About This Project

This project examines nineteenth-century and earlier missionary writing in India as a foundational site of colonial knowledge formation. Missionaries did more than criticize Hindu practices; they described, translated, ranked, and systematized Indian religion and society. In doing so, they helped consolidate categories such as “caste,” “Brahminism,” “idolatry,” “degeneration,” and “reform.” These categories did not remain confined to mission literature. They circulated into colonial administrative practice, census discourse, educational policy, and legal codification, and were later engaged, contested, and selectively internalized by Indian reformers and nationalists.

By curating and thematically organizing extracts from missionary texts, this archive seeks to trace the intellectual genealogy of the present. Many modern debates about caste, religious identity, social reform, and policy operate within conceptual frameworks stabilized in the nineteenth century. This project does not approach missionary writings merely as polemic, but as historical documents that participated in shaping enduring structures of thought. It aims to illuminate how those structures emerged, how they traveled across domains, and how they continue to inform contemporary discourse.