Voyaging into a Christian World: Indian children and the Church Missionary Society’s project of world-making, 1920s–1940s

Abstract

This article explores how figurations of children from India changed in the children’s magazine of the Church Missionary Society in connection with its new internationalist ideals. Analysing the content of The Round World, as it was then known, it examines how India and Indian children mattered to the internationalist imaginaries the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was promoting from the 1920s. From the late 1920s, the CMS Young People’s Department and its Education Secretaries fostered ideas of ‘world-friendship’. Against this backdrop, the article explores how children from India not only entered this conversation within the magazine, but were also seen as becoming part of an international Anglican network. Through an unpacking of various categories of narratives, the article argues that this recasting was connected to the political and geographical imaginaries of the interwar years, and explores the closely enmeshed institutional and personal agendas that aided these children’s entry into a ‘world’ of the CMS’s making.

The editor’s letter in a 1930 issue of The Round World (TRW), the children’s magazine of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), opened with an imaginary exchange between four children on the subject of their schools. While the conversation plays out in the editor’s office, not all the children described are English: one was from India and another from China, a detail that pointed to the TRW’s trademark internationalist ardour. ¹ The excitement that such ‘meetings’ entailed is made apparent: ‘The door of my room had burst open again! Before anyone else could shut it, a head, with a long swinging pigtail, peeped round.’ ² As this last child, Cheng Li, enters the room, she is greeted by an Indian boy called Rakhal, who tells her ‘… we’ve met before on our journey here, haven’t we?’ This alludes to the many ‘encounters’ between children of the world that were staged within the pages of the magazine. The docile ‘native’ child from colonial India is a well-known trope that was shaped by dominant nineteenth-century notions of race, and one that appeared in a range of imperialist sources including missionary publications. ³ Something of this rendering has continued to shape even contemporary historical imagination about these children, influencing the kinds of histories that can be written around them. But the contents of the CMS’s children’s magazine during the interwar years contradict this image in a significant way, reflecting a changing attitude that requires closer examination. The Indian children written about in TRW from the late 1920s were no longer pliant, timid recipients of moral and material succour. ⁴ Rather Rakhal’s character exemplified the type that appeared in the magazine’s non-fiction and fiction in the interwar years. ⁵

From the 1920s, TRW portrayed the world as one brimming with friends and kindred spirits, participants in incessant adventures, to accentuate inroads made by the CMS in various countries. Accounts of children like Rakhal or Cheng Li, meeting strangers from around the world, were abundant in the interwar issues and highlighted connections (real and imagined) forged through a network of missionary institutions. It thus presented to its readers a world that was culturally and racially more diverse than the average British children’s magazine. ⁶ Indian children, in particular, stood out in these issues in both fiction and reportage, often portrayed as cheerful, friendly, and resourceful, qualities that connected them with people from around the world.

The CMS had started as a small evangelical society associated with the Church of England in 1799 and expanded across the British Empire over the next few decades. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was the most important Protestant missionary society in India, with numerous schools, orphanages, and hospitals throughout the country. Unlike missionary societies such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, CMS did not simply work within British colonial structures, extending its activities to countries like China and Japan. ⁷ Nevertheless, India was one of the most important sites of its work from the nineteenth century, and it is not surprising that its children’s magazine featured India and Indian children very regularly. ⁸ In its reports and fiction, TRW showed a consistent interest in Indian children, yet from the late 1920s, their portrayal evolved. This article focuses on this interwar moment, arguing that Indian children, and their recasting in the TRW’s pages, were central to the CMS’s internationalist vision from the 1920s until the early 1940s. This focus both validated and demonstrated the ideal of ‘world-friendship’ that gained popularity within the CMS Home Education department in the 1920s.

This article thus contributes to the global history of interwar internationalism in two ways: first, it draws attention to how young, non-white actors from a colony were represented, and to an extent participated, in a Christian missionary society’s internationalist enterprise. Despite its commitment to studying ‘those in steerage’, global history’s understanding of non-elite actors is still considerably restrained. ⁹ Studying a British missionary children’s magazine allows one to see how children, especially Indian children from marginalised backgrounds, entered a project of global Christianity, and how stories of their actions and experiences sustained the Anglican utopia of world-friendship.

Second, it calls attention to the changing valence of race in the tapestried world of friends projected by TRW. Although the endurance of imperialist assumptions in internationalist enterprises has received much attention, the idea of race has not been adequately problematised in these contexts, with racial hierarchies being primarily regarded as inflexible and unchanging. Exploring how race interacts with age and histories of nurture is integral for understanding interpersonal relationships that emerged in the course of internationalist enterprises.

Throughout the nineteenth century, missionary literature relied on and promoted racial stereotypes. Indian children were primarily seen as pitiable, ‘mouldable’, slavish, and overall inferior to white children, who showed initiative, empathy, and moral character. ¹⁰ Scholarship on Christian missions focuses primarily on white children—either children of missionaries or children who were part of Protestant missionary causes in Britain or the settler colonies. ¹¹ Missionary societies often mobilised children to act for particular causes. The funding of the London Missionary Society’s ‘John Williams’ ship is one of many examples of the kind of response missionary children’s literature elicited from its readers. ¹² The prototype of the reader-actor in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was the white child, although in recent years it has received some resistance from scholars of African American childhood, who have drawn attention to reader-communities forged among non-white children through children’s magazines. ¹³ Indian children’s dialogic encounters through print have received little attention in comparison, although there has been significant interest in literary production shaping children’s subjectivities in colonial India. ¹⁴

