In 1907, Eleanor Rivett MA, a young modern woman and a graduate of Melbourne University, left Australia to become a missionary for the London Missionary Society in Calcutta. As she made her way from Colombo up to Calcutta, she stopped off in Madras, and spent a day with Elsie Nicol, another Melbourne graduate. Nicol was running the YWCA hostel in Madras, where women students could stay while studying at Madras University. In following her vocation as a missionary in India, Eleanor was leaving behind her parents and her numerous siblings. But she and her brother David had made a vow, that if he won the Rhodes scholarship he would spend some time with her in India. Later in 1907, she was able to take leave and explore the northern cities of India with David on his way to Oxford. They went to Benares, Lucknow, Cawnpur, Agra, Delhi and Bombay.^[1] They were, she recalled, ‘the innocents abroad’, but it was ‘a marvellous tour’. ^[2]

Eleanor Rivett was the first Australian to go to north India under the auspices of the London Missionary Society and she would spend some forty years there. But neither she nor Elsie Nicol was the first Australian to work as a missionary in India. As will be discussed below, a number of Australian women and men went to India in that religious capacity. They felt drawn to travel far from their homes to take up the cause, as they saw it, of evangelising the heathen of India. As they devoted themselves to their Christian work in India, many struggled with the long separation from home and family that such a step involved. For a number, such separations were eased somewhat when members of their family and friends visited them in India. Furthermore, missionaries were able to return home on furlough. Thus the ships that serviced the routes between Australian ports and Colombo and other ports on the subcontinent, would often carry a missionary or two. Such travellers felt called and definitely entitled to travel and to stay in India for long periods of time. They engaged in many activities there, such as establishing hospitals and running schools. For Australian women missionaries, the responsibilities as administrators, teachers, preachers, nurses and doctors in the mission fields were broader than those they could have taken on in Australia. Some might claim that their religious vocation marked them off from those with a mere desire to travel and see the world, to make a career or simply experience foreign lands. But these women can be also be understood in the same framework as those studied by Angela Woollacott in To Try Her Fortune in London. Observing that ‘the industrialization of travel and [their] … modern ambition for education, jobs, and careers promoted [these women’s] mobility’. ‘The Australian girl’, she suggests, came to stand for ‘modernity and independence’.^[3]

Also on these ships might be another figure, whom I will describe, for the purposes of summary as ‘an Indian’.^[4] Usually a man, the Indian traveller might have lived in India, Australia or another part of the Empire altogether. He could have been returning to Australia after a sojourn in India or a tourist seeking to enjoy the sights of Australia and other destinations. But, with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act in the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, such travel was limited and controlled. The Australian authorities categorised Indians, although British subjects, as ‘natives of Asia’, who had no automatic entitlement to travel freely between India and Australia. The Australians and the Indians had ‘differential access to mobility’.^[5] Although Indians were negotiating their own modernity, travelling around the world in pursuit of pleasure, greater opportunities and personal transformation, Australian government policies increasingly categorised them as people whose movements should be strictly controlled. Australians tended to represent Indians as exotic and backward. As David Walker has pointed out, Australian accounts of travel in India tended to emphasise its ‘antiquity and spiritual wealth’.^[6] He found in Alfred Deakin’s writing on India, that ‘Ancient India was readily celebrated while modern India and Indians were routinely disparaged.’^[7] In the discourse of modernity, Indians were represented as backward, fixed and static. Woollacott has pointed out that: ‘Western modernity must be viewed as having been created in a symbiotic relationship with its racially constructed others, and that racial hierarchies, including whiteness as a racial identity, have been integrally constitutive of modernity.’^[8]

When the Reverend Theo B. Fischer of the Australian Churches of Christ met some of the Indian lawyers at the High Court in Madras, when on a missionary tour to India in 1912, he was clearly surprised to find that they were ‘quite up in the politics of the world, acquainted with most English books of recent date, as well as standard works’.^[9]

This chapter will explore the differing experiences of Australian missionaries in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and those of Indians who also sought to travel and improve their life chances in Australia. The newly federated Commonwealth of Australia was established, in part, ‘to guard … against the dangers of Asiatic immigration’.^[10] The Australian government insisted upon the creation of a white nation, which meant that the movement of Indians seeking to travel to and from Australia was strictly controlled and often forbidden.

