India: mission within the empire
In the British imperial world, India stands alone in its complexity and imperial significance, predominating among much of Britain’s imperial endeavours in both Africa and Asia. In its diverse religious heritages, the complexity of its social structures and the range of languages used, it brought a testing blend of governing challenges.
The prized jewel in the imperial British crown, it was a country long associated with the British Protestant missionary movement, as the iconic Baptist William Carey journeyed there in 1792, to the consternation of East India Company officials in Delhi. While Carey and his associates quickly became invested in educational enterprises, they existed on the contentious periphery of British interests in India. It was not until the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1813 that William Wilberforce and other evangelicals expended a vast amount of political capital and organisational energies to secure the free admittance of British missionaries into the subcontinent so that they ‘may tend to the introduction among [those in India] of useful knowledge and moral improvement’.48 When the ‘Indian Mutiny’ occurred in 1857, the deliberate attacks on Western missionaries and their families confirmed British officials’ fears over the subversive and disruptive effects that Christian proselytisation was having within Indian societies. Missionary supporters, for their part, argued the inverse: that such violence was due to the East India Company’s attempts to remain neutral in religious affairs, not giving missions their full support.What transpired with the advent of the British Raj in 1858 was a policy that sought to counter critiques of the ‘secular’ elements of government education while at the same time investing educational funds to greater effect. Mission agencies, in turn, moved into positions to accept the money by aligning their curriculum with bureaucratic governmental standards while agreeing to not use the grants-in-aid for religious instruc- tion.49 This allowed the Raj to maintain its commitment to religious neutrality while simultaneously equipping mission schools to dispense Western education.
The growth of grant-aided mission schools in the northern United Provinces expanded remarkably between 1870 and 1910. Such institutions increased from 361 in 1870 to an incredible 4,276 just forty years later. Mission-run high schools that received government grants in the United Provinces went from 12 of 22 in 1880 to outnumbering government high schools by 4 to 1 in 1910.50But education, from the perspective of nineteenth-century missionaries, was not an end in itself. By the 1860s the purpose and nature of missionary education in India had been the subject of an extensive debate, and Alexander Duff, the foremost missionary educator in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, thought mass elementary education was inefficient and unproductive for conversion of India to Christianity. Duff believed that resources would be better employed by focussing on small groups of elite students taught at higher levels in the English language, the idea being that these enlightened young men would become beacons of civilisational light throughout India.51 Duff expressed this idea another way: ‘As regards the great interests of a realm (say Scotland), one Knox is worth ten thousand illiterate peasants.’52
Duff and other missionaries, however, faced the reality that the Christian message did not appeal quite as much to the ‘Knoxes’ of India, but rather to those who were at the bottom of the caste structure: the Dalits. Among the Chuhras of the central Punjab, for example, there was from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries a mass movement of conversion to Christianity. The Christian population grew from 3,912 in 1881 to 315,031 in 1921. Appropriately, and ironically from Duffs perspective, this movement was reportedly begun by an illiterate peasant named Ditt.53 Elsewhere in India, tensions arose over the egalitarian message of Christianity and the enduring desire of higher-caste Christians to enforce caste traditions within the Church.54
Early nationalist movements brought the forces of an educated Brahmanical class and Dalit Christianity to a head, sparking debates within missionary circles as to the appropriate role of education in a nation whose most vociferous politicians were hostile towards missions and stressed the uniquely ‘Hindu' character of the Indian nation.
Henry S. Lunn of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society denounced missions for blindly implementing Duffs educational vision for India, as it had simply equipped existing elites with new tools with which to maintain the supremacy of the Brahmanical caste.55 Others countered by stating that the ascendancy of mission-educated leaders, despite their lack of conversion, affirmed Duff s strategy, and even suggested that such Hindu nationalism was a movement that could have Christian ends.56 These conflicts were to continue through the early twentieth century (and indeed have endured into the twenty-first century), as mission-educated Dalit Christians were inspired by—and appealed to—Christianity’s egalitarian proclamations. In this sense, missionary schools and missionary education policy were in some cases the seedbeds for nationalist thinking while in other cases served to challenge the vision that nationalist thinkers were casting for India’s future.57Even in the field of higher learning, which Robert Eric Frykenberg described as the ‘apex of missionary efforts', one finds that Western missionaries remained heavily dependent upon local people, usually Christian converts, to staff mission schools.58 J.N. Ogilvie estimated that in 1923 there were approximately 21,000 mission-related schools across the British Empire, while there were only around 9,000 missionaries of all nationalities engaged in all kinds of work.59 The combination of education, Christianity and Indian agency is arguably best demonstrated by the case of Pandita Ramabai and her Mukti mission. Established as a place of refuge and education for marginalised and destitute girls, the Mukti mission became the site of a remarkable Christian renewal movement that would flow into the larger stream of Pentecostal revivalism in the early twentieth century. Ramabai, herself highly educated, well travelled and articulate, is consequently imbued with many of the internal tensions and legacies of missionary education in India. She had converted to Christianity, ran her own mission station and school for destitute and lower- caste women, from which emerged a unique form of charismatic Christianity, one that would go on to have substantial global ramifications through the course of the twentieth century.60 One missionary who worked near Ramabai's mission commented on ‘the extreme unimportance of the missionary’ in India because ‘the Spirit [was] laying hold of the girls themselves, in her school, as He had done in the work of Ramabai, so that teachers and leaders sat down and God by the Spirit wrought with those young native girls so wondrously'.61