Imperial optics and colonial disability: missions to blind and deaf children in ‘the East’, c. 1880-1939

ABSTRACT This article explores missions to blind and deaf children in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, Sri Lanka, and China which were established by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. Manly staffed by women, these missions can be seen as innovative in the colonial treatment of disability in South and East Asia, pioneering the use of sign languages, tactile alphabets, and oralism as methods of special education in what they referred to as ‘the East’. In making appeals to British readers, missionaries emphasized the humanity of those with whom they worked. At the same time, their representation of disability, ethnicity, and gender were firmly rooted in longstanding colonial and Orientalist discourses which emphasized difference as much as they did universality. I argue that these representations were ambivalent, encouraging both affective connections between missionaries, their subjects, and their supporters back in Britain and defined by racialized and ableist othering. As such, the article aims to track their development and analyse missionary praxis and discourse in relation to disability and colonialism.

East'.Missionaries aimed to make disabled children 'bright' by addressing their bodily, spiritual, and social needs and, as such, worked within a complex framework of race, disability, and gender difference.
The CEZMS missions can be contextualized in terms of two traditions of historical developments that have tended to be explored relatively separately.One is 'overseas' missionary activity in South and East Asia.This work, which dates back to the late eighteenth century, was well-established by the late nineteenth century, and the writings of missionaries provided a major 'conduit of information' about various disparate geographical locations, back in metropolitan Britain. 2 These endeavours have been much analyzed by critical colonial historians and historians of missionaries who, whilst seldom putting disability into the analytic frame, have elucidated the workings of race and gender on the mission stations, providing a useful foundation for this article. 3A second important context is philanthropic (including missionary) work amongst largely white disabled people back in the British metropole. 4Although most work analyzing these developments has not taken an imperial framework, it provides a wonderful basis for understanding another set of pedagogical and institutional forerunners upon which CEZMS missionaries also drew.In flagging some of the commonalities and differences between the treatment of disability in colonial and metropolitan spaces throughout this article, I argue that the CEZMS missions to disabled South and East Asian children represent a dense locus point through which to think about ideas about disability in a colonial context. 5 also build on a range of work that interrogates the complex relationship between disability and post/colonialism and that explores the intersections between disability and race.In his important 2011 publication Blackness and Disability, the cultural theorist Chris Bell urged work on the 'recovery and detection' of bodies that were both raced and disabled. 6Part of my interest in working on CEZMS missions is to uncover the lives of the South Asian and East Asian children who lived in them.Besides a fantastic article on blindness in colonial India by the medical historian Aparna Nair, a recent biography of Amy Oxley Wilkinson, a missionary to blind people in India, and a summary of the missions in my own monograph, Colonising Disability, there is little written about these missions. 7Recovery will form the basis of part one of this article, which sets up what we know about life on the missions, and part four of the article asks questions about 'resistance' and indigenous agency.However, because access to these children's lives is heavily filtered through archival and published records left by the (white, British) missionaries, missionary discourses themselves are by necessity also central to my analysis and this occupies the middle part of this article.In working with missionary writings, I argue that we come back to ideas about the construction of 'race' and the intersectional relationship with disability.The complex relationship between blackness and disability has been explored from both sociological and historical perspectives. 8Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy's work, for example, powerfully analyzes how systems of enslavement were not only physically and psychologically disabling for people who were enslaved but also created discursive associations between disability and blackness. 9In analyzing intersections between race, otherness, and disability in South and East Asia, I hope to add another strand to this work.
1. 'Dust of Gold': the establishment of missions and the children who lived on them Whilst almost all missions (particularly medical missions) had ad hoc interaction with disabled people, the female-led Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (CEZMS) was by far the leading British missionary organization in this period to work systematically with disabled children. 10CEZMS work with blind children started in 1887 in Amritsar (a school that later moved to Rajpur in 1901) and continued amongst missionaries to China with institutions for blind people established in Fuzhou (Foorchow) in 1903 and Jianning (Kienning) in 1908, both in the heavily missionized province of Fujian.Florence Swainson, a missionary at the Sarah Tucker College in Tirunelveli (Tinnevelly), is usually credited with establishing CEZMS work amongst deaf people in South Asia, having come across a 'poor deaf girl' whom she tried to educate, and subsequently found herself inundated by requests for similar treatment from the parents of other deaf children.Swainson established the Palayamkottai (Palamcottah) mission to deaf children in 1897.A similar school was then set up in Mayilāppūr (Mylapore), also in the Madras Presidency, in 1913, to meet the needs of prospective pupils to Palmayamkotta who did not speak Tamil and had to travel too far to reach the school.A school for the deaf and blind was established in Mount Lavinia in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1912. 11n writings for metropolitan audiences, missionaries strove to 'bring alive' the children for their readership back home.The missionary Gladys Bergg voiced this desire: 'How I wish that you could see the "babies"', she wrote of the children under seven years of age at the Sri Lankan mission, 'several of these have only just been admitted into the school and are the most charming little atoms of humanity!' 