These developments can be viewed within the broader context of the British Empire, in which the movement of British Indians was increasingly being curtailed. As British subjects, Indians posed a challenge to the governments of the settler colonies. Their status as British subjects might have meant that they could travel and settle freely, but with the growth of colonial nationalism, governments sought to maintain the power and influence of white settlers.

Following the abolition of slavery, Indians had been transported around the Empire as indentured labourers and some had elected to stay on in the colonies at the end of their term of engagement.^[11] Thus there were Indian communities in South Africa, in Malaya, Fiji, in East Africa as well as in the Caribbean. By the late nineteenth century, Indians began to outnumber Europeans in the colony of Natal, which passed legislation to restrict their further immigration following the example of an American Act of 1896 ( see chapter by Lake in this collection). In 1897, the Natal government passed an act to ‘prevent the importation of coolie labour from India’.^[12] This used a language test to exclude those it classed as prohibited immigrants. New Zealand followed suit in 1899 and Australia in 1901.^[13] Canada initially used a poll tax and shipping regulations to deter Indian immigration.^[14]

The British government, while purporting to uphold the equality of British subjects across the Empire, colluded with colonial governments in their determination to discriminate against non-white British subjects. British officials suggested particular forms of words for colonial legislation that appeared not to discriminate against non-white British subjects and the Empire’s Japanese allies, while making it possible for colonial and later Dominion governments to prevent the entry of Asians to their countries, to prohibit their enfranchisement and their participation in particular trades and occupations.^[15] The upholding of the rights of the British subject while denying them to British Indians and other non-white British subjects was, as Radhika Mongia notes, a good example of the ‘rule of colonial difference’.^[16] From time to time, the Viceroy and members of the Indian Civil Service contested this double standard and voiced criticism of particular pieces of legislation such as the Australian Immigration Restriction Act. In the official correspondence, there is evidence of resentment about Australian treatment of particular Indians and a refusal to accede to Australian requests to prevent Indians departing for Australia. Natal, Australia and New Zealand had restricted immigration and Canada was anxious to do so. Eventually, however, under the guise of wartime controls, the Government of India introduced a passport system in 1915, which controlled the movement of Indians, ‘requiring passports from all Indians proceeding outside India’.^[17]

Mongia has focused upon debates during 1906 to 1915, around ‘Canadian demands that Indians emigrating to Canada should have passports’,^[18] while Radhika Singha has explored the development of passport policy of the Government of India from 1911 to 1923,^[19] but a transnational approach allows for a broader address to such issues, bringing together policy developments across the British Empire, at least. Lake has shown the importance of looking further, to the United States, in examining the development of ideologies and techniques to restrict non-white immigration.

Indians resident in settler colonies often campaigned vigorously against racial discrimination. In South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi was a key figure in this resistance from the 1890s and his experiences there were crucial to the later development of his political philosophy.^[20] The treatment of Indians overseas was of continuing concern to the Indian nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. In 1901, Gandhi was instrumental in getting the Indian National Congress to pass a resolution on the rights of Indians in South Africa.^[21] G. K. Gokhale and the Servants of India Society in Poona and H. S. Polak and the Indians Overseas Association, based in London, as well as numerous Indians across the Empire, kept these issues on the nationalist agenda.^[22] The distinctions made between the white and non-white subjects of the Empire and, in particular, the denial of Dominion status to India continued to be condemned by Indian leaders in the interwar years.^[23]

While Indians were campaigning for the protection of their rights as British subjects, Australians were able to move about freely and work and settle in all parts of the Empire, as Australian missionaries did in India. To discuss the missionary activity of Australians in India requires the examination of the work of a number of different Christian denominations, which before and well after Federation, were organised on a colonial and then state basis. In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent Ellen Arnold and Marie Gilbert to do zenana work in Faridpur, West Bengal, where they established the South Australian mission. A number of other Australians from the various colonies followed in their footsteps. Between 1882 and 1913, the Australian Baptist Mission Societies sent fifty-four women and sixteen men to the field in Bengal.^[24] The Reverend Silas Mead of Flinders Street Baptist Church in Adelaide was a strong promoter of the Baptist mission movement and has been dubbed the ‘father of Australian Baptist missions’.^[25] From 1892, his son Dr. Cecil Mead and his wife, Alice served as medical missionaries at Faridpur.

