The General Baptist Missionary Society of England began its work at Cuttack, a provincial town on the east coast of India, in 1822. It engaged suitable adult native converts as itinerant preachers. It encouraged them to maintain journals and describe their everyday life in rich detail. This paper offers a reading of three crucial concerns of the everyday life these journals construct: time, interiority, and public good. Constituted by simultaneously pursued dialogues with English and Oriya discursive traditions, these notions and (...) attendant practices helped the formation of a small Christian middleclass that nurtured a new understanding of being human. The paper concludes by arguing in favor of local cultures of selfhood: a history of the particular discursive negotiations undertaken by the Oriya preachers accomplishes a fuller understanding of colonial modernity at Cuttack. (shrink)