12 In writing in detail about those with whom they worked, missionaries produced one of the few bodies of writing about disabled indigenous children available to a British readership in this period and indeed to the twenty-first-century scholar.One such child was Grace Anandhi, a resident of the Rajpur mission and the 'school baby' (aged about three in 1915), who comes through clearly in missionary writing.She was found at Saharanpur railway station 'saying her mother was dead, her father had gone to fetch corn and her big brother had gone to work'.The police had taken charge of her, but no one came to claim her, so they took her to the missionaries.Being totally blind, the missionaries sent her to the CMS station at Rajpur, where she was described as 'a loveable, tractable, intelligent and happy creature' who had 'learned to lisp the Lord's prayer, several texts and the hymn "Jesus Loves Me" in Hindustani'. 13Called 'Nanni' when she arrived, she was baptized Grace Anandhi.'If she happens to be in disgrace, she sidles up and shamefully whispers that just now she is not Grace but Nanni; if, however, she is good, which is far oftener, she comes forward gleefully calling "Nani ji (grandmother) salaam", and tells me proudly that her name is Gracie'. 14n his recent monograph on disability in postcolonial literature, the literary and deaf studies scholar Christopher Krentz emphasizes that 'important cultural work' is performed by disabled literary characters in postcolonial fiction by helping to generate 'connection' and empathy not just with the characters themselves but with 'real' disabled people in the Global South through making visible those who are traditionally marginalized. 15Whist missionaries produced non-fictional accounts rather than postcolonial novels, some of the same processes were at work whereby the stories missionaries told about their lives on the missions were self-consciously, as in the writing about Grace Anandhi, intended to provoke an emotive reaction and perhaps even a sense of empathetic 'kinship', as Kretz calls it.Of course, we cannot use this account as in any way a 'true' representation of Grace Anandhi's life, filtered as it is so strongly through the missionary lens, but it does perhaps, give us a glimpse of life on the mission.
In more general terms, everyday experience on the missions involved a strong emphasis on daily routine, education, and in some cases Christianization.Children were fed, clothed in line with missionary ideas about modesty and sometimes received medical treatment, and in some cases being involved in more general missionary activity bound up with conversion.Pupils at the school encountered various techniques of special education, including those being developed in Europe.The aforementioned Florence Swainson and Nesammal, a Tamil resident of the Palayamkottai mission, invented a 'finger alphabet' for the 240 Tamil letters to use with deaf children.Reflecting on this method in 1915 Swainson described it as 'very crude and unorthodox' but that 'it answered its purpose'. 16Despite the transition from manual to oral methods of deaf education in Europe and North America that followed the 1880 Conference of Milan and the subsequent shunning of sign language in favour of the oral vernacular, the school in Palayamkottai continued to use an exclusively manual (sign language-focused) method until around 1912. 17 Even then, it was felt that the Palayamkottai school could 'never be totally oral', due to the age of pupils on arrival, and the short time spent at the mission. 18Sign language there continued to be part of pedagogical communication, as well as everyday life.In Mayilāppūr and Mount Lavinia, however, a different approach was taken with an emphasis on oralism and English language teaching.In Sri Lanka, '[m]any of the children' were claimed to 'both speak and lip-read extremely well and have an excellent command of language, so that one is able to carry on a conversation with them with very little difficulty'. 19We might, however, drawing on scholarship of deaf communities elsewhere, imagine that sign language continued to be used communally between deaf children, if not strictly 'allowed'. 20lind students also encountered pedagogic methodologies used in Europe, which were quickly adapted by missionaries to Indian, Sri Lankan, and Chinese situations.In North India, Mrs. Sheriff and Annie Sharp adapted a Braille 'Hindustani' alphabet that was used as the main form of written communication in the Amritsar and Rajput missions. 21Sheriff Braille', as it became called, was then adapted by CMS workers for use in Urdu and Hindi.22 In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese Braille code was used.23 In China, a huge amount of effort was put into producing 'local dialect Braille' books, pioneered by missionaries, before this was scrapped in the late 1920s in favour of adopting standard Chinese Braille, which allowed missionaries to purchase Braille books in Shanghai.24 The work of transcribing indigenous written languages into Braille and other tactile alphabets was a huge task and it is striking that, at least before the establishment of the Braille Missionary Union in the early twentieth century, this was done by individual missionaries on an ad hoc basis.25 Many indigenous people became very successful in reading these tactile scripts, and in China in particular, some went on to read Bible stories, from tactile texts themselves, in a proselytizing capacity.
Another important part of day-to-day life on the CEZMS missions concerned engaging in 'industrial' practices.Usually taking the form of manual artisanal crafts such as basket-weaving and woodwork, the idea was to occupy the inmates, to train them in skills from which it was hoped they would eventually be able to earn an independent living and to raise money for the mission.Over time, this element of the missions became increasingly successful with industrial work described as a 'large business' in Palayamkottai in 1904 and inmates contributing to a large Exhibition and Bazaar in Rajpur in 1907, winning an award 'for excellence of quality of cane work' in the latter.The same was true in China where weaving was a major operation in the Jianning mission.To some extent the use of industrial techniques in these missions followed on from the structures of institutions for deaf and blind children (and indeed adults) back in Britain, where British deaf children were taught carpentry, blind adults were taught to make baskets, and inmates of asylums for those deemed mentally unwell or experiencing learning disability were taught weaving, knitting and the like.