This article attempts to dislodge Indian children from the histories of education and imperial agendas, where they are usually ensconced, and places them within the context of global encounters. For this, it draws upon certain strands of historiography on interwar internationalism: the first looks at internationalist debates within the Christian world in the interwar period, especially within the Protestant sphere. ¹⁵ The League of Nations was closely connected to the liberal Protestant sphere, and parallels between the League’s ideas of international cooperation and the Anglican debate on ‘ecumenical internationalism’ are often drawn. ¹⁶ Though its commitment to pacifism is a contested issue, in the 1920s the League garnered the support of diverse peace organisations, including social Christian organisations. ¹⁷ The fact that many political elites from the Anglo-American contexts who were known for their internationalist advocacy were liberal Protestants also shows how articulations of global Christianity were entwined with the League of Nations’ own articulations. ¹⁸ But Protestant internationalism did not simply mirror the League’s concerns and went beyond the issues of pacifism and realism. ¹⁹ Debates within Anglican missionary societies on international cooperation, ecumenical harmony, and universal brotherhood predated the First World War, ²⁰ and were also connected to the Anglican Church’s increasing attention to indigenous churches in the non-western world and its conviction that a harmonious future relied on their stability and the strengthening of native Christian leadership. ²¹

Secondly, scholars of interwar Christian internationalism have recently turned to non-western contexts that were connected with liberal Protestant internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, with India as a key locus of exchanges occurring between individuals and institutions within the internationalist Protestant sphere. ²² Feminist scholarship on a variety of evangelical and humanitarian enterprises in the Global South has emphasised the fraught nature of cross-cultural ventures anchored in ideas of ‘maternalism’ or ‘friendship’. ²³ These provide insights about the tensions within internationalist projects when read in conjunction with the broader scholarship on the endurance of imperialist ideas in interwar internationalist ventures. ²⁴

The third strand is the historiography on the influence of internationalist ideas on the young. Scholars have explored the diverse projects and experiments in the interwar years that attempted to inculcate internationalist values: from altered school curricula to the introduction of exchange programmes in order to give young people international exposure. ²⁵ Apart from humanitarian enterprises such as the Save the Children Fund, which emerged in this period, ²⁶ some internationalist ventures even involved the participation of children from non-western contexts, for example the Girl Guides movement. ²⁷ Schools promoted internationalism by encouraging children to debate and familiarise themselves with predominant political ideologies. ²⁸ Children’s literature of this period sometimes upheld internationalist imaginaries, even if its attitude towards other races and cultures was often contradictory. ²⁹ In some cases pacifist values influenced curricular reforms in order to reorient children’s understanding of the ‘world’. ³⁰ Thus ideals associated with the League of Nations spurred many efforts to promote feelings of international cooperation among the young and to teach children to become world-citizens. With few exceptions, scholarship on such ventures remains centred on the Global North.

As a source, TRW is particularly significant in this regard. Its contributors were almost exclusively white. Its contributors on India were often missionaries who taught in CMS schools or worked in its orphanages across India. They wrote fiction but also reports emphasising what children said or did. Though the reliability of these accounts cannot be ascertained, TRW is one of the very few sources on Indian children from non-elite backgrounds and their connections with those from other parts of the world. This article focusses only on content related to India, although in the same period, TRW also featured children from places like Persia, China, Japan, and Egypt.

Considering TRW as a source on children’s exchanges with others raises certain methodological challenges, especially since reports often adopted the format of the story, complicating the distinction between fiction and record. Children’s voices often appear to be ventriloquised, and there are striking similarities between accounts. I have used a cluster of markers to categorise reportage and fiction. ‘Reportage’ here includes anecdotes, letters, and announcements of events and their outcomes. Those features that include phrases like ‘a true story’, photographs, and names of specific villages, dioceses, schools, or orphanages are considered reportage. ‘Fiction’, in contrast, is the content using generic place names, and which alludes to children engaging in fantasy-travel.

It would be amiss to claim that TRW was a mouthpiece for children. Like most missionary children’s magazines, TRW had its own ideology, and its content was in keeping with its interests. I contextualise its particular, internationalist vision against the backdrop of discussions in the CMS about a world perspective, reading TRW in conjunction with other CMS periodicals, annual reports, papers of the CMS Education Secretaries, and of select committees that worked to promote foreign missions among the young. In the interwar years some of the key themes of the magazine—friendship, travel and adventure, and generosity—helped to consolidate its vision of an ideal ‘world’. Exploring how Indian children entered these discussions in TRW, and situating them within the historiography on global Christianity, reveals how even actors who were unaware or unconcerned with the changed political situation of the world mattered within a very specific internationalist fantasy.

‘World-Friendship’: TRW and CMS in the interwar years

TRW was part of the larger CMS family of magazines that included the CMS Gleaner, CMS Outlook, CMS Intelligencer, and India’s Women and China’s Daughters. These featured commentaries on evangelical work, appeals for financial contributions, and occasional biographical sketches of some missionaries. The children’s magazine also followed this format at first. Established in 1842, the magazine initially named CMS Juvenile Instructor had a didactic orientation, with quotes from the Bible and moral lessons embedded in all its content. It was redesigned and renamed, once in 1890 when it became the Children’s World, and then in 1901 when TRW came into existence. The Juvenile Instructor held an overtly imperialist view of places like India, China, and West Africa. India appears hostile and alien in anecdotes of idol worship, superstition, and ignorance, legitimising missionary intervention but equally highlighting the formidable nature of evangelical work in such places. For example, an account of native schools in India painted them as dismal and absurd institutions, with an accompanying illustration of students holding outrageously acrobatic poses of punishment next to a cane-wielding master. ³¹ Such portrayals were characteristic of the overall disfavour with which the magazine regarded India and other colonies.

