Almora, Brahmins, and Missionaries

Almora, where this story is located, is a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, now in the state of Uttarakhand in north India. It was, and remains, a town of modest proportions. The population of Almora numbered around 6,000 in 1872, and fewer than 9,000 people lived there in 1901; even by 1931 that number had not topped 10,000.Footnote ⁸ Rulers of the Chand dynasty moved the capital of their small kingdom to Almora from Champawat in the 1560s. When Gurkhas defeated the Chands and ruled Kumaon for twenty-four years starting in 1791, Almora was one of their headquarters. It was by occupying Almora and taking over the palaces for their own use that the British demonstrated their conquest of Kumaon from the Gurkhas in 1815.

Almora was never a British “hill station.”Footnote ⁹ It was an important center for British administrators in Kumaon, and also the headquarters for local operations of the LMS. But, despite the British presence, Almora retained an ambience quite distinct from the British-dominated hill stations. Its stone-flagged market street, market homes with elaborate wood carvings, and dominance by distinct neighborhoods (mohallas) marked by caste and clan gave Almora a character that was significantly different from even nearby Nainital (the British summer capital for the province) or other hill stations. One reason for this was the continued importance of a local elite.

Certain Brahmin families were prominent among the elites of Almora. Not just any old Brahmins either, as their descendants are quick to point out even today. Rather these Brahmins claimed descent from immigrants invited to settle in Kumaon by the Chand rulers possibly from the tenth century onwards.Footnote ¹⁰ In return for their support of the new regime, no doubt, these Brahmins—some of whom came from as far away as Maharashtra—were given the rights to collect revenue from significant grants of land. Over time, many of these immigrant Brahmin families became important courtiers, then kingmakers, in Kumaon. When their patrons, the Chands, moved the capital to Almora in the 1560s, the Brahmin courtiers followed and settled down in mohallas close to the royal palaces. These mohallas, such as Jhijar, Selakhola, Galli, Danya, and Kasoon, were named after the villages where the Brahmins had initially settled. The names also became markers of various Brahmin clans and were the locations from which some Brahmin families then proceeded to play a very significant role in the politics of the capital and the larger kingdom, sometimes as the de facto rulers of the kingdom.

Though the descendants of the kingmakers and courtiers in Kumaon lamented their decline in status, they were still in a position to be quite influential in a small, provincial town such as Almora. Their traditional status, both as Brahmins and as former courtiers, stood them in good stead. Many families retained zamindari rights over villages and continued to receive a share of the produce from the land. That combined with their ancestral homes meant that few of them had to worry about meeting their basic needs of survival. Beyond that, Kumaoni Brahmins, like many of their counterparts in other parts of India, were quick to adapt to demands made by changed circumstances.Footnote ¹¹ Despite the real or perceived opposition of the new rulers, many of them did well for themselves under British rule, especially after an education in schools established by Christian missionaries in Almora. Though a return to ruling Kumaon as in the days of Chand rulers was now impossible, by the early twentieth century some of the Brahmins were finding new ways to demonstrate their influence in Almora. Armed with cultural capital, old and new, they were successful in normalizing their representations of the town and region.Footnote ¹² Even a socially sensitive observer such as Ira Pande remembers Almora of the 1950s not as a town with streets and lanes but as “a sea of islands named after families and family homes.”Footnote ¹³ Needless to say, these islands were the mohallas of the Brahmin families. The rest of the town—other castes, clans, markets, and workers—was simply part of a vast, unknown, and most significantly, unnamed, sea.

The LMS had no plans to establish a mission in Almora. That came about as a result of a meeting and good personal chemistry between Reverend J. H. Budden (who came to town in 1850 to recuperate from illness and exhaustion) and the then assistant commissioner of Kumaon, Henry Ramsay.Footnote ¹⁴ The relations between the Almora mission and regional LMS missionary offices remained strained through their history together.Footnote ¹⁵ From the very beginning, the Almora mission's focus was more educational than evangelical. Defending his preference for education over other efforts at proselytization, Budden pointed out that missionary education brought about “the seething of new and great principles and the progress of tremendous change in the native mind.” As right-thinking individuals who remain nominal Hindus, Budden argued, they would have a better chance to influence a larger body of opinion. In any case, he concluded, “it is on all accounts better that they should be heretical Hindoos than inconsistent or unfaithful Christians.”Footnote ¹⁶

