The large missionary film collections held in various British archives attest to the extent of mission activity in parts of the world where British missionaries travelled to proselytise Christianity. Many missionary societies used film as well as other visual media, including photographs, lantern slides and filmstrips, in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to understand how Protestant and Anglo-Catholic organisations adopted film to convert and recruit, and to raise funds for the spread of the Christian faith, this chapter will look at examples of documentaries from these film collections that were made in India between the 1900s and the 1950s, and will also discuss related films mentioned in catalogues and missionary literature but of which there are no copies in the various archives. India was a key site for British missionary activities in the British Empire. It became a British Dominion of the said empire, and was named the Empire of India in 1876, after the British East India Company had transferred its rule to the British Crown in 1858. The film collections cover the period from the turn of the nineteenth century up until the decade after India's independence from Britain in 1947.

The films that will be discussed here draw on styles of early actualities, travelogues, films that constructed a sense of travel and showed tourist views of places, and popular ethnographic dramas that involve staging and filming scenes of the everyday life of people from another culture. Subjects include farming, fishing, hunting, culinary methods, craft and building techniques, ceremonial performance and religious activities, as well as familial relations, social structures and governance.

The films also fall under categories such as travel, educational and instructional documentary, as well as drama-documentary or documentary- drama, broadly defined as hybrid forms of film-making that re-enact and reconstruct actual events through characterisation and actuality footage. The films cover a range of missionary work, including proselytising and converting Indian subjects to Christianity, and church activities promoting the introduction of Western health and education as part of a ‘civilising mission’. They also portray the building and expansion of churches, mission stations, hospitals and schools.