Voyaging into a Christian World: Indian children and the Church Missionary Society’s project of world-making, 1920s–1940s

This article explores how figurations of children from India changed in the children’s magazine of the Church Missionary Society in connection with its new internationalist ideals. Analysing the content of The Round World, as it was then known, it examines how India and Indian children mattered to the internationalist imaginaries the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was promoting from the 1920s. From the late 1920s, the CMS Young People’s Department and its Education Secretaries fostered ideas of ‘world-friendship’. Against this backdrop, the article explores how children from India not only entered this conversation within the magazine, but were also seen as becoming part of an international Anglican network. Through an unpacking of various categories of narratives, the article argues that this recasting was connected to the political and geographical imaginaries of the interwar years, and explores the closely enmeshed institutional and personal agendas that aided these children’s entry into a ‘world’ of the CMS’s making.