¹ Lakshmi entered the British colonial legal archive with the name and honorific suffix ‘Luxmeebae’.

² During the entire decade from 1840 to 1850, the Marathi Mission only received a total of 159 converts, still a substantial increase compared to the total of 34 in the 1830s. The Mission's ministry targeted ‘Hindus of the lowest caste’, the poorest of the poor, and badly disabled people by providing food and medical services. Converting Brahmans was exceptionally unusual. On statistics of converts, see Report of the American Marathi Mission for the year 1880 (Bombay, 1881), p. 3.

³ See Narayen Ramchundur, Petition of Appeal to the Judges of Sudder Dewanee Adawlut, circa 1850, reprinted in full in Forjett, Charles, Our Real Danger in India (London, 1877), Appendix A, p. 92Google Scholar.

⁴ Sources are unclear about Ramchundra's precise date of birth in the spring of 1839. Some suggest that Lakshmi left soon after his birth; others suggest that she left just before giving birth. In a petition of appeal, Narayen claimed that ‘Your Petitioner's wife, the Respondent, Luxmee Baee, at the time he received baptism was in a state of pregnancy, and shortly afterwards gave birth to a son.’ But Narayen dates this in 1840, whereas the date of his baptism was publicized by missionaries in April 1839.

⁵ In 1845, the colonial state withdrew an earlier incarnation of the Act, with the name the Lex Loci Act, in the face of widespread protest that it unduly interfered with Indians’ religious life. This Act sought to extend to all of British India a rarely invoked clause of the Bengal Regulations of 1832 that protected the civil and property rights of converts. It territorialized these rights by violating ‘personal laws’ that up until then had been attached to persons as Muslims and Hindus. On the failed Lex Loci Act of 1845 and the CDRA of 1850, see the excellent analysis by Nancy Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company: Public Justice versus Public Instruction (New Delhi, 2010), Chapter 4; see also Viswanathan, Gauri, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, Belief (Princeton, 1998), Chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ My argument dovetails with J. Barton Scott's account of the emergence of new techniques of selfhood and the ‘self-ruling subject’ at the intersection of Protestant Christianity, British liberalism, and Indian reformist critiques of the tyranny of Hindu priestcraft. The cultivation of Christian conscience as an inward mechanism of regulating ethical behaviour and moral life was part of a broader set of intersecting arguments, advanced by Indians and Britons alike, for the emancipatory impact of ascetic self-restraint and its effects on social and economic relations. See Scott, J. Barton, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Such religious disabilities loomed large in the British political imagination in the aftermath of liberal reforms set in motion by Catholic Emancipation in Ireland in the late 1820s.

⁸ On the history of Muslim personal law and its impact on women and gender relations, see Stephens, Julia, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (New York, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nandini Chatterjee convincingly argues that the CDRA marked the invention of what she calls ‘Christian personal law’ in British India as a symptom of the colonial state's attempt to manage the boundaries between religion and secularism. See Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 (Basingstoke, 2011). See also Chatterjee, N., ‘Religious Change, Social Conflict and Legal Competition: The Emergence of Christian Personal Law in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 44, no. 6 (April 2010), pp. 1147–1195CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the implications of this legal distinction between Hindu personal and British colonial law, especially in the context of ‘joint’ or ‘undivided’ Hindu households as business enterprises, see Birla, Ritu, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance (Durham, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁹ Those involved in debating the CDRA always linked it to the precedent of the abolition of sati. Landmark feminist analysis of sati debates include Mani, Lata, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (eds) Grossberg, Lawrence and Nelson, Cary (Urbana-Champaign, 1988), pp. 271–313Google Scholar. Conscience figured in that controversy as some supporters of sati claimed that its abolition violated a widow's conscience-driven right to choose her own ritual death. See ‘Petition from Baboos Gopee Mohun Deb, Radakant Deb, Milmoney Dey, Bowany Churn Mitter, and others to the Right Honourable the Governor General, His Lordship [Lord William Cavendish Bentinck], January 18, 1830’, reprinted in The Days of John Company, Selections from the Calcutta Gazette, 1824–1832 (Calcutta, 1959), p. 467.

¹⁰ Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company, pp. 271–272.

¹¹ See Benton, Lauren and Ford, Lisa, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² My work is indebted to the pathbreaking studies by Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, 1989)Google Scholar on education and Viswanathan, Outside the Fold on conversion, in British India, but offers a substantially different interpretation of the CDRA. In Outside the Fold, she argues that the CDRA depended upon the legal fiction that native converts had remained Hindus and should not suffer caste-related loss of property, custody, and conjugal rights. This was emphatically not driven by the desire to use the law to protect individuals’ claims to Christian consciences. She calls this an ‘unreal fiction, a perverse denial of their [Hindu Christian converts’] adopted religious identity’: see Visnawathan, Outside the Fold, p. 81. By contrast, I demonstrate that stakeholders in the legal case of Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae, including newspaper accounts of the dispute, went out of their way to bolster Narayen's and his brother Haripunt's claim that they had experienced an inward and legitimate conversion to Christianity.

¹³ See note 206 below.

¹⁴ The idea that conscience acted through a painful prick has a long genealogy in English, from the mid-fourteenth century poem ‘The Prick of Conscience’ to James Fitzjames Stephen's elaboration in his 1865 essay, ‘The Rights of Conscience’ in which he argued that ‘every conscientious feeling contains the two elements of feeling and reason’ that combine cognition with emotion. See Stephen, J. F., Horae Sabbaticae (London, 1892), pp. 325–342Google Scholar.

¹⁵ On the Western liberal Protestant provenance of conscience, with its conceptualization of religion as a ‘voluntary private matter’, at odds with Hinduism as a ‘practice-based’ religion, see Spinner-Halev, Jeff, ‘Hinduism, Christianity, and Liberal Religious Toleration’, Political Theory, 33, no. 1 (February 2005), pp. 28–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ For an astute historiographical summary of toleration, tolerance, and secularism in modern India, see Adcock, C. S., The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (Oxford, 2014)Google Scholar, Introduction.

¹⁷ See Collins, Patricia Hill, ‘It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation’, Hypatia, 13, no. 3 (Summer 1998), p. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ For exemplary family-centric scholarship on women, political economy, and colonial law, see Ranajit Guha, ‘Chandra's Death’, in his Subaltern Studies, Volume V (New Delhi, 1987), pp. 135–165, republished in Ranajit Guha (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis, 1997); Sturman, Rachel, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law and Women's Rights (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Surkis, Judith, Sex, Law and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 (Ithaca, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghosh, Durba, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Deborah, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (New York, 2013), Chapter 1Google Scholar, ‘The Nabob's Secrets’; Stephens, Governing Islam; Viswanathan, Outside the Fold; Chatterjee, Nandini, ‘Muslim or Christian? Family Quarrels and Religious Diagnosis in a Colonial Court’, American Historical Review, 117, no. 4 (October 2012), pp. 1101–1122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Eliza Kent insightfully argues that conversion was structured by two linked but different processes: one, an inward process of individual wrestling with conscience, belief, and faith; the other, outward and group-focused, grounded in visible signs of transformation such as ritual practices surrounding food and dress. See Kent, Eliza F., Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Introduction and Chapter 5.

²⁰ An early pioneering example includes Chakravarthi, Uma, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and the State’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27, no. 14 (April 1993)Google Scholar. See also the synoptic overview in Chakravarthi, U., Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (Calcutta, 2003)Google Scholar, especially Chapters 7–8.