Budden's preference for “heretical Hindoos” over potentially unfaithful Christians was to have some interesting social implications in the Kumaon region. With their focus on education, the missionaries came to be much more involved with Almora's upper castes, especially the Brahmins, rather than trying to reach out to the lower orders of society. The reports and correspondence of the missionaries in Almora reflect this preoccupation. The Almora missionaries celebrated their upper-caste students' efforts, whether it was in securing jobs or when the first generation of graduates set up a library, a debating society, and a newspaper—the Almora Akhbar—in the town.Footnote ¹⁷

Unintentionally, mission activities contributed significantly to middle-class formation in Kumaon. It was through public-sphere institutions such as newspapers, presses, and debating clubs that the products of the mission school emerged as a new middle class in colonial Almora. The traditionally literate upper castes were the natural clientele for missionary educational institutions. Building on the cultural capital acquired through generations of service at the courts of the Chand rulers, and then (briefly) with the Gurkhas, the upper castes now sent their children to the mission schools to acquire the knowledge that would allow them to perform the same functions for the British rulers. But in the changed circumstances, they became more than just a class of courtiers. Rather, they saw themselves as a “middle class” seeking to represent the interests of the public to the rulers.Footnote ¹⁸

The relationship of the elite Brahmin families in town and the mission was profoundly ambivalent. Both sides depended on each other. Both helped, and on occasion, supported the other. Yet, both parties also maintained their suspicions of the other, and neither was willing to accept the other as one of their own. Missionaries frequently touted how much influence they had in shaping the outlook of the most influential sections of society in Kumaon. Yet, race and religion ensured that even at the best of times, the missionaries retained their sense of distance from and superiority to the native elite. The Brahmin elite realized the value of missionary institutions as vehicles of upward mobility in the British era, but they preferred to limit their relationship with the missionaries to professional or educational matters. Conversions transgressed these limits. When the moment was right, the Brahmins' resentment of the missionaries' efforts came into the open and led to some serious disturbances in Almora.

Tara Dutt Pant was the first Kumaoni Brahmin to be converted to Christianity in 1871, and we have no records of any public outcry at the event. By 1880, though, Almora's Brahmins were publicly denouncing mission activities and defending their faith against what was perceived as a Christian onslaught.Footnote ¹⁹ Quite possibly, as the missionaries pointed out, it was because education in mission schools exposed many students to nationalist ideas.Footnote ²⁰ Whatever the reasons, the attempted conversion of Raghubar Dutt Joshi in 1889 escalated the conflict in Almora. The missionaries claimed Raghubar Dutt voluntarily sought baptism. Later, he apparently changed his mind, and the missionaries thought he had been coerced to do so. Matters escalated, particularly because Joshi came from a well-connected Brahmin family. The encounter led to serious excitement around town, and on the following Sunday, streets around the school and church were found strewn with pages torn from the Bible. There were also threats of personal violence to the missionaries.Footnote ²¹ The missionaries were shocked because even their former students joined this protest. Evoking, probably deliberately, events of just over three decades before, Reverend Bulloch went as far as to say that the Brahmins' “opposition to the study of Christian Scriptures amounts to nothing less than a mutiny.”Footnote ²² And this was not the end of the public anger at the missionaries either. The matter was reported in the Almora Akhbar and was picked up by provincial newspaper reports as well.Footnote ²³ Two years after the Raghubar Dutt Joshi episode, in another controversy around conversion, the church was attacked with brickbats after a public baptism, and the “siege” (as Reverend Bulloch put it) was lifted with the intervention of the police.Footnote ²⁴ Serious as they were, these disturbances did not signal a total break between the missionaries and the local elite. Opponents and supporters of the mission's activities among the local Brahmin families had little hesitation in sending their sons and, soon afterwards, even their daughters to the school run by the missionaries.