In the south of India, the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Association (PWMA) of New South Wales supported the Church of Scotland Zenana Mission with Mary MacLean the first PWMA missionary to arrive in 1891. A few years later, the PWMA took over the mission at Sholingur, just north of Madras. Mary MacLean founded a school there and worked there for twenty years.^[26]

Mission work in India was the goal for a number of dedicated young Australian women. In the early twentieth century, many students at Australia’s fledgling universities supported the Missionary Settlement for University Women (MSUW) and its work with educated and higher caste women in India. The MSUW, which set up a settlement and then a hostel for women students in Bombay, had been established by women from Newnham, Girton and Somerville Colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. Their identity as university women was central to the organisation, which attracted strong interest from students in Australia, who heard about it from the networks of Empire. A Melbourne graduate, Susie Williams, came to know of the MSUW while she was a student at Newnham College, Oxford. She wrote home to her friends, also graduates from Melbourne University, and soon there were branches established at the universities in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.^[27]

In 1903, Katie Fell, with her sister and their mother, Lady Helen Fell, stopped off in Bombay on their way back from a European tour. Katie had graduated with an Arts degree from Sydney University, where she had become involved in the Student Christian Movement. Inspired by its leader, John Mott, with his message about the evangelisation of the world, she developed a particular interest in the MSUW. In London, its leaders had persuaded her to spend some time in Bombay and she remained there for six months, the first Australian to be based there. Other Australian women later came to work at the settlement and the associated YWCA hostels in Madras and Calcutta. Elsie Nicol had come to India under the auspices of the MSUW and soon after was asked to run the YWCA hostel at Madras, on behalf of both organisations. There she came to love the young Indian women with whom she worked, one of whom, Nallemma Williams, a medical student from Ceylon, became a special friend and her bridesmaid, when she married in Madras, in 1909.^[28] Nicol supported Nallemma Williams’ selection as a delegate to the YWCA world conference in Paris in 1903. Australian supporters of the MSUW could follow the activities of the settlers, which were reported at length in various other missionary publications.

These women were accustomed to the idea of travel and service abroad in the missionary cause. India was an important site of Christian missionary endeavour and for Australian Christians, who sought to become missionaries, India was an important venue. In 1895, Charles Reeve, an experienced evangelist from Tasmania, established the Poona and Indian Village Mission (PIVM) in Poona.^[29] He travelled regularly to England, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia to recruit missionaries and to raise funds. A number of Australian men and women subsequently joined this mission, including Amy Parsons, a young Adelaide woman, who had initially gone to Faridpur in East Bengal in 1888 under the auspices of the South Australian Baptist Mission Society. In this, she followed in the footsteps of Ellen Arnold and Marie Gilbert, who had been the first missionaries there in 1882.^[30] But back in Adelaide on furlough in 1894, she was taken by Charles Reeve’s message and joined the PIVM, where she served from many years. She continued to travel back and forth to Australia, only finally retiring to Australia in the late 1940s. Having spent virtually all her adult life in India, it is not surprising that she described India as ‘The Land of My Adoption’.^[31]

The PIVM and other missions depended on the railways and protection of the British Empire. They could count on the support of the British forces should their preaching prove offensive to Indians, when, for example, they campaigned at holy sites on special religious occasions. From 1905, the PIVM missionaries started going to Hindu holy places at Pandharpur, near Poona, at the time of the jutras. When these missionaries were attacked in 1908, British authorities arrived to protect them and their mission. Twenty-six Indian men and boys were arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced variously to rigorous imprisonment and whipping.^[32]

