the importance that it
7
This article seeks to apply insights coming from feminist film criticism, where the “gendered
gaze ensures a hierarchical positioning of male and female encoded in terms such as active/
passive and subjective/objective.” (159).
8
This famous essay, along with its revised version and a superb collection of writings on this,
has now been published in Morris 2010. The original essay is found on 237–291.
deserves as a repository of a particular point of view in providing a perspectival

approach, which offers me, today, an ingress point.
There are other reasons to undertake, today, a reading of the texts, docu-
ments and persons who have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the shaping
of our identities as Indian Christians: “. . . Our histories . . . must begin to take
into account what has been repressed or left out; they must begin to adequately
record the history of cultural desire. Such commencements, ultimately, are
matters of and for narrators.” (O’Donnell 1996: 257) Such attempts endeav-
our to facilitate the movement from being the narrated to being the narrator,
using at this point, precisely the texts which served to place those at the receiv-
ing end of mission in the category of being the narrated. Obviously such an
attempt involves a methodology not so much in search of answers as much as
evoking questions, for “[h]ow does one encounter the past as an anteriority
that continually introduces an otherness or alterity within the present? How
does one then narrate the present as a form of contemporaneity that is always
belated?” (Bhabha 1990: 308)
At this stage I am conscious of the reality that it is possible that I will be
projecting myself – my discontent, my anger, and my frustration – onto the
narrator of the text. There can be no neutral reading when confronted with the
terror and fear inherent in the text. Spivak admonishes us
In seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted
subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically ‘unlearns’
female privilege. (Spivak 1993: 91)
How can we speak to Lakshmi rather than simply listen to her or speak for
her? How do we unlearn our male as well as female privileges in order to
become receptive partners in this speech act? In this context we are reminded
by what Trinh T. Minh-ha says when she defines hegemony as “referring to the
authority of certain states over others, of one sex over the other, and to the
form of cultural and sexual ascendancy that once worked through direct dom-
ination but now often operates via consent – hence its pernicious, long-lasting,
and binding strength.” (Minh-ha 1989: 49) Any analysis of the hegemonic
aspects of the narration, which in its criss-crossing reminds one of the attempt
to somehow construct a clearly negotiable path through the thicket of native
unpredictability and obstinacy, seems to lead one to the concept of taming the
native and re-creating subjectivity and individuality in terms set forth by those
who were in a position to dictate and formulate (not forgetting to finance),
what they believed the native ought to be and what the native ought to do.
If “Woman can never be defined,” (Minh-ha 1989: 96) how can one presume
to try to “represent” her?
The Perspectival Gaze: Framing the Subject