The Upper-Caste Converts

But what of the evangelical part of the Almora mission? And, more importantly, what of the few who did embrace the new faith? Life was not easy for a Christian convert in Kumaon. It would have been even more so for the first Brahmin convert. Tara Dutt Pant faced more than simple social ostracism, if, indeed such ostracism can ever be simple. He was not told about the death of his mother, which occurred shortly after his conversion. His family had even told his friends that Tara Dutt had died, and they were obviously surprised to see him alive after his return to Almora.Footnote ²⁵ There was widespread suspicion about the motives of converts. More than a decade after Tara Dutt Pant's baptism, Reverend Uttam Singh Rawat related the scorn and social antagonism faced by the native convert. “We (native Christians) are looked down upon as apostates and renegades,” he said. “A Hindu was so bold as to ask me how much money I would get in case I get more converted.”Footnote ²⁶

Through their mission-work in Kumaon, Tara Dutt Pant and his family provided ample proof of their dedication to the objectives of the LMS. Tara Dutt himself worked in a variety of capacities for the mission, as did his wife.Footnote ²⁷ One of their daughters, Lydia, became a qualified medical practitioner—one of the first Indian women to get a medical degree from the United Kingdom. Missionaries hoped that through Lydia's medical training, “some of these staunch Brahmin families may open their doors to us that we may give their wives and daughters instruction and also teach them of Christ and his love.”Footnote ²⁸ Unlike that other, better-known, upper-caste Hindu convert, we have no extant evidence of Lydia's own thoughts, or whether she did or did not maintain the same ambiguities toward her faith, her locality, and her nation as did Pandita Ramabai.Footnote ²⁹

The Pant family may have been ostracized by their kin, but they did remarkably well for themselves in other ways. Lydia Pant's professional success has already been noted. Tara Dutt's son, Daniel, retired as a “high ranking officer” in the Secretariat of United Provinces.Footnote ³⁰ Most of Daniel's children also did well for themselves. Perhaps the most spectacular example of social mobility was displayed by one of his granddaughters, Irene, who married Liaquat Ali, later to become the first prime minister of Pakistan, and who herself served in Pakistan's diplomatic corps and as governor of Sindh after her husband's assassination.Footnote ³¹

For all their commitment to the mission and its ideologies, as well as their social and economic success, Tara Dutt and his male lineage insisted upon retaining their Brahmin last name. Not only that, from a history maintained by the Pant clan it appears that the family was keen to emphasize its Brahmanical origins. Titled “The Pant Clan from Maharashtra,” this seven-page typewritten account of the family up to the early years of the present century includes a full page that relates the achievements and high social status of their Brahmin ancestors in Kumaon. It also takes care to emphasize the financial losses (of zamindari land and even his own home) suffered by Tara Dutt because of his conversion. Perhaps retaining their Pant name and writing up a family history that demonstrates evident pride in their family's Brahmanical heritage was one way of negotiating a difficult situation.Footnote ³² There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that at least Tara Dutt's wife retained some connections with her natal family, and that such connections were maintained even in the next generation.Footnote ³³

If Tara Dutt Pant represented the first generation of Brahmin converts, Victor Mohan Joshi represented a later one. Born in 1896, Victor was the son of a Brahmin convert and ended up becoming a journalist and an active nationalist. Joshi suffered a severe beating by the police when he attempted to bring down the Union Jack and replace it with the Indian National Congress's flag in Almora in 1930. The injuries left him mentally imbalanced, and he died at the young age of forty-four. Today, in Almora and the district around it, there are various public institutions named after this well-known freedom fighter.Footnote ³⁴

Victor questioned authority, starting at home. Though christened Victor Joseph Joshi, he apparently rejected what he termed his “foreign” names and referred to himself only as “Mohan Joshi,” a name his mother also preferred.Footnote ³⁵ He could be critical of his nationalist colleagues too. He took to task his friend and eminent nationalist leader Badri Dutt Pande, editor of Shakti, when the latter made disparaging remarks about some lower-class nationalist sympathizers, referring to them as “riff-raff.”Footnote ³⁶ Despite his rebelliousness, despite his commitment to a more egalitarian world, and despite rejecting his given Christian names, Mohan Joshi appears to have had no problems with retaining, even celebrating, his Brahmanical last name. Some associates insisted that he regretted his father's conversion, and that he had sworn only to marry the daughter of a Kumaoni Brahmin. Joshi remained unmarried.Footnote ³⁷

Victor Mohan Joshi's relationship with his church was certainly somewhat strained. Mainstream nationalist accounts of his life, though, appear to suggest that Joshi completely rejected his Christian heritage.Footnote ³⁸ That is probably more a reflection on the limits of the nationalist imagination of his biographers, in which nationalism and an “alien” faith do not easily coexist. An essay by Joshi titled “Teen drishya” (Three scenes) published in the newspaper Shakti in 1919 allows us to see a vision quite at variance with the mainstream nationalist representations.Footnote ³⁹ The paper, edited by Badridatt Pande, a Brahmin and a close political ally of Joshi's, was also often a forum for what we might today label “soft” Hindu nationalism. For instance, it carried appreciative accounts of speeches urging Almora's Shilpakars (the preferred term for Dalit jatis in Kumaon) not to be lured by the blandishments offered by votaries of other religions, and to remain steadfast Hindus.Footnote ⁴⁰ On another occasion, Shakti celebrated a speech advising the audience to shun foreign religions and encouraging efforts to reconvert a young boy who had become a Christian.Footnote ⁴¹ Joshi's essay addressed both caste and religion, but could not have been more different.

