Missionary Christianity and Local Religion: American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836-1870 1602584346, 9781602584327, 9781602584341

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Missionary Christianity and Local Religion: American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836-1870
 1602584346, 9781602584327, 9781602584341

Table of contents :
Cover
Blurbs, Half Title Page, Series Page, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Map, Series Foreward
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Religious Context in North India: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity
Chapter 2. The Religious Context in North India: American Evangelicalism
Chapter 3. The Missionaries: Religious and Social Innovators
Chapter 4. Indian Workers and Leaders: Negotiating Boundaries
Chapter 5. Theology in a New Context
Chapter 6. Community in a New Context
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of Places
Index of Subjects and Names

Citation preview

Missionary Christianity and Local Religion ARUN W. JONES

American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836—1870

“Missionary Christianity and Local Religion is not the first publication to note similarities and draw historical connections between Evangelical Christianity and the bhakti (devotional) religious movements that preceded its arrival in North India, but it is easily the most detailed and thorough. Jones is a careful, conscientious historian, never running ahead of his evidence or oversimplifying the story for effect. The result is an argument of admirable subtlety, precision, honesty, and erudition about how bhakti religious traditions in North India opened up space for the development and growth of Evangelicalism.” —­Chad M. Bauman, Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, Butler University “Interrogating the religious ethos and the ‘landscape’ in which conversion movements were located and tracing disruption and continuity in the lives of nineteenth-­century North Indian converts, Arun Jones locates the various subjects of his inquiry, especially the ‘native’ voices, within the broader social, cultural, and religious histories of the region without shying away from carefully considered reconstruction that thoroughly engages the material at hand and goes on to offer possibilities of understanding people and situations that are plausible and foster ongoing discussion.” —­J. Jayakiran Sebastian, Dean of the Seminary and H. George Anderson Professor of Mission and Cultures, The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia “Readable, well documented, and very broadly contextualized, Missionary Christianity and Local Religion is based on careful and extensive research. Arun Jones highlights two especially important sources of influence affecting the ethos and character of mission communities: bhakti ideas that were popular in the towns and countryside of North India and the influence of mid-­nineteenth-­century Princeton theology on the North Indian Christian leadership. Jones’ argument that these ideas emanating from both India and the United States helped create two distinctive Christian communities somewhat different from those in the West reinforces the view that some form of ‘indigenization’ is basic for the survival and progress of the Christian movement, not only in India, but elsewhere as well.” —­Geoffrey A. Oddie, Honorary Associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney

“Arun Jones explores a new understanding of the Christian landscapes that were connected and divided in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Hindu and Muslim India, British India, and America. He traces the emergence of an Indian Christianity that formed a ‘third space’ within the religiously diverse colonial Indian landscape. Bringing new and overlooked materials into focus, Missionary Christianity and Local Religion skillfully offers a kaleidoscopic perspective on how multiple American, British, and Indian evangelical Christianities established and negotiated new locations from the early Raj to the present.” —­Paul B. Courtright, Professor Emeritus, Emory University

Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

The Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity Calvin College

Joel A. Carpenter Series Editor OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic Andrew E. Barnes Evangelical Christian Baptists of Georgia Malkhaz Songulashvili Converts to Civil Society Lida V. Nedilsky China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture YANG Huilin The Making of Korean Christianity Sung-­Deuk Oak The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia Tibebe Eshete

Missionary Christianity and Local Religion American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836–­1870

Arun W. Jones

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 2017 by Baylor University Press Waco, Texas 76798 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press. Cover Design by AJB Design, Inc. Cover Image: “One of our first preachers, sitting on his bed in his tent at camp meeting.” The photograph depicts a first-­generation Methodist preacher during a season of village evangelism, a typical activity for nineteenth-­century evangelical missions. Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album–India–O.P. #01 page 0004,” UMC Digital Galleries, http://catalog.gcah.org/omeka/ collections/show/121. © General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church. Interior photographs are from Twenty-­One Years in India, by Rev. J. L. Humphrey, M. D. (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1905). Interior sketch of the Mission premises at Bareilly is from Six Years in India: Or, Sketches of India and Its People as Seen by a Lady Missionary, by Mrs. E. J. Humphrey (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1866), 141. Interior map is from vol. 26 (Atlas) of The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), plate 28. This book has been cataloged by the Library of Congress with the ISBN 978-1-60258-432-7. Web PDF ISBN: 978-1-6025-8434-1 This ebook was converted from the original source file. Readers who encounter any issues with formatting, text, linking, or readability are encouraged to notify the publisher at [email protected]. Some font characters may not display on all ereaders. To inquire about permission to use selections from this text, please contact Baylor University Press, One Bear Place, #97363, Waco, Texas 76798.

