Missionaries in Postcolonial India:Jesuit Education in Jharkhand after 1947

Missionaries have an awkward standing in the postcolonial era. Critics consider them to be heirs of a ‘civilizing mission’ (Edward Said): the duty to bring Western ‘civilization’ to other parts of the world. Advocates emphasize missionaries’ continuing importance for the emancipation of marginalized regions and groups. This research project wants to give new and solid ground for debates about missionaries' role in the postcolonial era by analyzing Christian missionary education in India after independence in 1947. The project seeks to study how missionaries (and their local successors) changed their ideas about education and how they translated them into practice. It will also pay attention to the changing contexts in which missionaries were working as well as to the perception by local groups. These questions will be answered via the case study of Jesuit education in Ranchi, the second largest Jesuit province in India. The focus on the postcolonial era and the attention to the multi-religious environment are important innovations in the fields of missionary history and the history of education.