“Teen drishya” has no commentary but only describes three scenes. The first of these is set 2,000 years ago, featuring a “fallen woman” who is scorned for being born in a low caste, and for her loose morals. Though despised by those around her, she is transformed by the love of a kindhearted sojourner who offers unconditional love and affection. In the second, set fifty years before the then present, the sojourner meets a Brahmin who despises a group of untouchables for their vice-ridden lifestyle. The Brahmin, moreover, insists this is the fate of such people and is contemptuous of the sojourners' attempts to reform them. The last scene is set in the then present (ca. 1919). There is a huge effort by political dignitaries to bring the untouchables of Almora into the nationalist mainstream. Observing this all, Joshi tells us, was the sojourner. In response to a question about whether untouchable reform would be successful came a voice from the heavens: “Yes it will.… [A]s long as you befriend the sojourner, not hate him, learn from him, these efforts will certainly succeed.” The sojourner, Mohan Joshi tells us, was none other than the Lord of the world, Jesus Christ. That was the end of the essay.Footnote ⁴²

Whatever else one may say about the essay, it hardly reveals an author alienated from his faith. Of course, in common with many of his upper-caste and upper-class contemporaries, Victor Mohan Joshi probably had few qualms about demanding that the lifestyles of lower castes conform to the Victorian-Brahmanical moral standards that middle-class leaders were seeking to normalize as part of the nationalist agenda. But, at the same time, Joshi's essay offers not only a critique of the agenda of sectarian politics, but also a larger critique of Brahmanical disdain for the lower castes. While it adopts an overall position that can be read as liberal rather than radical in the context of the time, we also have to appreciate the courage it must have taken to write and publish an essay representing Christ as the savior of lower castes in a newspaper that, by and large, was sympathetic to upper-caste Hindu sensibilities.

The church itself was a very different entity in Joshi's time as compared to that of Tara Dutt Pant. As early as 1900, a movement toward Indianization of the church in Almora created tensions with the parent missionary body. Reverend Uttam Singh Rawat recalled the resistance he experienced when he raised questions about the lack of Indian representation in the LMS district committee. Such questions, he said, were, “received with disfavour.” His own writing exhibited great pride in how, ten years later, the Indian church elected its own members, paid its own bills, was “now a self-supporting and self-governing body.”Footnote ⁴³

Differences between Europeans and Indian converts became more apparent as the nationalist movement grew in strength. By 1905, Uttam Singh Rawat was the headmaster of Ramsay College.Footnote ⁴⁴ Rawat intervened to prevent a strike after Reverend E. S. Oakley's flamboyant anti-nationalist measures antagonized teachers and students alike. Rawat persuaded Oakley to apologize, leading Shakti to comment that “he [Rawat] is, after all, an Indian, and he understands the feelings of his students.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1927, the LMS handed over the Almora mission to the American Methodists. Despite a rhetorical commitment to support legitimate national aspirations, Methodist missionaries were largely conservative, and for most part, pro-British, probably explaining some of the ambiguity in Joshi's relationship with the church.Footnote ⁴⁶

Juniya: Understanding Lower-Caste Conversion

But what about Itwaaru and Miss Sunday, with whom I began this essay? Elite sources help us understand the prejudices of the upper castes and efforts to normalize Victorian-Brahmanical morality in colonial Kumaon. They can help us understand some of the possible ambiguities of their identity as Christians in Almora, or their connections with the Brahmanical world they had not quite left behind. In all these cases, we can juxtapose different narratives to try to get a more complicated sense of their lives in Almora. But such sources, given the limitations of their origins, do not bring us any closer to understanding the lives, concerns, or motivations of lower-caste converts such as Itwaaru or Miss Sunday. We can try to read against the grain of the LMS reports or newspaper accounts in Shakti. We can seek to understand the spin being imparted by family histories or the bias of upper-caste memories. But none of these sources brings us any closer to understanding Itwaaru or Miss Sunday than we were at the start of this essay. It is in the face of such limitations that I turn to a novel called Juniya.Footnote ⁴⁷

