In Their Own Voices

S. M. Hilda Miley and S. Mary Rose McCaffrey host Indian clergy Reverend Antony Kuriacherry, Archbishop Kavascutt, and Rev. Thomas Assaripurambid at Salve Regina College in 1960. Courtesy Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, USA. Permissions provided by Salve Regina UASC.

Among a feast day program of hymns and prayers at Salve Regina College in Newport, Rhode Island is one song not in English. It is in Malayalam, and the women singing the song are nuns visiting from India. The feast day program spans across two audio reels and is labeled “Indian Sisters,” recording performances captured in the 1960s, on the feast day of Sister M. Rosalia Flaherty, R.S.M (Religious Sisters of Mercy). The recording does not name the sisters individually and it is impossible to tell how many people sing in this chorus, or whether the groups of American and Indian sisters performed in any groups together.

Several of the Indian sisters speak in English, with one sister saying, “It is the generous hearts of our benefactors that give us wings to fly through the air and come to this strange land within a few hours. All our homesickness was vanished away by the loving embrace we received at the airport. […] It will enable us to fulfill our mission here and continue our work in India.”¹ She thanked one sister in particular, perhaps jokingly, for instructing the Indian sisters on correct pronunciation. This recording is one of the only places in the Salve Regina Archives where the voices of this nun and her fellow sisters from India are clear, unmitigated by American narration of their stories.

The visiting sisters were participants in the Overseas Education Program (OEP), a mission program under the Sister Formation Conference which provided education and religious formation at American Mercy colleges for “members of religious communities native to Third World countries.”² The OEP arose from political circumstances in India, after the Indian state of Kerala elected a Communist government in 1957 that banned Catholic clergy from being educated in state institutions. In a state where sixteen percent of the population was Catholic, religious orders lacked educated personnel to work their hospitals and schools.

In 1958, Indian priest Rev. Anthony Kurialacherry, then studying in Chicago, contacted Sister M. Josetta Butler, R.S.M., of Chicago’s St. Xavier’s College to request a program to educate Indian sisters in the United States. Sister Josetta advocated that colleges of the Sisters of Mercy of the Union in the United States “adopt” two sisters each for four years of funded college study, so that they would return to India “equipped professionally, socially, and spiritually to serve the people.”³ St. Xavier’s College accepted two sisters for the academic year of 1959-1960, and in May 1960, Sister Josetta wrote to education professor Sister M. Rosalia at fellow Mercy school Salve Regina College (now University) to inquire about inaugurating the program there.⁴

Sister Angel Mary and Sister Mary Selegrina celebrate taking their final vows in 1966. Courtesy Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, USA.

Local newspaper coverage as well as Associated Press and Wide World Photos images of the sisters disembarking from an Air India plane depicted the fascination with the August 1961 arrival of over thirty nuns from India and Burma. The New Bedford Sunday Standard-Times announced, “Indian Nuns Invade College,” on August 27, 1961, describing the nuns’ stay at Salve Regina to spend two weeks on what the newspaper called an “indoctrination course” before traveling to study at other Sisters of Mercy colleges. The Standard-Times better explained that, “Even more important than their actual education, the [Sister Formation] conference feels, is the first hand knowledge of the United States that they will bring back to their own countries.” The article described the sisters as petite or tiny as well as loud and happy, juxtaposing their “babel” with the elegance of the college campus. Quotations from the sisters focus on their excitement about the beauty of Rhode Island and the trials of living in a Communist-governed state in India.⁵

The first two sisters from Kerala to attend Salve Regina were Sister M. Jerome Valliath and Sister Jane Frances Kuzhuvelikalam, Sisters of the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament (S.A.B.S.), an order founded in Kerala in the early 1900s.⁶ The sisters traveled to Rhode Island from the Archdiocese of Changanacherry in November 1960.⁷ Letters from their superiors offer glimpses into the connections and complicated communications between the home communities, Salve Regina administrators, and the Indian sister-students. A letter from the Kerala convent to Salve Regina included updates for Sisters Jerome and Jane Frances at the end of a letter to Sister Rosalia in 1961, but then hints, “All other news the sisters will bring,” likely a reference to the coming arrival of more sisters from Kerala, bringing news without an intermediary.⁸