In the colonial sphere, as well as 'back home', 'industrial work' was also an important part of the reconfiguration of disabled children in relation to ideas of work.As scholars such as David Turner, Kirsti Bohata, and Steven Thompson have argued, the '[i]n/ability to do productive labour has been crucial to definitions of disability in many cultures, past and present'. 26In British culture, beliefs that work was 'good' for disabled people and would help maintain 'social order' significantly pre-date the onset of industrial capitalism.And, with the Industrial Revolution, as Sarah Rose and others have demonstrated, the inability to work in new, increasingly regularized ways demanded by industrial capitalism became pivotal to new configurations of disability in the modern era. 27Those who did not have what Rose refers to as 'intact and interchangeable bodies' or whose minds were unable to comply with specific demands, faced increasing processes of exclusion. 28roductivity was also figured as masculine and work represented as something that did not denote the reproductive labour of birthing, raising, clothing, feeding, and cleaning those destined to be 'workers'.Gendered divides were reflected in the work given to children in Britain and in South Asia and China, with boys tending to be trained in carpentry whilst girls tended to be given lighter craft work.For girls, domestic labour was also a substantial part of the daily routine.In the colonial sphere more so than in Britain, however, ideas of work in missionary writing also drew on long traditions of the racialization of labour, from claims that people of colour were inherently 'lazy' and would not work unless coerced with a whip, to East India Civil servant's denunciations of indolent South Asians. 29n attempting to 'recover' the lives of indigenous children, we might also consider the bonds that the children and adolescent residents of the missions formed socially.There is lots of evidence in Britain and North America that missions and schools formed sites of camaraderie and solidarity between disabled people.Although one has to read against the grain to find it, this can also be seen on the missions.Missionaries were proud of their South Asian mission stations where 'children of every caste, from the highest to the lowest, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu and Buddhists, all live and learn together'. 30hilst sexuality on the missions was taboo, some relationships inevitably developed.By the 1920s, private correspondence between missionaries at the Mount Lavinia station in Sri Lanka described the issue as 'how to provide for many of our young people who have reached … manhood and womanhood', as a 'real problem'.Aside from the problem of how these young people could be supported independently (sending them 'home' was considered 'undesirable for many reasons' and besides Mount Lavinia had come to rely on these older students for the 'routine work of maintaining this large institution'), there was the question of burgeoning sexual relationships between the residents.In early twentieth-century Britain, a context in which eugenics was gaining increased cultural and political resonance, intermarriage between two similarly disabled people was frequently seen as a de facto if not de jure restriction on marriageability. 31Interestingly, this does not seem to have been the case in missionary communities.In Palayamkottai, there were several marriages amongst former pupils and, in the 1920s, Hume Griffith wrote publicly that such marriages were 'satisfactory', not least because 'the children of these marriages are "hearing", normal healthy children'. 32The same was proposed for blind residents, of whom it was claimed that they 'should intermarry, and live where they can be still looked after and cared for', thus solving the problem that 'a normal man will seldom desire to take a blind wife, unless it be as a "secondary" which would of course exclude Christian girls'.In the early twentieth century, such an attitude is strikingly different from that surfacing around British schools for the deaf and blind, where inter-marriage, though not uncommon, was feared in terms of anti-eugenic implications.Perhaps this points to the importance of racial difference in framing the expectations of missionaries.Unlike in Britain, missionaries in South Asia were not concerned about the reproduction of disabled people leading to a 'tainting' of the 'imperial race'.Such discrepancies, which point to the way in which difference along racial lines was formative to missionary thinking, form the basis of the next part of this article.

'In spite of their yellow faces': 33 race and disability on the mission
Writing from Fujian in 1918, one missionary explained to her juvenile audience in Britain that 'Chinese children are very much like English children in spite of their yellow faces'. 34Such a statement both dismisses skin colour and notices it, and the power it could hold.Here we get the crux of the missionary dilemma: whilst theoretically committed to human universalism, race that mattered to missionaries. 35This is unsurprising as missionaries operated in a heavily racialized imperial framework which read 'race' from a range of markers and straddled 'biological' difference and the difference of 'culture' in their writing.Writing from Palayamkottai in 1902, Miss Campbell, a newly arrived missionary to India, listened in appreciation and astonishment to (hearing) children on the station singing: 'I had understood that Indians cannot sing in tune', she proclaimed naively in response to their song. 36Some years later, Miss Nightingale, a visitor to the same station, commented in a letter that '[y]ou would love the little children at once with their merry smile; most of them are naked, but what does that matter if you have a nice brown skin?', again returning to skin colour as a marker of difference. 37isability was also an important marker of difference that went well beyond the impairment used to characterize blind and deaf children and intersected with ideas of race in complex ways.'It is a singular fact', the missionary Sarah Hewlett remarked, and I am not aware whether anything of the same sort has been observed in England or other countries, but in India the blind are peculiarly depraved, and sayings such as the following are quite provable: 'If one devil is in an ordinary man, ten are in a blind man'.
