Some years ago, during a break from an academic workshop in Calcutta, I found an inner cityscape that was a mix of overbuilt and rather shabby looking shops, oddly punctuated by the occasional Western-looking skyscraper. As a historian my eye was drawn to its decaying colonial buildings whose beauty was being steadily eroded by choking pollution and the sprouting bayan trees in their brickwork.

A more immediate concern was the many street children below, selling vegetables on the curbside or begging for money at traffic lights – or worse, children at dangerous play, none protected by any adults in their lives.

Feeling a bit despondent, I chanced upon a school whose buildings seemed to fit into this dystopic scene. Yet its female students looked middle-class, as they departed at the end of their school day, shyly sweeping past. A colonial placement was more relatable here as the school was run by Roman Catholic (Loreto) women religious: Indian and Irish. My attention was then drawn to another Loreto school in the nearby suburb of Sealdah – run by Sister Cyril Mooney.

What began as an impromptu curiosity transformed into a decade-long project – a book about what I would then see in the city. Working on what a European could write about, it took its own time. The Irish sisters that I encountered on that day seemed like a curio to me – strange products of empire in fact. How was it that they were still in India – a kind of ‘staying on’ after 1947 Indian independence when many Protestant missionaries had departed the scene?

As I learnt more, Cyril’s school’s localization and outreach were impressive. There was little reference to Europe, except for a small portrait of Mary Ward on the wall – Loreto’s English foundress in 1609. Cyril was running a large school for middle-class females but also a rainbow education program for illiterate street girls – educated and housed at night in the school’s basic rooftop quarters, protected from the city’s pimps. Some of these little girls had taken on Hollywood names, learnt from the television sets on the nearby train platforms where they had once slept. There were older girls here, too, rescued from enforced prostitution and subsequently rejected by their parents. As a male in their midst they did not wish to look at me. There was also after-hours education of children in modern-day slavery – making bricks in the blazing sun in the non-monsoon season on the outskirts of the city.

None of this Loreto remediation was perfect. How could it be in the organized chaos that is India? Yet the communities of these children were not disrupted by Loreto’s intervention either. Most of these underprivileged girls were, in fact, refugees in their own country – their families tenuously occupying ribbons of land created by large government infrastructure developments such as canal dredging and urban flyovers.

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But what about the historicity of this intervention and why was it so cost effective compared to the cruder template approaches of the World Bank and UNESCO, with much more funding at hand? In fact, the Loreto order’s work was borne from a long lineage of institutional knowledge, shaped by historical contingencies and built gradually on the subcontinent. As a non-Roman Catholic, and without much religious background at all, I wondered about my subjectivity. Cyril simply likened me as sitting on the riverbank watching them in the river swim by.

Loreto was the first Roman Catholic female order to come to India in 1841 – it was clear it had deep roots. The order began with just six Choir sisters and six others, with their leader only 24 years of age. Navigating social outreach, well beyond its teaching vocation, meant contending with the early bishops – who refused to sanction a security wall around their central convent or to allow new sisters from Ireland to come to India to reinforce their ranks. Church patriarchal knowledge of their bodies was garnered through their confessions, including the timing of their periods.

They were forced to work in Calcutta’s Lock Hospitals that incarcerated prostitutes with venereal disease. When serving this great need there was the ever-present threat to their moral bodies of contracting it through medical contact. Amongst other foundations, a grand convent in the Hill station of Darjeeling was established, funded by wealthy tea planters and senior British officials who retreated from the summer heat of the plains. Loreto’s central school adjacent to its mother house in Calcutta catered for the children of the bhadralok (middle-class) and in 1912 it became Bengal’s first university college for women, affiliated to Calcutta University. The agency of these women religious was strongest in India – and it needed to be, especially concerning outreach to destitute Indian children. Here the racial, class and imperial agendas were most in play. Established Hindu families were wary of their conversion agendas. They hid in church steeples during the Great Revolt of 1857. Government eugenic agendas forced Loreto to set up schools for Eurasians (mixed-race girls) and banned by them admitting Indians to its novitiate. In response, Loreto began its own sub-order – the daughters of St Anne – to build economies of scale.

Loreto’s ‘orphan’ programs were more problematic, reflecting church dictums about orchestrating ‘child rescue’. Yet, its main orphanage at Entally had over 500 orphans in it by the 1960s – augmented sometimes by Mother Teresa who left abandoned babies on its doorstep at dawn, briefly pacified by the sugar she smudged onto their thumbs.

As the academic sitting on the riverbank there was much for me see. Yet, clever academic paradigms and entitled Western scepticism seemed no longer enough. The outreach of the women religious whose work I observed mostly did not know much about their history, although it gives much context to adaptive strategies of the likes of Sister Cyril. She and others had worked in Calcutta for over 50 years – for me successive six-week fieldwork stints were quite enough.

This blog is based on my book: Tim Allender, Empire Religiosity: Convent Habits in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Manchester: MUP, 2024). WINNER of the Triennial Distinguished Book Award, 2022-25, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Notre Dame University, South Bend, USA.

Tim Allender is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. His principal research over the past 30 years concerns Indian education and empire studies using multidisciplinary approaches that focus on gender, feminism and religious studies. He also works on deconstructions of the image in colonial settings and the semiotic and situational positionings of the underprivileged – as inscriptions on an otherwise exclusionary European, text-based imperial past.