²¹ The call for improved secular education in the Wood Despatch strengthened, not weakened, the association of education with religion by making the ‘pedagogic subject’ and the ‘religious subject’ coterminous. See the masterful analysis of this paradox in Sengupta, Perna, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (Berkeley, 2011), Vol. 2, pp. 30–35Google Scholar.

²² The literature on missionaries and empire, especially in India, is vast. See the comprehensive empire-wide study by Porter, Andrew, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004)Google Scholar.

²³ On political emotions in British India, see Agathocleous, Tanya, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (Ithaca, 2021)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley, 2014)Google Scholar. See also Bayly, Christopher, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Notable exceptions include Viswanathan, Outside the Fold and Robert Frykenberg, ‘Conversion and Crises of Conscience Under Company Raj in South India’, in Asie du Sud, Traditions et changements: VIth European Conference on South Asian Studies, Sevres, 8–13 juillet 1978, (eds) Marc Gaboreieau and Alice Thorner (Paris: Colloques Internationaux Du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1979), pp. 311–321.

²⁶ See Bebbington, David, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Peter Marsh (ed.), The Conscience of the Victorian State (Syracuse, 1979); and Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London, 1994). Priya Satia makes British colonial guilt about the violent excesses of their eighteenth-century empire central to her interpretation of conscience, which she pairs with her analysis of historical writing about empire. See Satia, P., Time's Monster: How History Made History (Cambridge, MA, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Jeffrey Cox's work challenges the Saidian master narrative of ‘unmasking’ missionaries as handmaidens of imperial aggression. He contends that ‘missionaries and Indian Christians were in many respects engaged in a common enterprise, creating something new that was neither European nor Indian but simultaneously indigenous, foreign, and hybrid’: see Cox, Jeffrey, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, 2002), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ On the ‘Brahmanization’ of this part of western India and links between banking, military, and religious power under peshwa rule, see Chakravarti, Uma, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi, 1998), Chapter 1Google Scholar. Haripunt was married at the age of six to Radhabai, two-and-a-half years old at the time. On details of the arranged marriage, see ‘Rev. Hari Ramchandra Khisti’, Sketches of Indian Christians: Collected from Different Sources (Bombay, 1896), pp. 190–191.

²⁹ See Mr Henry Ballantine, letter to American Board of Commissioners, 4 September 1839, reprinted in ‘Mahrattas. An Account of the Conversion of Two Young Brahmins at Ahmednuggur’, Missionary Herald, July 1840, pp. 263–273. It is also the only account that mentions that their father was a banker for the peshwa. See Rev. Appaji Bapuji, A Short Memoir of the late Rev. Hari Ramchandra Khisti, Pastor of the First Church of the American Mission at Ahmednagar (Bombay, 1883) pp. 1–3, which characterizes the family as engaged in moneylending on a local level, albeit with a very high level of integrity and scrupulous regard for fairness. The family believes that their name derived from the Marathi word ‘kisht’, which refers to an instalment of money paid for a loan. Private communication with Raju Khisty, 13 February 2020. Note that all translations from the Marathi text of Appaji's memoir into English are courtesy of Shreenivas N. Mate.

³⁰ Ballantine, ‘Mahrattas’, p. 263. Ballantine blamed Seetabai's ‘mismanagement’ as well as the treachery of family friends who stole money.

³¹ John Stuart Mill, Examiner of the India Office, ‘Return to an Order of the House of Commons (9 June 1857), showing under what tenures, and subject to what Land Tax, lands are held under the several Presidencies of India’, in Rorabacher, J. Albert, Property, Land, Revenue, and Policy: The East India Company, c.1757–1825 (London, 2017), p. 432Google Scholar.

³² Guha, Sumit, ‘Society and Economy in the Deccan, 1818–1850’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20, no. 4 (1983), p. 397CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Guha shows that Deccans succeeded in pushing back against this individualizing logic in the late-1830s. See Sumit Guha, ‘Commodity and Credit in Upland Maharashtra, 1800–1950’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 (December 1987), pp. 126–140.

³⁴ On the ryotwari system in Ahmednagar, see David Hall-Matthews, Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India (London, 2005).

³⁵ See ibid., p. 97.

³⁶ Petition of 27 July 1840, ryots of Thana to the Bombay Government, as quoted by Kumar, Ravinder, ‘The Deccan Riots of 1875’, Journal of Asian Studies, (August 1965), p. 616Google Scholar.

³⁷ Wedderburn, William, The Indian Raiyat as a Member of the Village Community (London, 1884), p. 19Google Scholar, in Charlesworth, Neil, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850–1935 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Charlesworth concludes that the credit system was hampered by an overall lack of capital (Chapter 3).

³⁸ See Deepra Dandekar (ed. and trans.), Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, The Subhedar's Son (Oxford, 2019), p. 91.

³⁹ For a detailed analysis of Maratha power and, crucially, the means by which the Marathas accommodated and ‘co-shared’ Mughal authority while projecting their own, see Wink, Andre, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth Century Marātha Svarājya (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Papers Relating to Revision of Assessment in Six Talookas of the Ahmednuggur Collectorate (Bombay, 1871), pp. 38–39. During the 1875 riots that rocked the region, British officials returned to Anderson's report and blamed Marwari moneylenders (sowkars) who heartlessly confiscated family homes when debtors could not pay off loans. See East India (Deccan Riots Commission), Report of the Commission Appointed in India to Inquire into The Causes of the Riots which took place in the Year 1875 in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the Bombay Presidency (London, 1878). On imprisonments for debt circa 1850–1852, see p. 18.

⁴¹ Warren Hastings, testimony before Parliament during the debate over the renewal of the Company Charter, 30 March 1813, Lettered Minutes of Evidence Before House of Lords, East India Affairs (London, 1813), p. 11. On Hastings’ consistent opposition to the colonial state's interference with ‘native’ religions from the 1770s onwards, see Rosane Rocher, ‘The Creation of Anglo-Hindu Law’, in Hinduism and Law, An Introduction, (eds) Timothy Lubin, Donald Davis and Jayanth Krishnan (Cambridge, 2010).

⁴² On government ‘protection’ of the American Marathi Mission, see ‘Letters from Mr. Ballantine, 7 February 1861’, Missionary Herald, June 1861, p. 177. Ballantine reflected on his 25 years at the Mission and the protection and support it had always received from the government.

⁴³ On this decision and transaction, see correspondence of H. A. Harrison and J. P. Willoughby, ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade’, Sessional Papers of the House of Lords, vol. 16 (1841), p. 262.

⁴⁴ See Ebeneezer Burgess to Justin Perkins, 8 December 1839, in Justin Perkins Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. Digitized Archive.

⁴⁵ On his work translating George Bowen's Life of Mohammad (1853) from English to Marathi, see David Grafton, ‘George Bowen’, in his Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History (Leiden, 2020), Vol. 16, pp. 185–189. The work appeared under the Marathi title, Mahamadācā vôrttānta (Haripant Ramchandra, trans.). On the work of native Christians, including Haripunt, as translators of religious texts into Marathi, see Abbot, Justin, A Catalogue of Marathi Christian Literature during Eighty Years (Bombay, 1892)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ See ‘Report from Mr. Ballantine. Boys’ School. Girls’ School’, Missionary Herald, December 1842, pp. 487–488.

⁴⁷ On the Khisty family's Deśastha subcaste, see the biography of Haripunt by Rev. S. N. Suryawanshi, Chandanache Zad (Pune, 1983), p. 1. My thanks to Uday Khisty for translating and providing this information.

