'"Dancing for joy": disability and affect in British missionary writing from early twentieth-century South Asia'.

This chapter examines missionary representations of the emotions of disabled Indigenous children in India and Sri Lanka, as depicted by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, a British Protestant organization focused on women and children. Drawing on both physical and digital archival materials, the study reveals that happiness was a recurring but deeply complex theme in these portrayals. Representations of happiness often served multiple purposes: they could underscore or contrast emotions more traditionally associated with disability, such as pity, and they also functioned as tools of discipline and moral instruction, both in colonial contexts and in metropolitan Britain. The chapter aims to make contributions to three historiographical fields. In missionary history, where attention has increasingly turned to race and gender, disability remains underexplored; this work demonstrates how disability was strategically instrumentalized in missionary literature. In the istory of motions, the paper contributes to scholarship on happiness by showing how emotional scripts around disability and joy were shaped by—and reinforced—racialized dynamics within imperial and missionary contexts. Finally, within the history of disability, the article highlights the intersections of race, gender, and disability in the emotional narratives constructed by missionary actors, revealing how these representations influenced both colonial subjects and domestic audiences. By interrogating these layered emotional and ideological strategies, the study underscores the importance of disability as a category of analysis in both colonial and emotional histories.