Edward W. Said asks: “Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In
what circumstances? These, it seems to me, are the questions whose answers
provide us with the ingredients making for a politics of interpretation.”
(Said 2001: 118) The politics of interpretation from the perspective of the
writer is revealed in the comment, where, after reporting that when Hermann
decided to take “the great, decisive, step in the name of Jesus, he was already,
in accordance with Indian custom, married, had his own house in Mangalore,
where he led, along with his wife, an independent family life”, the writer goes
on to say that “among the pagan Hindus there exists, namely, the unnatural,
pernicious custom, that children, already in early childhood – often in their
3rd or 4th year – are festively engaged, which is held to be a firm and unbreak-
able band, so that when the young boy dies, the unlucky young girl is consid-
ered to be a widow, and must remain a widow her whole life long.” For me,
this is interesting because the account does not set out from what already
exists, namely, the fact that Kaundinya and his wife were married and were
leading an independent life, but puts this in a context of the what the narrator
sees as deeply problematic and unnatural “Indian customs.” The case, for the
writer, can only be interpreted from within this premise – there is something
unnatural and incorrect in Indian marriage customs. Since this is so, then
there is at the core of the marriage of the Kaundinyas something fundamen-
tally wrong. Once this premise is accepted, then the rest of the narrative falls
into place. In her brilliant and provocative analysis of Sati, Rajeshwari Sundar
Rajan points out that “[t]he imperialist text covered over sexuality by dis-
crediting conjugal love, and by sublimating chivalric love into disinterested
justice or ‘romance’. . . .” (Rajan 1993: 53)9 It is only when the subject is neatly
framed in opposition to that which is deemed appropriate and correct that the
narrator believes a clear and obvious understanding of the case of Lakshmi
Kaundinya can be articulated.
9
Another important point that she makes is that “the colonial perception of a collective
gendered identity for the women who die sharply contradicts a focus on the individual female
subject, the sati, who is framed for scrutiny.” (Rajan 1993: 59).
The cultural biases clearly emerge when the narrator reports that in the mar-
riage negotiations one does not take into consideration “whether the two are
suitable for one another. Nothing regarding this is asked and cannot be asked,
for the poor maiden is surely, on the one hand, nothing more that a burden,
which one would like to get rid of as soon as possible, and, on the other hand,
a commodity, which one would like to sell for as great profit as possible. This
is because the main point for the marriage contract, which is negotiated by
the parents, is the question, how many jewels and ornaments the bridegroom
would give the bride.” Following further comments on how the family priest
is then summoned and asked to interpret the horoscopes, and if this is all
right, then he fixes the day and hour when the ceremony is carried out, the
narrator goes on to report that “the parents from both sides come together to
a family festival, the house-priest says some prayers in Sanskrit over the bridal
pair, carries out some other meaningless ceremonies, and now the bride
and bridegroom eat out of one plate. With this the covenant is sealed, which
implies that the maiden, without having a clear consciousness of what has just
passed, is eternally fettered to the man.” The question of representation must
now be raised. Can one distinguish between perceived reality and perverted
representation? It would be an over-simplification to ascribe all this to the
native informant/s.
Mary John, in analysing an article on feminism and anthropology, sum-
marises an important aspect – “from a feminist perspective that emphasizes
the need to expose, if not undo, relations of oppression, the idea of a collab-
orative relationship between anthropologist and informant, and especially the
idea of multiple authorship . . . is a delusion.” ( John 1996: 114) The narrator
thus builds up the frame of reference in providing the backdrop to the discus-
sion of Lakshmi Kaundinya, which would then lead the reader to ask whether
anything positive or of worth could emerge from such a situation. What is of
significance here is that the frame is built up using the ethnographic method-
ology of description, through an attempt to capture the details and invite
the reader to be a spectator. Thus, moving beyond the case or issue at hand,
a generalised picture is presented so that the object can be securely framed
within this.
What next? After describing the engagement customs, the narrator then
moves on to the question of what it is that the bride does after the ceremony.
The bridegroom returns to his house and the bride will not see him again
till the actual wedding ceremony. Till then the young bride must live hidden
in her parents house. She cannot come into contact with a man, and when this
is inevitable she can only do so heavily veiled. “Her occupation is sleeping,
playing with her bridal jewels, decorating herself with them and sit brooding
dismally without thinking, prattling with her mother and other women, eat-
ing and sleeping again.” Here what we get is the attempt not only to comment
on the discipline of the child-bride, but also to situate such a person within the
‘disciplining’ categories, which could be utilized as moral or ethical object les-
sons by those for whom certain behavioural patterns were considered abhor-
rent and disgusting. Gyan Prakash notes
It was in British India . . . that scientific knowledge was placed in a position of undisputed
cultural authority and where its “inappropriate” mixture with superstition exposed
and realigned the process of its authorization. To return to the colonial scene, there-
fore, is to release histories and knowledges from their disciplining as area-studies; as
imperial and overseas history; as the study of the exotic other that seals metropolitan
structures from the contagion of the record of their own formation elsewhere – in
fantasy, and fear, in cultural difference and uneven and entangled histories, in contin-
gency and contention. (Prakash 1995: 11–12)
Thus the narrator feels an obligation, verging on the obsessive, to locate and
situate Lakshmi Kaundinya, sincerely believing that only then the stage would
be set for the appreciation and appropriation of the tragic, evocative and
admonitory tale. The narrator goes on to report that “learning to read is for-
bidden to girls since the holy books of the Hindus are too holy for females
who are impure beings, and since their only destiny in life is to serve their
husband. It is only recently through the effects of European influences has it
happened that here and there, a girl learns to read, just as Hermann’s wife
quite unsatisfactorily understood this skill. However, writing is absolutely
forbidden, since this could give the female access to forbidden traffic with
others – Hermann’s wife could not do this either. The maiden did not receive
lessons in anything, except what she had learnt from her mother, to prepare a
few dishes, which are required of the Hindu, in order that in the future she
would be able to understand how to cook for her husband. By the way,
she must – although she belongs to the highest caste and is the daughter of a
rich man – carry out the lowest duties of the household: fetch water, prepare
cowdung for the fire, stay behind the father and the brothers during the meal-
time and serve them. There is no talk of female handwork; if and when the
needle is necessary for the unstitched and unsown wraparound of the Hindus,
would be used by no one other than the tailor-caste; the clothes to be washed,
when they reach a stage of being so dirty that a wash is necessary, is solely and
alone a matter for the washer-caste.” This is what the narrator would have his
object do (or not do) till the 12th or 14th year when she reaches a ripe enough
age for the marriage. This fact is conveyed to “the father of the bridegroom,
and immediately the convenient day to celebrate the marriage will be fixed.”
Having now located and situated the bride, the narrator now invites us to
“accompany the still-young 18-year old Brahmin, Anadaraja Kaundinya to his
bride who half remains at a childhood age.” We go along with him to his place
where his bride is prepared and waiting and the narrator, in excruciatingly
exquisite detail describes for us the details of the wedding ceremony, including
the information that Lakshmi is the daughter of the Sadaramin,10 and details
regarding the gifts of jewellery, clothes, and fruit. We are informed about the
heavily-veiled Lakshmi and the variety of relatives around, although the narra-
tor rather modestly informs us that it is not possible to “list the variety of the
other customs” like the role of rice and butter among other things. After the
sumptuous meal, which ends the “long, tiring, festivities, . . . the bridegroom
now leads his wife, accompanied by music and lanterns to the house, where
he, for the first time, sees the face of the one whose fate is now for eternity
bound with his unveiled.”
We too have spent a long time in situating Lakshmi Kaundinya, and for a
short time ought to leave her and her bridegroom alone, in Sirsi, far from the
prying and probing eyes that hold up domesticity and the improbability of
conjugal love for scrutiny and survey.11 Perhaps a handle is offered by the con-
clusions of Harriet Ritvo, who, in analysing the implications of where the
science of taxonomy has led, writes:
. . . there was no clear way of distinguishing between the appearance of order and order
itself. And the more that taxonomic categories seem to reflect alternative (and inevita-
bly inconsistent, and therefore undermining) ways of classifying, the harder it becomes
to claim that the systems they constituted had either the rationality or the novelty
or the power that have generally been attributed to them. Rather than consolidating
10
A Sadaramin was “the second class judge over a civil court subordinate to the zillah courts.”
(Kittel 1894: 1495). The narrator understands this to mean an “Oberrichter”.
11
It is instructive to compare this account with that of Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–
1922), who can be brutally frank in holding up for scrutiny what she considers to be the demean-
ing and cruel realities in the life of married Hindu women. Chapter 3 in her book The High Caste
Hindu Woman is entitled “Married Life,” where she concludes: “In spite, however, of all these
drawbacks, there is in India many a happy and loving couple that would be an honour to any
nation. Where the conjugal relation is brightened by mutual love, the happy wife has nothing
to complain except the absence of freedom of thought and action; but since wives have never
known from the beginning what freedom is, they are generally well content to remain in bond-
age; there is, however, no such thing as the family having pleasant times together.” (Tharu and
Lalita 1993: 252–253)
human intellectual dominion over the variety of nature and the vagaries of mind, they
demonstrated the difficulty of those attempts. (Ritvo 1993: 251)
What we have encountered is the interplay between rationally exotic “other-