⁴⁸ See ‘The Maratha Polity’, in Ian Copeland, Ian Mabbett, Asim Roy, Kate Brittlebank and Adam Bowles, A History of State and Religion in India (New York, 2012), p. 161.

⁴⁹ While some were Chitpavan Brahmans, most were probably higher status (though less politically powerful) Deśastha Brahmans, who dominated the upper tier of religious occupational hierarchies in the Deccan. Only they could perform ‘the complex and critical steps of a Vedic sacrifice’. See Patterson, Maureen L. P., ‘Changing Patterns of Occupation among Chitpavan Brahmans’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 7, no. 3 (September 1970), p. 394CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ Each temple supported approximately ten dependent people and many more who provided goods and services. This made them big business as well as a magnet for Brahmans from across India. On the political and religious economy of Pune, see Gokhale, Balkrishna Govind, ‘The Religious Complex in Eighteenth-Century Poona’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 4, no. 4 (1985), pp. 719–724CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ On Chitpavan and Maratha disputes over religious rituals and political authority, see O'Hanlon, Rosalind, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge, 1985), Chapter 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘From warrior traditions to nineteenth-century politics: structure, ideology and identity in the Maratha-kunbi caste complex’, pp. 15–49.

⁵² Guha, Sumit, Beyond Caste, Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden/Boston, 2013), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Mitchell, J. Murray, In Western India, Recollections of My Early Missionary Life (Edinburgh, 1899), p. 256Google Scholar. On the intersection of Scottish Presbyterianism and imperialism in India, see Devine, Thomas M., Scotland's Empire: 1600–1815 (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Mackenzie, J. M., ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 15, no. 4 (1993), pp. 714–739CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Constable, Philip, ‘“Protestant Hinduism” and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India’, Scottish Historical Review, 86, no. 22 (October 2007), pp. 278–313Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ See Patterson, ‘Changing Patterns’, pp. 375–396.

⁵⁵ Ballantine, ‘Mahrattas’, p. 264.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 267.

⁵⁷ See Krupabai Satthianadhan, Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life (Madras, 1895), Chapter 3.

⁵⁸ See Bapuji, A Short Memoir, Chapter 1, ‘Birth, family and childhood’.

⁵⁹ See Jon Keune, ‘Eknath in Context: The Literary, Social, and Political Milieu of Any Early Modern Saint-Poet’, in Scholar Intellectuals in Early Modern India: Discipline, Sect, Lineage, and Community, (eds) Christopher Minkowki et al. (London, 2015), p. 71.

⁶⁰ ‘Eknath, A Religious Teacher of the Deccan’, Calcutta Review, 206 (August 1896), p. 276.

⁶¹ On the concept of Hinduism and its use to unify, but also conceal, diversity, see Robert Eric Frykenberg, ‘Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23, no. 3 (Winter 1993), pp. 523–550.

⁶² See Louise Gliem Fisher (comp.), ‘The American Marathi Mission’, Ahmednagar, 1961, typescript, American Board of Commissioners Archives, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁶³ My strong hunch is that the Marathi press of the time included many more discussions of all the events analysed in this article.

⁶⁴ See Bapuji, A Short Memoir. For the abridged English version, see the book edited and introduced by Krupabai's husband, Samuel: Satthianadhan, Sketches of Indian Christians, pp. 189–194.

⁶⁵ See ‘Letter from Mr. Ballantine, Dated Ahmednuggur, April 13, 1839. Conversion of two Brahmins to Christianity’, Missionary Herald, November 1839, pp. 410–412. See also Ballantine, ‘Mahrattas’, pp. 263–273. Ballantine was an 1829 graduate of Ohio University and 1834 graduate of Andover Theological Seminary. He and his wife embarked on missionary work in India in 1835. See his obituary, ‘Rev. Henry Ballantine’, The Missionary Herald, 62, February 1866, pp. 37–41.

⁶⁶ Rev. Ramkrisnapunt V. Modak, ‘Account of the Conversion of several persons of High Caste’, in his abridged History of the Native Churches Connected with the American Marathi Mission, and especially of those in the Ahmednagar Districts, for the Last Fifty Years. This was published in the Memorial Papers of the American Marathi Mission 1813–1881 (Bombay, 1882), pp. 28–30.

⁶⁷ The story of the conversion of the brothers and Haripunt's wife also figures prominently in the unsigned handwritten manuscript fragment, ‘Historical Sketch of Ahmednagar Mission, 1831–1842’, written circa 1850, in the Archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, India Records, Marathi Mission, Harvard Andover Theological Library, Special Collections, bMS 1264/2 (5) Box 2, Folder 5. Harvard University.

⁶⁸ It is worth noting that the degradation of her power as a widowed senior female head of household coincided with the colonial state's efforts to undermine widowed female heads of state.

⁶⁹ For background on political and religious structures of western India and the impact of British victory over the Maratha peshwas on caste ideologies and practices, see O'Hanlon, Caste, Conflict.

⁷⁰ See Memorial Papers of the American Marathi Mission, p. 27.

⁷¹ John Murray Mitchell (ed.), Baba Padmanji: An Autobiography (Madras, 1892), p. 48.

⁷² On anti-Christian violence in contemporary India, especially toward Pentecostal Christians, see Bauman, Chad, Anti-Christian Violence in India (Ithaca, 2020), Chapter 2Google Scholar, ‘A prehistory of Hindu-Christian conflict’ which includes Bauman's explanation of how East India Company (EIC) interference in religious matters in the first half of the nineteenth century fuelled the shift from ‘controversy to conflict’ between Indian Christians and Hindus.

⁷³ See Modak, ‘Account of the Conversion of several Persons of High Caste’, p. 28.

⁷⁴ This part of the narrative is based on an account written by fellow Brahman convert, Rev. Ramkrisnapunt V. Modak, who was ordained as a pastor with Haripunt in 1854. See R. V. Modak, ‘First Brahman Converts at Ahmednagar, India’, Missionary Herald, March 1883, p. 121. Haripunt's posthumously published conversion narrative, The Great Salvation, was published in 1875. On Hari Ramchundur's conversion, see David, M. D., Missions, Cross-cultural Encounter and Change in Western India (New Delhi, 2001), p. 54Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ The impact of a Hindu's conversion to Christianity on a Hindu spouse who would not convert had long troubled missionaries. On these dilemmas and attempts to find ways to free Christian converts to remarry, see the testimony of David Hill, member of the East India Company's judicial department before the parliamentary commissioners appointed to Inquire into the State and Operation of the Law of Marriage, Stephen Lushington to David Hill, Minutes of Evidence, 19 February 1849, in Second Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State and Operation of the Law of Marriage (London, 1850), pp. 1–3. Missionaries published their report on this situation in April 1841 and September 1842 in the Calcutta Christian Observer and in the Commissioner's Report as ‘Statement and Propositions regarding Marriage and Divorce, chiefly as they affect converts to Christianity’.

⁷⁶ The American missionaries had few disputes with their British counterparts, except that they took a harder line that converts needed to abandon entirely caste-based ritual practices. On the marriage politics of the American Board, see Conroy-Krutz, Emily, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, 2015), Chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the dilemmas posed by Hindu wives for converted Christian men, see Murray Mitchell (ed.), Baba Padmanji, pp. 83–85. Padmanji's mother and father, unlike Narayen and Haripunt's mother, supported his decision to convert even as they remained Hindus.

