By: Wesley Jacob
PREFACE
The extent of the
complicity of missionaries in the imperial project is complex and much debated.
Colonial occupation of the world made political and territorial unification a
possibility. India,
by contrast was never a single political unit until the period of colonization,
but a collection of hundreds of petty kingdoms, with diverse languages,
multiple faiths and numerous ethnicities who were often at odds with each
other. This made it difficult for local missionaries to cross boundaries and
proclaim the new faith. Harriet Wilder, citing a village missionary tellingly overviews
how the Divine hand still controlled Indian history.
For centuries, Hindu rule
in India brought no blessing to the people, the village preacher said, and for
that reason God willed that they should be supplanted by the Mohammadan [sic] rulers
who are monotheists and…therefore better than the Hindus… When the
Mohammadans were weighed in the balance and found wanting the British were sent
by God so that they might present Christ and Him crucified to the people of
this country.
As the
village preacher perceived, the British conquest of India came when India was already a subjugated
country. The Hindu majority had been ruled by the Mughal Empire
from 1526. The juxtaposition of the Muslim minority rulers with the Hindu
majority subjects had its many problems. While Hinduism was intrinsically polytheistic, as they worshiped
idols and cows, the relatively new religion of Islam was monotheistic, and did
not worship idols, and ate beef. The Mughal Empire was particularly weakened by
the intolerant Aurangzeb,
who even placed a tax on Hindus for their religion. This weakened national
situation set the stage for the British conquest. The context was therefore conducive and ripe for the spread of the Gospel,
as Wilder has graphically observed.
Among some possible
reasons for the conquest of India
by the British are, the decline of the Mughal rulers. The better technology of
the British army. The Superior sea power,
which not only enabled military strength, but also allowed the British economic
resilience. And the esprit de corps
among the British soldiers, a sense that destiny that rewards the adventurous. India was the “Jewel in the Crown”
of the stately British Empire .
As more countries came under British rule, the concept grew that the British
were destined to rule by a moral superiority. The British
Empire was the first genuinely global empire, an empire that
ranged, at times, from the American colonies in the West, Australia, and New Zealand in the East, Canada
and her dominions in the North and huge portions of Africa
in the South, including Egypt
and Rhodesia.
These colossal lands, and many other smaller islands, were to be shaped,
controlled, and brought under the dominion of a nation.
That
the Imperial British Empire significantly kick-started the world into the
modern era, and gave the world a unifying language is not really in dispute. However, the truth and the ugly reality behind
the ever-polished and very-rarely challenged veneer of respectability of the British,
and hence the Missionaries of the Empire in the Imperial project, is far from
the rosy picture of a benign and benevolent undertaking, that an unlearned
person might suppose. This paper therefore involves both a
Historical and a Missional interpretation regarding the degree of the collusion
of missionaries in the Imperial Project, attempting to trace the attitude of
the people toward the Government and their attitude toward the Christian
Mission.
THE
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRE IN INDIA
British presence in India
dates back to the early part of the seventeenth century. On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth,
the then monarch of the United
Kingdom, agreed that a royal charter be
given to a new trading company, "The Governor and Company of Merchants of
London, Trading into the East Indies." Between
1601-1613, merchants of the East
India Company took
twelve voyages to India,
in 1609; William Hawkins arrived at the court of Jahangir
to seek permission to establish a British presence in India but was rejected. Later Sir
Thomas Roe, in 1617, was successful. Two years afterward, Roe gained Jahangir's
permission to build a British factory in Surat,
and in 1639, this was followed by the founding of Fort St. George, Madras. In 1757, on
account of the British victory at Plassey,
where a military force led by Robert
Clive
defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah,
the East India Company found itself transformed from an association of traders
to rulers exercising political sovereignty over a largely unknown land and
people. Less
than ten years later, in 1765, the Company acquired the Diwani of
Bengal, Bihar,
and Orissa. Warren
Hastings then
consolidated British rule after initial military victories, which got rid of
the Sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor. Hastings
also made the British more acquainted with Indian history, culture, and social
customs; but upon his return to England,
he would be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. His numerous
successors, though fired by the ambition to expand British territories in India,
were also faced with the task of governance.
In a paradox that is so typical of
God, the Lord used Governor-general William Bentinck (1828 to 1835) from the peripheries as a Key Leader to
awaken elite Hindu minds regarding the stifling and oppressive effect traditional
Hindu rituals. Certain Indian religious practices that the British found offensive
were banned, such as Sati in
1829. Systematic operations were undertaken against inherited Hindu practices that
were obscene. Under Bentinck, Company employees were encouraged to dissociate
themselves from Hindu ceremonies and involvement in the administration of
temples. Passive tolerance was shown publicly to native religions. A handbook
of advice for young officers, published in 1833, suggested that they would have
to show forbearance towards native religions even though they were unwholesome. Systematic
measures were also adopted to eradicate Thagi.