ness” representation, which has inbuilt in it the propensity of the use and
abuse of power – power as a structure which has within it the possibility and
the privilege to represent.12 Although I am not in a position to comment on
the identity of the narrator, the text that we are reading, with its centre being
not Lakshmi as herself so much as Lakshmi, the wife of Kaundinya, is, in this
sense, a “male” text, and I am conscious that it is as a male reader that I have
come to this text chastened and challenged by warnings such as those articu-
lated by Tania Modleski who writes
Recognizing that women have long been held prisoners of male texts, genres, and
canons, many feminist critics have argued for the necessity of constructing a theory of
the female reader and have offered a variety of strategies by which she may elude her
captors.13 (Modleski 1986: 136)
My desire to speak with Lakshmi Kaundinya is, sadly, not an attempt to enable
her to elude her captors, but is informed by my desire to understand how
varieties of identity have been generated through texts, through prescriptions
of modes of behaviour, through awakened expectations, and through the cul-
tural baggage that forms an inevitable part of the encounter between either a
colonising power or a foreign mission agency and the people of India. It is
clear to me that at the heart of the encounter involving colonisers and mis-
sionaries with the inhabitants of the land there lies a deep ambivalence, which
12
Michel Foucault’s precautionary point regarding the operation of power is helpful: “Power
must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather something which only functions in the
form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated
as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organiza-
tion. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position
of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting
target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the
vehicles of power, not its points of application.” (Emphasis mine) (Foucault 1994: 214)
13
Modleski concludes: “By working on a variety of fronts for the survival and empower-
ment of women, feminist criticism performs an escape act dedicated to freeing women from
all male captivity narratives, whether these be found in literature, criticism, or theory.”
(Modleski 1986: 136).
cannot be simply and crudely reduced to either-or terms. (See Ferro 1997 for
a broad and sensitive analysis of colonization)14 As for the recipients of mis-
sion, referring to the Indian context, Lamin Sanneh writes, “[m]ission will be
the crucible in which Indian Christians will become enmeshed in the world
of vernacular self-understanding, with equally inevitable implications for the
vernacular itself.” (Sanneh 2009: 141) I would subscribe to this, even “trans-
lating” the future tense to a past and adding that I do not underestimate or
overlook the role of the missionaries in generating the vernacular.
Trying to Deserve the Attention that Has Already Been Attracted15

We now return to the newly-wed couple. They are deeply in love: “. . . Her-
mann loved his wife, and she, too, clung to him with all the love of which she
was capable.” This, for the narrator, is a very surprising thing. The German
word left out in the previous quotation is “doch” – “yet.” Why the “yet”?
Because the narrator has just described the life of Lakshmi after the wedding
ceremony. “Closeted in the women’s area, she spent her time with nothing to
do or with childish games. She got out of her sluggish situation only to spend
hours decorating herself with flowers and her jewels, after which she spent
hours sitting on the ground with nothing to think or to do, or spent hours
chatting with visiting women, and then again went to sleep. For her husband,
she cooked the rice each day as the other, fetched water or cow-dung, stood
behind him while he ate and then went with the leftovers to the women’s area,
where she could then satisfy her hunger. Regarding intellectual or leisure com-
panionship – how could one even talk about such a matter?” Then comes the
plaintive “doch.” The natives never loose the capacity to surprise. Just when
one thought that the attempt to situate had been accomplished, there comes
along an unforeseen and unexpected complication. It is precisely here that,
however unwittingly, both Kaundinya and his wife, serve to subvert the cate-
gories set out for them. “It is particularly important to mark strategies of con-
tainment (points at which the subaltern are contained by dominant ideology)
14
For an attempt to read the missionary encounter with India as the effort “to transplant the
European church to India,” see Dharmaraj 1993.
15
Modification of a phrase in Roy 1997: 144): “Adoor Bai wasn’t trying to attract attention.
He was only trying to deserve the attention that he had already attracted.” The contrast to this
image comes later: “Rahel was only trying to not attract the attention that she deserved.” (146)
as sites of power and the assertion of subaltern autonomy.” (Visweswaran

