Are They Saviors? Medical Missionaries in the Development Sector

In this paper I examine the Christian Medical College (CMC) founded by a Protestant medical missionary, Dr. Ida Scudder (1870-1960) in 1900 in Vellore, South India. I focus on the work conducted in the department of the Rural Unit of Health and Social Affairs (RUHSA), an NGO offshoot of the CMC founded in 1977. I draw primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at RUHSA in the summer of 2023, supplemented with archival records from “The Ida Scudder Papers,” an extensive archive dedicated to Ida Scudder and the CMC. I use one of the self-help groups on campus as a case study to explore how developmental ideals are translated into action, and how the women within the self-help group interact with those ideals. I argue that the racial capital accrued by foreign missionaries has found new expressions in both caste and religious positionality in modern day medical missionary endeavors.