Speculating on the cause of this 'depravity', Hewlett hypothesized that a 'quickening' of 'hearing' accompanied by 'habitual laziness', 'street beggary', and the 'licentiousness' of both 'Hindu Temples' and 'Mohamedan Masjids' were to blame.Elaborating further, Hewlett explained that a 'very large proportion of the cases of blindness in India are the direct result of sin', citing 'child marriage' and the 'shameful degradation of Hindu widows' as 'responsible for instances of idiocy, malformations, and congenital blindness, quite too numerous to come at all within any known process of computation'.She concluded that there were 'hundreds and thousands' of 'helpless little ones whose eyes, limbs or mental devices proclaim them the victims of parental vice'. 38In linking indigenous cultures with high numbers of impaired children, Hewlett constituted disability as a signifier of racial difference.
Working from the opposite perspective, part of the way in which disability was constructed in missionary writing was the recurring trope that disabled people overseas were cruelly treated by indigenous cultures: '[o]ne of the saddest facts in Indian life today is the indifference shown by the majority of the population towards the afflicted, the deaf, the dumb and the blind'. 39The pupils are literally depicted as the 'afflicted children of the East'. 40This affliction was also gendered.'In many Hindu households', one missionary wrote, blind and deaf children are looked upon as accursedas people who have sinned in a former birth and are now paying the penalty of their misdeeds.This feeling is so strong that in the case of girl deaf mutes, whose lives are considered of little value compared with boys, many disappear as soon as their infirmity is discovered. 41e same was argued in China.Miss Codrington, writing from Fujian, deplored the 'startling facts regarding the terribly sad condition of the blind girls and women.Blindness, being looked upon as coming from the Devil is treated as a cursed thing, and the treatment meted out by heathen people to these sufferers is indeed pitiless and cruel'.'It is a significant reality that blind women are comparatively rare in China', she continued, 'because so few survive to womanhood.A motherless blind girl is [often] doomed to death, and for others, their usual fate is to be married to beggars, with whom they live in unspeakable beggar houses, and for whom they have to solicit money in the streets'. 42Writing from Fuzhou (also in Fujian), Katharine Watney wrote that 'China is a land where the afflicted receive neither pity nor help; but rather hatred and contempt', before going on to detail girls 'who have been rescued from death', and other children who had 'disappeared'. 43In missionary discourse, this violent and unsympathetic treatment of disabled people was, as I have argued, heavily racialized, but pity was, of course, also central to the way in which disabled people were also constructed back in contemporary Britain, where domestic missions also wrote about 'saving' (British) disabled people from degradation.As much work has already argued, disabled people were constructed as 'objects of pity' in a range of contexts. 44oth in Britain and in what missionaries referred to as 'the foreign field', pity was closely linked with the construction of disabled people as intrinsically vulnerable.In Embodying the Monster, the feminist scholar Magrit Shildrick points us to an important relationship between 'corporal insufficiency' (which tended to be read off disability), 'vulnerability', and 'monstrosity' in Western thought.Both the monstrous and the vulnerable, she argues, are constituted as negative conditions, and jettisoned from understandings of the contained 'self'.Regarding both vulnerability and monstrosity, she writes, 'what is at issue is the permeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self', neither being 'fully containable within the binary structure of the western logos'. 45Both monstrosity and vulnerability 'signal a transformation of the relation between self and other such that the encounter with the strange is not a discrete event but the constant condition of becoming'.Both vulnerability and monstrosity exist in the realms of 'corporeality', expressed as 'differential' bodies.
The children on the CEZMS can be read as having 'differential bodies' from several perspectives.As Shildrick writes, the 'ideal of the humanist subject of modernity' (the 'self-sufficient', 'rational' 'self') can only be 'maintained' through a 'series of putative exclusions' that typically would include 'black people' 'foreigners', 'animals', the 'congenitally disabled', and 'women', all of which have been seen as, in some ways, 'monstrous'. 46In the language missionaries used to describe their work with brown disabled children, whose disabilities often rendered them (in missionary discourse) animalistic, the figure of the 'monster' (the profoundly other though disconcertingly 'like') is never far away.However, ideas of monstrosity are closely linked with extreme vulnerability.To understand further it is useful to broaden out from those missions directly aimed at disabled children, to think briefly about the wider genre of missionary literature of which missionaries' writing was a part.
In the colonial sphere, ideas about monstrosity were embodied both culturally and in human actors.One example of this can be seen in the representations of Hindu manifestations of divinity in missionary writing, which are the focus of numerous articles, accounts, and journals and are often resonant of that triumvirate of monstrosity, vulnerability, and disability to which Shildrick refers in a very different context.In one depiction of the Snan Jatra bathing festival in Serampore, the idol of the god is described by an unnamed missionary thus: What an ugly monster he is!His goggle eyes stare fiercely.His grinning mouth stretches all across his face.His stunted arms are fixed close to his side, and he looks altogether a hideous, helpless, misshapen monster. 47e relationship between the 'monstrous' and the 'helplessness' in missionary thought, signified through 'goggle eyes', 'stunted arms', and helplessness, into which we might also read vulnerability in light of Shildrick's discussion, is striking.These tropes also occur, though very differently, in depictions of cultural practice as embodied in Indian people themselves.The figure of the Indian husband is often a stock character in missionary literature (paired with equally formulaic depictions of the 'child-bride') and is often represented as monstrous.Again, in such accounts, we can see the weaving in and out of images of monstrosity and images of vulnerability with disability both overtly and implicitly present.I quote from an article published in 1911 at some length: While the girl is still an infant she is bargained away irretrievably to be the bride of a youth whom she has probably never seen and who may turn out … an imbecile, a tyrant or a brute.While still a child the actual marriage takes place, and at an age when our happy children are only half out of the nursery the ignorant and immature Indian girl … will soon be suffering the pains and burdens of motherhood.Her mind is cramped like a pot-bound plant, her body enfeebled by enforced inactivity. 48ere we see the man with a learning disability held up alongside brutishness and tyranny as the archetypal demonization of the undesirable Indian husband.The girl is depicted as disabled (intellectually 'pot-bound', by the marital situation, by the pain of early motherhood, the condition of purdah), and confined in both body and mind.Further, through constructing disabled children as particularly vulnerable, the European, non-disabled, and adult 'self' is solidified and strengthened through a process of counterfoil.As Shildrick argues, both vulnerability and monstrosity are effectively exteriorized, as part of a profound process of racialization.Whilst I have analyzed this here in regard to South Asia, similar processes can be identified in the Chinese material.