In the 1840s and 1850s, under the Governor-generalship of Dalhousie and
then Canning, more territories were absorbed into British
India, either on the grounds that the native rulers were corrupt
and indifferent about the welfare of their subjects, or that since the native
ruler had failed to produce a biological male heir to the throne. Such was the
fate of Sambalpur (1849), Baghat (1850), Jhansi
(1853), Nagpur
(1854), and Awadh [Oudh] (1856). In 1874
Benjiman Disraeli, ridiculously observed, "In olden days, and for a
considerable time - indeed, until I would say the last ten years - the
principle of our government of India,
if I may venture to describe it in a sentence, was to respect
Nationality."
Shortly after the annexation of Awadh, the Sepoy Mutiny,
more appropriately described as The First War of Independence
of 1857-58, broke out. Within the space of a few weeks large territories in the
Gangetic plains fell to the mutineers. The Indians understood that they could
not be held in submission forever. Delhi
was recaptured by British troops in late 1857, the Emperor Bahadur Shah, last
of the Mughals, was put on trial for sedition and convicted, and by mid-1858
the Resistance had been entirely crushed. The East India Company was then
annulled.
India became a Crown colony,
governed directly by Parliament. Responsibility for Indian affairs fell upon a
member of the British cabinet, the Secretary of State for India, while in India itself the man at the helm of
affairs would continue to be the Governor-General, or the Viceroy of India. The
proclamation of Queen Victoria
ushered in the final phase of the British
Raj. The Queen pledged to work for the welfare of her Indian subjects. In
1885 the Indian National Congress, was founded in order that educated Indians
might gain a voice in the governance of their own country.
A
SURVEY OF MISSIONARY UNDERTAKING DURING THE RAJ
Among the multiplicity of motives that underlay the
British penetration into India
such as commerce and security, for the Missionaries the spiritual welfare of
the people was chief. India
was opened for missionary activity. Home-based
mission Modalities consolidated Christian mission expansion through their
respective Soladities by providing both endurance and durability. Though they
served quite efficiently as a supply structure, they could do little to check
and balance, power hunger missionary imperialists. The BBC documentary
Missionaries succinctly sums up the paradox: “Britain was in the process of
transplanting a religious ideology throughout her empire in which the majority
of those at home had already ceased to believe”.
The contributions of the Serampore Trio, Carey,
Marshman, and Ward, of the late eighteenth century -- provided enough inspiration
for future generations. The missionary impact on India through publishing, schools,
orphanages, vocational institutions, dispensaries, and hospitals was unmistakable.
Though education was predominantly left to the charge of Indians who imparted
instruction in the vernaculars, in 1813, the British became convinced to awaken
the Indians by exposing them to British literary traditions. William Bentinck,
the governor-general from 1828 to 1835, introduced the English language as the
medium of instruction. English replaced Persian in public administration and
education.
Missionaries
built Primary Schools where initially the medium of instruction was the local
language. Later High Schools introduced English as the language of instruction.
As the British began building universities in India from 1857, several Indian
leaders of that era, who were seen as the new elite supported the English
language and were seen as the new elite. Many new English schools were
established. India
as a colony of Britain
adopted English as the legal, financial, educational,
and business
language. High caste Indians, especially the Brahmans were used as mediators to
help in the administration. This also created a Class who could think like the
British, or as it was said then in Britain “Indians in blood and color
but English in taste, in opinions and morals and intellect”. The
British also established in India
universities based on British models with emphasis on the English language. Additionally,
a few Indians got their education in British universities and there was a consequent increase in English-language
journalism. Even
after India’s
independence, though it was supposed to terminate after 15 years of Independence. English
remains the main language of India.
British intellectuals, including Christian
missionaries, sought to bring Western cultural innovations to India. The Hindu English-educated
minority spearheaded many social and religious reforms either in direct
response to government policies or in reaction to them. Western-educated Hindu
elite sought to rid Hinduism of its much-criticized social evils: idolatry, the
caste system, child marriage, and Sati. Christian expansion in Tradition- fettered
India
provided a fresh and penetratingly contrasting understanding of the liberating
power of the Gospel. Shackled Hinduism served to highlight the meaning of Life
Christ freely gives. Issues of social emancipation were dealt
with, such as Female Education, Widow Remarriage, the Age of Consent for
Marriage, and more generally the Status of Women. For example, Religious, and
social activist Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj in
1828, displayed a readiness to synthesize themes taken from Christianity, and enhanced
the possibility of effecting broad reforms of societal values or religious
practices. These reform movements served as a catalyst to awaken the
conventional Hindu mind. The movement saw the emergence of amazingly new and
unexpected leadership patterns for ministerial training.