⁷⁷ On Elizabeth's missionary labours and her marriage to Henry, see ‘Mrs. Elizabeth D. Ballantine’, Missionary Herald, July 1874, pp. 203–205. On women's roles at the Mission as educators, see Porterfield, Amanda, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York, 1997), Chapter 5Google Scholar. Ballantine was the first woman trained by Mary Lyons to undertake mission work in Maharashtra.

⁷⁸ Bapuji, A Short Memoir, Chapter 4.

⁷⁹ Ibid., Chapter 4, ‘Radhabai's life before she became Christian and her notions about religion’, pp. 28–29.

⁸⁰ Catherine Hall has analysed Baptist missionaries’ use of the trope of the universal family of humanity across racial divides in the British Caribbean at this same time. See C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (Chicago, 2009). On the colonial trope of the ‘family’ of humanity, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995).

⁸¹ Feminist scholars have extensively analysed the claims, instrumental uses, and limits of discourses of cross-race sisterhood in the British empire. See the influential critique of imperial feminism in Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994); B. N. Ramusack, ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies. British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’, in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, (eds) N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (Bloomington, 1992), pp. 119–136; Antoinette Burton, ‘Fearful Bodies into Disciplined Subjects: Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary Carpenter's “Six Months in India”’, Signs, 20 (1995), pp. 545–574; K. Jayawardena, The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (New York, 1995); Clare Midgley, ‘Mary Carpenter and the Brahmo Samaj of India: A Transnational Perspective on Social Reform in the Age of Empire’, Women's History Review, 22, no. 3 (2013), pp. 363–385.

⁸² See Modak, ‘First Brahman Converts’, p. 122.

⁸³ Bapuji, A Short Memoir, Chapter 4.

⁸⁴ See Modak, ‘Account of the Conversion of several Persons of High Caste’, p. 29.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Bapuji, A Short Memoir, Chapter 4. Radhabai's conversion received considerable publicity within missionary circles. See ‘The Mahratta Mission: Radhabaee, Wife of Haripant’, Christian Observer, 19 November 1841, p. 185. This same article appeared in the Missionary Herald, November 1841.

⁸⁷ For a dense and subtle account written by a Chitpavan Brahman wife and Christian convert 40 years after Radhabai, see Lakshmibai Tilak, Smritichitre: The Memoirs of a Spirited Wife, (trans. from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale) (New Delhi, 2017). Her memoir makes clear her own keen love and desire for her husband even as she recounts the patriarchal excesses of her famous poet husband and orthodox, ritual-obsessed father-in-law.

⁸⁸ I repurpose Hartman's influential formulation within the context of British India while underscoring the profound differences in historical context, especially Radhabai's privileged status as Brahman wife. See Saidiya Hartman, ‘Seduction and the Ruses of Power’, Callaloo, 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996), p. 547.

⁸⁹ This formulation is indebted to J. Barton Scott's analysis of the liberal Hindu subject in colonial India. As he puts it, ‘managed into managing herself, the internally differentiated subject of self-rule is always necessarily open to incorporation into networks of guidance that exceed and constrain her’. See Scott, Spiritual Despots, p. 20. This argument parallels Patrick Joyce's influential analysis of the animating tensions within liberalism in Britain as the strategic deployment of freedom to govern people. See Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York, 2003).

⁹⁰ ‘Historical Sketch of Ahmednagar Mission, 1831–1842’, Harvard Andover Theological Library, Harvard University.

⁹¹ For a contemporary account of Krupabai, see Mrs. H. B. Grigg, ‘The Story of Krupabai’, reprinted in The Church Missionary Review, 47 (September 1896), pp. 670–677. On Krupabai and Saguna, see Shetty Parinitha, ‘“Re-Formed” Women and Narratives of Self’, Ariel, 37, no.1 (2006), pp. 45–60. On gender and conversion in South India, see Kent, Converting Women. See also Deepra Dandekar, ‘The Context of the Subhedar's Son’, in The Subhedar's Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth Century Maharastra, (ed.) Deepra Dandekar (New York, 2019), p. 19.

⁹² See Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, Women Writing in India, 600 B.C to the Early Twentieth Century (NY, 1991); see also Madhu Joshi, ‘New Women in Transition: Krupabai Satthianadhan and her Saguna’, in Studies in Women Writers in English, Volume 5, (eds) Mohit K. Ray and Rama Kundu (New Delhi, 2006).

⁹³ See Satthianadhan, Saguna, p. 38.

⁹⁴ See Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2010).

⁹⁵ For a feminist critique of Hindu patriarchy and caste in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, see Chakravarti, Rewriting History, especially Chapters 1–2.

⁹⁶ Ballantine later wrote a detailed account of Radhabai's (Radhabaee) conversion on 28 March 1841. He emphasized how literacy led her to Bible study and ultimately to conversion. In this letter, he does acknowledge her initial pain and suffering: ‘When she first came to live with her husband, after his renunciation of the abominations of idolatry, she felt very little sympathy with him. She regarded both him and herself as infinitely degraded by the step which had had taken, and for several months she brooded over her sorrows with a heavy heart.’ See ‘Letter from Ballantine, dated 15 June 1841, in ‘Biographical Notices of Female Converts’, Missionary Herald, November 1841, pp. 468–470.

⁹⁷ Ballantine, ‘Mahrattas’, pp. 263–273.

⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 269.

⁹⁹ In the 1840s, Narayen and Haripunt Ramchundur contributed small sums of money to defray the costs of Dnyanodaya's publication. On Dnyanodaya, see O'Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, pp. 66–67.

¹⁰⁰ See Petition of Narayen Ramchunder Khisti to the Judges, reprinted in Forjett, Our Real Danger in India.

¹⁰¹ There were several celebrated precedents of Hindu wives who, like Lakshmi, left their Christian convert husbands. On the conversion of Dwarkanath Bose in the late 1830s in Bengal and its violent impact on his wife, see Muhammad Mohar Ali, ‘The Bengali Reaction to Christian Missionary Activities, 1833–1857’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1963, pp. 170–182.

¹⁰² See Bapuji, A Short Memoir, Chapter 3, ‘Narayanrao Goes to Wai and Brings Radhabai to Nagar’.

¹⁰³ Ibid., p. 33.

¹⁰⁴ See Modak, ‘Account of the Conversion of several Persons of High Caste’, pp. 28–29.

¹⁰⁵ ‘Report of the Station at Ahmednuggur, dated 29 January 1841’, Missionary Herald, June 1841, p. 261.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid.

¹⁰⁷ Narayen's petition of 31 May 1847 is part of the case file, ‘True Copy of the Court Decree regarding the custody of 7-year old son of Narayen Ramchundra, Christian convert, against his wife Laxmibai, Hindu. 1855’, Ahmednagar College Archives, Ahmednagar, India (hereafter ‘True Copy of the Court Decree’).

¹⁰⁸ My reconstruction of this part of the case and the three court rulings derive from the publication of the case in James Morris, Selected Decisions of the Court of Sudder Dewanee Adawlut of Bombay (Bombay, 1853), pp. 61–67 as well as Forjett, Our Real Danger in India.

¹⁰⁹ See ‘The Case of Ramchander Khistee, Decision Regarding Parental Rights of Hindoos and Converts From Hindooism’, Suit no. 474 of 1847’, reprinted as Appendix A in Forjett, Our Real Danger in India, p. 90.

¹¹⁰ See ‘True Copy of the Court Decree’.