Despite the obvious difference in imperial status between Sri Lanka and India as British colonies, compared with mainland China as outside the formal jurisdiction of the British empire (and indeed between disparate parts of India itself), and between the states of being deaf and being blind, very similar language was used to describe all these endeavours.Missionaries deplored the 'sorrows of the three million heathen blind in China', alongside proclamations that the '600,000 blind of India' would, if left undisturbed, 'strengthen Satan's kingdom'. 49The '105,000 blind people in the United Provinces alone' were listed alongside the 200,000 'deaf mutes' in India and 3,000 'deaf and dumb' in Sri Lanka.In all cases, disabled people were described as 'a heavy burden upon the hearts of some of God's children', a 'multitude' who 'live [d] not only in the blackness of heathenism, but also in the blackness of physical blindness', and as victims of 'ignorant and superstitious practice' as well as organic disease and congenital disability. 50Comparisons were drawn between 'at home' and 'overseas': '[i]n England the proportion of blind to seeing is as one to a thousand, while in India it is as one to five hundred'. 51he utter homogenization of the cultures, languages, peoples, and traditions missionaries encountered between the South Asian and Chinese missions is one example of the 'Orientalism' Edward Said so famously explored. 52The complete collapse of cultures into 'the East' is indicative of a profound failure to engage with indigenous cultures at an autochthonous level and a refusal to engage with the specificity of geo-political, cultural, and linguistic differences.'Natives' and 'Europeans' were the categories with which missionaries worked, refusing to acknowledge in doing so not only cultural differentiation but also the geo-political differences between British involvement in South Asia and in China.Alongside skin colour, the language of 'heathenism' was used to bind disparate groups together.Metaphors of 'darkness' played off both colour and spirituality as missionaries discussed their 'great work' of 'bringing light out of darkness to many'.Disability too contributed to the power of these extended metaphors.
At a more granular level, we can also see this homogenization informing praxis in the missions themselves.Whilst many missionaries were at pains to demonstrate the individuality of the children for their British readership, naming them, describing their appearance and characteristics, and providing a backstory to their time at the mission, there is also evidence that the children were treated as a homogenous group and at times reduced to their disability.One revealing slip appears in a description of the work of the matron at the Sri Lankan Station which, significantly, was not intended for publication.The matron ensured that each boy had his correct shirt on: 'No boy must leave her care with Khaki shirt incorrectly buttoned … or hair rough.Nor must B 21 (which means twenty-first blind boy) appear in the shirt marked D10 (which means tenth deaf boy) for such an exchange when it did occur, caused confusion in Matron's orderly department'. 53The fact that the boys were reduced to a number and letter (and a letter reductive of their disability) is hugely striking here and undermines attempts to individualize the children elsewhere.It also brings to mind the work of disability theorist Anita Ghai, and her reading of Albert Memmi's 1967 The Colonizer and the Colonized.Drawing on a disability studies perspective, and on Memmi's scholarship, Ghai writes that those demarcated as 'Others' are seen not as belonging 'to the human community, but rather as part of a muddled, confused and nameless collectivity'.The other, she writes, according to Memmi all 'carry … "the mark of the plural".In other words, they all look alike'. 54hroughout missionary writings we see tensions between attempts at individualization and subterranean convictions that individuals also carry the 'mark of the plural', feeding into, contracting, and enabling patterns of racialization.
There were other ways, too, in which discourses of race and ableism shaped daily praxis on the mission station.Some missions such as the Mount Lavinia school were proudly reported to 'know no distinction between races and dominions', however, even here, a special fee was charged for European students which covered separate accommodation, so the limits of this lack of distinction are questionable. 55Other missions were more explicit in considering race to be more of a 'problem'.For example, missionaries struggled with how to handle 'Eurasian' (dual heritage) pupils at the mission stations.One laid out the situation thus: There will be no difficulty in appreciating a problem which has been presenting itself to Miss Swainson in a very concrete form.Where are English and Eurasian children who have this sad affliction to go in order to receive the special instruction they need?Applications for admission have been made to Palamcottah several times, and they can hardly be refused when there is nowhere else for the children to be sent.But more accommodation is a necessity if these newcomers are to receive proper attention.Miss Swainson is at present in England, and will no doubt be pleading the cause of her 'dummies' in different places. 56plicit in such an account was the taken-for-granted assumption that English and 'Eurasian' children, whilst in this case accepted by the mission (not the case for all CEZMS missions), would not share accommodation with indigenous Indian children.That is, there were segregated living conditions and, it is suggested, educational experiences.In the introduction to this passage, we can note that such a practice was completely naturalized through racialized discourses in missionary thinking.