Missionaries translated the Bible into the vernaculars, taught
company officials local languages, and, after 1813, gained permission to evangelize
within the company's territories. Renewal
and Expansion often began on the periphery of the days Ecclesiastical Structure.
There were instances when entire groups of people embraced Christianity, such
as the Nayars in the south or the Nagas in the northeast.
THE MAGNITUDE OF COLONIAL DOMINANCE IN INDIA:
A CRITIQUE
India
provided commercial reasons for establishing Imperial presence through the
hugely rewarding spice trade. From the sixteenth century, European ships could
make fortunes carrying exotic foodstuffs from India back to the cities and
peoples of Europe. A combination of European
rivalry and technical expertise over India made the extension of
Imperial control possible and commercially desirable. The Dutch, Spanish, French,
and Portuguese all strived with Britain
for access to these rich commodities that could often fetch their weight in
gold in the European market. Textiles, cotton, indigo, pepper, yarn, sugar,
silk, tea, and opium would provide economic incentives for trade throughout the
eighteenth, nineteenth and even up to the twentieth century. Control over the
sources of these commodities and naval bases in Madras, Bombay,
and Calcutta
revealed that Imperial control was economically and strategically necessary. India
was the most commercially successful area of Imperial endeavor.
The History of the
Imperial Raj would be incomplete
without mentioning the positive side. The 1850’s witnessed the
introduction of the three "engines of social improvement". They were
the railroads, the telegraph, and the uniform postal service, inaugurated
during the tenure of Governor-general Dalhousie. The first railroad lines were
built in 1850 from Howrah
(Haora, across the Hughli
River from Calcutta). This grew into a vast railway system, which
more than anything else unified India.
The three different presidency or regional postal systems merged in 1854 to facilitate
uniform methods of communication at an all-India level. The structures of this remarkable Postal system,
has survived until today. The increased ease of communication and the
opening of highways and waterways networked and accelerated movement. The roads network of India. The transportation of
raw materials and goods to and from the interior, and the exchange of
commercial information. With the
expansion of the government, larger numbers of Indians joined government
service. Economic progress was made
in the areas of communication, agriculture, and education. Schools, colleges
and hospitals, roads, railways, and telegraph wires symbolized the irreversible
march of progress. However, all these
were not really meant for the welfare of India, but for the Empire to better
administer the colonies. Edward Said in his book, Orientalism,
historiographically explains how Colonialism was made possible, and sustained
and strengthened, by technology as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes
of conquest that first established power in India.
Though his argument regarding the economic logic of colonialism may be correct,
I believe a distinction must be drawn between the Imperial project and the
missionaries who came to India
during that time period to avoid the danger of analyzing the British State
as a monolithic. Though one is forced
to wonder if the British left India
with any understanding, any inkling of the greatness of the country they had
lived with for two centuries.
Colonialism also brought serious negative consequences. Culturally, India underwent exacting abuse. The
thousands of art treasures, the diamonds, the priceless statues, stolen, which
now adorn the houses of the rich in England, or the Queen's private
collections. That the British still do not feel the need to hand back these
treasures to India
is a shame. The ecological exploitation of India is also a fact: the tens of
thousands of tigers needlessly shot, the great massacre of trees and forests.
and the razing of old forts and houses. The British also neglected and
even hindered the development of the fledgling Indian drug industry especially
Ayurvedic and Unani enterprises who suffer from the lack of global publicity.
THE DIALECTIC OF IMPERIAL MISSION AND MISSIONARY
IMPERIALISM
The history of India
since 1600, as chronicled by the British, was a steady ascent from the depths
of ignorance and backwardness towards the heights of peace and material
progress. Yet, one wonders how Christian missionaries with deep convictions
about personal worth could agree with such an Authoritarian Empire, which
ultimately rested on force. Imperialism as defined in the Webster's dictionary
is “the state policy, or practice of extending power and dominion of a nation,
especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining indirect control
over the political or economic life of other areas.”
