How to Cite

May, Andrew J.: Our Miniature Heaven: Forming Identities at Dr Graham’s Homes, in Viehbeck, Markus (Ed.): Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a “Contact Zone”, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2017 (Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, Volume 3), p. 55–69. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.301.c4103

License (Chapter)

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Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-946054-56-6 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-946054-58-0 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-3-946054-57-3 (Hardcover)

Published

12/14/2017

Authors

Andrew J. May

Our Miniature Heaven: Forming Identities at Dr Graham’s Homes

Abstract In 1908 Katherine Graham, wife of the Reverend Dr John An­derson Graham, wrote to her own children about the recent arrival of three girls who spoke Khasi with only a few words of English and Bengali, describing them as “quite different to the people here,” but “an interesting addition” to the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes at Kalimpong. “There is a great conglomeration of races and languages in the lace hostel at present,” she noted. “A friend here calls it our miniature heaven.”1 Heaven or hell are, of course, relative terms. This discussion will consider the foundational and complex role of Dr Graham as a cultural and political broker and interme­diary, who at the same time both reinforced and unsettled British ideas of race, education, morality and colonialism. Pratt’s notion of contact zones, around which this volume coalesces (Pratt 1992), might lead us to inquire not simply into the literal and symbolic spaces between vastly different cul­tures and belief systems, but also between competing and transforming senses of what it meant to be British, Christian, white and modern.