Frontiers in Flux: Indo-Tibetan Border: 1946–1948

On the eve of Indian Independence, as Britain prepared to devolve the Crown’s treaties with Tibet to the Indian government, the Tibetan government was debating its future treaty relationship with India under the 1914 Simla Convention and associated Indo-Tibetan Trade Regulations. Soon after Indian independence, Tibetan government made an expansive demand for return of Tibetan territory along the McMahon Line and beyond. This led to a long diplomatic exchange between Lhasa, New Delhi and London as India deliberated its response to the Tibetan demand. This article decodes the voluminous correspondence between February 1947 and January 1948 that flowed between the British/Indian Mission in Lhasa, the Political Officer in Sikkim, External Affairs Ministry in Delhi and the Foreign Office in London, on the Simla Convention and the ensuing Tibetan territorial demand. Housed at the National Archives in New Delhi, this declassified confidential communication provides crucial context for newly independent Indian state’s relationship with Tibet. It also reveals the intricacies of Tibetan elite politics that affected decision-making in Lhasa translating to a fragmented and often contradictory policy in forging its new relationship with India. Most importantly, this Tibetan territorial demand undermined the diplomatic efficacy of Tibet’s 1947 Trade Mission to India entangling its outcome with the resolution of this issue. This was a lost opportunity for both India and Tibet in building an agreement on the frontier which worked to their mutual disadvantage in the future.

India and Britain’s First Application to Join the European Community, 1961–1963

The first British application to join the European Economic Community (EEC) in July 1961 came at a time when India confronted an acute foreign exchange crisis and chronic trade deficits and when it was heavily dependent on the UK as a major market. Unlike the widely held belief, this article argues that India engaged Community institutions in a proactive and calibrated manner from the outset till de Gaulle vetoed British membership in January 1963. It highlights the crucial role of the Indian Mission in Brussels and its first ambassador to EEC in efforts to seek redressal of Indian concerns and secure a viable trade arrangement with the Community.

Rev. John Burton frames the Fiji Methodist Mission, 1924

In his role as General Secretary of the Australasian Methodist Missionary Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Reverend John W. Burton travelled each winter to one of the ‘mission fields’ in the South Pacific to inspect the mission’s activities, and to encourage and advise. Accompanying him was his camera; Burton had long been an enthusiastic photographer. Following his 1924 visit to Fiji he created two albums of his photographs, one illustrating the indigenous Fijian mission, the other the Indian mission. This article focuses on the ‘social biography’ of the photographs, and examines Burton’s choice and balance of subjects in each album, which cover educational and other mission activities, village and town scenes, landscapes and individual and group portraits. It also considers the placement and message in context of many of the individual photographs when they were later reproduced to illustrate stories in the mission magazine, Missionary Review, of which Burton was the Editor.

Japan, a Separate Province From India? Rivalries and Financial Management of Two Jesuit Missions in Asia

This article analyzes the organization of the Jesuit missions in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the case of the relationship between the Indian mission and the Japanese mission, which was subordinate to it. It highlights the management and control methods which were specific to the Asian missions. It thus demonstrates the growing autonomy of the Japanese mission, which was trying to free itself from Indian administrative and financial supervision. In doing so, the deep-seated nature of the rivalries and tensions between missions within a single Jesuit province are brought into focus, despite Roman arbitration. The article is thus an invitation to reassess the regional dimension to Jesuit governance, which is sometimes ignored in favor of the global aspect.

Protestant ‘Indian Mission’ Work in Guatemala from a Woman Missionary's Perspective: Dora Burgess (1887–1962)

Dora Belle McLaughlin Burgess was an American Presbyterian missionary, devoted to the mission to the Quiché tribe in Guatemala from 1913 to 1962. During her service, she translated the New Testament from Greek into the Quiché language. She also published a hymnal in Quiché and an ethnographic writing on Quiché culture. This paper attempts to shed light on the life of Dora Burgess, whose work was unknown, and to trace the formation of her identity as a missionary and her mission approach to the native inhabitants. In doing so, the paper argues that her interaction with the native tribes in the mission field shaped her identity as a missionary and her understanding of mission in ways in which the indigenous people's agency and subjectivity were recognised and respected. In the earlier period of her service in Guatemala, Dora Burgess conceived of mission work as a rescue project to transform the native tribes into Christians who would denounce their ‘superstitious’ traditions; however, her later focus in mission work, especially in her bible translation project, lay in acknowledging the native traditions and cultures and giving the indigenous tribe opportunities to be Christians in their own ways.

Negotiated and Mediated Lives: Bolivian teachers, New Zealand missionaries and the Bolivian Indian Mission, 1908–1932

This article places missionary education squarely at the centre of any consideration of European expansion in the modern era. It focuses more specifically on the place of local teachers in Bolivia and their relationship with one evangelical Protestant mission, the Bolivian Indian Mission, which originated in New Zealand in the early 1900s. It takes a non-metropole and a “multi-sited” approach to missions and education. It argues that what we know about Bolivian teachers was mediated through the missionary voice and that these teachers negotiated their lives within a particular missionary space, in which there operated a number of intersecting influences from other sites within the wider imperial or Western network. It aims to both reclaim the identities of Bolivian teachers (focusing on teachers’ identity and function) and to reflect critically on intrinsic methodological and conceptual issues (emphasizing the nature of sources, missionary discourse, the resulting status of Bolivian teachers, and Bolivian agency).