Increasingly, the Juvenile Instructor included more fiction by popular writers like A.L.O.E., ³² and as Children’s World, the magazine, despite its moralising tone, featured content that was more engaging and less fixated on Scriptures. This new orientation may have been the result of CMS’s increased self-consciousness regarding its approach towards children. The conviction that mission work had to be appropriately and imaginatively introduced to children was articulated within the CMS from the late nineteenth century. At a Gleaners’ meeting the Rev. T.C. Chapman, a missionary serving in New Zealand, suggested that games like Lotto, Post, and Turn the Trencher be deployed to acquaint children with mission stations. ³³ At a Young People’s Union (YPU) conference in 1911, the secretary of the Belton branch ‘in a racy paper described the ways in which boys may be beguiled to help and led on to take a keen interest in the work’. ³⁴ TRW was born out of this legacy and thus stood apart from earlier iterations of the magazine. Foreign missions had a significant place within it, infusing the fabric of TRW with a remarkable diversity.

Initially directed towards children within Britain, TRW’s ambit grew as its readership expanded world-wide. By 1927, it was said to have a circulation of ‘over 50,000 copies’ per month. ³⁵ As the editors’ comments in some of the issues indicate, copies were also distributed outside Britain, through the CMS networks, to places like India and Japan. Its contributors were mostly missionaries serving the CMS abroad, ³⁶ so the sixteen-page magazine comprised fiction, letters, images, and reports from CMS schools, orphanages, and hospitals. Many of its editors at some point in their careers were also involved with foreign missions. Notable among them were Constance Padwick, Violet Vodden, and Margery Sykes. Padwick, who was editor from 1914–16 was a ‘literary missionary’ who had spent many years in Egypt and Palestine. ³⁷ Likewise, Vodden, who was editor before Sykes, was familiar with foreign missions, ³⁸ and both she and her husband the Rev. Henry Vodden sought to popularise missionary fiction for children.

TRW featured news of various CMS children’s organisations like Mothers’ Union and Sowers’ Bands and their fund-raising activities. ³⁹ The most significant organisation, however, with which it was intimately connected, was the YPU, founded in 1906. The YPU familiarised children with the society’s work abroad, organising ‘talks’ by missionaries, arranging exhibitions, sale of works, and even conducting examinations to appraise members’ knowledge of CMS’s work abroad. ⁴⁰ News of the Union’s activities occupied much of TRW’s reportage, especially from the 1920s. Through it, TRW’s readers learnt of CMS’s projects in other countries, which were either featured in ‘YPU Talks’ or which had received gifts from the YPU. Apart from this, the magazine had its own fund-raising enterprise, ‘Share Plans’, a feature wherein each month readers sent contributions for specific CMS-aided institutions in other countries. TRW also organised monthly competitions, which involved readers making and sending dolls and notebooks, for example, to children in other countries. It thus encouraged reader participation across all its features.

In the initial years, TRW acknowledged children who had sent gifts or funds for a CMS cause. But after the First World War, two changes distinguished it from the earlier issues. From the 1920s, ‘interaction’ among children across the world came to be a subject of intense display. The magazine, through its non-fiction and fiction, started implying that readers could and often did ‘meet’. A related change was its emphasis on international friendship.

The rise of internationalist ideals within the CMS from the 1920s was partly reflected in CMS periodicals of this period, which advocated a more global imagination of its community and nurturing camaraderie across countries. Some periodicals, such as CMS Home Gazette, asked for an inclusive approach to mission work and denounced the distinction between ‘Foreign’ and ‘Home’ missions. ⁴¹ Others stressed the need for cooperation between churches and were vocal in their support for the ecumenical movement. ⁴² Debates about the importance of ‘native’ churches were renewed against this backdrop. The idea of ‘diocesanisation’, whereby control of native churches would be handed over from missionary societies to the diocese, was one such example. ⁴³ The CMS Secretary Henry Venn had emphasised as early as the nineteenth century that missions should ideally create local leaders until missions were no longer required. In the 1920s, at the peak of the ecumenical movement, ⁴⁴ some of these concerns were reinforced in a political context in which discussions about international cooperation reigned supreme. At the International Missionary Council’s meeting in 1925, ‘the independence and spiritual vitality and efficiency’ ⁴⁵ of indigenous churches was a central theme. CMS reflected this interest in Protestant communities beyond the western world in its reworked imagination of the ‘world’ as the parish, relinquishing localised or national imaginaries. ⁴⁶

The concept of ‘international friendship’ epitomised the pacifist ideals of interwar Christian internationalism. In Britain its primary champion was Willoughby Dickinson, who was as closely connected with the Protestant sphere as he was with progressive politics. ⁴⁷ The fact that Dickinson, a proponent of the League of Nations, also established the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship, points to the possibility that the idea of friendship in the Anglican Communion emerged from the cross-fertilisation of notions of harmony and cooperation that prevailed in both spheres. In the 1920s, these diverse articulations and concerns made their way into various CMS periodicals, and in the TRW they produced a specific idiom—the idea of ‘world-friendship’.

CMS Education Secretaries had expressed the desire for internationalist teaching material for some years. In 1923, members of the newly created Committee on Adolescent Work contemplated how missionary children’s literature could be deployed to effectively promote an interest in the ‘world’. ⁴⁸ A memorandum for teachers from the Home Education Secretary of CMS enclosed the names of some ‘books on “WORLD FRIENDSHIP”’, including titles such as Enter China and Talks on Friends in Japan. ⁴⁹ ‘World-friendship’ appeared in CMS bulletins and circulars in 1928, where it featured in advertisements for missionary books for children. ⁵⁰ ‘World-friendship’ books continued to be advertised in its circulars into the 1930s, as well as in advertisements in TRW. Within the decade many such titles were circulating in the British market. In 1933, Margery Sykes reviewed several children’s titles for CMS Home Gazette weighing their worth as potential Christmas presents. Discussing the suitability of books like Everyday Tales of China and Yarns from the Far East, Sykes saw them as bestowing on readers a gift ‘specially right for Christmas—world-wide friendship’. ⁵¹ She said they were like magic carpets, allowing the child to ‘sail over the barriers of time and space’. ⁵²

In the pages of the TRW, friendship was enacted through narratives of encounters or exchanges between individuals. A significant characteristic of TRW’s content in the 1920s and 1930s was a depiction of the missionary enterprise as a Christian adventure, in which encounters between children could take place at a world level. Stories about ‘friendship’ were yoked to the act of voyaging—in fantasy and sometimes vicariously through the eyes of missionaries—across the world, but really within the Christian world. While the magazine continued to be published into the 1950s, by late 1940s it had lost its ‘world’ focus, instead turning to the idea of the Commonwealth, reporting mostly about select missions in Uganda, Kenya, scattered stations in the newly formed nations of India and Pakistan, and Malaysia.