Authored by a prolific playwright and novelist, Govind Ballabh Pant (who is often confused with his namesake—a major political figure in north India), Juniya was published in the late 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁸ The novel tells the story of an independent-minded young man called Juniya from a dum, or untouchable, family in Kumaon. Pant was hardly the first to take up the theme of education and conversion to Christianity as a mode of liberation and social liberty for the lower castes in colonial India.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was unusual, however, to see such unambiguous celebration of the theme in the writings of upper-caste men, though that too is an issue that has drawn a fair degree of recent controversy. The representation of Dalit actors by liberal or reformist upper-caste writers, including iconic figures such as Mulk Raj Anand and Premchand, has been debated extensively among activists, writers, and scholars in recent years.Footnote ⁵⁰Juniya is certainly the product of an upper-caste imagination as well.Footnote ⁵¹ Pant was very much a part of the influential Brahmin community of Almora. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, or his relatives, Pant exhibited a surprising degree of empathy with his subject. He did not simply represent his characters as victims or objects of pity. Rather, Juniya and his wife, Sani, are shown to be active agents, albeit subordinated by society. Pant's novel highlighted issues not just of untouchability (being addressed by larger nationalist and Dalit politics in his time), but the everyday acts of domination and subordination that were the stuff of a dum's life in Kumaon of the 1930s.

Juniya's family are halis, that is, they plough fields for their landlords. Unlike those around him, Juniya actively resents the indignities that are part of the life of a dum. He finally leaves the village in anger, along with his wife Sani, swearing never again to plough a field. After a series of mishaps, Juniya meets up with a distant uncle, who had converted to Christianity and is now a preacher for the mission. Juniya is attracted by the new ideas and seeks baptism himself. Sani has reservations about Juniya's conversion, and follows her husband only after considerable persuasion on his part.

Some background to the relationship between dums and the upper castes in Kumaon helps set the story in context. Local hierarchies in Kumaon, based as they were on caste, class, and migration, were complex. Generalizing across complexities, three broad strata can be observed. At the very top were the Brahmins, and among them particularly those who claimed immigrant status, who owned land but never cultivated that land. In the middle stratum were the Khasis, some of whom did own small amounts of land. Below both Brahmins and Khasis were the Dum (or dom), whom many argue were the original inhabitants of the land.Footnote ⁵² Certainly under the Chands and then the Gorkha regime, dums were, for all intents and purposes, hereditary slaves of the upper castes who “could be sold with or without land like any other piece of property.”Footnote ⁵³ Things did not change too much under British rule either, with one report terming them “free and disposable property.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Though the Commissioner of Kumaon claimed his court could not recognize slavery, he also added that “enfranchising all the slaves would occasion very extensive private loss.” This apparently made it necessary to “tolerate this contrivance.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Such tolerance meant that the everyday position of this untouchable group remained virtually the same as it had been for centuries before. That they were landless, on the margins of society, and totally dependent on the upper castes for their livelihood severely limited the options of most dums in Kumaon.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Dalit groups in Kumaon, as in other parts of India, were beginning to assert their rights. Yet, it was quite clear that the upper-caste leadership claiming to represent all of Kumaon did not welcome this assertion. Not only were Dalit representations to the Kumaon Parishad, one of the earliest political organizations created in the region, ignored, but also the nationalist newspaper, Shakti, reprimanded the Shilpakars for their “divisive” efforts. The editors of Shakti, wrote Khushiram Mantri, admonish the Shilpakars for aping the upper castes by wearing the sacred thread, and for deliberately annoying the upper castes by using their water sources or touching their vessels. Yet, Mantri says, the illustrious paper has little to say about what the upper castes do to the Shilpakars. The upper castes, Mantri reported, induce Shilpakars to enter upper-caste homes and then beat them up, they smear the Shilpakars' sandalwood (used for ritual purposes) with shoes, they enter Shilpakar homes and break their sacred threads, and even beat up their womenfolk. The same upper castes, Mantri says, have evicted Shilpakars from lands they had ploughed for generations, do not give receipts for the rent paid by Shilpakars, and then demand the money again.Footnote ⁵⁶