For Yoli, Suresh, and Amihan

Series Foreword

I

t used to be that those of us from the global North who study world Christianity had to work hard to make the case for its relevance. Why should thoughtful people learn more about Christianity in places far away from Europe and North America? The Christian religion, many have heard by now, has more than 60 percent of its adherents living outside of Europe and North America. It has become a hugely multicultural faith, expressed in more languages than any other religion. Even so, the implications of this major new reality have not sunk in. Studies of world Christianity might seem to be just another obscure specialty niche for which the academy is infamous, rather like an “ethnic foods” corner in an American grocery store. Yet the entire social marketplace, both in North America and in Europe, is rapidly changing. The world is undergoing the greatest trans­ regional migration in its history, as people from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific region become the neighbors down the street, across Europe and North America. The majority of these new immigrants are Christians. Within the United States, one now can find virtually every form of Christianity from around the world. Here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I live and work, we have Sudanese Anglicans, Adventists from the Dominican Republic, Vietnamese Catholics, Burmese Baptists, Mexican Pentecostals, and Lebanese Orthodox Christians—­to name a few of the Christian traditions and movements now present. Christian leaders and institutions struggle to catch up with these new realities. The selection of a Latin American pope in 2013 was in ix

x — Series Foreword

some respects the culmination of decades of readjustment in the Roman Catholic Church. Here in Grand Rapids, the receptionist for the Catholic bishop answers the telephone first in Spanish. The worldwide Anglican communion is being fractured over controversies concerning sexual morality and biblical authority. Other churches in worldwide fellowships and alliances are treading more carefully as new leaders come forward and challenge northern assumptions, both liberal and conservative. Until very recently, however, the academic and intellectual world has paid little heed to this seismic shift in Christianity’s location, vitality, and expression. Too often, as scholars try to catch up to these changes, says the renowned historian Andrew Walls, they are still operating with “pre-­Columbian maps” of these realities. This series is designed to respond to that problem by making available some of the coordinates needed for a new intellectual cartography. Broad-­scope narratives about world Christianity are being published, and they help to revise the more massive misconceptions. Yet much of the most exciting work in this field is going on closer to the action. Dozens of dissertations and journal articles are appearing every year, but their stories are too good and their implications are too important to be reserved for specialists only. So we offer this series to make some of the most interesting and seminal studies more accessible, both to academics and to the thoughtful general reader. World Christianity is fascinating for its own sake, but it also helps to deepen our understanding of how faith and life interact in more familiar settings. So we are eager for you to read, ponder, and enjoy these Baylor Studies in World Christianity. There are many new things to learn, and many old things to see in a new light. Joel A. Carpenter Series Editor

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii Preface xv Introduction 1 I 1 The Religious Context in North India Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity

21

2 The Religious Context in North India American Evangelicalism

63

II 3 The Missionaries Religious and Social Innovators 4 Indian Workers and Leaders Negotiating Boundaries

89 131

III 5 Theology in a New Context 6 Community in a New Context

183 225

Conclusion 273 Bibliography 287 Index of Places 311 Index of Subjects and Names 313 xi