While Australian women missionaries sought to impart a Christian education to those in the settlements, many Indians in the late nineteenth century sought to enhance their education by travelling across the world to Europe and America. Although Hindus were concerned about travelling across ‘the black waters’, a steady stream of students made their way to British universities.^[33] Moreover, Christian converts went to recruit more to the mission field. Others just wanted to see more of the world and to experience new places and see new people. Some Indian travellers published accounts of their travels.^[34] One such was Hajee Mahomed, who made extensive tours around the world between 1886 and 1887 and again between 1893 and 1895. He was a man of Empire, Indian born and in business in Cape Town. In the introduction to his book, he explained why he published an account of his travels: ‘My principal object in publishing these pages is to give some idea, however faint and crude, to my countrymen, and particularly to my Mahomedan brethren, that beyond the narrow bounds of their home, there lies a world of joy and beauty.’^[35]

On his second tour, he spent some time in Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney and was quite taken with the night life of Melbourne: ‘On Saturday night, Melbourne, as is the case with large European cities, was gay and brilliant with illuminations and crowds of pleasure seekers going to theatres, concert and restaurants. I wandered about in amazement and wonder till a late hour.’^[36] He enjoyed the sights in the Dandenongs and through his imperial connections was able to visit the Observatory. A Cape Town friend, settled in Melbourne, introduced him to the superintendent, Mr. Ellery, who explained to him ‘some of the wonders of the starry world’.^[37] He then went north, where he enjoyed the beauty of Sydney, ‘superior to Melbourne in its natural loveliness’.^[38] In Hobart he saw some business opportunities: ‘I believe that if some enterprising countrymen of mine were to open a business in Indian cloth Japanese curiosities and Cutch [sic] and Delhi metal and art works, they are likely to do well.’^[39] Generally, he found the colonists he met kind and polite. But he also noted the difficulties encountered by poor hawkers from Bengal, Kashmir and the Sind: ‘These traders appeared to be quite a harmless lot, working hard for their daily bread. They are perfectly innocent of English and do not know how very black they are painted by the jealousy and prejudice of writers in the Australian journals.’^[40]

A number of Indian men had arrived in Australia from the mid-nineteenth century, and often took work as hawkers or labourers. Some arrived from elsewhere in the Empire. Otim Singh, for example, had worked as a ‘supervisor in a large tobacco-plantation on Sumatra, on behalf of an English firm’ where he, reportedly, had ‘200 coolies under his control’.^[41] He returned to his home in the Punjab, where he purchased some land, but the call of distant lands caught him once more and he set sail for Batavia (Jakarta) to visit his brother, before arriving in Melbourne in 1890. He worked as an itinerant hawker in Victoria and later in South Australia, where he established a store and a prosperous business which he ran until his death in 1927.^[42]

Otim Singh was one of many Indians living in Australia at the end of the nineteenth century when the Australian colonies began to legislate to restrict the entry of Indians and other ‘Asiatics’. In New South Wales, for example, after an attempt to exclude Asians by name was ‘reserved’ by the Colonial Office, the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Bill, utilising the ‘Natal formula’, was passed in 1897. Aliens, including Indians, had thenceforth to enter their names on an Aliens Register and around ninety Indians did so in Sydney between 1899 and 1902.^[43] They were required to pay two shillings and sixpence for this privilege. Acts to restrict Asian immigration were also passed in Western Australia, Tasmania and Victoria.^[44] At the time of federation, in 1901, one estimate calculated the number of Indians in Australia at 7637.^[45] The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, as noted earlier, classified Indians as ‘natives of Asia’ who could only enter Australia if they could pass a ‘dictation test’ in a European language, administered in such a manner as to exclude them. In the years following the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act, the number of Indians in Australia declined to around 3698 by 1911.^[46]

Initially, after 1901, it became virtually impossible for any Indian to come to Australia, except some who had lived in Australia previously. It was possible for those already resident in Australia to gain a Domicile certificate and, after 1905, a Certificate of Exemption from the Dictation Test (CEDT). This operated like a passport, which allowed the holder to re-enter Australia within three years. It carried two photographs of the holder, a profile as well as full-face view and a handprint. It was possible for holders of such certificates to apply for extensions and some were able to stay away from Australia for twelve or more years before returning. But not all Indians who had resided in Australia were accorded the right to re-enter.