Juniya suggests that conversion to Christianity did offer a dum the chance to transcend the limitations of birth. But the missionaries were not very interested in the lower orders of Kumaoni society. Correspondence and reports generated by LMS missionaries in Kumaon are completely silent on the enslavement of the dums, though they often comment on other aspects of native society and belief. Nationalist accounts (conservative and liberal) from about a decade before Pant's novel represent the untouchable castes as being grateful for even the slightest attention that upper-caste leaders might pay them. Shakti reported on the Shilpakars of Almora responding to a prominent conservative Hindu leader's exhortations with the following statement: “We have for long wallowed in ignorance. Hence we have become weak…. We thank God that now you have made us your own…. We now seek refuge in you. You can reform us, you can uplift us.”Footnote ⁵⁷

An important strength of Juniya is a narrative that rejects such subservience even as it reinforces the experience of subordination in the everyday life of a lower-caste family. Take something as simple as sitting on a chair. While this is something most of us take for granted, it is not so for domestic helpers even in much of South Asia today—largely composed of people from lower castes. In Juniya's world of early twentieth-century Kumaon, such an act clearly represented a significant crossing of boundaries. A chair, a seat, a kursi, is a word that not only has a literal meaning, but also is rich in symbolism. After leaving his village, Juniya approaches a landlord who initially welcomes him. But when Juniya reveals his decision not to work the plough, the landlord is obviously irritated and sarcastically inquires if Juniya then plans to sit on a chair—तो क्या कुर्सी पे बैठेगा? (To kya kursi pe baithegaa: Will you sit on a chair, then?).Footnote ⁵⁸ Clearly, both literally and figuratively a chair was to be denied to a dum.

Becoming a Christian allows Juniya opportunities that upper castes take for granted. He learns how to read and write. He gets a regular job, first as a watchman at the school;then, through enormous effort, he qualifies as a teacher in that school, and then as a preacher for the mission.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nor is the novel unrealistic enough to suggest that conversion transforms Juniya's identity as a dum absolutely. Throughout the novel, Pant has Juniya encountering situations where he hears the words “जूनिया डूम है” (Juniya dum hae: Juniya is a dum).Footnote ⁶⁰ Evidently conversion was insufficient to completely erase the marks of generations of subordination.

Through the novel, Govind Ballabh Pant is able to humanize the lower-caste convert. Of course, this model of humanity is derived from the class-caste-modernity nexus of which Pant was undoubtedly a part. There are certainly moments in the novel that make us aware of this. Immediately after his baptism, Juniya, on returning to his home, now finds it unbearably dirty. We have had no indication prior to this that he was in any way dissatisfied with his home. But now Juniya wants to reorganize his house, whitewash it, and even have a living room, a “baithak.” His wife has no idea what a baithak is, and Juniya explains: “What is a baithak? It is a place to sit. We will put a table and chairs there. We will put pictures on the wall, and curtains on the doors. We will sit there and read books, serve our friends tea and tobacco, and talk about all the good things in the world.”Footnote ⁶¹ So a man, who has so far lived hand to mouth, suddenly converts to a totally bourgeois habitus and expresses a desire for a living room, a baithak, to entertain company and discuss “all good things in the world.” Clearly, this is a conversion to modernity with a vengeance.Footnote ⁶² It seems to reveal the author's inability or unwillingness to step outside of the bourgeois-aesthetic model. But, for all its limitations, there is a real value in this exercise that is sometimes lost in the ways that critiques of humanism enervate any attempts at a social, imaginative history. Ignoring the novel because it does not represent an authentic-enough voice of the Dalit will deprive us of understanding the importance of self-respect to the Dalit community in colonial Kumaon. It will perpetuate, in some ways, the Dalit as the nameless Other.

In Juniya not only does the dum have a name, he is a man who is obviously striving to challenge the Brahmanical norms of the society that oppressed those like him for generations. Examining a manifesto Juniya draws up soon after his conversion, a document he calls “Juniya's Five Commandments,” indicates the sort of humiliation a dum might encounter, and what he might aspire to change in his own life.Footnote ⁶³ Juniya's Commandments are as follows:Footnote ⁶⁴

1. 1. You will not eat leftovers (juthhan जूठन), nor wear others' cast-off clothes (utaran उतरन).Footnote ⁶⁵

2. 2. You will not plough the earth.

3. 3. You will not carry a headload.

4. 4. You will learn English.

5. 5. You will not quarrel with Sani [Juniya's wife].