The sisters’ struggles in learning English concerned their superiors in both the U.S. and India. Mother General Mary, S.A.B.S. in Kerala noted to Sister Rosalia that the second pair, Sister Anne Maria and Sister M. Arsenia, would be able to get help in Malayalam from Sisters Jerome and Jane Frances.⁹ The OEP administration emphasized the importance of guiding sisters from India through the cultural shock of moving to the United States, a priority not without paternalism. Sister Josetta wrote to Salve Regina in November 1960 to anticipate some problems in acclimating the Indian sisters. She noted that English language learning, especially oral communication, should be a priority, that sisters studying biology may not have had facilities for laboratory work while in India, and even suggested they might not understand Western hygiene, advising, “instruction along this line will be needed immediately.”¹⁰

The attitude of the order toward the “adopted” sisters echoed beliefs about foreignness from earlier in its history, when Sisters of Mercy wove together cultural assimilation with religious study in Eastern European immigrant parishes and schools in the early 20th century.¹¹ Sister Josetta depicted the program to the Vatican as seeking tolerance from the Indian sisters for “those aspects of Western culture by which they, their communities, the Church, and the country benefit,” so that they may adopt those aspects.¹² The program was concerned that since “the sister students were acquiring experiences that their superiors had not had, it was critical to insure [sic] acceptance for them and their ideas upon their return to India.¹³ There is no mention of what tolerance toward India the program promoted. Sister Josetta writes that Indians “are a people determined to move into the 20th century. But twenty-one hundred years is a great time to cover in ten years.”¹⁴

Three images from a Salve Regina College scrapbook, depicting Sister Mary Selegrina the day she took her final vows; Indian priests who visited the ceremony; and Sister Mary wearing a sari wrapped by S. M. Selegrina. Courtesy Salve Regina University, Newport, RI.

From the American sisters’ perspective, they were engaging in cultural exchange, and Sister Josetta secured a grant from the U.S. State Department to visit Indian colleges in 1962. The mother general of the Sisters of Mercy in the United States explained to a reporter that “people in other countries don’t want Westerners coming in and imposing Western culture on them. […] [T]hey [want] their own leaders and teachers.”¹⁵ This same article, however, characterized the program as a foreign mission brought to Newport, and the program never seemed to question whether it was imposing Western culture indirectly. While the original request to create the OEP sought a solution to a lack of educational opportunities, the Sisters of Mercy had additional objectives, seeking to change India through the sisters who studied in America, and it worried that the sisters who had undergone transformation in the West would no longer fit in their communities.¹⁶ In a Eurocentric perspective, “the non-West provides unsigned raw materials to be refined by named Western artists,” which can serve as a metaphor for the desired process of remaking the Indian sisters according to Western values.¹⁷ Both Indian and American sisters often refer to those studying at Salve Regina as the “little Indians”; smallness, sweetness, and docility recur in the language from superiors on both sides of the world and in American news coverage, contributing to the narrative of the sisters’ necessary malleability.¹⁸ The Sisters of Mercy’s perspective pushed against some impulses of colonialism, but it could not wholly avoid assumptions about what was best for India.

1960s-era scrapbooks, kept by Salve Regina’s American sisters, depicted American and Indian nuns, with photographs of nuns on excursions and at events with Indian sisters present, such as the New England tradition of a road trip to view fall foliage.¹⁹ Photographs also show Sisters Angel Mary and Sister Mary Selegrina, both Catechists of St. Anne, praying in the college chapel when they made their final vows on January 6, 1966, and many sisters gathered around a table with cake and soda afterward. On Easter Sunday, 1968, Sister Celestina made her final vows; photographs show her with a crown of daisies atop her wimple.

S. Jerome and S. Jane Frances on a yacht off the coast of Newport, early 1960s. Courtesy Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, USA.

