| Summary/Abstract |
This essay investigates the significance of autobiographical conversion narratives using a case study from the Basel Mission, active in India in the mid nineteenth century. I argue that such narratives are pivotal for the realisation of conversion in the discourse-oriented Protestant mission. Taking up Foucault's idea of ‘regimes of truth’, I understand autobiographical accounts of conversion as ‘acts of truth’. Such acts shape and contribute to a certain discourse formation that has a normative function for the individual and the community involved. The autobiographical conversion narrative thus not only reports events and experiences, it also brings an aura of authenticity and genuineness to the individual conversion, and it reinforces the validity of the norms expressed through the experiences of the subject for the community that subscribes to the discourse.
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