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‘India, my appointed place’: an account of Mary Carpenter’s four journeys to India by Norman C. Sargant. Typescript.

Norman Sargant was Bishop of Mysore 1950-72.

Mary Carpenter, 1807-1877, became well known for her work on behalf of deprived and delinquent children in Victorian England. She was devoted to her father, a Unitarian Minister, and to Raja Ram Mohan Roy whom she came to know well in his visits to England. Her early life was spent as a teacher and she became interested in Reform Schools and worked hard for their establishment. She recognised the need to train teachers, particularly women teachers, in India and during the last ten years of her life she made four visits to the subcontinent. Her ideal of liberal, Christian training establishments with women teachers met with only partial success, but she undoubtedly sowed the seeds of reform in education, prisons and factory employment in many of the cities she visited – Ahmadabad, Surat, Bombay, Poona, Calcutta and Madras.

In 1870 she founded the National Indian Association in England to improve knowledge of native affairs in India and to promote reform in cooperation with enlightened Indians.

The Journal of the Indian Association which started in January 1871 continued publication until 1933. 163pp.