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How are religious educational institutions built? In histories of
evangelical institution-building in the Victorian Indian colonial
period (1858-1901), this question has mostly been addressed from
the perspective of the religious ends that Christian missionaries
sought to achieve and the ideological obstacles they encountered.
This may be called the 'values' approach. Missionary Calculus sets
this aside and examines, instead, the most routine transactions of
missionaries in building an evangelical institution, the Sunday
school. Missionaries daily struggled with and acted upon certain
questions: How shall we acquire land and money to set up such
schools? What methods shall we employ to attract students? What
curriculum, books, and classroom materials shall we use? How shall
we tune our hymns? Shall we employ non-Christians to teach in
Christian Sunday schools? The makers of colonial Sunday schools
focused obsessively on the means, the material and symbolic
resources, with which they felt they could achieve certain
immediate objectives. Such a transactional or 'instrumental'
approach resulted in stated religious 'values' being insidiously
compromised. Using insights from classical Weberian sociology, and
through a close scrutiny of missionary means, this book shows how
the success or failure of meeting evangelical ends may be assessed.
With extensive archival research, chiefly on American missionaries
in colonial India, this work examines the formation of Sunday
schools at the point of transnational, intercultural contact.
Readers interested in religion, education, and colonial history
should find the matter, method, outcomes, and narration of
Missionary Calculus new and thought-provoking.
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