Indian friends

Indian children’s appearance in TRW’s interwar issues prompted the use of certain strategies to emphasise readers’ closeness with them. The idea of friendship implies that it disregards and even unmakes hierarchies, including those of race. Yet scholarship on interwar internationalism reveals that some of the most liberal enterprises that promoted cross-cultural friendship could not rise above the hierarchies of race. ⁵³ Even within the Anglican sphere, race was a significant concern, especially in the early twentieth-century debates around ecumenical cooperation. At the World Missionary Conference of 1910, Bishop Samuel Azariah, the first native bishop of the Anglican Communion drew attention to the relationships among white workers of Anglican missionary societies in India and the native Christian co-workers. ⁵⁴ One of the central subjects of the speech was ‘friendship’, which Azariah said was not to be equated with ‘condescension’. ⁵⁵ Azariah’s speech was not only a sharp critique of the imperialism pervading Anglican missionary societies, but it simultaneously highlighted the challenges of ecumenical internationalism. Azariah stressed reciprocity over sacrifice or self-denial as the foundation of friendship, an assertion that points to the stark inequalities obscured by claims of friendship.

In earlier times, the CMS children’s magazine also resorted to racialised expressions, even in sympathetic portrayals of children. In 1895, Children’s World published several letters written by the editor on her travels across Ceylon and South India. In one letter, titled ‘My New Friends’, the writer says that in the course of her travels, she had learnt ‘even Heathen children’ could answer questions related to the Scriptures. ⁵⁶ The ‘friends’ in question—Hindu girls of a missionary school in India—could read deftly from their Tamil Bibles. Full of praise for them, the readers are told: ‘Now white children must not be left behind in this best knowledge by my brownie friends at home.’ While the ‘charm’, ‘grace’, and responsiveness of the Tamil students of the Sarah Tucker Institution won them admiration, their differences from English children were obvious, especially when they were said to ‘look as merry and roguish as even Irish children could do’. ⁵⁷ The descriptions reveal a constellation of assumptions and stereotypes used by the magazine for non-white children. The term ‘friendship’ was also used more loosely as an expression of sympathy towards the ‘other’ than for any cross-cultural or interracial exchange.

Thirty years later, the concept of friendship took centre-stage in TRW. It also articulated differences as well as affinities among children, but in a manner that was in stark contrast to its earlier issues. The imaginary of ‘world friendship’ parlayed in TRW in the 1920s and 1930s did not have the overtly imperial tone that characterised earlier claims of ‘friendship’. In a 1927 article, readers were asked to help their ‘friends’ in India by extending their support to the missions. ⁵⁸ But unlike earlier appeals it refrained from suggesting an asymmetrical relationship. The writer instead suggested Indian and British children were already acquainted, citing YPU ‘Talks’ as the basis. The article stressed that the exchange of letters, photographs, and gifts between the two countries through YPU had led English children to ‘feel real friends[hip]’ with the Indian children featured in the ‘Talks’. ⁵⁹ This appeal to feelings born of prior acquaintance was used for persuading TRW readers to invest in ‘Round World Shares’. TRW used reportage, photographs, and illustrated serial stories to promote a more expansive notion of friendship with children whom the readers had not ‘met’.

This idea of far-away friends one had not met in person was a powerful theme in TRW. ⁶⁰ Some of the editors in the interwar years played a particularly significant role in emphasising international friendship. Violet Vodden, for example, in the late 1920s wrote serialised fiction for TRW. In one story, some English children discover their ‘friends’ over a Christmas spent in quarantine through children’s books written by missionaries. The story’s overarching assertion was that these friendships should not be dismissed as being simply ‘make-believe’ but rather should be seriously regarded. As one of the English boys in Vodden’s story says: ‘You see these boys and girls we have got to know have become our friends and you can’t drop friends just because the game is over.’ ⁶¹ Vodden explored the same theme in another story published in 1930, where English children ‘encounter’ their friends through missionary literature. One of the characters exclaims, ‘I think stories of people in other countries are much nicer than fairy stories or just English ones’ ⁶² —a perspective the CMS Education Secretaries had been popularising since the 1920s.

These stories, especially in their embedding of fiction within fiction, reflected CMS’s attitude towards missionary literature for children in that period. Insisting that stories of far-away children were not mere fiction allowed TRW to legitimise its claims of ‘world-friendship’ between children and to mobilise funds towards overseas missions. ⁶³ At the same time, children’s fiction about ‘friends’ in other lands was actively marketed by the CMS as an exciting genre.

