Introduction to “The Cosmo-politics of Friendship in Imperial Contact Zones 1870 – 1950,” special issue of JCCH

The entwining of the Anglo-American Protestant missionary movement with white racism and colonial authority was challenged at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 when the Indian cleric, Azariah, called for
missionaries to be friends working with Indian Christians rather than fathers who controlled and dominated.9 Charles Freer Andrews, whose friendships with Gandhi and Tagore constitute an important element in the literature on
cross-cultural friendship between representatives of the colonial ruling elite and the colonised, advocated that recruits to the Indian mission field should have a "sincere and whole-hearted personal friendship… with at least one
fellow-Christian communicant of 'another race. The struggle against slavery saw women of religion affiliate themselves with their enslaved sisters and some British women campaigned against sati (widow burning) as friends of Indian womanhood.13 Indeed the nineteenth-century notion of "woman's mission" and "women's work for women" saw western women extend the hand of friendship towards colonised women and children.14 While often this could develop into a one-sided maternalist control15 it might also lead to sisterhood and friendship.16 Into the twentieth century, Susan Haskell Khan has argued that increasingly American women missionaries in India "presented themselves as allies, rather than as saviours of Hindu women. "17 Kumari Jayawardena problematised the sharp binary divisions between colonisers and colonised people, by arguing that a number of western women, while sharing race and class positions with colonial rulers, "crossed boundaries of accepted race, gender and class positions, proclaiming 'sisterhood,' and taking political stances against colonial rule. American Congregational missionaries in Japan in the later nineteenth century anticipated the direction of the 1910 World Missionary
Conference in Edinburgh, by promoting Indigenous leadership among Japanese Christians and aiming for the devolution of power from western missionaries to local churches.