Scholars
like Brian Stanley, while providing an overview of missionary history, attempt
to absolve missionaries from imperial complicity on the grounds that their
motives were fundamentally distinct from imperialists like military officers,
government officials, merchants and scholars. I
would argue that it is not a matter of motivation but of orientation, in that t Stanley’s theory gives the
impression that the ‘rest’ as he calls them, namely, military, government
officials and the like, were not Christians, though many of them were indeed
likely to have been practicing the faith. Therefore, I wonder, if they followed
two different versions of the same faith: one altruistic, the other
imperialistic. R.E. Frykenberg likewise argues that in India “[at] no time were the
majority missionaries predisposed in favor of colonialism.”
Could he be implying that missionaries meekly followed the footsteps of the
conquerors and that they could have regarded the imperial project,
providential? Geoffrey Oddie reasons that with a “deeply Christian view of the
world”, it is impossible for missionaries to have colluded with imperialist.
The question is, which ‘world’, whose ‘world’? The missionaries definitely had
a “deeply Christian view” of their world – the civilized world of Europe. To them, the Orient was the ‘other’ world –
unredeemed and unregenerate. That everything religious outside the Christian
West needed to be resisted and overcome.
Colonialism and the Oriental “other”
Experts like Edward Said, on the other hand, assert that “one cannot be
neutral about imperialism: either one is for it or against it.”
This is a comment on the neutral posture of political correctness of which
missionaries were clearly guilty. Subaltern scholar Ranajit Guha maintains that
missionaries were one of the “dominant foreign groups”, and that as such “were
comprised of ‘British officials’ of the colonial state and foreign
industrialist, merchants, financiers, planters, landlords and missionaries.” These
dominant foreign groups used the
construct of the "White Man's Burden" to help justify their
colonization of foreign lands. Missionaries patronized the religious
cultures of India
to their own peril, as did when he said “Who could deny that
a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature
of India
and Arabia?”
Isaac Padinjarekuttu is clear that during the early decades of the nineteenth
century, British imperial interests and missionaries, interests were identical. Drawing
from disciplines such as Politicals, Economics, and Theology, one can quite
definitely explain how religious convictions of the British and their notions
of Providence
played an important part in their Colonial rule. The religious beliefs of
imperialist Christians clearly shaped politics under the Raj.
The dualistic theological world-view of British missionaries,
tended to see the world in terms of the Christian God in combat against the
pagan gods. To the extent that it was this philosophical bent that persuaded
Christian Missionaries to accommodate British Expansionism. In the words of
David Ludden,
Equating non-European cultures with non-European
religions thus became a fixed cognitive routine in scholarship and colonial
policy. This enabled Europeans to justify imperial expansion in both religious
and secular terms: for Christians, European imperialism saved souls, and for
modernists, it brought progress into a world of backwardness and tradition.
Samuel
Huntington, who plays the Christian West against the Islamic, Sinic, and Indic
civilizations, is forced to admit that, “The West, however, has never generated
a major religion. The great religions of the world are all products of
non-Western civilizations.”
It is therefore understandable why India was hesitant to accept a
westernized gospel. Said and those who postulate missionary complicity in the
imperial project use the scientific instrument of Orientalism
to demonstrates that Colonialism fabricated the "Oriental other" to
legitimate the dominance of the “Western self”. Orientalism was the philosophy
that fuelled by colonialism. It was driven by a twofold agenda: It
"proved" the irrational, immoral, and backward nature of the Oriental
(Eastern) world, and routinized the active, rational, moral, and realistic
nature of the Occidental (Western) world. The logic of this understanding
implied that it was natural and beneficial that the self (West) overcome the
other (East) for the sake of humanity’s progressive evolution. Thus, this
theory is integrally intertwined with power: to colonize, to dominate, to
educate, and to control. Where the Occidental (Self) tames and names the unruly and unrulable Orient (Other).
The colonial construction, of the "Indian identity" was therefore a
homogeneous, oriental identity, which "captured" varied and
differentiated peoples. And by taming
and naming the unruly and unrulable, it posited itself as the essence,
which could bind India
together. British rule was justified,
in part, by the claims that the Indians required to be civilized, and that
British rule would introduce in place of Oriental despotism a reliable system of
justice, and the rule of law. In most cases, British Missionaries emphasized
the Pilgrim Principle of Missions to the extent that it sometimes tended to
overwhelm the Contextual Indigenous Principle. Perhaps based on the Imperial
assumption that the Oriental, meant backward.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
It is therefore impossible to divide the attitude of the
people toward the Government from their attitude toward Christianity. What
might otherwise be expected to have been a benefit, seemed to turn out to be
harmful to the objectives and purpose of the missionaries. For several,
particularly the upper classes, in refusing the idea of British rule in India,
they rejected Christianity as well.