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Acknowledgments

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his monograph would not have been possible without the cooperation and help of countless people who labor in libraries, archives, special collections, and other such repositories of knowledge and wisdom in many places around the world. It is due to the quiet efforts of such persons, who day in and day out go through the often tedious mechanics of preserving and providing access to the treasures needed for contemporary Western scholarship, that we who call ourselves scholars can do the work that we love to do. I am much obliged to them for their assistance. I have received much appreciated service from personnel at the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Archives of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Archives of The United Methodist Church, the Pelletier Library of Allegheny College, and the library of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. At Emory University, I am very grateful to the staff at the Pitts and Woodruff libraries, who have always been gracious and ready to assist me expeditiously with requests for resources and information. Further afield, I thank the students and faculty at Leonard Theological College in Jabalpur, India, especially the Rev. Richard Rogers and the Rev. Dr. Naveen Rao, for their hospitality during a research visit there. Several organizations have generously provided valuable resources for research and travel. This project received much needed time, focus, and funding through a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology from the Luce Foundation in 2008–­2009. The Wabash Center supplied scholarly guidance and finances for early explorations into my topic. The xiii

xiv — Acknowledgments

administrations of Austin Presbyterian Seminary and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University have strongly supported my academic endeavors. Michael Jinkins at Austin Seminary, and Ian McFarland and Jonathan Strom at Candler, facilitated funding for research during leaves and summers. While I was in the United Kingdom, Jim and Nancy Pratt provided me (and at times my wife) with a home away from home. Numerous scholars have taken precious time to talk with me and to read my work. John C. B. Webster and Richard Fox Young offered important guidance at the beginning of my project. Paul Courtright has been always encouraging and has helpfully commented on various pieces of writing, as has E. Brooks Holifield. Joyce Flueckiger and Scott Kugle read and corrected portions of the manuscript, and V. Narayana Rao has freely shared with me his keen knowledge of and perspectives on Indian religions and cultures. I have also relied on Ellen Gough and Marko Geslani for their expertise in the field of Indian religions, while Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Jon Keune have provided important observations on my work. Joel Carpenter and Carey Newman, as editor and publisher respectively of this volume, have greatly improved it through their careful reading and editing of different versions of the manuscript. To all these colleagues, and many more, I am deeply indebted. If it were not for them, the shortcomings of my work would be so much greater than they already are. Finally, this book would have been impossible without the love and support of all the members of my family and especially my wife, Yoli. They have had steadfast faith and confidence in my abilities as a scholar and have provided me with the constant encouragement, space, and time needed for what became a sprawling endeavor, involving three continents and three centuries. This book is therefore dedicated to Yoli and to our children, Suresh and Amihan.

Preface

O

n a warm, humid Sunday morning in July 2008, I attended worship at the Methodist Church in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. Judging from their clothes and demeanor, the hundred or so congregants were predominantly from the lower middle class. There were some exceptions—­people in business and service professions who had the means to purchase their own automobiles, which they drove to church. The congregation filled the space of the modest brick and cement church building comfortably. As I expected, the service proceeded according to habits inherited from late nineteenth-­century Anglo-­American Evangelicalism—­an orderly progression of songs, prayers, Scripture readings, sermon, and notices of communal life. The liturgy was conducted and engaged with sincere attention to both decorum and devotion that characterizes the worship of the lower and middling classes in the Methodist and the Church of North India congregations in Uttar Pradesh. After the final blessing was given, I expected the congregation to disperse. Instead, over half the people, after greeting their fellow worshipers, moved up to the front benches and quickly produced a number of hitherto ­concealed musical instruments, mostly percussive ones such as drums and tambourines. And then with a vigor and enthusiasm noticeably more intense than what had been displayed in the just completed worship service, this group of Methodists began singing bhajans, which are vernacular songs of praise. Drums boomed and hammered out rhythms, tambourines joined them and added their jingles and clangs,

xv

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and the voices pelted out the favorites, some of which I remembered from childhood. “Jai jai Yeshu, jai jai Yeshu!” (“Hail to Jesus, hail to Jesus!”) Chorus: Hail to Jesus, Hail to Jesus, Hail to the Lord, Shouts of triumph, Lord of Creation, Lord of Protection, Lord of Salvation. Destroying the misery of the oppressed Filling hearts with peace Hail Joy of the World, Hail Destroyer of Sorrow Shouts of triumph, Lord of Creation, Lord of protection, Lord of Salvation. Sacrificed in the body of man, the Descent of God in the world Giving his own life, the Deliverer Hail Savior of the World, Hail Giver of Joy Shouts of triumph, Lord of Creation, Lord of Protection, Lord of Salvation. Breaker of the bonds of death Bringer of everlasting life Supporter of the sick and sorrowful Shouts of triumph, Lord of Creation, Lord of Protection, Lord of Salvation. Make shouts of triumph, all beloved Call men and women together Shout slogans! Cry victory! Shouts of triumph, Lord of Creation, Lord of Protection, Lord of Salvation.1