Non-fiction content emphasised the same theme of connections between children from around the world. In one issue, the editor discussed a competition announcement in the magazine that had elicited an unexpected response when a copy of it reached ‘a far away village in India’. ⁶⁴ On reading about the competition, in which winning entries (of paper bead necklaces) would be sent to children in Africa, the Indian girls reportedly crafted necklaces with the resources at hand—paper wrappers peeled off tins of paint. The imagery of children from a village ‘far away’ participating in a TRW competition with limited resources, and for African children, accentuated the transregional influence of the magazine. Given the great distances, it is doubtful whether entries sent by readers outside Britain would have reached the TRW office in time. However, the editors appeared increasingly conscious of the fact that TRW was being read in other parts of the world. Buoyant from the incident involving the Indian orphans, the editor pondered the possibility of Japanese children reading about the next month’s competition. ⁶⁵

TRW’s reports about India also covered the activities of Scouts, Guides, and Bluebirds organised primarily in CMS schools. ⁶⁶ Although reporting emphasised visible cultural differences, such as the sari worn by Girl Guides in Purulia, it drew attention to how these girls’ engagement in patrol work, team races, and games was similar to that found in Guide companies elsewhere. ⁶⁷ Such depictions were in accordance with broader CMS views on reaching out to English children. The Committee on Adolescent Work, founded in the 1920s, debated at length the requisites of appropriate reading material for the young that would foster an interest in foreign missions. At its first meeting, one of its members, a Mrs Thornton, spoke of the need to ‘emphasize [the] likeness of people of other lands to ourselves not the differences’. ⁶⁸ This strategic use of sameness is also found in other examples of interwar children’s literature. ⁶⁹ In the case of TRW, this emphasis implied expurgating the unequal balance of power that previously characterised relationships with Indian or other non-white children.

TRW occasionally deployed familial imaginaries centred around missionaries who worked among Indian children. ⁷⁰ In 1936, it published a letter allegedly from a child. The writer claimed kinship with the CMS through Miss R.M. King, a missionary who had taught at the CMS school in Gojra. ⁷¹ The letter presented an account of Victor Zaffar ul Zaman’s everyday routine to his ‘grandmother’. The letter offers TRW readers a picture of domesticity in a Sindhi Muslim family: ‘In the evening, when the lamps are lit, and my mummy, abba, grandfather and uncle are free, I give them a dance such as we have on Bisakhi day, so much so that my abba calls me Bisakhi-wala.’ ⁷² Although the first-person narration rendered it implausible, the letter was not presented as fiction but as an instance of CMS’s real connections with children far away. The editor, in a separate note, substantiates the claims of relatedness made by the letter, regardless of its peculiarity. Victor’s mother was said to have been ‘an orphan girl, a poor little Indian waif whom Miss R.M. King found many years ago’ and was educated at St Faith’s Gojra, which Victor hoped to attend when he was older. The note explains that as his mother addressed Miss King as ‘Mother’, the missionary was his ‘grandmother’. Affiliation to missionary schools and orphanages was often the basis of purported intimacy between children and missionaries in India and was not restricted to CMS workers alone. ⁷³ TRW’s strategic appropriation of such narratives and the deployment of fictive kinship woven around two generations of Indian children strengthened its claims of a connected children’s world, by emphasising that real connections already existed.

Some Indian adults were also swept into TRW’s world of friends. In a work of fiction by the Rev. C.W. Haskell of the New Zealand CMS, an altercation takes place between a fourteen-year-old boy and his father, as the latter destroys a copy of the Gospel of St Matthew found in his son’s possession. But a local Colporteur, ⁷⁴ who had given the boy his first copy, procures him yet another and is thus portrayed as a friend of CMS. ⁷⁵ Non-fiction in TRW also upheld some Indian men as ‘friends’ of its international community. Bishop Azariah was the most written about in TRW in the interwar years. Another figure was the Rev. S.K. Tarafdar, a Bengali who later became bishop. TRW’s reportage emphasised Tarafdar’s friendly attitude towards children during his time as principal of the CMS boys’ school in Chhapra. ⁷⁶

Real figures also appeared in TRW’s fiction, allowing the magazine to suitably work them into its more recognisable tessellations of friendship. In one story published in 1934, a little girl ‘meets’ her imaginary brother whose name is Azariah. ⁷⁷ While it does not explicitly say that this child was the future Anglican bishop, a description of Azariah’s village with its surroundings of palm trees and villagers worshipping local deities places him in Tinnevelly, ⁷⁸ where the real Bishop Azariah went to school. ⁷⁹ The children ‘meet’ in their imagination—a recurring theme in TRW. Like most adventure stories, this too deploys visible markers of climatological, geographical, and cultural difference such as a pet mongoose, an elephant, poverty, and worship of the snake-god formulaically. Despite these differences, the fact that the children ‘pretended’ themselves into each other’s surroundings indicated a special mobility afforded to children who were part of the CMS ‘world’. This did not rest on imagination alone, but on familiarity that was fostered by CMS’s work and that came from reading TRW’s reports. That the magazine was selectively genial is exemplified by its attitude towards the Mahatma Gandhi, who is mentioned in two issues and yet not entirely regarded as a friend. ⁸⁰ In a magazine that considered Azariah its friend, this is not surprising. ⁸¹ Yet Gandhi’s presence in an itemised ‘must see’ holiday list emphasises the extent to which TRW exerted control over who its readers should be acquainted with, and how.

India and the great CMS adventure

He has lived on the flat top of my desk ever since Christmas; and on the grey, gloomy, nothing’s-going-to-happen sort of days, or on the sunny blue sky days when I want a change, I just jump on his little pink saddle and off we go together to discover all kinds of things. ⁸²

Thus began a serialised column in 1929, acquainting TRW’s readers with CMS’s expansive network. The column ‘Wanderings of a Wooden Horse’ acquainted readers with the ways in which the CMS General Fund was utilised. ⁸³ It emerged at a time when a dominant view among CMS Education Secretaries was that children’s literature should portray ‘the adventurous, romantic and heroic aspects of Christian discipleship’ in its depiction of the foreign missions. ⁸⁴ ‘Wanderings of a Wooden Horse’ appears to have been inspired by a similar view, using adventure and travel to weave in mundane reports of missionary funds and how they were utilised.