Against this powerful representation, we have the complete absence of Dalits in the reports of the missionaries, and the obsequious Shilpakars with their gratitude in the nationalist newspaper. Pant's Juniya reveals a dum with a name, with feelings—someone who experiences resentments, love, affection, and disappointments. He is a man who craves, strives for, and finds self-respect.

The Gendered Convert

If Juniya tells us about the male convert, what of the women? If we were to rely on a straightforward reading of conventional sources alone, it would seem that gender made no difference at all to the experience of conversion. Women constituted a significant majority of the converts in Kumaon, but missionary records are amazing in their lack of attention to gendered difference.Footnote ⁶⁶ They do indicate the politics around gender within the missionary community, but say little about the life of converts.Footnote ⁶⁷ Middle-class or upper-caste nationalists, till the 1930s, hardly speak of women in Kumaon unless it is for the purposes of reforming the practices of those who did not conform to their values of propriety.Footnote ⁶⁸ Family records are little better in this regard. The Pant family history tells us nothing about what Tara Dutt Pant's wife or daughters felt about their experience as women and as Christians. We know from that document that Irene Pant wrote a thesis on women's labor as part of her master's degree, and hence was evidently attuned to gender distinctions. But the Pant family history does not archive this gendered experience.

To get a sense of gendered differences in the experience of upper-caste converts, we have to explore not only what is present in the evidence, but also the absences and anomalies they reveal. For instance, in most cases we know there was a gap between the baptism of a man and that of his wife. Almost four months passed between Tara Dutt's baptism and that of his wife, Durga (now Sarah).Footnote ⁶⁹ Was there perhaps some resistance to his decision from his wife? An accompanying anomaly is also quite interesting. Durga and her two daughters were baptized in April 1871, and a son was born to Tara Dutt and Sarah on July 11, 1871. With two Christian parents, the son should have been born and baptized a Christian. But the Pant family history records his birth name as Devidutt Pant, “who was rechristened Daniel Pant.”Footnote ⁷⁰ What might be the reason for this? We do not have a clear answer, but certainly grounds enough for raising some questions, especially when we know from other sources of the reservations of a Brahmin wife following the conversion of her husband.Footnote ⁷¹

Questions related to gendered differences are equally obvious if we consider the case of the other celebrated Brahmin convert, Victor Mohan Joshi. There was a gap between the baptism of his father and mother. There is also the knowledge that his mother insisted on calling her son “Mohan” rather than using either of two names with which he was christened—Victor Joseph. Was this some form of resistance on her part? Perhaps the upper-caste memories today, which relate Durga Pant's profound regret at the estrangement from her Brahmin kin, her desperate desire to receive ritual gifts from her natal home (in secret), are not entirely the product of wishful thinking on their part.Footnote ⁷² Women lived in—and knew they lived in—a very patriarchal world. But within the confines of that world, they were often able to exercise a degree of agency in small matters. We do know from other sources that women from even the most orthodox Brahmin families in early twentieth-century Almora were able to circumvent patriarchal restrictions that prevented them from meeting their daughters or sisters who were married into less orthodox clans.Footnote ⁷³ It is only by turning our attention to such small matters, to smaller histories, that we can hope to recover some strands of that agency for the historical record. Without that we have only the evidence of untrammeled patriarchy, and only the men speak in that historical narrative.

Perhaps it is not surprising that it is Juniya, located in a lower-caste milieu, that reveals most clearly that conversion was neither experienced nor perceived in the same way across gender lines. When Juniya first brings up the possibility of conversion, Sani is shocked at the idea.Footnote ⁷⁴ When he goes ahead with his own baptism, without letting her know, she refuses to allow him entry into their house. “You have destroyed everything that seven generations of our ancestors have done,” she says, “You have lost the right to come into my house.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Nor does she take to his modernizing mission too easily. She is skeptical of Juniya's efforts to learn to read and write English, and even more so when he insists she learns the language too. “Me, read English? Sure,” she mutters sarcastically. “Learning the language has made you such a big man, now I will conquer the world!”Footnote ⁷⁶ She is the first to remind Juniya, on a number of occasions, that he needs to pay attention to earning a living and bring money to the household budget, rather than living in a fantasy world.Footnote ⁷⁷ Juniya is hardly represented as a traditional patriarch in the novel. He does defer to Sani on important issues, most significantly when he adds the prohibition on debt to his list of commandments.Footnote ⁷⁸ But, on the question of the religion of his son, his response is quite traditional. Juniya simply cannot fathom that the son of a Christian man (his mother had not yet been baptized) could be anything but a Christian.Footnote ⁷⁹

Concluding Remarks: Returning to Miss Sunday

Even with its limitations, reading Pant's novel can help us better understand the sort of resentments that might have driven the actions of women such as Miss Sunday. It may help explain why she would not accept the evidently upper-caste conferred name of Itwaaru as being suitable for her standing in Almora. Or, for that matter, perhaps Juniya may help us understand what being Miss Sunday rather than Miss Itwaaru would have meant to her.

