"Though an Englishman, he was a Nationalist": Border-Crossing and Friendship in Late Colonial India

Abstract

This paper draws upon the work of Leela Gandhi and Priyamvada Gopal on cross-cultural friendship in colonial settings and argues the importance of friendship in enabling the opening up of the binary divide between coloniser and colonised. It considers this through a case study of the impact of the personal contact and long friendship between the missionary Herbert Popley (1878-1960) and the Indian Christian leader K.T. Paul (1876-1931) to the movement of Popley towards support for Indian nationalist aspirations in the last decades of British rule in India. Their friendship grew from their collaboration on the project to indigenise the Indian church and in relation to the rural reconstruction movement launched by Paul under the auspices of the YMCA of India, Burma and Ceylon, where Paul was the first Indian General Secretary from 1916-c1928. The paper focuses upon three textual interventions Popley made in relation to race relations, to the Mother India controversy and in his biography of K.T. Paul.