1996: 86–87)16
It is after this period – however represented, although the joy shines
through – that the life of Lakshmi Kaundinya took another turn. She had
moved along with her husband to Mangalore – the narrator is not sure when –
Kaundinya attended the mission school for a while, and through the education
that he had acquired there rose to a high place of honour in the Government,
and it was then that “he found the precious pearl which he certainly did not
seek.” The narrator can only speculate on the nature of the struggle that Kaun-
dinya had to undergo up to Christmas 1844, and the power and grace that he
obtained through Jesus for his victory. Following his baptism on the day of
Epiphany 1845, “in order to win Jesus he sacrificed absolutely everything what
he had in this world, in respect of happiness and honour, his possessions and
his prospects. With this step he renounced his house and all his goods –
his wife, whom he loved from his heart – his relations, who reckoned him as
dead and lost, without wanting to have any sense of community with him, all
his shining prospects, which his position, his talent, had opened for the future.
As one through and through poor, forsaken and dishonoured by his own
people, he moved into the house of our brother, only holding fast to simple
faith in Jesus, and holding everything other than this holy knowledge as dirt
and damage.”
These dramatic events, and the build up to them is something on which we
can only speculate, led “Lakshmi, his poor wife, hurried back to Sirsi, to her
father, as one filled with deathly agony, as one who had become a widow.” The
narrator reports that “any close connection with Hermann was from then on
an impossibility. Hermann remained in the Mission House in Mangalore, and
came to Basel in 1846 with brother Mögling, where he prepared himself for
five years, in humility and fidelity, for future mission work among his people.”
Right at the outset we had been informed where the focus of this report would
lie and had been told that the narrator had, a short time previously, published
a report on the life and conversion of Hermann. After our sojourn in Basel, let
us return with Hermann Kaundinya to South Kanara, where, suitably trained
in the exercise of power, he returns not only to a task which he has to fulfil, but
also to the reality of a wife who has now spent several years in Sirsi, wondering,
wishing, waiting to exhale. . . .
16
Visweswaran adds a rider here: “I want to argue however, that the constitution of the sub-
altern in, and as series of relations of power, requires some revision when gender is concerned.”
Controlled Encounters
The narrator begins this section on the return of the native with the assertion
that “The hand of God had prepared for him a further difficult test, which was
more difficult and painful that all that had happened till then.” This test was
nothing other than Lakshmi: “His heart had never given up the hope that the
Lord would lead him to his beloved wife once more, and also that her soul
would be gifted to him as booty. Only the Lord knows how he wrestled over
this matter in prayer.” Hermann returned to Mangalore with an inspector of
the Basel Mission in October 1851, and “the news spread like lightning among
the Brahmins of the whole neighbourhood, that the ‘lost’ Kaundinya had
returned. All wanted to see him, all spoke about him.” The point is that this
news reached Sirsi very quickly. Events at the mission station and among the
missionaries too moved quite rapidly. Brother Mögling had to visit a neigh-
bouring town on the coast along with the Inspector, and decided to take this
opportunity to “visit the old Brahmin, without letting him know that he,
Mögling, was in fact the one who was the ‘enticer’ of his son-in-law. Contrary
to all expectations, the missionaries were received with friendliness by the
old one, who even asked whether it was true that Kaundinya had returned
to India. It seemed that there was an attempt at good will in his behaviour.
Hearing this news, Hermann wrote a letter immediately to his father-in-law
and another one to Lakshmi. Hermann received an answer from his father-in-
law – but quicker than this came a letter from Lakshmi, or rather, since she
herself could not write, from a trustworthy relative, who wrote in her name
under instructions from her. Hermann opened this and read it with a flutter-
ing heart. Yet all hope appeared to be clearly cut off. With deep melancholy he
laid the letter aside. However, after further thought, it struck him that the
words of the Hindus and particularly the Hindu women are not to be taken as
they appeared, but that very often the hidden sense of their words denoted the
opposite of what they appeared to say.” Here we have comments on the codi-
fication of motives, but what strikes me is the not-so-subtle sexual undertones
that encapsulate the narrative, not only here but in other sections as well. The
five years in Basel are passed over in this account in silence, but the moment
the native returns to his home country the intrusive curiosity of the narrator,
especially with regard to the natives as sexual beings seems to obtrude.17
17
An analysis of such intrusive curiosity in a different context is found Gilman 1986. The
author writes: “The ‘white man’s burden’ thus becomes his sexuality and its control and it is this
This element, where the narrator in attempting to think through Hermann’s

thoughts, tell us more of the narrator than of the one being narrated, and
any reading of such texts ought to exhibit sensitivity to such elements, espe-
cially when religious sentiments, which are being analysed, are recognised
as being embodied in human bodies, including the body of a woman who
has spent many years in a state of practical unknowing, without having had
the chance to clarify obvious “why” questions through a face-to-face encoun-
ter. (Young 1985: 159–182. This is the chapter on “Colonialism and the
Desiring Machine”)
We have reached the stage where “practical unknowing” will shortly yield to
a direct encounter. “He read the letter again – and behold, he wasn’t disap-
pointed. He quickly realised in the way the words were formed what the actual
wishes of his wife were. The letter closed with the urgent request that Her-
mann ought not to come in the absence of her father. But that he ought to
come precisely at this time was the hidden meaning of these words, something
which Lakshmi herself confessed to her husband later.” Hermann was under-
going a great struggle as to what he ought to do. At this point when he was
unable to come to a decision, Lakshmi’s relative who had written the original
letter came to Mangalore bringing the inheritance papers which Lakshmi had
kept safely and also bringing “the unexpected assurance that Lakshmi had
decided and was ready to once again join him.” Hermann was requested to
come to Sirsi and if faced with resistance was to take Lakshmi away from there
by force, “and if she appeared to put up a fight or screamed, he ought not to
get confused.” One is justified in wondering how the story would have turned
out if Hermann had gone along with the elaborate plans made by Lakshmi,
but what we now get is the manifestation of the christian domestication of
Kaundinya, since the narrator reports: “Certainly, as a Christian, Hermann
could not follow this advice.” For the narrator it is self-evident that this was a
matter where Kaundinya did not trust himself sufficiently to act but obviously
looked to his new advisors as to the best course of action. They too could not
let their prized star wander off on a matter that could lead to the ripping open
of festering tensions, and so the native must go home, not alone, but accom-
panied by one who would be at his side to control the situation, which after
all the years of investment could not be allowed, in a moment of passion, to
slip out of control. Rationality ought to rule over the heart and its reasons.
which is transferred to the need to control the sexuality of the Other, the Other as sexualized
female.” (256).
“However the main thing was clear – that his wife wished for the renewed
union. With a heart beating for joy Hermann hurried to Sirsi. Brother Mögling
received from Inspector Totenhans the instructions to meet Hermann on the
set day in Sirsi and to support him during this important matter with appro-
priate advice. On 21st December, 1851, the Sunday before Christmas, the two
met in the already mentioned town.” The stage is now set for the controlled
encounter – even Lakshmi’s father has returned and is at home.
Face to Face Again: Re-establishing the Connection
The stage is all set, the curtain is being drawn, and “there follows now a scene,
of the totally dreadful struggle, which we are allowed to witness, which this
poor completely heathen Hindu woman has to pass through, at the time
where, on the one side, the true, treasured love attracts her forcefully to her
husband, but where, on the other side, she is called to sacrifice her deeply
enrooted distaste, which had grown with her whole being, against one who
had lost caste, who was in her eyes impure, lost and reprehensible.” The choice
is clear, but the role of religion and custom is yet to make its powerful state-
ment determining the course of events. “On Monday morning, at 10 o’clock,
strengthened by prayer, Hermann and Mögling set out for the house of the
Sadaramin, which was half an hour distant from their place of shelter.” The
narrator then goes on to describe the mise en scène which is the house of Lak-
shmi’s father, laying stress on the courtyard where the two entered and asked
for Lakshmi’s father, who after having been called made his appearance after
some delay, seating himself on a carpet which had been placed in the courtyard
and extending the courtesy of chairs for his guests. “Mögling started the con-
versation with some questions regarding the Sadaramin’s health and so on, and
then asked, that since this time he had also brought Hermann with him, he
[Hermann] would be pleased not only to see him [the father-in-law] but also
his daughter. At the beginning the old one was very friendly, his face darkened
at the mention of his daughter, and all sorts of excuses were paraded. He didn’t
want to know Hermann any more, he claimed not to understand what
Hermann wanted of his daughter, and asked why he was being disturbed.” At
this point Mögling, manifesting the Aaron syndrome, spoke up on behalf of
the apparently tongue-tied Hermann. Is there a strategy of authority at work
here? Homi K. Bhabha in an evocative and tantalisingly provocative reading of
an incident regarding the encounter of a group of Hindu wandering merchants
with the Bible, which they refused to identify as “the European Book,” and the
rather bumbling attempt by an Indian evangelist to hammer sense into