Adopting an approach typically found in fantasy fiction whereby Augustine, the toy horse and the author of the column, travels outside Britain, the column featured some of the institutions established by the CMS in the overseas mission stations. The approach allowed it to evoke a Christian landscape encompassing diverse geographies, in which evangelical work was an adventure. This mode of storytelling using travelling objects had been adopted by the magazine before in the early twentieth century, in a column written by the missionary Percy S. Shaul, whose talking satchel was the mouthpiece for stories of missionary work. ⁸⁵ Shaul’s column, with its emphasis on abject landscapes, dusty roads, and starving children, stood in stark contrast to the column that appeared in 1929.

Augustine’s ‘wanderings’ promoted an Anglican geography that was enticing and yet believable. ⁸⁶ Readers often traversed this ‘world’ without having to physically travel. One of its chief attractions was the promise of adventure and respite from a quotidian life in Britain. This imagined geography even animated discussions about the CMS General Fund whose pragmatism might otherwise have been unappealing:

‘Umph’, said Augustine, ‘that sounds a bit dull. Now I’, he went on in an argumentative tone, ‘I like a fund that helps something you can really know about—say a hospital in China, or a school in Africa—or to buy lantern slides (I love pictures!) for a missionary in India, or even to get paper and pens for you, to write TRW with’. ⁸⁷

The column’s excursionist tenor is exemplified in the following exchange: ‘“Where to?” called Augustine as I swung myself up. “Can we go out of England?” “Rather”, I called back, “to all the CMS countries—choose which you like”.’ ⁸⁸ This emphasis on a limitless world made up of ‘CMS countries’ reflects the internationalist mood within the Anglican sphere. But it also makes ‘world-travel’ seem accessible to readers in its suggestion that the CMS had already fostered the relationships they would need. Through its commitment to world-friendship, it had laid the tracks for their adventure, and now all children needed to do was to respond to these relationships to take off into any ‘CMS country’ of one’s choosing.

From the August issue, Augustine started acquainting readers with projects across central and south Africa, Japan, Persia, and also Britain, showing the activities at the headquarters in Salisbury Square, London. India and Indian children were significant presences in this capacious world. In one issue, Augustine travels to Sikandra, where he come across boys from the CMS school swimming in a public bath with their English master and having a ‘ripping time’. ⁸⁹ The author explains the significance of this scene, telling readers how some of the boys teaching each other to swim came from castes as disparate as Rajputs and the Chamars who otherwise would not even converse. ⁹⁰ The scene is thus a testament to the work of missionary schools. At Sikandra, Augustine also visits a printing press supported by CMS, where he finds there are vacancies for English prints men. ⁹¹ Despite its use of the fantasy genre to transport readers in imagination, the column frequently crossed the borders of reportage and fiction to document actual traffic of artefacts, funds, and prospects.

Internationalist encounters in TRW were often hinged on other travelling objects, such as dolls, that were culturally and racially coded both in fiction and non-fiction. In one story, an English girl receives a Chinese doll from her aunt, who hopes it will instil in her an affection for Chinese children and someday make her want to travel to China. ⁹² Like photographs and adventure stories, such objects also acted as an impetus to know the CMS’s ‘world’. But desires for excitement and adventure were at times recoded into more weighty sentiments like ‘duty’ and Christian love for others. The dolls were the surrogates of children who sent them, ⁹³ travelling across continents, meeting all sorts of people. In many works of fiction, children followed the routes already physically traversed by dolls in flights of imagination. In one serialised story, readers were introduced to a fairyland-like Japan through the adventures of Thea and Chris, a pair of twins who learn about porcelain dolls traditional to Japan and find out how the doll they had sent from England was received. Even beyond dolls, adventure in such stories was in itself a lesson in cultural diversity. When the children cannot identify the country they are in, they try deducing it from their knowledge of other cultures. Thea tells Chris, who cannot identify the kimono worn by a Japanese girl walking past them: ‘Tisn’t a sari you juggins! That’s what they wear in India.’ ⁹⁴ TRW’s world focus acquainted readers with a variety of places, instilling in them an ability to distinguish one foreign culture from another.

Geographical diversity made up an important part of adventure stories in TRW in the interwar years. One such story published in 1933 was set against the backdrop of the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests in southern Bengal. ⁹⁵ Revolving around another pair of twins—Jean and Jock Mackenzie—who visit their estate-manager father in India, the story narrates their adventures in the wilderness of Baghmara village, surrounded by wildlife, snake charmers, and other formulaic tropes. Yet it shows that the Mackenzie children start to understand local people better after becoming acquainted with a missionary couple, the Thornes. ⁹⁶ Another story, ‘Rescue on the Northern Frontier’, which appeared in 1941, featured an English boy Harry Kent and a native boy called Bijli. Their adventures demonstrate the Indian boy to be more courageous and at times more quick witted than his English friend, who is frightened by a buffalo and a mad dog, ⁹⁷ thus inverting the imperial logic of stories in which white children were undisputedly protagonists.

In TRW, reading was the means of adventuring, and at one point it even called its readers ‘stay-at-home adventurers’. ⁹⁸ This idea of adventure was the pivot of its internationalist vision. Nineteenth-century geography writing for European children often othered places in a manner that consolidated claims of empire. ⁹⁹ TRW too hinted at the otherness of some places in its interwar issues, but it avoided overt portrayals of the cultural inferiority of the other, just as it evaded reference to certain sites as colonies. ¹⁰⁰ Compared to prewar prose, they eschewed their marked racial hierarchy and instead showed children of diverse races as being different only in terms of their circumstances or access to Christian education, not their moral fabric. TRW’s reportage complimented this imaginary of travel. Connections between parochial children in Britain and the ‘world’ were shown through reports of YPU Talks on China or India, themed garden parties, and exhibitions or performances that deepened the impression of the constant traffic of people and objects across the world.

