WERE CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES COLONIZERS?

For decades, scholars have debated whether Protestant Christian missionaries who travelled from Europe and North America to the colonized world were essentially 'evangelists of empire' or whether they rather served to undermine the logic and operations of colonial rule. In this essay I examine some of the major positions within the debate in the Indian context and argue that these are sometimes fraught by superficial representations of colonial power relations in the subcontinent. Using examples from the Danish evangelical mission's activities in late colonial South India, I suggest that to better understand the missionaries' variable roles in the 'imperial social formation' we need to reorient our critical attention and explore new research trajectories. Not only must we disassemble the analytical categories of colonizer and colonized, we must also take into account the missionaries' part in hierarchically entangled histories in a way that goes beyond an analytical framework of 'metropole and colony'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]