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Article ID: CBB205905451

From Missionary Work in the Pacific to the Future of India: Jean Begg on Faith, Friendship and Social Science in a Life of Service (2021)

Paisley, Fiona (Author)

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume: 22
Issue: 3

DOI: 10.1353/cch.2021.0047

URI: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/841353

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Colonialism Missionaries and missions Social sciences Christianity and politics 20th century, early Sri Lanka Myanmar (Burma) India

The following sets out to investigate the early career of New Zealander Pākehā woman Jean Begg, the head of the YWCA in India, Burma and Ceylon in the 1930s. Begg was tasked with developing local leadership in ways that would contribute to India's peaceful transition towards Dominion status. Although critical of Britain's management of this process, she also considered India as yet to reach maturity as a nation and people, and so endorsed a form of enlightened guidance, one based on Christian progressivism in combination with social science. In seeking to enact a form of social gospel Christianity towards Indian people and particularly women at this time of transition, this one-time Pacific missionary who became a social worker considered that progress towards self-rule was the destiny of all individuals, communities, peoples and nations. Women would be a dynamic force in that process, and modern Christianity, along with the social sciences, would help them to build the cross-cultural partnerships necessary for a world project of reform at once local and global. The ideal of "friendship" on which this international intercultural partnership was to be based was central to Begg's interactions with less "advanced" or empowered women who she considered her friends but also in need of her guidance, an agenda that drove her early career and informed her sense of being an agent for good in the world. As will be shown, Begg's ecumenical cosmopolitanism enabled her work in the Pacific and in South Asia as well as her work among delinquents and youth in the United States and New Zealand. It also led her to question her own sense of authority as a white woman reformer. The many letters she wrote from overseas expressed her desire for fulfilment through service, yet they contain traces of the tensions inherent to her vision of camaraderie and partnership across eugenic, colonial and racial divides.

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