With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has develop into a unstable factor, erupting in violence opposed to converts and missionaries. on the peak of British colonialism, although, conversion used to be a route to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, specially within the Tamil-speaking south of India. during this e-book, Eliza F. Kent takes a clean examine those conversions, focusing in particular at the event of girls converts and the ways that conversion remodeled gender roles and expectancies. Kent argues that the construction of a brand new, "respectable" group identification was once crucial to the conversion procedure for the rural workers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity lower than British rule. whilst, she indicates, this new id used to be expert as a lot via elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as through Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized via the dominant castes for his or her ritually polluting occupations and comfy ideas governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identification partly through the reform of gender family members. those reforms affected beliefs of femininity and masculinity within the components of marriage, domesticity, and get dressed. through the construction of a "discourse of respectability," says Kent, Tamil Christians was hoping to counter the cultural justifications for his or her social, monetary, and sexual exploitation by the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's specialise in the interactions among Western girls missionaries and the Indian Christian girls not just provides intensity to our knowing of colonial and patriarchal strength dynamics, yet to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing a major problem to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, person second in time, Kent's learn takes under consideration the ways in which public habit, social prestige, and the transformation of lifestyle tell spiritual conversion.