The historicity of female Roman Catholicism In India and the outreach of Sister Cyril Mooney in Kolkata, 1841-2012 (DOMUS Seminar)

DOMUS Seminar Series 2023 - 2024

Professor Tim Allender, University of Sydney, Australia

This paper examines the work of women religious in postcolonial India, focusing specifically on the 57-year career of Sister Cyril Mooney (1955-2012). The granular detail of Mooney’s influential outreach has largely gone undocumented, even though it has been recognized by the UN - as well as the governments of Ireland and India. Mooney’s work is steeped in the learnings and heritage of her order that began a congregation in Kolkata in 1841. Her outreach has been embedded in the organised chaos that is Kolkata - understanding different and problematic colonial legacies around poverty and working with Indian middle-class conceptions of Western educational modernity. She has developed ground-up educational experiments robust enough to then build into them economies of scale, sometimes working with secular NGOs and communist state governments. Though such outreach in India is never unblemished, her work has made a difference to India’s very poor street children, those girls who have been trafficked or who suffer from domestic abuse, as well as those children who are enslaved in the city’s outlying brickworks.  

Tim Allender is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum at the University of Sydney. Tim has worked in the fields of empire studies and history didactics for the past 30 years, specialising on themes regarding gender and the oppressed. His forthcoming book with Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism series) is entitled: Empire Religiosity: convent habits in colonial and postcolonial India.  

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