The author of a new book challenges the stereotype of British women in India as racists and snobs in search of a husband. Among the many remarkable characters she portrays are the missionaries, who were the first to discover the key to unlocking social change

In 1822 a remarkable woman called Mary Ann Cooke Wilson founded an Orphan Refuge on the banks of the Hooghly River, just eight miles upstream from Calcutta. All the expenses for her mission had been paid for by funds raised by the women of Liverpool, after a Baptist missionary, William Ward, had published a diatribe denouncing the darkness and ignorance in which their “degraded” Indian sisters were living.

Another Englishwoman, Honoria Lawrence, described her visit to the refuge some 10 years later, when she was greeted by a hundred girls, aged between three and 12, ranged in orderly rows “all dressed exactly alike [in white sarees] and exquisitely clean, and not disfigured with earrings and nose-rings”. When questioned on the gospels, they were able to answer “readily and intelligently”, she wrote; and later they sung a hymn for her in Bengali. “It was very sweet to hear a hundred young voices joined in its simple music,” she recalled, “especially when one thought from what they had been rescued.”