¹¹¹ It's not clear why the case came before Manisty, an Edinburgh trained medical doctor, who had arrived in Bombay Presidency in 1841 to serve the Company as a civil surgeon. There were precedents, however, for civil surgeons to combine their medical duties with adjudicating civil disputes.

¹¹² See ‘True Copy of the Court Decree’.

¹¹³ Missionaries acknowledged that Brahmans particularly abhorred the fact that most Christian converts in Ahmednagar were members of two ‘low’ castes, the Mahar and Mang. For a Brahman like Lakshmi to mingle with such people would have been a disgrace to her family: ‘a hundred times worse than death’. See Memorial Papers of the American Marathi Mission, p. 27.

¹¹⁴ This Act did not resolve the legal issues raised by such conversions and divorces, which remained a point of contention well into the twentieth century. See IOR/L/PJ/6/1385/file 2891, India Office Records, British Library (hereafter BL).

¹¹⁵ On Forjett's much praised control of public order in Bombay during the Indian Uprising, see G. B. Malleson, The Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London, 1891), p. 383.

¹¹⁶ For a detailed account of this first trial, see ‘Singular Case of Custodiership’, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 11 December 1847, p. 974. The paper called Forjett an East Indian, which was synonymous with ‘Indo-Briton’. On contemporary understandings of these names, see Chandra Mallampalli, Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family (Cambridge, 2011), p. 162. On Forjett and his remarkable later career as Bombay's most charismatic and unconventional superintendent of police during the Uprising, see S. M. Edwardes, The Bombay City Police, A Historical Sketch,1672–1916 (London,1923), Chapter 3.

¹¹⁷ See Forjett, Our Real Danger in India, p. 13.

¹¹⁸ See Ibid., Appendix A, esp. p. 90.

¹¹⁹ On the history of the use of ‘justice, equity and good conscience’ in British India and Hindu Law, see Alan Gledhill, ‘The Influence of Common Law and Equity on Hindu Law since 1800’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1954), pp. 576–603.

¹²⁰ See Minutes of Meeting of the Legislative Council, 2 August 1845, Letter from Sir Lawrence Peel and Sir H. W. Seton to Sir H. Hardinge, on proposed Lex Loci Law, 25 March 1845, IOR/P/207/306, BL. See also Copies of the Special Reports of the Indian Law Commissioners, House of Commons, 1847, p. 636.

¹²¹ See ‘Singular Case of Custodiership’, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 11 December 1847, p. 974. This document explicitly names Lakshmi and Narayen's son, Ramchundra.

¹²² On Bombay Parsi community critiques of government support for Christian converts, see Framjee Cowasjee, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy et. al. to Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, 18 May 1839, Mss Eur F88/112/14, Mountstuart Elphinstone Papers, British Library.

¹²³ See Murray Mitchell, In Western India, pp. 97–105.

¹²⁴ Mrs Colin McKenzie, Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana; or Six Years in India (London, 1853), Vol. 3 p. 119.

¹²⁵ For a summary of Woodcock's decision, see Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae, Case 2627, Special, in James Morris, Selected Decisions of the Court of Sudder Dewanee Adawlut of Bombay, Part 1 (Bombay, 1853), pp. 64–66. See also summary of Woodcock's decision in Friend of India, 13 March 1851, p. 163. The lengthy petition that Narayen submitted to the court appealing Woodcock's decision restated and refuted each of Woodcock's arguments. See Forjett, Our Real Danger in India, Appendix A, pp. 183–189.

¹²⁶ See Chandra Mallampalli, Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863–1937 (London, 2004). See Viswanathan, Outside the Fold.

¹²⁷ For the complete text of the Act, see The Unrepealed General Acts of the Governor General in Council, from 1834 to 1867, both inclusive (Calcutta 1898; 3rd edn), Vol. I, pp. 72–73. ‘Whereas it is enacted by section 9, Regulation VII. 1832, of the Bengal Code, that ‘whenever in any civil suit the parties to such suit may be of different persuasions, when one party shall be of the Hindu and the other of the Muhammadan persuasion, or where one or more of the parties to the suit shall not be either of the Muhammadan or Hindu persuasions, the laws of those religions shall not be permitted to operate to deprive such party or parties of any property to which, but for the operation of such laws, they would have been entitled and whereas it will be beneficial to extend the principle of that enactment; It is enacted as follows :—1. So much of any law or usage as inflicts on any person forfeiture of rights or property, or may be held in any way to impair or affect any right of inheritance, by reason of his or her renouncing, or having been excluded from the communion of, any religion, or being deprived of caste, shall cease to be enforced as law.’

¹²⁸ Forjett sympathized with and supported missionaries’ work in Ahmednuggar during his time there as a sub-judge or Sudder Ameen. He regularly contributed funds to support its Christian missionary magazine, Dnyanadoda.

¹²⁹ Hindu personal law adhered to persons and their bodies, wherever they went. Lex loci territorialized law by identifying it with statutes governing a place. Missionaries had long demanded legal protection for the property rights of Christian converts. See ‘Native Christians—The Disabilities Under Which They Labor’, Calcutta Christian Observer, September 1840, pp. 548–550.

¹³⁰ Minute by Governor General Hardinge, 18 July 1845, India Legislative Proceedings, 2 August 1845, no. 32, IOR/P/207/36, BL. Protecting the property and persons of Christian converts had long troubled colonial legal officials, who saw it as their duty to safeguard what they called ‘the subjects of a liberal Government’. See 11 February 1840, IOR/E/4/761/703-714, BL.

¹³¹ See Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, esp. pp. 62–64.

¹³² ‘An Account of the Conversion of Two Young Brahmins at Ahmednuggur’, p. 264.

¹³³ Ballantine's entire speech was reprinted in ‘Ahmednuggur Debating Society’, Bombay Gazette, 14 June 1855, p. 559.

¹³⁴ See summary of ‘Principles of Morality. Translated into Marathi by Major Condy’, Dnyanodaya, VIII (1849), p. 46. Condy prepared the book for the Board of Education for use in government and missionary schools alike. See p. 128.

¹³⁵ See Ian Copeland, ‘Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Company, circa 1813–1858’, Historical Journal, 49, no. 4 (December 2006), pp. 1025–1054. On the convergence of East India Company and missionary goals in the mid-nineteenth century and the invention of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ to describe unified religious groups and beliefs, see Geoffrey Oddie, ‘Constructing “Hinduism”: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding’, in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500, (eds) Robert Frykenberg and Alaine Low (Grand Rapids, 2003), Chapter 7. Oddie discusses the CDRA and the use of the word ‘Hindu’ by various groups critical of it.

¹³⁶ Stephens, Governing Islam.

¹³⁷ See Nancy Cassels’ careful reconstruction of these debates in Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company, Chapter 4. See also the report by D. Elliott and extensive commentary on it by East India Company legal officials about Lex Loci, which were stirred up by debates in Madras Presidency about the relationship between the colonial state and the administration of religious endowments of institutions, in 1 March 1845 and 28 September 1845, India Legislative Proceedings, IOR/P/207/38, BL.

¹³⁸ On the Bishop of Bombay's intervention to mitigate the ‘difficulties and hardships to which native converts to Christianity are exposed’ and defend ‘their civil rights’, see Lumsden, Secretary of the Ecclesiastical Department, to Halliday, Secretary, Government of India, 14 May 1849, IOR/P/207/59, BL, pp. 58–74. The correspondence mentions that the Bishop of Bombay had in mind several legal cases of Christian converts denied custody of their wives, children, and property. Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae must have been among them.