Babar,
a descendent of the Genghiz Khan, came to India in 1526 at the request of an
Indian governor to fight against Ibrahim Lodi, the last head of the Delhi
Sultanate. Babar defeated Lodi
at Panipat, and so came to establish the Mughal Empire in India. Babar ruled until 1530, and
was succeeded by his son Humayun,
who gave the empire its first distinctive features. But it is Humayun's son, Akbar the Great, who is conventionally
described as the glory of the empire. Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605, and
extended his empire to Afghanistan
in the west, and as far as the Godavari
River in the south.
Akbar, was a tolerant ruler, and started a new faith, Din-i-Ilahi, an attempt
to blend Islam with Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, and other faiths. He won
over the Hindus by naming them to important military and civil positions, and
by marrying a Hindu princess. Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir.
In his reign (1605-1627), Jahangir consolidated the gains made by his father.
Shortly after his death in October 1627, his son, Shah Jahan, succeeded to the throne. Shah Jahan’s chief legacy is
the Taj Mahal. the controversial Aurangzeb
his son saw further expansion in the early years of his long reign (1658-1707),
but by the seventeenth century the empire was beginning to disintegrate. After
Aurangzeb's death in 1707, many of his
vassals established themselves as sovereign rulers, and began the period of
"successor states".The Mughal Empire survived until 1857, but its
rulers were, after 1803, pensioners of the East India Company. The last
emperor, the senile Bahadur Shah Zafar,
was put on trial for allegedly leading the rebels of the 1857 mutiny and for
sedition.
Aurangzeb Alamgir’s ("World
Conqueror"), reign of forty-nine years was characterized by vigorous
military campaigns to extend the frontiers of the Mughal Empire. The common
people were heavily taxed. His harsh treatment of Hindus, was the reversal of
the liberal religious policies of his predecessors, particularly Akbar, have
been cited as principal reasons for the disintegration of his empire from
Richard, John F. The Mughal Empire of the New
Cambridge
History of India.
Vol. I, Part 5. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.246.
Queen Elizabeth and other British Heads of
State and British Prime Ministers are
given chronologically in Appendix IV
The East India Company, a merchandise
Company, had the distinction of ruling an entire country. From when, Sir Roe
gained for the British the right to establish a factory at Surat to the
Gradually eclipsing of the Portuguese, a massive expansion of trading
operations was established with numerous trading posts along the east and west
coasts of India, around the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and
Madras. Despite their trade and revenue increase, the Company found itself
burdened with military expenditures chiefly of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and
its destruction seemed imminent. Major victories were achieved against Tipu
Sultan of Mysore
and the Marathas, and the conquest of the Sikhs in a series of Anglo- Sikh Wars
led to British occupation over the entirety of India. Among the many Generals who
engaged in the ruthless British territorial expansion were Robert Clive, Warren
Hastings, Lord Wellesley, and Lord Dalhousie.
The Battle of Plassey
began on June 23, 1757
in a small village mango grove between Calcutta
and Murshidabad. The outcome of the battle had been decided long before the
soldiers came to the battlefield.The “battle” lasted no more than a few hours.
The paper includes appendices of Maps of British possessions of the Indian sub
continent before and after 1947 Partition
Dennis Judd, The British Raj (Avon,
England: Wayland Pub., 1972) 56.
James Lawrence, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
(London: Abacus, 1998) 220.
On May 10, 1857, Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army,
drawn mostly from Muslim units of Bengal,
mutinied in Meerut,
and plunged much of north and central India into a year-long insurrection
against the British. The uprising that seriously threatened British rule in India
was caused by the British blunder of using rifle cartridges that were allegedly
greased with animal fat, which was offensive to the religious beliefs of Muslim
and Hindu Sepoys. The rebellion fired the imagination of the nationalists for
whom, the rebellion represented the first Indian attempt at gaining
independence.
The Sepoy Mutiny has been called many names
by historians, including the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Mutiny, and the Revolt
of 1857; many people in South Asia, however, prefer to call it India's first
war of independence. The telling of History depends on, from which side one
sees an event. The history of the Revolt of 1857 is, to this day, an ongoing battle
between two competing narratives, the history belonging to the British that won
the war, and the history claimed by the Indians who were defeated.
Lawrence, the British
Empire, 300.
Dennis Judd, The
British Raj (Avon, England: Wayland Pub., 1972) 148
Lawrence,
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. (London: Abacus, 1998), 220-300.
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin,
1995),
The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.(London: Simon & Schuster,1997),
Orientalism, for Said, was, and largely still
is, a collection of ideas about the Orient written by Europeans for Europeans.