Govind Ballabh Pant is careful to keep the nationalist movement away from Juniya's story—not an easy task given that the novel was published in the late 1930s. Yet for those converts who lived real lives in Almora in the 1930s, that was not an option. This was a time of nationalist ferment across India. In my mother's recollection, Miss Sunday was particularly vocal in her opposition to the nationalists. On one occasion, she was apparently overheard saying that if old Gandhi continued his clamoring for too long she would have no choice but to leave for “Home.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In a sentence that was otherwise spoken in Hindi, she chose to use the word “Home” in English because what she meant by it was not the home of her parents or their natal village. In this context, for her, Home probably meant England, which she had never visited.Footnote ⁸¹

The history of the mission in Almora, the history of upper-caste derision of the aspirations of Dalits, and the upper-caste hegemony over nationalist representations, all help us better understand Miss Sunday's reactions and her desire, in this passing instance, to look for another “home.” Juniya's fictional experiences as a teacher and a preacher, where he is repeatedly derided for being a dum, may well have been part of Miss Sunday's own experiences as well. There was more than a hint of such derision in the verse my grandfather composed in response to Miss Sunday's alleged appropriation of the song my mother sang at the school. It is even more evident in a verse penned by one of the most well-known and widely published nationalist poets in Kumaon, best known by his pen name, Gaurda, who is credited with the following ditty:Footnote ⁸²

Roughly translated, it would read as follows in English:

Hiradungri was the area that the local administration had granted to the London Mission, and became the area where the majority of the town's Christians lived (and continue to do so). Harua to Henry and Jasua to Jack refers to the new Christian names of lower-caste converts, while the last line is the clincher. Their father's names would obviously reveal the lower-caste origins of those who now called themselves Henry and Jack.Footnote ⁸⁴

There was an assumption among Almora's upper castes, perhaps shared by the converts themselves, that an affiliation with the religion of the rulers, Christianity, somehow gave them a closer affinity with the English sahibs.Footnote ⁸⁵ Conversion to Christianity was perceived as evidence of aspiration to upward social mobility. Gaurda's verse, as well as the barbs composed by my grandfather, were aimed at reminding uppity dums of their origins. They were reminders of the lowly social station from which the Miss Sundays (or Juniyas) of Kumaon sought escape.

For the Pants or Joshis, the desire to retain their Brahmin last names came with obvious advantages, the most significant one being that in a highly status-conscious society such as Almora, their names distinguished them from the larger number of lower-caste converts. As late as 2005, one of the descendants of an early Brahmin convert spoke disparagingly of the aspirations of dum converts to Christianity.Footnote ⁸⁶ Being Miss Sunday, therefore, must have been very important for Itwaaru's daughter. As an educated Christian, quite possibly baptized from birth, she had little reason to want to remain tied to her father's former identity as one of the lowest of the low in Kumaoni society. There is no doubt she would have resented any attempts to reinforce her father's lower-caste status—and there must have been many more than Gaurda's verse or my grandfather's quip. Daniel Pant may have been allowed entry into Brahmin homes, but never a Miss Sunday. As a teacher, she had authority over her students, but outside the school, no doubt she heard taunts about her social origins similar to the fictional Juniya. It is not surprising then that, when confronted with a nationalism that was overwhelmingly Hindu in Brahmin-dominated Almora, Miss Sunday's reaction was a prickly one. In this context, it is not surprising that she saw nationalism as an attack not just on the English, but also on her own identity. No doubt mimicking the English (or possibly even American) missionaries' talk about returning “home,” Miss Sunday too sought to go Home. Her real home, Almora, and its denizens, were only too ready to remind her of her subordinate status. No wonder, then, that she wanted to have as little to do with her former name as possible. Juliet had it wrong, a Miss Sunday by another name would have been a dum.