¹³⁹ On the refiguring of unfree Dalit labour under the supposedly benign dispensation of paternalist ‘agrestic labor’/slavery in the aftermath of the formal abolition of slavery in British India in 1843, see Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India (New York, 2014).

¹⁴⁰ See J. G. A. Baird (ed.), Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie (Edinburgh, 1910), p. 118.

¹⁴¹ See Rev. R. V. Modak, ‘Civil Rights obtained from the English Government by our Christians as a Community’, in Memorial Papers of the American Marathi Mission, pp. 36–37.

¹⁴² See ‘Cardinal Wiseman's Defence’, Morning Post, 21 November 1850, pp. 5–6.

¹⁴³ Whately was also the most important leader of the Church of Ireland to support the secular system of national education in Ireland—and served on its Board of Commissioners until Catholic assaults on one of his widely used school textbooks led to its banning in national schools and his resignation from the Board.

¹⁴⁴ See ‘Society for Protecting the Rights of Conscience in Ireland’, Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, 15 February 1860, p. 164. For a full account of one of its meetings, see ‘Society for Protecting the Rights of Conscience’, Warder and Dublin Weekly Mail, 30 July 30, 1853, p. 6. On the Society's focus on conscience, not conversion or truth, see ‘Rights of Conscience’, St James Chronicle, 16 September 1854, p. 3.

¹⁴⁵ See ‘Religious Liberty in India’, Abstract of report read at Annual Meeting of London Missionary Society, Morning Advertiser, 10 May 1850, p. 4.

¹⁴⁶ ‘Indian Government’, The Natal Witness, 21 June 1850, p. 3. The Calcutta Review proclaimed it an Act of ‘no small importance to the future well-being of the country’. Establishing ‘Liberty of Conscience’ would undercut ‘Hindu superstition’ and enable free men of property to ‘forsake the ranks of idolatry’ by converting to Christianity. See ‘Annals of the Bengal Presidency for 1849’, Calcutta Review, 13 (1850), p. 106.

¹⁴⁷ The actual terms of the law were not limited to property-holding men. In his analysis of the law governing kinship relations and adoption, Herbert Cowell contended that the law provided that ‘even an outcast and a pervert shall retain his rights of inheritance’ while acknowledging that such persons would not be able to ‘discharge the religious duties annexed to them’. See Cowell, Herbert, The Hindu Law: Treatise on the Law Administered Exclusively to Hindus by the British Courts in India (Calcutta, 1870), p. 340Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁸ On Catholic critiques of reading the Bible in schools without guidance by priests and Catholic teachers, see Proceedings of a Meeting of the New Catholic Association, 17 December 1825, File IX (no.18), Section 56/2 in Archbishop Murray Papers, Dublin Diocesan Archives.

¹⁴⁹ Calcutta Eastern Star, 23 March 1850 as quoted by Hough, William, India As It Ought To Be Under the New Charter Act (London, 1853), pp. 7, 19Google Scholar. Hough himself knew quite a bit about unhappy marriages. His was dissolved when his wife, 20 years his junior, left their marriage to be with their close friend and neighbour, Major Skinner. See ‘Hough v Skinner, July 19’, Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign, Supplement to Register (November 1838), p. 245.

¹⁵⁰ See ‘Religious Liberty in India’, Morning Advertiser, 10 May 1850, p. 4. The Annual Report of the London Missionary Society quoted the Friend of India's disapproving quotation of the Hindoo Intelligencer as proof of the need to spread Western education among Indian intellectuals, including the Intelligencer's editor, Kashiprasad Ghosh.

¹⁵¹ See ‘Memorial of the Native Inhabitants of Madras’, 11 April 1850, IOR/P/207/59/81-82, BL.

¹⁵² Here, I follow Geoffrey Oddie's fine analysis of the use of ‘Hindu’ by memorialists debating the CDRA. See Oddie, ‘Constructing “Hinduism”’, p. 157.

¹⁵³ See ‘Memorial of the Native Inhabitants of Madras’, 11 April 1850.

¹⁵⁴ Memorial of Madras Hindus, IOR/P/207/59/81-82, BL.

¹⁵⁵ See ‘Memorial of the Hindoo Inhabitants of Bengal, Behar and Orissa to the Governor General of India in Council against the proposed Act for Altering the Hindoo Law of Inheritance’, 11 April 1850, IOR/P/207/59, BL. See also Cassels, Social Legislation of East India Company, p. 245. This memorial in turn generated further debates in the House of Lords in Britain several years later during a campaign to repeal the CDRA.

¹⁵⁶ East India Company officials quite openly assessed the ‘tone’ of various petitions and their political implications. They found the memorial from Calcutta against the CDRA ‘more temperate and guarded in its language than that from Madras, the tone of which appears to me extremely reprehensible’. See IOR/P/207/57, BL, pp. 83–87.

¹⁵⁷ See Marianne Keppens and Esther Bloch, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, (eds) Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde (New York, 2010).

¹⁵⁸ See Bayly, Recovering Liberties, pp. 48, 37.

¹⁵⁹ On Roy's use of conscience in 1817, see Sivanath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj (Calcutta, 1911), Vol. I, p. 16.

¹⁶⁰ For a psychoanalytically inflected history of the Brahmo Samaj movement that celebrates its contributions to all of the major forces of ‘modernity’ in Indian history, see David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979). Kopf believes that the men who founded the Brahmo Samaj shared a similar ‘identity crisis’ and awakening to what he terms a ‘humanitarian conscience’ through their acute awareness of the degraded sinfulness of Calcutta: see Chapter 3, ‘Identity, Achievement, and Conscience: The Human Development of the Bhadralok Reformer’. By the late 1880s, Brahmo Samaj leader Sivanath Sastri made ‘liberty of conscience’ part of his nationalist platform and Keshub Chunder Sen elaborated his doctrine of ‘God in conscience’ with its moral imperatives called ‘divine commands’. Brian Hatcher characterizes the Brahmo Samaj as a religious polity rather than a religious sect within ‘early colonial modernity’ and documents Rammohun Roy's debts to Upanishadic, Islamic, and post-Enlightenment intellectual and political traditions’. He also recovers the renunciatory ‘upcountry’ early life journeys of Rammohun before his arrival in Calcutta to dislodge the teleology of reform as modernity. See Hatcher, Brian, Hinduism Before Reform (Cambridge, MA, 2020), p. 99 and Chapter 5Google Scholar.

¹⁶¹ See ‘The Old Orthodox Hindus and the Educated Native Youth’, Dnyandoda, 15 February 1851. On these unintended consequences of Western education as a source ‘moral crisis’ among Indian students and their use of education as means to gain economic advantage, see Seth, Sanjay, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, 2007), esp. Chapter 2Google Scholar.

¹⁶² I have found a few exceptions to this generalization. When Lord Tweeddale proposed introducing the Bible as a ‘class book’ in schools receiving state support in Madras, so-called ‘Hindoo memorialists’ claimed that doing so would violate British claims to protect their religious consciences. On the memorial and the controversy surrounding it, see ‘Hindu Memorial’, The Christian Instructor and Missionary Record, February 1848, pp. 68–73; ‘The Second Memorial of the Hindoos of Madras’, The Friend of India, 15 July 1847, pp. 435–438. See also Frykenberg, Robert Eric, Christianity in India (Oxford, 2008), esp. Chapter 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘Indian Christians and “Hindu Raj”’.