'A marked change': 57 conversion, 'civilisation', and education
Nevertheless, although there are many ways in which missionaries represented difference as innate, the premise of the missionary endeavour was change, an endeavour to eradicate the difference, or perhaps some of the difference, as explored above.As many scholars of missionaries in other contexts have demonstrated, their work of transformation did not simply concern itself with proselytization but with shifting the entire social and cultural fabric of the people amongst whom they worked. 58This included shifts in the cultural construction of race, changes to religion, and changes to the configuration of disability.Writing of blind children at the Fujian mission, Mrs. Wilkinson wrote of two ostensibly happy boys before reflecting: 'How different would have been the lives of these blind boys in their heathen homes.The Heathen have no pity, and the blind is neglected and often ill-treated; they have nothing to brighten their lives and know nothing of the "Happy land" to look for beyond this life'. 59Whilst the missionary endeavour to change will be familiar to scholars of missions to non-disabled people, so too, from a different perspective, are they reminiscent of the 'overcoming' narratives and tropes likely to be familiar to scholars of disability in British and North American contexts.It is therefore unsurprising that, woven throughout the writing about the CEZMS missions for the deaf and blind, were powerful narratives of redemption, 'civilisation', and Christianization.
Mission stations were literally described as places of transformation, as it was claimed that missionary education let 'sunshine and joy' into the formerly 'wretched lives' of the inmates. 60For example, at the Rajpur mission, it was recorded that many of the children 'have been saved in this school from a life of miserable idleness and brought out of the darkness of ignorance into the wonderful light of reading, writing, and general knowledge, while not a few have found the Light of Life and have begun to be Christians indeed'. 61Such generalizations were then illustrated by individual examples, as in the case of an unnamed Hindu girl 'whose life', it was said, 'has been transformed as by a miracle from a state of utter degradation to one of useful service'.The girl was reported to have grown up 'absolutely without the care or control of the parents' who had thought 'it was not worthwhile to trouble about a deaf and dumb child (and that only a girl), who was useless, and also, in their estimation, devil-possessed'.Following this 'early neglect', when she came to the school at the age of twelve, 'her mind was degraded, and her whole being seemed depraved and degenerate.She was scarcely normal in her behaviour, and often frightened the other children by her wild outbursts of temper, accompanied by fits of screaming'.After a period of hard work, the missionaries believed they had been rewarded: the change was very gradual, but very real, and now this child, formerly uncontrolled and disregarded, is asking for a Christian baptism.What a change!Surely a miracle, and ho! How well worthwhile, to save such as these from lives of sin and misery, for the service of the Master. 62is said the extent to which they actively engaged in systematic Christianization varied between stations.Overtime, the Rajpur mission became explicitly named 'North India Industrial Home for the Christian Blind', and in Amritsar, Rajpur and Mount Lavinia, stories of conversion were frequently and uncritically repeated.We are told, for example, about 'Blind Nihali' at the Amritsar mission, who was 'feebleminded as well as blind' and despite at first seeming as though 'she would always be like an animal', the 'truth found its way into her heart, and she gave satisfactory evidence that she was really a Christian'. 63In China, this tendency was even stronger, as blind people were explicitly trained up as evangelists and 'scripture readers' in their own right. 64In the Palayamkottai mission, meanwhile, it was cautioned that '[w]e cannot speak of many baptisms as unless the children are given over to us entirely, it would not be legal to baptize them without the consent of their parents, who would surely object, though they do not mind what we teach'. 65Writing from all the missions is pervaded with a triumphant sense of the 'marked change' the children underwent.Whilst this could entail Christianization, it was also about 'civilisation' (by which missionaries often meant Westernization) and education.These forceful narratives of change drew on a powerful combination of overlapping tropes that occurred in writing about missions to non-disabled people (conversion and Westernization) and those to disabled British children in the metropole (education and 'civilisation'). 66The centrality of change to missionary practice can be seen in the very titles of their writing, not least in C. F. Gordon-Cumming's pamphlet Work for the Blind in China.How Blind Beggars may be transformed into useful Scripture Readers. 67he mitigation of the difference in disability was also a central axis of transformation.The ability, after missionary education, of previously deaf-mute children to communicate, perhaps even to use oral speech, was seen as transformative: from a degraded state reinforced by the use of animalistic imagery, to a 'civilised' being.As a missionary from Mayilāppūr put it: The child enters the school deaf and dumb.We cannot cure their deafness, but practically all of them can be taught to speak … thoughtful people will realise that it is no easy task and that special teaching is very necessary if these children are to be raised from the state of the 'dumb animal' to any kind of equality with normal people'. 68e kind of imagery that accompanies such a description of the teaching of speech here, which evokes a transition from animal state to human state, from abnormality to normalcy, is typical of the language used to describe the education of disabled white British children in the metropole as well as those overseas, who were also described as 'little above brutes' until the transformation of education. 69In Britain, deafness was readily understood as a barrier to being Christian, particularly since the Reformation and amongst Protestants where spiritual well-being was intimately linked with being able to hear the 'Word of God'. 70Those who were deaf and 'on that account do not attend church' were an identifiable constituency back in Britain.In India too it was felt that children at the mission 'have not only the ordinary barriers to the entrance of the gospel message, but the strong barrier of deafness' (italics original). 