Narrating the Slave-Caste

This chapter examines the Protestant narrative strategies deployed in nineteenth-century Travancore, focusing on Joseph Peet’s missionary letters and The Slayer Slain , a serialized novel by Frances Wright Collins and Richard Collins. Through these texts, this chapter explores how the Church Missionary Society framed oppression of the slave-caste not merely as a social ill but as a theological failure, requiring reform through conversion. While claiming to champion the emancipation of the slave-castes, these narratives consistently positioned the Suriyani Christian community as the true impediment to reform. By delegitimizing Suriyani ritual authority, Protestant discourse sought to remake Travancore’s religious and social order in its own image. Extending Christopher Hodgkins’s thesis on Protestant colonialism and conscience, this chapter argues that moral appeals to rights and liberty were inseparable from the imperial project. In Travancore, Protestantism became both the language of humanitarian concern and the instrument of religious and cultural consolidation.