¹⁶³ See ‘Memorial of the Native Christian inhabitants of Calcutta and its vicinity’ (1850), Tr. 161 (j), pamphlet, British Library. Here, I borrow Talal Asad's account of the ‘sanctity of conscience’ and its relation to the ‘sacred right to property’. Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003), p. 36Google Scholar.

¹⁶⁴ See Allen's Indian Mail, 17 June 1850, pp. 367–368. Metropolitan newspapers like the Scottish Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser, 24 April 1850, p. 2, reprinted the glowing praise of the CDRA's protection of liberty of conscience from the Oriental Christian Spectator, 17 January 1850.

¹⁶⁵ The case was widely reported in the Metropolitan and Indian press. See ‘Liberty of Conscience in India’, Brighton Gazette, 15 May 1851, p. 7. It received two notices in Allen's Indian Mail, 5 May 1851, pp. 263, 272.

¹⁶⁶ ‘Important Decision. Liberty of Conscience in India’, Dnyanodaya, 15 May 1851, pp. 157–161. My thanks to Anjali Nerlekar for providing this translation. For an extensive analysis of the application of the CDRA in matters of lawsuits revolving around inheritance and property rights of widows, illegitimate children, converts to Christianity and Islam, persons with disabilities, and those who committed acts of gross immorality, see Cowell, Herbert, The Hindu Law; being a treatise on the law administered exclusively to Hindus by the British courts in India (Calcutta, 1870), pp. 184–205Google Scholar. Cowell does not mention Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae.

¹⁶⁷ Indrani Chatterjee characterizes this as ‘the interpellation of speech and silence in specific narratives about families’. See Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’, in her Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004), p. 9.

¹⁶⁸ See ‘Important Decision. The Wife of a Brahman Convert to Christianity restored to him by the Supreme Court at Madras’, Dnyanodaya, 1 July 1851, pp. 203–206.

¹⁶⁹ See Allen's Indian Mail, 30 July 1851, p. 453 and 18 October 1851, pp. 623–624. See also ‘Journal of Dr. Scudder: A Wife Restored’, Missionary Herald, November 1851, p. 375.

¹⁷⁰ ‘The Case of the Brahmin Convert at Madras. Judge Burton. From the Englishman, July 1’, Bengal Catholic Herald, 12 July 1851, p. 26. The most detailed account of this case is ‘Madras Supreme Court. In the Matter of Lutchmee Ummal', Bombay Gazette and Indian Daily News, 18 June 1851, pp. 599–600.

¹⁷¹ Satia, Times's Monster, p. 3.

¹⁷² Modak, ‘Civil rights Obtained from the English Government by Our Christians as a Community’, p. 37.

¹⁷³ For a report of the decision as establishing ‘liberty of conscience’, see ‘India’, Atlas, General Newspaper and Journal of Literature (London), 12 July 1851, p. 435. For a brief summary of the case, see also ‘Colonial India’, Royal Cornwall Gazette, 6 July 1851, p. 2; ‘Liberty of Conscience in India’, Kendal Mercury, 24 May 1851, p. 2. As news spread of the precedent established by the Ramchundur case, other ‘native’ Christians, abetted by missionaries, sought to regain custody of their children from Hindu wives. One account captures the horror and violence of the legal separation of a Hindu mother from her children, in which the wife and 12-year-old daughter tried to commit suicide rather than be parted. See ‘Letter from Mr. H. M. Scudder, 8 April 1852’, Missionary Herald, July 1852, p. 206, on his native assistant Daniel's success in reclaiming his children.

¹⁷⁴ ‘The First Suit under the Liberty of Conscience Act’, Friend of India, 13 March 1851, pp. 163–164.

¹⁷⁵ Ibid., pp. 9, 163. The case was widely hailed in this way across India. See ‘Liberty of Conscience in India’, Indian News and Chronicle of Eastern Affairs, 20 May 1851, p. 227; Madras Athenaeum, 1851, p. 60; ‘Law Intelligence, Suddur Adawlut, Narrayen Ramchundur vs. Luxmeebaee, wife of Narrayen Ramchundur’, Bombay Gazette and Indian Daily News, 24 February 1851, p. 186.

¹⁷⁶ See ‘The Disturbed State of India’, Allen's Indian Mail, 21 October 1850, p. 606.

¹⁷⁷ Rev. J. Mullens, ‘Results of Missionary Labour in India’, Calcutta Review, July 1851, p. 272.

¹⁷⁸ Missionaries frequently used the trope of the sleeping Hindu conscience that would awaken under the prodding of Christian education. Rev. J. Wietbricht claimed that Hindu conscience, ‘though hidden under a heap of sin and error, sometimes awakes sufficiently to render him uneasy’. See ‘Conscience of the Hindus’, Morning Star (Jaffna) August 1845, p. 14.

¹⁷⁹ See Mullens, ‘Results of Missionary Labour in India’, pp. 494, 495.

¹⁸⁰ Rev. Munger, one of the American missionaries in Ahmednuggar described how discussing Scripture impressed the ‘truth which it inculcates upon the hearts and consciences of all present’. See ‘Letter from Mr. Munger’, Missionary Herald, July 1840, p. 273.

¹⁸¹ ‘An Account of the Conversion of Two Young Brahmins at Ahmednuggur’, p. 265.

¹⁸² See Report from Ahmednuggur Mission in ‘Southern Asia: Bombay, Ahmednuggar, Madura, Ceylon, Madras’, Missionary Herald, January 1846, p. 42. The report is unsigned, but there is good reason to assume that Ballantine wrote it.

¹⁸³ On the interplay of facts and myths about Wood and the Whig government's policy of non-interference during the famine, see George Bernstein, ‘Liberals, the Irish Famine and the Role of the State’, Irish Historical Studies (November 1995), pp. 513–536.

¹⁸⁴ Newspapers reported Wood's long speech in full. See Evening Mail, 6 June 1850, p. 3. My thanks to Julia Stephens for this citation.

¹⁸⁵ In the Duke of Argyll's reflection on the violent history of India in the 1850s, he connected the protection of ‘liberty of conscience’ under the CDRA with the Wood Despatch. See Campbell, George Douglas, India under Dalhousie and Canning (London, 1865), pp. 66–67Google Scholar.

¹⁸⁶ See Nururllah, Syed and Naik, J. P., The History of Education in India during the British Period (Bombay, 1943), see Chapter 7Google Scholar ‘The Wood Despatch’, esp. p. 169.

¹⁸⁷ On Hardinge's link between the Liberty of Conscience Act and education, see Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company.

¹⁸⁸ In the immediate aftermath of the Uprising, contemporary missionaries and officials analysed the connections between ‘liberty of conscience’, the CDRA, and the wholesale transformation of state-aided education with the Wood Despatch. For a critique of ‘neutrality’ in religious matters as an unmanly sham, see Marshman, John Clark, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward. Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission (London, 1859), Vol. 1, pp. vii–xiiiGoogle Scholar. Sir John Kaye linked the CDRA, which he termed the ‘Law of Hindu Inheritance’, with the Wood Despatch and both with the promotion and protection of Christianity. While praising the CDRA's universal values of religious toleration, he lamented that in practice the law protected only Christian converts and not converts to Islam. He also criticized the Wood Despatch for sanctioning the expenditure of public funds to support Christian missionary schools. See Kaye, John, Christianity in India (London, 1859)Google Scholar.

¹⁸⁹ See Thomas Andrews, ‘Address on Education’, in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Belfast Meeting, 1867, (ed.) George Hastings (London, 1868), p. 99.

