Another nonfiction book consisting of the letters home of a 19th century white century woman who travels to a different country, listened to as a Librivox audiobook! This one is by accredited doctor Clara Swain, who travelled to India in the 1860’s as a missionary and stayed for 27 years.

This book is definitely even more colonialist than the one about New Zealand I listened to last year. The New Zealand one just has a few offhand mentions of the native population which means at least the reader doesn’t get descriptions of active terribleness on the part of the white people, just the knowledge that the writer is there as part of a Very Colonial Endeavour. But this one is all about the writer’s regular interactions with the local people as she tries to convert them to Christianity.

I mean, it was obvious going in that it was going to be terribly colonialist and probably pretty racist, the question was merely about degrees. It’s.....not as bad as it could be, which I know is still not saying a lot. Clara is definitely of the benevolent-paternalism school of racism, which is at least not as directly violent as some brands of racism. But it's still unfortunate, and gets rather bad sometimes. An example:

Clara, as a doctor, regularly goes out visiting local Indian women who are in need of medical care - both in order to heal them, and as an “in” to their household to talk to them about Christianity. (She seems nearly as evangelical on the topics of reading and needlework as she does about Jesus, btw, which is kind of hilarious/terrible. The reading at least makes sense: Clara wants these people to be able to read the bible. But needlework???)

And in Chapter 6 Clara discusses a woman who she’s been visiting who Clara wants to teach how to read. The woman refuses because she says it’s against her religious beliefs but asks Clara to keep visiting her anyway, basically because she is bored and lonely. Clara says she only visits women who are sick or who are willing to be educated so she can’t keep visiting this woman. (Gross use of pressure to make her do what Clara wants!) The woman says she’ll think about it.

Then the woman comes to Clara in distress because her husband is talking of taking a second wife and wants Clara’s help. Clara says she can’t help in the way the woman wants, but she says that if the woman improves herself through learning to read then her husband probably won’t want another wife. (EVEN GROSSER use of pressure to make her do what Clara wants!) The woman promptly agrees to be taught how to read. And then as a result of her education her husband loves her more and she becomes a tidier housekeeper and her husband does not take a second wife.

WOW.

Throughout the book I regularly wished I could hear some other perspectives on the things Clara was saying, because tbh I do not trust her to be a reliable narrator. She is writing to a very specific audience of white people back home who are supporting her in her mission work, so obviously she is going to put a particular spin on things. Plus she’s a racist white person in colonial India which also means that certain nuance is going to be lost. But in this story I just described I PARTICULARLY wanted to hear anyone else’s description of events because....wow, Clara. Wow.

Overall, despite Clara’s issues, the book was an interesting one, though kind of tedious and repetitive at points since it covers 27 years' worth of relatively similar work and the letters are excerpted to exclude anything personal. It was neat to learn about the types of missionary work done in India at that time, especially since at a later era my great-grandparents were also missionaries in India, though in a different region.

And I was also made to think once again about the gendered social roles available to someone like Clara in her era. At one point in the book, Clara makes an offhand comment where she's clear that if she'd been born a boy she would have been an engineer. But in her gender and culture, one of the few ways a woman can have a respectable independent, ambitious, career-focused life is as a missionary. Engineer is right out. It's one of the things that's so interesting in reading about 19th century Western missionary women: wondering what else they might have done with their lives instead, if they'd had more options open to them. Clara seems to genuinely feel called to her mission work, and get real satisfaction out of it (....for better or worse), but she also knows that if she'd been a man she would not have been a missionary. But of course we only get one sentence on the topic because obviously we can't learn too much about Clara's personal feelings about things!

I rather wished in general to know more about what was going on in Clara’s personal life throughout the book, in fact. The extracts from the letters that comprise this book are all about Clara’s missionary work, and there’s just hints here and there of what else might be going on. For example: after 5 years in India Clara goes back to the USA for a home leave, stays for several years, then returns to India looking much more haggard and having clearly uncertain health. What happened during her time at home??

Well, I understand Clara's desire to make sure her published letters didn't include too many personal details since I would probably feel similarly if I were to publish something like that. But it still makes for a less engaging reading experience than Lady Barker's chatty letters from New Zealand.

For the last 10 or so years Clara was in India, she was personally attached as a doctor to a royal family in Khetri (in the region now known as Rajasthan), as she thought this would open a new mission field for her. This somewhat changes the focus of the letters. I found myself very interested in the royal family, as these are the only recurring characters in the entire book who get at least some minor personal details shared about them. Clara acts as something of a grandmother to the three children - two princesses and a young prince. She retires from mission work and moves back to the USA when the prince is still a toddler and the oldest girl is a recently-married preteen. But a decade later, Clara returns to India for a brief visit, and she sees the kids again, and it's nice to get that glimpse into how they grow up, since I'd become kind of attached.

(Except then I googled the rajas of Khetri to discover the names and histories of the people Clara refers to only by title and description, and learned a few details of the kids' fates, though there's not much on the internet about them in English that I can find. Multiple of them die young!!! I'm so sad.)