Marie de Lepervanche has argued that in the earliest years of federation, the definition of ‘domicile’ was very narrow, so that many who had lived for years in Australia were not granted a ‘certificate of domicile’. Generally, those who had some capital in Australia were more likely to be allowed to return than those who had very little.^[47] After 1903, it seems that ‘applications for domicile were generally approved if evidence of good character and five years’ residence was produced’.^[48] In order to establish their worth, local police officers were required to make a check on the applicant for a Domicile certificate, or after 1905, a CEDT. Thus, in 1903, the Walgett police made enquiries about Burket Ali Khan, who applied for a certificate of domicile, as he wished to go to India for ‘about three years or less, attending private business’. He had been in Australia since 1895 and was a storekeeper in partnership with Curam Bux, Nabob Khan and Omar Khan at Comborah near Walgett. Although the police reported that Burket Ali Khan was ‘not the owner of any land and his share in the business is not worth over £25’, he was granted a certificate. The police report noted that they ‘knew nothing against his character’.^[49]

Thus Indians who left Australia had to undergo quite rigorous scrutiny in order to be able to return to Australia. Their applications were accompanied by references, often from employers or people with whom they had done business, in which the referees acknowledged knowing the applicants for some time and testified to their good character. Often the police made a visit to the referees to get confirmation that the photograph on the application was that of the person for whom they had vouched.

Most Indians in Australia were men and they found it difficult if not impossible to bring wives from India. In 1904, Hushnak Singh, a domestic servant of Narrabeen applied for ‘a certificate of naturalization’. A Punjabi, he had been in Australia since 1898. He was, he wrote, ‘a British subject’ and formerly ‘a trooper in 6^th Bengal Lancer[s] Prince of Wales [Regiment]’. He planned to make a brief trip to India to marry and wanted the necessary documentation to enable him to bring his bride back to Australia. The Department of External Affairs informed him that naturalisation was unnecessary as he was a British subject. His intended bride, however ‘would be deemed a prohibited immigrant’. The Secretary Attlee Hunt advised, ‘the Lady will have to pass the Education Test which may be imposed in any European language’.^[50] It is not known what happened to Hushnak Singh and his bride, but it was very difficult for British Indians to bring their families to Australia.^[51]

Until 1904, only Indians formerly resident in Australia and able to get a certificate of domicile were able to enter Australia. However, in 1905, following negotiations with the Government of India the regulations were relaxed and amended to allow for the visits and temporary stays of tourists, students and bona fide merchants. The British authorities in India were required to issue passports, for visits to Australia, to those eligible under the revised regulations. The passport specifically devised for this purpose detailed the traveller’s name and that of his father, given in both English and the vernacular. Information on this form also included the traveller’s caste or clan, residence – detailing town or village and district or state – profession, age and, for male travellers only, a description of distinctive marks. A full description of the purpose of the visit, its probable duration, the port of embarkation and the names, ages and relationships of members of the family accompanying the applicant were also to be given. This document and the accuracy of the information on it had to be vouched for and endorsed by a magistrate or political officer in India.^[52]

Article 14 of the amended Act worked to deter shippers from bringing prohibited immigrants to Australian ports. Huttenback notes: ‘It required the master or owner of any vessel bringing a prohibited immigrant to the Commonwealth to return him whence he came at no cost to the state and to recompense the Government of Australia for any expenses incurred in the interim.’ Shipping companies thus became extremely cautious in deciding whether to allow Indians to embark for Australia. In 1908, when Syed Iran Shah Sahid attempted to travel to Australia to bring back ‘an aged relative who had settled there’ he failed to secure a passage, although he had the required passport. He travelled four times to Colombo from Madras, but discovered that ‘the steamer companies there refuse to book any natives of India to Australia unless they hold a pass from the Australian government allowing them to land’.^[53] Similarly, Ghulam Jan, who planned to visit Australia ‘to search for a brother who has not been heard of for many years’. was also denied a passage by a shipping company at Colombo.^[54] Further information had to be sent to the various shipping companies to explain the new arrangements for Indians with a legitimate passport allowing them to visit Australia.

