Missionaries in India brought about enormous changes in the social fabric of the country. Not only were their influence and intervention obvious in the formulation of policies for the governance and education of natives but they also created major upheavals in the ways identity and gender were defined. Their influence brought dramatic and far-reaching changes in which both the self and the other sought to refashion and recreate each other. The traditional dominant social groups in Bengal found it increasingly difficult to keep their markers of identity impervious to change as social mobility began to transcend the earlier rigid limitations of caste and class. As education began to be considered a benchmark for social acceptance and status, more and more social groups began to construct new identities, or radically modified their existing identities and aspired to ‘fit’ into the newly defined parameters of acceptance under the British Raj. Western education in mission schools and conversion to Christianity, either or both, not only guaranteed a clerical job but were also seen as sure-shot ways of being included within the ambit of what Macaulay defined as a new ‘class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.

Perhaps the most fundamental revision in ‘taste’, ‘opinions’, ‘morals’ and ‘intellect’ was seen in expectations related to gender roles, particularly the role of women. The increasing participation of Christian women missionaries and the emphasis on female education in schools and in the zenana, was bound to have decisive repercussions on the identity of Indian women. Missionary discourses highlighting the contrast between Western or Eastern, or Christian and non-Christian, very often brought in issues of morality and respectability as an indicator of racial difference.