them, notes:
As the discriminated object, the metonym of presence becomes the support of an authori-
tarian voyeurism, all the better to exhibit the eye of power. (Bhabha 1994: 120)
To go on: Mögling informs the father that Hermann would like to hear directly
from the mouth of his wife whether she would indeed be willing and ready to
join him again. The father declared that such a thing was unthinkable and
impossible. Had Hermann behaved in a manner appropriate for a relative,
“that which has come to pass would not have come to pass. Now it was impos-
sible to treat him as a relative.” The shadow-boxing continued and Mögling
now took it upon himself, calmly and politely, yet firmly, to inform the
old father that according to the law, it could be ordered that Hermann be
allowed to look ahead to a future which included his wife. The father must
now simply decide “whether he would allow this voluntarily or not.” The
veiled threat succeeded in overcoming the natural resistance. Perhaps memo-
ries of the earlier encounter with the law, and all that it had entailed in terms
of time and bitterness, played no small part in the change of heart. Was
Mögling, perhaps, seen as some kind of extension of the colonial power
(despite whatever missionaries from the Basel Mission may have thought
about the Empire). What is perceived is very often not that which is seen. The
intertwining of the discourses of the missionary and the Brahmin poses a sub-
stantial challenge to those who would like to compartmentalize the issues of
perceived authority and resistance. Writing about the narratives of Empire,
Sara Suleri notes that they
do not merely ‘mess’ with the colonial subject, but are in themselves encoded with a
dubiety that requires the fiction of intransigence to protect the myth of colonial
authority.
This absence of authority is most readily discernible in the colonial will to cultural
description, which demonstrates an anxious impulse to insist that colonized people
can indeed be rendered interpretable within the language of the colonizer. . . . On such
a stage, vested interests are too great to allow for any unambiguous ethical or political
judgements, raising instead the issue of the audience’s implication in the successive
scenes of disempowerment that it must witness. (Suleri 1992: 7)
It is as an implicated audience that we turn again and look at the father, who
has now become compliant, and informed his visitors that “he himself had
nothing against it, but his daughter didn’t want it. Now someone was sent into
the house, and behold, after some delay, Lakshmi appeared, veiled, in an ante-
room, whose open door looked out on the veranda. While Mögling remained
with the old one, down in the veranda, Hermann stood up and went forward;
only about six steps distant from him in the room stood the shivering
Lakshmi, whom he had not seen for eight years. His heart surged within him.
Finally he asked her whether she was prepared to follow him and was ready to
be united with him once again. But the poor woman found no answer for a
long time. She finally broke the silence only to shower him with the accusation
that he had abandoned her. He should have asked her this question eight years
ago, but then he had not bothered to even ask her her opinion. Now any talk
of a reunion was no more possible. Hermann clarified to her how things had
come to pass and declared to her his uninterrupted love. He asked her again,
begged and pleaded, but in vain. Already a full hour of these negotiations had
passed. The Sadaramin called over self-contentedly – ‘Look here Hermann,
my daughter does not want to come’ – and Hermann began to lose courage.
Then Mögling called to him, in German, to gather fresh courage and asked
him to hold on and persevere as long as possible. Our poor brother started
again with requests, began again at the beginning with clarifications, explana-
tions, admonitions; Lakshmi answered everything either with silence or
unclear whisperings. A second, also a third hour flowed by, without Hermann
being unable to move a further step. His body and soul had become weak. The
Sadaramin repeated again and again that it was obvious that his daughter
didn’t want to do what was being proposed. But Mögling opposed him, not
without good reason, that on the contrary his daughter could not bring herself
to separate from her husband. Already it was about 2 in the afternoon. For
three full hours, Hermann had stood down in the veranda; three hours had
Lakshmi held herself inside, and still it was as it had been in the first minute.
The unlucky woman was bound to Hermann in her heart, and yet she did not
deem it possible to give herself over to the ‘unclean’ and ‘lost’ one. Finally the
Sadaramin unwillingly demanded, in an imperious tone, a decisive answer
from his daughter. But she remained silent and shut herself up in her silence.
Now, finally, Mögling and Hermann set out and said their good-byes with
a wounded disposition. The hope of the two brothers was severely toned
down – however a second visit was planned for another morning.”
From this point on Lakshmi moves more and more to the centre-stage of
the narrative, and my effort to speak with her will be an attempt through the
translation of the text to move her from being a musty object of archival curi-
osity to the flesh-and-blood person that she really is. Obviously this textual
incarnation (or re-incarnation) happens within given parameters, but it is
precisely in the attempt to open the discourse to a wider body of participants

than originally envisaged that the enfleshment occurs. Aijaz Ahmad raises a
pertinent and provocative discussion point when he writes
The damage Orientalism often did can now be undone by superior scholarship, if and
when we ourselves produce such scholarship, but the Orientalism scholarship as such
cannot simply be dismissed as an exercise of bad faith . . . (Ahmad 1992: 259)18
We have to take the other unintended meaning of “faith” in this context when
we speak of Lakshmi, and look at the subsequent developments with this in
mind. At the same time Edward Said’s observations continue to hold good:
. . . the Orient needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed, then re-created
by scholars, soldiers, and judges who disinterred forgotten languages, histories, races,
and cultures in order to posit them – beyond the modern Oriental’s ken – as the
true classical Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient.
(Said 1994: 92)
It is precisely the programmatic nature of the discourse which we cannot over-

