Through Missionary Eyes: Representing and Reforming the Assamese Subject in American Baptist Writings

This paper investigates how American Baptist Missionaries in the Brahmaputra Valley constructed and circulated a dichotomous image of the indigenous people through texts and photographs. Missionary records depicted a “before-version” of the people as unclean, indolent, deceitful, and spiritually lost, shaped by the racialized tropes of tropicality and moral deficiency. These depictions justified missionary presence and intervention. The “after-version” presented Christian converts as clean, disciplined, and spiritually elevated - embodying Christian virtue and Western modernity. Drawing on missionary writings, visual culture, and theoretical frameworks such as Orientalism and knowledge production, this paper argues that such narratives were not neutral accounts but ideological projects that helped legitimize colonial rule, missionary labour, and cultural transformation. These missionary representations actively shaped both imperial discourse and local realities, producing an “Assamese subject” who symbolized moral redemption and political utility. This paper situates these representations within broader debates on colonialism, religion, and identity in Northeast India.