The OEP expanded to work with sisters elsewhere in Asia and later from South America, and Africa, but grew less necessary by the late 1970s, as sisters gained educational opportunities in their home countries. By 1979, the program’s former participants included four physicians, eighteen school administrators, eight hospital administrators, four social workers, and fifty-nine in leadership positions in their religious communities.²⁰ Sister Jane Frances and Sister Mary Jerome continued on to fully-funded graduate work in biology after graduating. As part of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations for the Salve Regina class of 1968, Angel Gingras, formerly Sister Angel Mary, described the influence the Sisters of Mercy had on her desire to help others in need, leading to her starting a nonprofit organization to provide resources, infrastructure, and education for people in India.²¹

The OEP’s development progressed through a self-determined movement of women crossing boundaries. A handful of letters, recordings, and images are all that represent the voices of the Indian sister-students in the Salve Regina University Archives. There are few instances of the Indian sisters presenting themselves. Finding their stories depends on the modes of narrative they had available to them; the act of interpreting their experiences through these modes constitutes a contact zone of its own. While American sources dismissed the voices of the sisters as “babel,” their stories are coherent in their own voices.

1. Songs by Indian Sisters for Sister S. M. Rosalia, Salve Regina University Archives, Newport, RI, Part 1:  https://library.artstor.org/public/31572227; part 2:  https://library.artstor.org/public/31572228).
2. Sister Mary Regina Werntz, R.S.M., Our Beloved Union:  A History of the Sisters of Mercy of the Union (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, Inc., 1989), 195.
3. Werntz, 196-197.
4. Letter from Sister M. Josetta Butler to Sister M. Rosalia Flaherty, May 14, 1960, RG18 box 1, folder 4, Salve Regina University Archives. All archival materials hereafter are from this repository.
5. Eileen Lardner, “Indian Nuns Invade College,” Sunday Standard-Times, 27 August 1961.
6. The latter’s name is spelled Jane Frances or Jane Francis almost interchangeably. This order is not to be confused with the French order Sisters of Reparative Adoration (A.R.) or the American order Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (S.B.S.) founded by St. Katharine Drexel.
7. Salve Regina College Annals Vol. I, pp. 71-72; Annals vol. II, 95.
8. Letter from Sister Martin Mary to Sister Rosalia, July 31, 1961, RG18, box 1, folder 5.
9. Letter from Mother General, Sister Mary, S.A.B.S., to Sister Rosalia, September 17, 1961, RG18, box 1, folder 5. Mother General Mary signed her name this way; she was most likely head of the convent in Kerala.
10. Letter from Sister M. Josetta to unidentified recipient (likely Sister Rosalia), November 3, 1960, RG 18, box 1, folder 4. The letter assumed the Indian sisters would be unfamiliar with stand-up showers and menstrual products.
11. Werntz, 191-192.
12. S.M. Josetta to Most Rev. James Knox, February 20, 1962, RG18, box 1, folder 4, 1.
13. Werntz, 198.
14. Sister M. Josetta, Overseas Education Program report, March 22, 1962, RG18:  box 1, folder 4.
15. Eddy Venzie, “Salve Regina Nuns Have Brought Foreign Mission Field to Newport,” most likely from Newport Daily News, 1960. Located in RG18, box 1, folder 8.
16. Sister M. Patrice Noterman, SCC (1988), “An Interpretive History of the Sister Formation Conference, 1954-1964,” Loyola University Chicago eCommons, https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss_2563, 158. See also Sister Mary Jeremy Daigler, Through the Windows: A History of the Work of Higher Education among the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas (Scranton, PA:  The University of Scranton Press, 2000), p. 163.
17. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “The Seismic Shift and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” in Race in Translation:  Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 66-67.
18. Letter from Sister Mary, S.A.B.S., to Sister Rosalia, August 23, 1963, RG18, box 1, folder 5.
19. Pictures 1963-1972 scrapbook, Salve Regina University Archives, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.29112902.
20. Daigler, 164.
21. Angel Gingras (2018), Reflection, Class of 1968 Legacy Project, https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/legacy1968/6/.