look or underestimate. Our narrator continues: “Tuesday dawned. With great
fervour the two [Hermann and Mögling] united in prayer before the Lord,
and entreated him, the one who directs hearts, to turn Lakshmi’s mind to
Hermann and also to save her soul. They had the faint hope that Lakshmi
would send for them, but in vain. Finally, in the evening at around 5 they
hurried again to the house of the Sadaramin.” The scene is repeated, but this
time with a bunch of relatives in attendance. Although the father was not
around the actors took their assigned positions, with the difference that Her-
mann was not content to remain down in the veranda but went forward to the
immediate proximity of the door behind which stood Lakshmi. Two hours
pass and no answer is given. Finally Lakshmi pleads, “I cannot give a clear,
decisive answer yet, I’ll do that in four months.” Hermann and Mögling,
totally dejected and depressed return to their traveller’s lodge. “I was terribly
weighed down in my disposition,” he wrote (the narrator informs us), “we had
placed all our wishes before the Lord during that day; but now I had to give
up the hope of rescuing my wife from her wretched condition. That was not a
simple matter. However, the next morning I felt my heart lighten and was
18
The important insights and methodological warnings of David C. Scott on pre-colonial
orientalism, especially in a context where the missionary does not initially create, but enters into,
structures of authority, perceived or otherwise, must not be lost sight of. (Scott 1996)
truly satisfied with the way of the Lord.” Christmas Eve dawned. “Hermann
wrote a melancholy farewell letter to his wife and sent it across to the house of
the Sadaramin, packed his things, sent the palanquin, in which he had hoped
to take his wife, along with the palanquin-bearers ahead, had lunch, and rode
off with Mögling towards Mangalore.” The way through the town which
was to signal the end proves to be the herald of a rapid succession of events.
There is rapid movement on this road – a messenger runs behind them in great
haste – “he requested them to come once again to Lakshmi. The two brothers
turned their horses towards the Sadaramin’s house; Mögling remained outside
on the road in the shade, Hermann went in to the inner courtyard. Lakshmi
stood again in her old place, surrounded by many relatives. ‘Will you come
with me now?’ asked Hermann with quiet determination. But it was as if a
devilish power again held her back she began once again, ‘I’ll come with you
after four months.’ Without taking leave Hermann turned away, went out, sat
on his horse and rode away from there. They had traversed a distance of a
hundred steps, when Lakshmi’s family priest hurried behind them out of
breath, and requested them to return ‘just once more, only for a moment.’
Again Hermann returned for some moments to stand before Lakshmi with the
question whether she would come with him. And now – finally – through the
quivering lips came a quiet ‘Yes.’ Her love for Hermann had won an indescrib-
able victory. There was only one thing that she requested – not to be com-
pelled to ride along with Mögling. This was accepted – Mögling would come
slowly behind them.” There was a flurry of activity. He hurriedly rode off
behind the palanquin bearers who had a start of three hours, “rode hurriedly
back, prepared his wife for the journey, and at 10 o’clock in the night, without
even saying farewell to the father and the mother, the festive procession started
out, Lakshmi in the palanquin, Hermann riding beside her. The magic-circle
in which the unlucky ones had been imprisoned for so long had been broken,
and a new joyfully rich hope appeared to dawn over the two.”
Taming the Pagan
The protagonists are now on their way to the security of the mission com-
pound in Mangalore. The narrator begins to speculate on the incredible events
of the past few days, how Hermann couldn’t believe his victory achieved
against Lakshmi’s inclination, and the nature of the love which brought this
about. “In her heart there was not even the slightest idea of the heavenly mag-
nificence of Christianity, to which her husband owed allegiance; more than
this she was imprisoned and caught in the spell of paganism to the depths of
her inner being; and she looked upon her husband, whom she loved as a man,
not simply as a lost, cast-away and impure apostate, who had cast himself and
her with him in unutterable misery. Because of this, the more her natural love
bound her to her husband, with even more anxious tenacity did she cling on
to her heathenism. She appeared to be someone who being bound to a demon
with irresistible magical power, became more and more panicky, resulting in
her inability to escape from its clutches.” Having laid the ideological grounds
for us to understand the complexity of thoughts that were cruising through
Lakshmi, the narrator returns to the procession which is travelling through the
night. Around midnight they reached a Bungalow or travellers lodge; shortly
after their arrival came Mögling who had been travelling behind them, who
occupied the second of the available guest-rooms. This resulted in an incon-
ceivable situation for Lakshmi – “that she, a Brahmin woman should spend
the night in a house built by a European. This was an unbearable thought . . .
to stay under the same roof as a European, and that her bitter enemy . . . she
begged, pleaded, threatened suicide. Hermann prayed with or, or at least next
to her, as he reported. This was in vain, she couldn’t be consoled. The night
was spent in unutterable wretchedness. The next day they travelled on. On the
third day they reached Honavar. Here, for the first time, she ate something
which was brought to her by her uncle who was living there – from Tuesday
evening to Thursday evening she had eaten nothing, because she couldn’t bring
herself to eat food which had not been prepared by holy Brahmin hands.”
Lakshmi had to undergo another process of systematic unlearning (which
did not have to wait for a postcolonial interpreter!), and had to face the harsh
realities of her changed situation: “In Mangalore, where she arrived on Decem-
ber 28th, the lamentations began anew. She was expected to dwell under one
roof with other Europeans in Balmatta (the hillock on which our Mission
House stood). Her condition bordered often on despair, almost on insanity.
To be sure, Hermann attempted to read to her daily from the Holy Scriptures
and to pray loudly beside her, but he had to give this up on account of her
uncontrollable resistance. To eat at the Mission table was impossible for her.
She was allowed to have her own small kitchen, where she cooked for herself
and her husband. When someone else perchance touched this food, it was
thrown away. Here there was clearly no other way possible to overcome her
deadly distaste for anything Christian but the way of patience and sincere
intercession. For half a year, Hermann allowed her to go on her way unhin-
dered, but pleaded fervently to the Lord on behalf of his poor wife. However,
there appeared to be not even the slightest change in her. The most that one
could say was that she appeared pleased when her husband, in her presence,
read loudly from the Book and prayed. At the same time she daily put the
saffron-coloured mark on her forehead, which was the heathen Brahmin sign,
overloaded herself daily with nose, foot, and ear rings and other pieces of jew-
ellery, and spent the day, having completed the small task of cooking, doing
nothing. Hermann himself said, ‘For six months, apart from cooking, eating,
chatting, bathing, and sleeping, she has done absolutely nothing.’ He started
to fear that his wife would interpret his pliability and friendliness for an
approval of this existence and decided now, after many prayers and consulta-
tion with the brothers, that demand from Lakshmi compliant obedience. So,
one day he came to her and spoke heartily and in a friendly manner to her
heart and demanded only three things: to remove the marks on the forehead,
laying aside of the excessive jewellery, and joining the common mission table.
She would have a month to think over the matter. There arose again in this
poor heart the complete, terrible power of resistance. The month passed with
the unspeakable agony, that she knew that she daily caused her poor husband.
He often felt like loosing courage, but the grace of the Lord held him upright.
At the end of the deadline, he demanded her obedience. He himself wiped
away the mark on her forehead, removed the jewellery before her eyes and
handed them over to the brothers for safe-keeping. However, in case of this
eventuality, she had a small container of saffron with her already. Yet Her-
mann’s composure and decisiveness won through. Following unspeakable dis-
tress, she declared that she was willing to put aside the mark on the forehead,
to remove the jewellery, to learn feminine work with sister Greiner and the
German language with sister Hoch. The only thing she could not be forced to
do was to eat at the mission table. She begged so imploringly to be relieved of
this condition that Hermann gave up. ‘She is now,’ wrote Hermann at this
time, ‘she is now without gold and silver, without colour and flower strands,
poor and miserable, like a widow, an expression she uses of herself.’ ” The pro-
cess of taming is proceeding; the white brothers and sisters are saving the
brown woman both for themselves and for the brown man,19 whom they have
succeeded in creating in their own image. All this was getting to be too much
for Lakshmi. She fell sick and the lessons had to be postponed. “ ‘Continue,’
wrote Hermann in July 1852, ‘continue to pray for her, that her utterly dark
heart will be illumined by the grace of Jesus!’” In words that apply to a later
19
This sentence owes much to Spivak’s use of the idea, in discussing sati, of white men saving
brown women from brown men. (Spivak 1993: 93)
period in the history of global colonialism but which resonate with our text,
Edward Said writes
At the apex of high imperialism early in this century . . . we have a conjunctural fusion
between, on the one hand, the historicizing codes of discursive writing in Europe,
positing a world universally available to transnational impersonal scrutiny, and, on the
other hand, a massively colonized world. The object of this consolidated vision is
always either a victim or a highly constrained character, permanently threatened with
severe punishment, despite her or his many virtues, services, or achievements, excluded
ontologically for having few of the merits of the conquering, surveying, and civilizing
outsider. For the colonizer the incorporative apparatus requires unremitting effort to
maintain. For the victim, imperialism offers these alternatives: serve or be destroyed.
(Said 1993: 168)
In the meantime the seemingly indefatigable Lakshmi recovered, and “with

