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Abstract: The making of a “good and moral” child in colonial Kerala was a deeply contested process shaped by caste hierarchies, missionary pedagogy, and colonial governance. Protestant missionary societies such as the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the Basel Mission sought to transform lower-caste and impoverished children into disciplined Christian subjects through schooling, orphanages, and industrial training. Education was framed not merely as literacy but as a project of moral regulation and religious conversion, instilling obedience, cleanliness, industriousness, and piety. Missionaries depicted low-caste children as degraded and in need of civilizational uplift, constructing ideals of childhood that aligned with European evangelical morality while erasing local cultural practices. Schools and textbooks cultivated virtues of self-help, honesty, and diligence, drawing upon global Protestant ideals of respectability and gendered domesticity. For girls, “moral” childhood was tied to chastity, sewing, and domestic labour, whereas boys were prepared for artisanal or evangelical service. Yet, the missionary project was neither uncontested nor unidirectional. Children and their families exercised forms of “fleeting agency”—resisting discipline, running away from boarding schools, or demanding literacy over menial labour—thereby shaping the limits of missionary authority. The moral child was thus produced at the intersection of coercion, charity, and aspiration, as colonial regimes and indigenous communities debated the value of compulsory education and respectability. This history underscores how colonial childhood in Kerala became a terrain where morality, caste, and education were mutually constituted, producing both new possibilities of dignity and enduring exclusions.

Bio: Divya Kannan is Assistant Professor, Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR. She is also the co-founder and co-convenor of the Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC) and the author of Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala (Cambridge University Press, 2024), for which she recently won the Grace Abbott Best Book in English award from the Society for the History of Children and Youth ( SHCY). 

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