Giving

TRW also wrought a moral geography through its reportage: the ‘world’ was made up of children who not only voyaged around it but also acted solicitously towards each other. Giving was an integral part of the CMS’s work with regard to children. Consequently, stories about children giving money, clothes, and toys to foreign missions abounded in the magazine for years. Gifts were typically sent to Africa, India, and China. But from the 1930s anecdotes about gifts changed in tone, drawing readers’ attention to tracks that had been overlooked in the CMS world.

Indian children’s participation in this world was partly reflected in the poems, drawings, essays, and letters they sent to TRW. ¹⁰¹ Gifts were acknowledged innovatively, showing that Indian children knew who their friends were. For instance, TRW reported that a cow that medical missionaries had bought for children in Travancore was named ‘Philippa’ because it was purchased with funds sent by children from St Philip’s Sunday School, Liverpool. ¹⁰² The magazine also facilitated exchanges that played out beyond its issues. In 1939, the principal of an Indian school in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, wrote to a CMS school in Deoghar requesting poems and sketches about India after seeing a photograph of Bluebirds from the school in TRW. ¹⁰³

In 1936, TRW published a piece about an incident at the CMS orphanage in Benares, sent by an S. Willis. The writer, a missionary-in-charge of the orphanage, described the ingenuity and generosity of her charges. Willis claimed that the girls were concerned about the shortage of Gospels to distribute among Hindu pilgrims and devised their own plan. ¹⁰⁴ Older children at the orphanage offered to save money by giving up one portion of rice for one week so they could buy more copies of the Gospel. But the incident did not end there. Willis wrote:

A short while later there was a pitter patter of small feet, and a voice said, ‘Miss Sahiba, please may we speak to you?’ I went to the door and there were many earnest brown faces and all said: ‘Please, we also want to save half a handful of rice; and we want to help at the mela.’

The missionary emphasised how remarkably selfless it was, coming from children who had known starvation in their own lives. The younger children described bear a strong resemblance to the pious ‘brownie friends’ featured in the magazine years ago. The moral value of the anecdote is clear, especially as Willis encouraged readers to appreciate the Indian children’s action: ‘[D]o you not think that these girls were truly thinking of others and not of themselves? Some of them told me afterwards that they had felt very, very hungry.’ ¹⁰⁵ Yet the narrative takes several turns, which are distinctive to its interwar concerns.

This incident of the orphanage set in motion a series of exchanges. Willis reported that a girl in England heard about the Indian children and gave up her sixpence so she could send a doll to Benares via CMS headquarters. Around the time the doll reached the CMS orphanage, a Hindu girl who had strayed from her family also arrived there. To quell the distraught child until she was united with her family, the girls of the orphanage shared the doll with her. After Miss Willis saw her, the child refused to go to sleep and begged to see her ‘white-faced mother’ again. She was only comforted when the golden-haired doll was brought to her. ¹⁰⁶

Several insinuations are embedded in the anecdote. The waif-like Hindu girl is almost the same age as the younger children of the orphanage as well as the English girl, yet she cannot say her name or where she comes from. Her attitude towards the doll mirrors her instant affinity towards Miss Willis. What makes this anecdote characteristic of TRW is the image of a series of connected exchanges or adventures. The emphasis on ingenuity, laughter, and merriment among the givers also drew the anecdote into the genre of adventure prose of the interwar years.

The stratified world that connected rural with urban India, India with England, Christians with non-Christians, orphans with children who lived with their families: this was the ecumene TRW forged, and it was distinct in the 1930s. Although giving was a key component of such accounts, it was no longer pious, upright, and somewhat sanctimonious white children whose generosity the magazine recounted. Rather, the narratives swung around to children from India or Africa who showed concern for their friends. Anecdotes about Indian children’s selflessness showed them to be active participants in the CMS world, not just inhabitants.

Such accounts increased in the early years of the Second World War, with reports of Indian children giving to their friends in Britain. To illustrate, in 1941 among news of various children’s organisations in Britain that had raised funds, TRW reported that thirteen Indian children gave a rupee each, donating 1s 6d to help those children in London whose houses had been destroyed in the air raids. Here too the extraordinary selflessness is emphasised: ‘This money was to have been spent on fireworks at a festival, but they preferred to give it to those less fortunate than themselves.’ ¹⁰⁷ Similarly, children of a boarding school in Aurangabad raised money for children at St Mary’s Sunday School, Islington. ¹⁰⁸ Some CMS schools in India raised funds for Britain, and there is one account in which a girl unhesitatingly gives up her silver bangle for the medical expenses of English children. ¹⁰⁹ These accounts demonstrated to readers that feelings of solidarity existed across this world, mirroring TRW’s imaginary of world-friendship. It was further emblazoned on its wartime cover: silhouettes of a (presumably) English boy, an Indian girl (in sari), and an African boy hold hands, standing against a globe, while a biplane flies above.