71eaching blind children to read was invested with much the same importance.In They Shall See His Face.Stories of God's Grace in Work among the blind and others in India, the missionary Sarah Hewlett repeatedly equated blind children learning to read (Braille) with the bringing of 'light' to their lives, which operated metaphorically to signify Christianization and education.In China, too great stories of transformation were told, the difference in state heightened by emphasizing in great detail the 'degraded' state of blind people prior to arrival at the mission.As the aforementioned missionary Gordon-Cumming put it, many of these blind men and women are simply the most miserable beggars, hungry, and almost naked lying on the dusty highway and clamouring for alms … thus for unnumbered centuries have the blind legions of China dragged through their darkened, dreary lives, a burden to themselves, to all around them. 72e same was true of the 'industrial work' discussed earlier in this article.The assumption underlying missionary thinking was that, as disabled people, the natural life course of the children on the mission would be unproductive.And, this was contrasted against their own lives, which were considered to be highly productive, in keeping with what Max Weber called the 'Protestant work ethic'. 73That the value of industry and the commitment to labour went beyond its practical benefits can be seen in how it was valorized in missionary writing and praxis.Missionaries were highly anxious to convey the changes that their pupils had undergone to their supporters back in Britain.Missionary periodicals and magazines repeated stories of conversion (religious and social) so often that they became formulaic.Photographs and sketches often accompanied the textual imagery, in an attempt to enable the British readership to effectively connect with the children.And on some occasions prize children even travelled to Britain in order to encounter a British audience in person.In 1922, for example, Mrs. Wilkinson, a missionary at the Fuzhou Chinese mission, took 'twelve blind boys' to London where they were to play their 'brass band' at the Church Missionary Society's Africa and the East Exhibition. 74Of course, the boys were not there simply to play music but also to perform other dimensions of 'civilisation' and 'conversion', representing both disabled populations and Chinese populations as both 'like' and 'other'. 75he exhibition of model students could occur within the missions as well as outside them.It was not just the children resident at the mission who were thought to be transformed by deaf and blind education: the success of the missions was also thought to have a transformative effect on visitors and other locals, who could 'witness' the work of God.For example, one missionary wrote of the Mount Lavinia mission that, [o]ne Sunday morning three Buddhist priests came to see our school.They were filled with wonder when they saw the blind boys reading and writing, and heard the so-called 'dumb' child speak.Before they left, they asked who we were and why we did this wonderful work, and this gave us the opportunity of witnessing for our master. 76e tropes of 'civilisation', 'Christianisation', 'Westernisation' and 'education' are heavily entangled in missionary writing.

Disability and resistance
Part of the way in which racist and ableist discourses operated in colonial writing was to assume (or perhaps hope for) passivity.In such writing, non-disabled people of colour and disabled white people were both denied agency, depicted as waiting for the attention of white and/or non-disabled people to 'help' them or conversely to oppress or commit violence against them.Both postcolonial analysis and disability studies have complicated this, increasingly emphasizing ideas about resistance which, as the theorist Michel Foucault argued, always coexists with regimes of power.As the queer cultural theorist Robert McRuer explores in his book Crip Times, there are multiple ways in which disability (or 'crip') resistance can and has been configured, not least in terms of the powerful reclaiming of 'crip' identity, participation in global political and anti-capitalist movements, and the queering of the relationship between disability and sexuality.But what about resistance on the mission station?
The vast majority of published accounts of the children who lived on the mission stations represent these children as obedient, eager to learn, highly compliant and committed to the missionary enterprise.In the uniformity of these accounts, we can perhaps read insecurity in the missionary mindset.To confess to resistance, even in small ways, may be seen as deeply troubling to their project.However, on closer inspection, cracks in their accounts can also be identified.In these cracks, we catch glimpses of small acts of resistance from turbulent bedtimes through acts of petty theft to more generalized 'disruptive' behaviour.
One such resistant child was Stephen, referred to as 'a poor little waif', who was sent to the Palayamkottai mission in 1901 at six years old.'Sharp as a needle and full of mischief his one idea seemed to be, wandering about'.'For weeks it was almost impossible to get him to sit still many minutes and unless watched he was sure to be doing some mischief', one missionary wrote, and '[t]wice when punished he managed to run away, and both times was found after some hours fast asleep with his pockets full of cakes which some kind-hearted shopkeeper had given him'.He kept back bits of the charcoal to be used to clean his teeth and scribbled on the walls with it, chipped away bits of the plaster from the school buildings and was generally up to 'pranks'.Always 'up to some queer tricks', missionaries tried disciplining Stephen by whipping him, dosing him with 'Gregory' (presumably 'Gregory's Stomachic Powder') 'in the hope that his naughtiness came from his not being quite well', praying for him more than they did any other child and, in desperation resorting to putting him in a girl's petticoat so he could not run away (apparently because of the embarrassment of being found 'in that dress', rather than its ability to physically restrain him).Such children not only proved challenging in practical terms but also had the power to rock the discursive power of the mission, which relied on the idea that children should be grateful for the 'help' that had been 'bestowed' on them.It is therefore interesting that in reporting the example of naughty Stephen, the account concluded with his ultimate conversion and his death some years later from whooping cough. 77Ending the account in this way may have been a strategy for containing some of the threats his mischief posed.Describing the behaviour through discourses of 'naughtiness' and 'mischief' may have been another such strategy of containment and indeed the very title of the article, 'Stephen one of the "Dummies" at Palamcottah', can be seen to diminish the power Stephen may have represented.
