"Orphan" Rescue Missions: Childhood, Colonialism and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1860s-​1920s

My Ph.D. proposal tentatively titled, “Child ‘Rescue Mission’: The Case of Orphans in Colonial North India; 1860-1947”, proposes to assess the apparent ‘humanistic’ ‘rescue missions’ of the state and non-state agents to ‘save’ the orphans from the fate of drudgery and poverty. Works on orphans has focused largely on the racial anxiety surrounding European and Eurasian orphans in colonial India. The project proposes to assess the growing public significance given to ‘native’ orphans as the object of child ‘rescue missions’ in colonial north India. The proposed project seeks to assess the experiences, meanings and implications of being an orphan in the colonial setting. By the late nineteenth century a fierce contestation had emerged between the colonial state and various religious ‘charitable’ organizations like the Arya Samaj, various mission societies, Muslim orphanages and Sikh orphanages, over the right to take charge of destitute and orphaned children. The productive capacity of orphans as laboring assets and their religious and caste identities became the major grounds on which these custody battles were fought. It is in this context that I propose to explore, first, the ways in which orphans became an important ingredient in defining and preserving religious and communal boundaries; and second, the ways in which orphanages were increasingly becoming sites for producing 'well trained' specialized labour force for their claimants, namely, the Arya Samaj, mission societies, private ‘charitable’ individuals, Sikh orphanages, and Muslim orphanages. Gendered experience in the orphanage is yet another aspect that the project seeks to explore. The overwhelming presence of female orphans in mission and Arya Samaj orphanages allows us to assess the gendered experience of institutionalized orphanhood. Works on institutionalized training and education of girl child is limited to focusing on lives of young women and girls of educated and elite families. The current project will allow us to explore the institutionalized experiences of female child belonging to the marginal classes, kinds of labour envisaged for female orphans and the way in which norms of feminity and sexual division of labour was constituted in the orphanages. Finally, by going through autobiographical records and oral testimonies the project also seeks to explore the social and intellectual conditioning of children in the orphanages and the degree to which this continued to shape their lives after they left the institution.