Gifts did not move between India and Britain alone. The results of each month’s Share Plans showed the directions in which aid travelled. The opening feature of the magazine, the editor’s letter, also sometimes contained details of money raised or gifts sent, and acknowledged particularly noteworthy contributors. News of Indian children’s generosity continued to be published for a year or two after the war ended. One such announcement took note of a contribution from students of Mary Sargent School, Palamcottah, sent to Cairo. ¹¹⁰ This school appears to have been an active participant in the Share Plans, its name appearing in reports in two consecutive years. A year after the war ended, children from the same school sent contributions for Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘Warphans’ through Share Plans, and in turn they received pictures of Chinese babies as a token of gratitude. ¹¹¹ The next year, they contributed 15s for children in northern and southern Sudan. ¹¹²

TRW projected itself as a community of feeling, emphasising not only how recipients of gifts expressed gratitude, but also how the readers worried about their friends, sometimes even wanting to help many friends at the same time. The photographs published in the magazine, as well as those sent directly to children’s organisations or schools, promoted this sense of connectedness. But especially from the 1930s, the reports and letters acknowledging gifts were treated as a form of communication between children, regardless of their heavy mediation. ¹¹³

Other children’s magazines in Britain also mobilised their readers’ support. Some even encouraged communication between readers and those who had benefited from their philanthropy, such as sick children at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. ¹¹⁴ The popular press in nineteenth-century Britain was known to have implemented another kind of participatory model, inviting working-class children to write about their lives. ¹¹⁵ But in these other instances, where communication took place between children, it usually took place between children of the same race or in contexts that were geographically bounded. TRW’s approach, especially its attention to diverse geographies ¹¹⁶ and emphasis on ‘tropological contrasts’ to Britain ¹¹⁷ allowed it to impress on readers that they were in touch with the world. But it also allowed the publication to ‘sugarcoat’ its didactic tone—an approach that various children’s magazines were experimenting with at the time. ¹¹⁸

The ideals that TRW promoted from the 1920s to the 1940s differed from that of ‘world citizenship’ that some institutions sought to instil in children. ¹¹⁹ The magazine avoided discussion on themes like ‘nations’, liberal democracy, fascism, or communism. For its vision of the world, it chose to look inwards, showing readers CMS’s own networks around welfare, education, and aid. Reports about children’s ingenuity, their generosity, and the adventures that giving entailed brought a touch of intimacy into the already existing world-friendship.

Conclusion

Almost a decade and a half before TRW embarked on its project, Bishop Azariah had pointed out the challenges of interracial friendship, ending his speech at the World Missionary Conference with the words: ‘We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS!’ ¹²⁰ TRW grappled with this challenge with its turn towards world-friendship. Racial markers were not erased in the magazine, even in anecdotes where Indian children were protagonists. ¹²¹ But its focus in the 1920s on adventuring and travelling blurred hierarchical ideas of race, and the project of world-friendship turned earlier narratives on their head by the 1930s, with reportage on Indian children sending funds to others. The emphasis on self-denial made the children stand out for their resolve and ability to confront hardship, and also demonstrated the benefits of missionary education. ¹²² It was only with these reports of Indian children helping others—in Britain, China, Egypt, or Sudan—that their friendship became truly reciprocal. Accounts of their thoughtfulness and compassion towards others painted a hopeful picture of the future of the Anglican world. As Indian children engaged with CMS, these accounts should be read in connection with the debates on nurturing ‘indigenous churches’. The courage, generosity, and resolve emphasised by non-fiction and fiction alike are suggestive of their potential as future leaders. Azariah’s appearance in TRW can be similarly interpreted. He was both a friend to readers learning about the international Anglican sphere and an embodiment of what (international) friendship could produce. ¹²³

The entry of Indian and other children into Christian networks, in real life and in stories, was a braided phenomenon. Some factors unconnected with internationalism might have played an important part in determining this occurrence. Changing perceptions about the psychology and dispositions of British children provoked discussions within CMS in the 1920s, influencing the production of certain kinds of missionary literature for children. By the late 1930s, women like Rebe King or Sarah Willis, frequent contributors to TRW, had already spent many years in institutions like St Faith’s, Gojra and the CMS Girls’ Orphanage in Benares. ¹²⁴ Their interest in narrating the exploits of their wards and their desire to speak on behalf of them reveal a deep investment. By showing off to TRW that these children were fit to be friends with each other, these women in effect were also demonstrating the years of labour put into the mission field. The ventriloquised child voices they produced allowed Indian children to be connected with others. They papered over the violence of deracination and ‘child rescue’ inflicted on many families by Christian missionaries in colonial India, ¹²⁵ instead painting a picture of a merry and bonhomous environment that was possible because of CMS. Thus around the time when pedagogic reforms inspired by the League of Nations were preparing children in the Global North to be world-leaders/citizens, TRW’s internationalist project also involved non-elite children from places like India. It was their affiliation to CMS-run institutions, as well as their participation in TRW’s competitions, writing letters, or sending money, that were interpreted as their engagement with the world.

TRW’s content says little about the children’s actions or experiences beyond what interested the CMS. But to see them simply as figments in a children’s magazine would be to ignore some of the ways in which Indian children mattered to, and could engage with, the missionary societies of the twentieth century. To focus on their centrality is not to overstate their agency but to demonstrate how the conceit of a CMS ‘world’ crystallised most effectively around young people bridging geographies. Children’s magazines in India had emphasised the ‘exploration narrative’ since the early twentieth century. ¹²⁶ But where travel and transcultural exchanges were still a distant reality for most (middle-class) readers, less privileged and far less well-read children from rural schools and orphanages nevertheless had the opportunity to ‘interact’ with and befriend children from around the world through the auspices of the CMS.

TRW’s project of world-making was undoubtedly indebted to the perspective that children were yet to acquire fixed racial or cultural identities. But it reveals much more than that. From the scholarship on interwar internationalism, one gains the impression that debating, reading certain kinds of literature, and learning about the world were some of the primary ways in which children experienced the internationalist moment through their progressive schools in the Global North. The Indian children featured in TRW draw attention to a wider range of activities that an internationalist project could entail: activities that were not dependent on cultural capital, knowledge of current affairs, geographical mobility, or even literacy. These allowed both imagination of and engagement with a diversity of actors—very young children from orphanages, older schoolchildren, native Bible-women, missionaries, and editorial staff of the magazine—all of whom were part of a global Anglican enterprise. By exploring these issues, this article hopes to have demonstrated that thinking about children can be productive for global history in some contexts.