Once Indian travellers landed in Australia, there was still a possibility of deportation. Ghulam Jan and the servant who had accompanied him ran into trouble shortly after their arrival in Australia in 1908. The West Australian police alleged that they were ‘imposters’, ‘cadgers’ and ‘undesirables’ and they were deported. This was despite the fact that a number of Ghulam Jan’s ‘countrymen and co-religionists’ in Perth signed a memorial testifying that

Indians had protested against the Australian policies since the late nineteenth century. In 1898, Indian traders in Melbourne had sent a Memorial to the Government of India protesting against the Victorian colony’s Immigration Restriction Bill and in the following year, ‘Certain Sikhs resident in WA’ sent a petition ‘complaining of their disabilities under recent legislation in that colony’. Such protests continued after 1901. Merchants in an Indian business in Melbourne wrote to the press in 1902 in relation to the Immigration Restriction Act. They were seeking to get five Indians into the country to work in their business: ‘the Act is operating very harshly upon us, and is likely to bring about results inimical to the interests of Australia and to the good feeling existing between fellow British subjects of two shades of colour.’^[56] They warned of a boycott, or on the part of the Mohammedans, a ‘jehad’ just as they had done, they said, in regard to Natal when it introduced immigration restrictions. They advised that the National Congress of India ‘have already taken the matter up, and may be expected to pass some resolution on the matter early in the coming year’.^[57]

Indians across the Empire became more aware of Australian policies in 1905 when Mool Chand was deported. He was an Indian civil servant from Lahore who arrived in Perth on a visit in 1904. Having previously worked on the railways in India, in Uganda and in the civil service of British North Borneo, he was an experienced man of Empire, able to travel around to take up work. When he was discovered working in a Perth business owned by a fellow countryman, Inder Singh, however, he was summarily deported. This led to a storm of protest from the Indian community in Western Australia and their supporters. Mool Chand instructed a Perth solicitor to institute action for damages for false imprisonment and illegal deportation against the Collector of Customs. He also stated his intentions to institute proceedings against Alfred Deakin, the Australian Prime Minister.^[58]

When the Reverend Theo. Fischer of the Church of Christ was visiting missions in India, he was challenged about Australian policies: ‘An official to whom we spoke in one place could not understand why Australia, which claimed to be a Christian country, would not admit him, for instance, to Australian shores.’^[59]

Indian public opinion was often incensed by Australian immigration policies and Indians began to ask why, when they were being treated so badly by the Australian government, that Australian citizens could still enter India freely and take up jobs and establish businesses there. In late August 1905, three Indian doctors arrived in Perth. While they acknowledged that they had proper papers and did not have ‘much difficulty’ in landing in Australia, they were shocked to note that they were listed on their ship’s papers as ‘prohibited immigrants’.^[60] They contrasted the cordial welcome they had received in England, with the efforts to debar them when they were merely making a short visit to Australia. Australian doctors visiting India, in contrast, were ‘allowed every freedom’.^[61] Furthermore, they would be ‘free to come and go and given every help in the pursuit and investigations of their studies’. Certainly, Australian doctors visiting India were not required to carry special exemptions, nor were they on ‘mustered up like sheep to pass an inspection’ and subject to a penalty of £100 per head for their safe removal.^[62]

While Australians – as white British subjects – enjoyed the freedom to travel to and work and spread the Christian gospel in India, the White Australia Policy effectively debarred Indians from the enjoyment of reciprocal rights in Australia. The mobility of modernity was reserved for those deemed white.