¹⁹⁰ See Prys Morgan, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’, in Welsh Society and Nationhood: Historical Essays Presented to Glanmor Williams, (eds) R. R. Davies, Ralph A. Griffiths, Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Kenneth O. Morgan (Cardiff, 1984), pp. 199–215. See also Frank Price Jones, ‘The Blue Books of 1847’, in The History of Education in Wales, (eds) Jac L. Williams and Gwilym Rees Hughes (Swansea, 1978), pp. 127–44.

¹⁹¹ Parliament first legally (rather than administratively) codified a ‘conscience clause’ in Great Britain in 1859 with the so-called Endowed Schools Act. See ‘Amendment to Law regulating Endowed Schools’, in Leone Levi (ed.), Annals of British Legislation (London 1861), Vol. 9, pp. 69–70.

¹⁹² On Llanelly and the campaign to gain state funding for an Anglican National School, see NS/7/2/516, National Society Archives, Church of England Record Office, Bermondsey.

¹⁹³ Conscience and conscience clauses only emerged as subjects of ethical and political debate in India in the mid-1880s, then again in 1904–1905 and 1915–1923. For initial references to ‘conscience clauses’, see Friend of India, 24 February 1870, p. 223.

¹⁹⁴ The overwhelming majority of Catholic parents—though not the entire Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy—made peace with this and sent their children to schools governed by the Educational Commissioners’ Byzantine codes and regulations. Many Protestant parents did not, instead preferring to send their children to private church-affiliated schools that made the Bible the cornerstone of religious, moral, and secular education.

¹⁹⁵ See Inspector Reports, Booterstown and Blackrock Female National Schools, November 1854, February 1855, in Cardinal Cullen Papers, Section 46/3, File II, Educational, no. 1. Dublin Diocesan Archives, Dublin, Ireland.

¹⁹⁶ During the First World War, British officials commissioned an India-wide survey of grassroots demands for ‘conscience clauses’ in schools while simultaneously soliciting the views of missionaries. The detailed reports included 60-year surveys of the history of debates about liberty of conscience in schools as well as granular findings for each school in each district. The overall findings were summarized by H. Sharp, Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, to Sir T. W. Holderness, Under-Secretary of State for India, in a confidential memorandum, No. 13 of 1918, ‘Abstract of Opinion Received from Local Governments on the Question of a Conscience Clause in Educational Codes’, in IOR/PJ6/1478, BL, 1048. See also Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism, pp. 41–47.

¹⁹⁷ Julia Stephens coins the term ‘rubber band state’ to characterize this flexibility and adaptability. Stephens, Governing Islam, p. 14.

¹⁹⁸ The Rev. Alexander Pollock condemned Methodist missionaries for adopting one policy about conscience in schools in Ceylon and the exact opposite at home in Ireland. See Rev. Alexander M. Pollock, ‘The Education Question’, Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, 15 February 1860, p. 168. Pollock's remarks were provoked when his long-time mentor and patron, the Protestant Primate of Ireland agreed to give up Bible education in the poorest schools in exchange for state funding. For Archbishop John Beresford, it was immoral to compromise the education of the poorest members of his flock in order to hold onto his conscientious conviction that true education required Bible study during regular school hours.

¹⁹⁹ On Burke's ‘geographical morality’, see Satia, Time's Monster, p. 40.

²⁰⁰ Khan, Syed Ahmed, The Causes of the Indian Revolt (East Lansing, 1873)Google Scholar.

²⁰¹ On Khan and the Aligarh Islamic reform movement, see the foundational work by Lelyveld, David, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar. Khan championed the translation into Urdu and use of Western ethical, philosophical texts for use in classrooms in the 1860s. On the impact of events in 1857 on Khan's strategy of conciliation with the British empire and his efforts to distance Indian Muslims from their identification with violent rebels, see Yasmin Saikia, ‘Sir Sayyid on History: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and Rethinking the “Rebellious” Muslim Question’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, (eds) Yasmin Saikia and M. R. Rahman (Cambridge, 2019).

²⁰² Murray Mitchell, In Western India, p. 110.

²⁰³ Rev. A. Hazen, ‘Freedom of Conscience, Being Substance of a Lecture Delivered before the United Students’ Society’, Bombay Gazette, 1 May 1856, p. 3.

²⁰⁴ Stephen, James Fitzjames, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London, 1874), esp. pp. 54–57Google Scholar. For an astute contextualization of Stephen and Indian ‘social legislation’, see Sturman, Rachel, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law and Women's Rights (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 21–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Conti, Greg, ‘James Fitzjames Stephen, John Stuart Mill, and the Victorian Theory of Toleration’, History of European Ideas, 42, no. 3 (2016), pp. 364–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰⁵ See H. H. A Correspondent, ‘The Cause of the Indian Mutiny’, Liverpool Daily Post, 24 July 1857, p. 5. This article drew heavily on Hough, Major William, India as it Ought to Be (London, 1853), pp. 3–9Google Scholar. Many contemporary accounts of the Indian Mutiny also emphasized the inflammatory effect of the CDRA. On the CDRA as a contributing cause of the Uprising, see Urquhart, D., Rebellion of India (London, 1857), pp. 24–25Google Scholar.

²⁰⁶ Lloyd's, the radical populist newspaper, offered a similar assessment, linking the Mutiny to the infringement of ‘liberty of conscience’ of Muslims and Hindus. See ‘The High Hand in India’, Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper, 19 July 1857, p. 6.

²⁰⁷ Duff, Alexander, The Indian Rebellion; Its Causes and Results (London, 1858), pp. 246, 181, 304Google Scholar.

²⁰⁸ On the role of post-1857 colonial governance and tools such as the census in codifying and attempting to stabilize caste in British India, see Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

²⁰⁹ Forjett, Our Real Danger in India, pp. 30–31.

²¹⁰ A scathing review of Forjett's book points out that not only did he make himself a key actor in each part of the story, but that his own evidence ‘boomerangs’ against his argument that fear of conversion had no impact on the Mutiny. ‘Our Real Danger in India’, The Friend of India and Statesman, 18 June 1878, pp. 537–538.

²¹¹ On the work of intellectuals like Narayen and Haripunt in the ‘nativizing’ of Christianity as a Marathi religion, see Dandekar, Deepra, Baba Padmanji, Vernacular Christianity in Colonial India (London, 2021), p. xviGoogle Scholar.

²¹² On Haripant's travails, see ‘Local News’, Bombay Gazette, 12 February 1861, p. 2.

²¹³ The Mission devoted almost two pages of its annual report for 1863 to describing Haripunt's life and death. See Report of the American Mission among the Mahrattas for 1863 (Bombay, 1864), pp. 11–12. See also ‘Letter from Mr. Ballantine, January 25, 1864. Death of a Native Pastor’, Missionary Herald, June 1864, p. 173.

²¹⁴ Their eldest daughter, after studying with Mary Lyons at Mount Holyoke, returned to the Marathi Mission in 1857 after marrying fellow missionary Samuel B. Fairbank. See ‘Mrs. Mary Ballantine Fairbank’, Missionary Herald, April 1878, pp. 107–108. Their daughter Mary Fairbank in turn married fellow missionary in Maharashtra, Robert Allen Hume. Mrs Frances Woods Brown worked for four years at the girls’ school founded in 1838 by her great grandmother, Mrs Ballantine, and returned for the centenary celebration. See Letter of Clara H. Bruce, 28 February 1938 as quoted Fisher, ‘The American Marathi Mission’, p. 73.

²¹⁵ ‘Mahrattas’, Missionary Herald, June 1868, p. 197.