returning health her unbowed resistance manifested itself again. Already in
August she demanded her jewellery back, decorated herself anew in the man-
ner of pagans with flowers, made the marks on her forehead and refused to be
obedient. Yes, on a particular morning, when Hermann was away, she left
Balmatta with a maidservant and went over to Hermann’s sister (who was like
her also a heathen) in the city, and did not return. Her poor husband found
her, begged, pleaded – but in vain! She had completely decided not to give way
or to give up even the least thing. Under these circumstances, Hermann
believed that according to the Scriptures (I Cor. 7) to have the right to separate
from his poor wife formally and legally. He told her that and requested her for
a part of his inheritance. But look, that was too difficult for her; her natural
love did not allow her to completely separate herself from Hermann. She
changed direction and followed him back to Balmatta under the former con-
ditions. Regarding this time Hermann reported: ‘In reality, however, there is
no change to be noticed in her; she is as obstinate and indifferent as ever.’
Nevertheless, the dear brothers held fast to the hope, through prayers and
entreaties that the grace of the Lord would triumph in the end. And this hope
appeared to finally approach fulfilment in June of last year. She became milder,
compliant, and tried to live in a manner pleasing to her husband. On 6th June
she started to learn German, on the 13th June, despite her almost insurmount-
able distaste against ‘the business of tailors,’ as she said, she began to learn
feminine skills. In half an hour she learnt the German alphabet, in eight days,
she could read reasonably well. However, this shimmer of hope of moving
towards a better time was not a dawn, but a sunset. On the same day that she
began her feminine work (13th June, 1853), she was struck with spasmodic
fever. Her tender nature, which had been deeply upset by so many inner strug-
gles, couldn’t resist the power of the sickness. Despite all medical care and
nursing she started to sink perceptibly . On the evening of July 6th, Hermann
spoke to her with great fervour about the Saviour and the possibility of her
possibly approaching death, she however replied with the calling upon the
name of her idol Rama. Then heart spasms overtook her. ‘I could only cry to
her (wrote Hermann): the Lord, the true God, wants to show you mercy,
when you go over!’ After some hours, at 10.45 in the night, she drew her last
breath. Hermann added: ‘Only He knows whether in drawing her last breath
called to Jesus. I can’t dwell in this hope. This exactly is, for me, my greatest
sadness; that she went over without hope of eternal life. Remember me in
your intercessions.’ ”
Does she then rest in peace? Rest in Rama? She continues to speak, forcing
me to look behind the production of missionary texts, exemplary in tone,
ethics-creating in intent, admonitory in style, and sincere in purpose. I have
learnt so much from them, but I have learnt to let the dead speak. Sometimes
they need no interpretation; occasionally an extra effort, however unpleasant,
may be necessary to assist in the work of exhumation. No, the dead do not rest
so peacefully after all. Otherwise I would not have felt this need to speak with
them. Am I looking for myself, my buried identity, roots and strands which
have shaped me and made me what I am?
Back to the Bible? Fragmenting Speech

