Mission-Made Kannur? A Counter-Portrayal of the Basel Mission Station of late Nineteenth Century
Deepthi Puthenpurackal
The Basel Mission, established in 1815 in Basel as an ecumenical missionary organization, operated in several African and Asian countries with the primary goal of propagating Evangelical Christianity. Central to their ideology was the promotion of a Western idea of labor and discipline.
When their conversion efforts started in South India in 1834, the Basel Mission encountered the Hindu caste system. For the new Christians, conversion was an ambivalent situation: on the one hand, they were “liberated” from caste-related constraints, while on the other, leaving Hinduism also meant the loss of all possessions, including their social network and occupation. To address this issue, the Basel Mission initiated the establishment of various commercial institutions, including industries, providing the “Heidenchristen” with an alternative source of income.
The mission’s entrepreneurial success was mirrored in the establishment of several industries, such as weaving mills, and international export of products, such as textiles. Fabrics could not only be exported across the entire British Empire but also generated a new market for Swiss industrial products: weaving looms, spare parts, and chemical dyes from Switzerland found a new market in the South Indian mission compound of Kannur.
Some of these Swiss industrial export companies were, in fact, owned by the shareholders of the Mission Trading Company.
The history of the organization is documented in the Basel Mission archive, which contains holdings dating back to 1815 including reports, photographs, maps, and plans. Even though the archive is very rich in its quantity, I started to ask myself questions to which I could not find clear answers. For instance, who lived in the area surrounding the Basel Mission compound? What was life like there? Where are the documents showing native livelihoods?
The archive’s selectivity, influenced by editorial policies and consensus within the Basel Mission, determined the content and preservation of the Mission’s materials. In an architectural and artistic way, I addressed these gaps and created a fabulated recreation of the neighborhood by drawing, mapping, and embroidering, aiming to tell a new, yet old, story; a story that cannot be found in the archive. Next to material in the archive, I based my work on the 1897 Malayalam novel Sukumari by Joseph Muliyil, Markus Imhoof’s movie Flammen im Paradies from 1996, comments of a former missionary in the SRF documentary Basler Mission from 2016, and discussions at the conference “The Basel Mission in India” in 2023. Based on these sources, I added my own critically fabulated narrative.
Main Sources
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). „Architectures of Care“. Accessed 17 February 2024.
Fischer, Rudolf, and Rudolf Braun.
Die Basler Missionsindustrie in Indien 1850-1913 : Rekrutierung und Disziplinierung der Arbeiterschaft, Reihe W, 1978.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.”, Small Axe 12, , no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
Flammen im Paradies, , film by Markus Imhoof, 1996.
Raghaviah, Jaiprakash, Basel Mission Industries in Malabar and South Canara, 1834-1914: A Study of Its Social and Economic Impact. New Delhi: Gian Pub. House, 1990.
