James Elisha Taneti's book contextualizes the emergence of a new class of evangelist and social servant, Biblewoman, in the Northern Circars, the Telugu-speaking coastal belt along the Bay of Bengal in the Madras Presidency. The story he tells highlights the largely forgotten history of the key role played by low-caste women in the establishment of humanistic social service in India. He tells this story through what we might call a conjunctural approach to social change wherein the agency and intentions of these woman played as large a role in that development as an increasingly globalizing missionary movement begun in Europe and America throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries in colonial India. Indeed, the movement and these Biblewomen emerged nearly simultaneously, suggesting that women in both metropole and colony had equal and complementary roles in the formation of that movement. Taneti suggests that these women, coming from predominantly Dalit communities, were not merely adopting Christianity as a function of colonial agency. Rather, women exploited a peculiar form of leadership they enjoyed in these communities in matters of religion among their extended families. Female preaching, a “distinctive mark of dalit religiosity” (p. 55), found a natural home in Christianity. But more than that, Taneti argues that low-caste women adopted Christianity to extend their agency into wider and wider realms based on the power of sacred texts, literacy, and their linkages to transnational networks of evangelical Christians and the resources they mobilized.
Following a thematic and theoretical introduction, Taneti roots the power of Telugu Biblewomen in pre-Christian Dalit women's leadership roles as “preachers” and oracles who crossed social boundaries and assumed leadership positions within their communities. An early nineteenth-century religious movement in the area, the Rajayogi Sect (perhaps inspired by Christian evangelicalism?), encouraged women as itinerating preachers who worked among women in their communities. Also predominantly Dalit, many of the early Christian converts came out of the Rajayogi movement and were ready to accept agentive roles in the larger society. Nearly simultaneously, mid-nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the emergence of Biblewomen, mostly working-class evangelicals who, with Bibles in hand, focused their missions on the working women in industrial areas and slums. These women combined preaching the Bible with helping women in their homes, providing bedding, nursing children, and teaching literacy. In combination with the British Foreign Bible Society (BFBS, founded in 1804), which sought to translate Bibles into the major languages of the Empire, a new class of missionary—the single woman—began to extend their mission to India, Burma, South Africa, and China. By 1879, the BFBS had sent some thirty-four British women around the world; they would work to cultivate a cadre of local women to reach out among their own communities. Coinciding with several waves of mass conversions in the late 1860s and 1870s, it was these local women who “appropriated the practices of native agency, Bible reading, house visiting, and social activism” (p. 52).
Over the course of the next eighty years, the Biblewomen's impact was far wider than received historiography suggests. Indeed, given the role of women in Dalit communities, the Dalitization of Christianity in the northern Circars also resulted in a feminization of Telugu Christianity. The British Biblewomen, supported by an influx of American women who had taken up leadership roles during the US Civil War, ushered in a massive social transformation not only through their house-to-house evangelizing, nursing, and teaching, but also by promoting an explosion of girls' schools in the Madras Presidency: a respectable 136 girls' schools in 1870 had grown to 546 only ten years later. By the 1920s, women's seminaries and training centers were educating dozens every year to enter homes, take up teaching positions in schools, and serve as nurses in hospitals. Travelling in twos and dressed in white saris—a mark of their piety and, perhaps, asexuality—professional Biblewomen enjoyed a new kind of geographical mobility and independence from familial and community strictures. It was under these conditions that they were emboldened to confront issues of personal temperance and social injustice, particularly within the caste system. Missionaries among their fellows, “they saw themselves mandated to introduce Christianity to their compatriots and at the same time subtly pursue social change” (p. 143).
The last chapter of the book locates the experience of the Telugu Biblewomen within a larger global movement of women in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Taneti's account weaves back and forth between the experience of women across the planet and the singular lives of those women in the Northern Circars of coastal Andhra. His short conclusion ends with a crisp overview of his main findings and an analytical synthesis of how these women operated in their times along with their significant, and largely unrecognized, achievements.
Taneti's book is well researched and marked by an expository clarity. He clearly admires these women, and the book is filled with the stories of individuals wherever he finds them, whose names we would never have known were it not for this book. At times catechetical, Taneti provides numbered answers that suggests a book written from deep within the missionary culture he describes, suggesting, too, a deep commitment to address and serve a broad audience. Scholars and students of caste, gender, colonialism, and the “convoluted cultural web” (p. 3) that was developed at the conjuncture of missionary intentions and local agency will be grateful to James Taneti for offering us this remarkable account.
