This volume provides an important study of Sunday Schools, which were spearheaded by American missions, in late nineteenth-century colonial India. This institution was a crucial dimension of Christian missions in the context of the British Empire in India and has been generally ignored by scholars of both Christianity in India and of imperial India. The work's fundamental argument is that in order to implement their stated goals of providing biblical and other Christian knowledge in a fully Christian environment to Indians and unconverted Europeans, missionaries found that they had to engage with both the empire and Indian society in all sorts of compromises. The book, therefore, “focus[es] not on the professed evangelical ends of missionaries, but on the means they used in attempting to achieve their stated ends” (5).

In order to carry out this project, the author employs a distinction first proposed by Max Weber “between Wertrational and Zweckrational, or value/substantive and instrumental reasoning” (5). The substantive reasoning, in Weberian terms, of the missionaries involved evangelical ends: their goal was to spread God's Word to those who were ignorant of it. The instrumental reasoning, on the other hand, involved the nitty-gritty of building and maintaining institutions where this lofty ideal could be put into practice. It is the latter, Zweckrational, which interests the author, inasmuch as it seems to have—to a significant extent—contradicted the Wertrational that the missionaries proclaimed. Throughout the mission enterprise, then, there existed a tension between the ends and the means of the missionary Sunday School enterprise, and by extension other mission work and projects. The result of this tension was that the Sunday School was a “hybrid” creation which involved the influence and interplay of persons and structures of the Anglo-American missions, of a variety of Indian social classes and castes, and of the British Empire. Drawing on this argument, the book goes on to suggest that “instrumental reasoning can remake values” (6).

The book consists of six chapters. The first is the introduction, in which the author lays out the methodological and theoretical approaches that he is taking. Chapter 2 gives a history of pre-Victorian colonial education, beginning with the early eighteenth century and ending in the middle of the nineteenth century. The third chapter describes the lives of two American missionaries, the Rev. T. J. Scott and the Rev. J. L. Phillips—respectively of the Methodist and Baptist traditions, who were instrumental in the establishment of Sunday Schools in India. Following that, a chapter is devoted to the beginnings of the institution of the Sunday School in India: its emergence due to frustrations from the evangelistic work of bazaar preaching, the gathering together of pupils, the systemic organization of Sunday Schools into an arm of Christian (Protestant) missions, the financial aspects of running Sunday Schools, and the growth of the schools. Chapter 5 details some of the ideologies and curricula that were employed to operate the Sunday Schools. The next and penultimate chapter, by far the longest, delves into the pedagogical methods and means used in American Protestant mission Sunday Schools in India during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The book ends with a brief conclusion, which offers reflections on as well as a summary of the work in the previous chapters.

One of the great strengths of this work is that it shows how Indian responses to and engagement with missionary initiatives and work influenced, shaped, and changed the Christian mission enterprise. For example, a system of education that was first introduced to train the minds and morals of young children had to be quickly adapted to deal with adult learners who were eagerly seeking Sunday School education (143–144). In such ways, Indians did indeed reshape the values and goals of the missionaries under study.

At one level, this study of Sunday Schools run by Americans offers fresh insights into mission work in India. This is a topic that has not really been investigated much in scholarship. On the other hand, the study does not significantly change the overall picture of Christian missions in India. As a matter of fact, the author's caustic views of the foreign mission enterprise tend to perpetuate rather well-worn images of missionaries as bumbling religious zealots whose enthusiasm for their work kept them from seeing the truth that was facing them all the time. This bias, which permeates the whole study, makes for strange historical interpretations at times. For example, T. J. Scott and J. L. Phillips are accused of “floundering” in their attempts “to reconcile the supposed universality of their message with the frustrating specificity of their largely rural, impoverished Victorian mission field” (83). Yet what change agent, whether secular or religious, whether contemporary or historical, does not face difficulties in implementing their imported solutions to any local context? This is not to excuse the narrowness of Scott's and Phillips's understandings of Indian society; rather, it is to ask whether they have been justly located in their own historical context. Perhaps more importantly, the authorial bias against missionaries also works against one of the main arguments of the whole book: that missionaries significantly adapted and changed their goals in response to local people and factors. Finally, some of the choices in secondary literature are puzzling. For example, one wonders why the history of early East India Company chaplains (27–28) draws from a Victorian colonial history written in 1904, rather than a history precisely on the topic of East India chaplains published in 2012—Daniel O'Connor's The Chaplains of the East India Company, 1601–1858 (Continuum International Publishing). Overall, however, with a judicious reading, Missionary Calculus will help scholars fill in some of the important missing pieces of the interesting and still incomplete puzzle of missionary work and its local reception in colonial India.