In one particularly fascinating case that I have written about elsewhere, the children of the mission are discussed using their bodily impairments themselves to engage in resistant behaviour.Writing of the Palayamkottai mission, Miss Swainson asked: What can you do when a naughty [deaf] child deliberately closes her eyes and will not look at you when you are trying to reason with her, and not being able to reach her through her ears, you realize how powerless you are to influence her for what is right. 78e limitations to Swainson's power here were indeed considerable and the acts of the children were, as such, subversive.
An even more substantive threat to the wellbeing of the mission was behaviour that challenged the heart of missionary activity itself such as children leaving the mission, refusing to give up 'heathen' ways, or 'relapsing' on return to their parents.Whilst these were common strategies of resistance to missionary enterprise, all such acts of resistance were highly disruptive to the missionary assumption that disabled indigenous people should be 'grateful' for the 'help' 'bestowed' upon them, as well as the worrying potential of providing fodder for those who believed that people of colour were 'incapable' of 'civilisation'.In the aforementioned article by Miss Swainson about the 'naughty' deaf children refusing to look at her, we also see the wider framework of resistance as Divine Struggle, within which this pretty mild behaviour was interpreted.'Many a time we feel discouraged', she wrote, and 'almost tempted to give up'.'We have had cases which one can only describe as "possessed by an evil spirit" in which the devil seems really fighting for a soul and all we can do is to ask Christ to cast the devil out'. 79It is evident, that despite their strategies of containment, physical and discursive, missionary regimes in regards to the treatment of disability, as in their wider project of proselytization, were also contested.

Conclusion
The relationship between postcolonial and disability studies is evolving rapidly from a range of disciplinary perspectives.In literary studies, Clare Barker, Stuart Murrey, Christopher Krentz, and others have analyzed the multiplicity of disabled characters in post/ colonial fiction and the resonant symbolism and narrative power with which they are invested. 80Whilst I have been examining the representation of 'real' children here, not fictional characters, missionary literature, with its tendency to formulaic melodrama, uses many of the tropes identified in novels and, at the very least tends to share the tendency to use certain 'characters', albeit here based on the work of individuals, to 'bring alive and attract sympathy for the plight of people often doubly disadvantaged'. 81These children, though difficult to get at in an authentic sense due to the way in which their lives were heavily filtered through missionary discourse, are nonetheless examples of disabled people of colour, who, in nineteenth-and twentieth-century colonial discourse, are frequently marginalized into obscurity.Their discussion here, including their small-scale acts of resistance, is only a tiny part of a long process of recovery.In the social sciences, meanwhile, scholars such as Helen Meekosha have pointed to the connections between disability and colonialism and in particular the way in which colonialism, race, class, gender, and disability intersect. 82By exploring how disability and race interwove on the mission station in both discourse and praxis, this article has also attempted to think about race and disability intersectionality and to do so historically.One thing that is clear is the power of colonial discourses to layer differences on top of each other, to use ideas of disability to exemplify and symbolize differences otherwise attributed to 'race'.
Writing of the work at the Mount Lavinia mission in 1915, Miss E. Chapman summed up the hardships she felt were faced by the children there, and the ways in which they could be overcome by the education the mission offered: To be deaf, to be dumb, to be blind, is to have blundered past the three great roads to life and joy, to wander, groping, faltering and afraid, along a narrow path of gloom haunted by vague impressions; and then the new creation, the link between self and the world; a system of dots in relief, tuition in lipreading and most wonderful of all, infinite patiencethese are the slender threads which lead to the door of expression, not flung wide open, it is true, but left ajar, hinges well oiled, ready to be pushed back with trembling hands. 83tting aside the question of blame that, in the use of the word 'blundered', appears to be attributed to blind and deaf people themselves, the passage is instructive.Written of the children encountered in Sri Lanka, the imagery here bears a marked similarity to writings about blind and deaf people in the metropole, who were also depicted as 'afflicted' people, a 'burden' on their non-disabled counterparts, and in need of education and 'civilisation'.But within the rest of the paragraph, the missionary Miss Chapman moves swiftly to position the reader in Sri Lanka, pointing to the 'appalling' high rates of blindness and deafness found on the island, particularly amongst its children, and the suspicion in which the missionaries were held by the children's 'heathen' parents.The combination of being disabled and racialized as different was a powerful one in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, where 'darkness' was associated with both disability and racialized otherness, and missionaries with light, metaphorical and physical.And yet within these heavy racialized and ableist discourses, this article has also attempted to discuss the 'trembling hands' of those children with whom missionaries worked and who resisted, as well as complied with, the worldview they attempted to construct.