How does our narrative end? What are the lessons drawn for us? What can be
said over the mound which houses Lakshmi, to which “on the next day already,
as demanded by the Indian climate, her mortal frame was carried to”? The
brothers-in-faith gather around and “Brother Greiner prayed a prayer and the
brothers at the request of Hermann, sang some verses from the beautiful Ger-
man song: ‘What God does, that is well done.’ ”20
The narrator in turning away from the graveside asks us: “We think on the
serious, forceful words of the Lord (Luke 17: 34ff ): ‘I tell you: at this time
there will be two on one bed – one will be taken, and the other will be left.
Two would be grinding together – one will be taken, and the other left.’ Yes,
Lord! We call along with Paul (Romans 11: 33) how incomprehensible is your
20
This hymn is found transcreated in Kannada in the Kanarese Hymn Book 1984, No. 303.
judgement, and unfathomable your ways! For who has understood the pur-
poses of the Lord? Or who has been His advisor? Or who has offered Him
something before, that would again be repaid? To Him, however, be glory for
ever and ever. Amen.” In this Amen we uncover a new beginning – baptism as
dying and rising – an affirmation that the dead indeed speak. . . .
As a “product” of the Basel Mission and the Church of South India, this
existential reality pervades much of what I am attempting to do – to come
to terms with the estranged rootedness and the rooted estrangement which
defines me. How does one understand what baptism is supposed to be?
Chandran perceptively writes “The traditional image of separation which has
created the impression of the ‘baptised’ being a loss to his original Hindu
or Muslim family or community needs radical re-thinking. Separation can
only be from sin and not necessarily from one’s community. Baptism seeks to
bring unity and not disunity.” (Chandran 1972: 58/ The essay is reprinted in
Chandran 1991: 9–17)
As part of my doctoral dissertation on Cyprian of Carthage, I wrote that
In order to deepen our understanding of the relevance of such a study today, it is not
enough to restrict this question to the level of an interesting historical curiosity, but to
seek to place the issue within the wider context of the researcher, within the living
stream of the life and witness of the church today. (Sebastian 1997: 7)
The question lingers: “But suppose that there were a historiography that
regarded ‘what the women were saying’ as integral to its project, what kind
of history would it write?” (Guha 1996: 11) Rereading the story of Lakshmi
Kaundinya is then, for me, a dialogue with the dead, where in converting
death, an act of subaltern resistance had unanticipated consequences for those
who sought to thrust their own understanding of how one ought to live and
believe, and for the one who refused to yield to the rigid expectations of how
she ought to serve and obey, who refused to submit to any form of being
defined and represented, leaving us to interrogate the traces of the dead who
refuse to rest in peace, but seek to reclaim their place within the “living” stream
of life, life in both church and society.
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Le baptême de mort : une relecture de la vie et de la mort de Lakshmi Kaundinya

Cet article propose une relecture de la vie et de la mort d’une jeune femme brahmine, Lakshmi
Kaudinya, rapportées dans un journal missionnaire du milieu du dix-neuvième siècle. Utilisant
les outils analytiques de la théorie postcoloniale, il soulève des questions urgentes sur notre pré-
sent instable en redonnant à cette femme la voix qui a été étouffée dans un récit. Celui-ci, bien
que sympathisant, tente de la représenter comme une femme brahmine arrogante qui ne voulait
pas abandonner les voies de sa culture pour se conformer aux attentes de la mission. Il offre un
arrière-texte à l’histoire plus « réussie » de la conversion de son mari, Anandarao Kaundinya – qui
deviendra l’un des membres de l’équipe de missionnaires de la Mission de Bâle. Il porte ainsi
attention aux défis posés par le genre et la culture dans les récits de conversion au christianisme
écrits au XIXe siècle.
Die Taufe des Todes. Reinterpretation des Lebens und Todes von Lakshmi Kaundinya
Dieser Artikel interpretiert das Leben und den Tod einer jungen Brahmanin, Lakshmi Kaundi-
nya, wie sie in einer Missionszeitschrift in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts berichtet wurden. Der
Artikel verwendet die analytischen Werkzeuge postkolonialer Theorie und stellt dringende Fra-
gen zu unserer unsicheren Gegenwart, indem er dieser Frau ihre Stimme gibt, die zum Schwei-
gen verurteilt wurde in einer Erzählung, die in zwar positiver Haltung versucht, sie als eine
arrogante Brahmanin darzustellen, die ihre kulturellen Gebräuche nicht aufgeben wollte und
sich den Erwartungen der Mission nicht anpassen wollte. Er ermöglicht einen Untertext zur
“erfolgreicheren” Geschichte von der Bekehrung ihres Mannes, Anandarao Kaundinya, der
schließlich in das Missionarsteam der Basler Mission integriert wurde. Der Artikel behandelt die
Herausforderungen, die Gender und Kultur an die christlichen Bekehrungsnarrativen im 19.
Jahrhundert stellen.

The Baptism of Death Rereading The Life

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Mission Studies 28 (2011) 26–53 brill.

The Baptism of Death:

Introduction: Setting the Stage and Staging the Set

Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the

From the Narration to the Narrated

deserves as a repository of a particular point of view in providing a perspectival

The Perspectival Gaze: Framing the Subject

What we have encountered is the interplay between rationally exotic “other-

Trying to Deserve the Attention that Has Already Been Attracted15

as sites of power and the assertion of subaltern autonomy.” (Visweswaran

This element, where the narrator in attempting to think through Hermann’s

Face to Face Again: Re-establishing the Connection

rather bumbling attempt by an Indian evangelist to hammer sense into

precisely in the attempt to open the discourse to a wider body of participants

It is precisely the programmatic nature of the discourse which we cannot over-

Taming the Pagan

In the meantime the seemingly indefatigable Lakshmi recovered, and “with

Back to the Bible? Fragmenting Speech

——— (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Le baptême de mort : une relecture de la vie et de la mort de Lakshmi Kaundinya

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