‘India’ in ‘Jane Eyre’

 
Jane Eyre was written in 1847, when India was on track to becoming the crown jewel of the Raj. So the references to India in Bronte’s novel, though a surprise to me, were very much with keeping up with the world she inhabited. Towards the end of the novel, Eyre is proposed by the clergyman Sir John Rivers to join his missionary work in India as his wife. Jane, being a smart lass, predicts the fate awaiting her in India:

I believe I must say yes – and yet I shudder. Alas! If I join St John, I abandon half myself: if I go to India, I go to premature death. And how will the interval between leaving England for India, and India for the grave, be filled?

A little bit of digging around made me discover that missionary work in India was approved by the British through the 1813 Charter Act. Until then, the East India Company had largely discouraged missionary activity, preferring to focus on trade and avoid provoking religious unrest. Post 1813, missionary work gets sanctioned and Christian evangelization kicks off in India with full gusto. Prior to this, Christianity was primarily practiced across the Malabar coast, the eastern coast of Tamil Nadu, Goa (thanks to the Portuguese presence) and small pockets of West Bengal, such as in Serampore which was under the Danes. Post 1813, it spread, most prominently in the North East of India and the tribal regions.

Bronte’s other reference to India was also comical. It happens when the young Jane is berated and described as:

this girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut – this girl is – a liar!’

Coming back to Rivers calculated proposal to Jane, we have Bronte famously capturing the cool, dispassionate, calculative approach of Rivers towards love and affection through ‘experiment kisses’. Bronte was a keen observer of the human mind and her feminism (through Jane’s eventual rejection of Rivers) shines bright here:

She pushed me towards him. I thought Diana very provoking, and felt uncomfortably confused; and while I was thus thinking and feeling, St. John bent his head; his Greek face was brought to a level with mine, his eyes questioned my eyes piercingly–he kissed me. There are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin’s salute belonged to one of these classes; but there may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss. When given, he viewed me to learn the result; it was not striking: I am sure I did not blush; perhaps I might have turned a little pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters. He never omitted the ceremony afterwards, and the gravity and quiescence with which I underwent it, seemed to invest it for him with a certain charm.

 Jane Eyre is a deeply Christian novel and Jane’s eventual choice of marrying the maimed, disabled Rochester can also be argued as a marriage of her feminism with Christian ethics. Henry Oliver expands this Christian-feminism of Bronte in his Substack essay.