Book
Come, My Beloved
First published 1953
In the 1890s, American millionaire David MacArd responds to the poverty he sees in Bombay by founding a seminary to train Christian missionaries. Although he remains in New York, the institution shapes his descendants: his son chooses missionary work in India, and his grandson Ted goes farther by living in a remote village and trying to understand the people his family once expected merely to instruct. Each generation believes it can correct the limitations of the one before it.
Their efforts unfold through the British Raj and the growth of Indian nationalism. Religious conviction, philanthropy and paternalism repeatedly collide, particularly when the family's professed universalism is tested by intimacy and interracial marriage. The novel treats mission work not as a simple contest between belief and unbelief, but as a multigenerational struggle over power, cultural respect and the difference between serving another society and attempting to reshape it.
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