Each line was sung with gusto, and then repeated with gusto, as though once through was not quite enough to satisfy the heart’s yearnings for communion with the divine. A half hour later, the thirst of their souls quenched by the songs gushing forth through their voices, the Christians dispersed to take up life in their small but historic city. This was not the first time I had noticed Christian laity demonstrating a liturgical partiality to bhajans. In Bareilly, again at a Hindustani worship service, a time had been set aside within the ritual for the singing of bhajans. To the sound of harmoniums and drums, the folk religious songs poured out, with the volume and vigor of the singers ratcheted up a notch from what they had employed for the hymns in the rest of the service. There had been no such time for bhajans in the English services 1 “Jai jai Yeshu,” in Hindi Git Ki Pustak (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1958), 364; translation by Elliott McCarter.

Preface — xvii

I attended in Delhi and Lucknow; the more elite of Christian society had embraced genteel decorum to the exclusion of palpable devotion in their rendition of historic Protestant worship.2 The bhajan is an indigenous religious song form in North India, rooted in the region’s bhakti movements.3 These are centuries-­old Hindu devotional movements centered on a particular deity. They are famous for their religious poetry and songs, and their tendency to disregard the caste and gender norms of Brahminical Hinduism in favor of community based on fervent religious conviction and worship. As soon as Christian congregations started gathering in North India in response to Western evangelical missionary work in the nineteenth century, Christian bhajans began to be written and sung along with the songs that were translations of European hymns into local languages.4 For a religion that promoted itself as an alternative to, if not the antithesis of, Hinduism, such explicit borrowing may appear inexplicable, if not completely illogical. Yet the bhajan points to a truth far deeper than the appearance of contradiction. That truth is that the Evangelicalism brought to India by Western missionaries in certain crucial ways resembled the bhakti movements, and because of those resemblances, evangelical Christianity was both pushed and pulled into the space in the religious terrain that had been developed and circumscribed by indigenous bhakti movements for over four centuries.

By “historic Protestantism” I mean Protestant movements that owe their identity to the Reformation in sixteenth-­century Europe, as opposed to Pentecostalism, which emerged in the twentieth century and is a powerful movement in Indian Christianity today. 3 Until recently, scholars thought of a rather singular bhakti movement that spawned many different groups. Current scholarship proposes instead a wide array of bhakti groups and movements throughout India, lodged throughout the social spectrum of Indian society. See John Stratton Hawley, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 327–­33. 4 Among the Methodists at least, Indian pastors composed Christian hymns before English hymns were translated into Hindustani. Clementina Butler, Mrs. William Butler: Two Empires and a Kingdom (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1929), 91–­92. See also Jeffrey Cox, “Sing Unto the Lord a New Song. Transcending the Western/Indigenous Binary in Punjabi Christian Hymnody,” in Europe as the Other: External Perspectives on European Christianity, ed. Judith Becker and Brian Stanley (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 149–­63. 2

xviii — Preface

I came to this conclusion after pursuing a somewhat circuitous route in the emerging field of world Christianity.5 I had begun my study by wanting to investigate how American Presbyterian and Methodist missionary Evangelicalism was adapted to its religious context in the British-­ruled territories of North-­Western Provinces and Oudh, what I am calling “Hindi North India” for short—­realizing that Urdu was spoken by much of the population as well.6 Yet the more I read missionary reports, diaries, and publications, the more I wondered why any Indian would take the missionary movement seriously. The question for early missionaries was quite the opposite: Why were Indians not responding to their message and converting to Christianity in droves? To missionaries, the gospel as salvific truth was so self-­evidently superior to the beliefs of Hinduism and Islam that they were genuinely perplexed at the general apathy and even hostility they experienced. The conclusion they frequently drew was that their own shortcomings, human sinfulness, the bastions of Hinduism and Islam, and Satan were far more formidable enemies than they had anticipated. As one American Presbyterian missionary put it in 1862: The obstacles to conversion are great. They are found, not only in the natural antipathy of the human heart to God and holiness, but in the power of Spiritual Wickedness in high places,—­in the unceasing activity of the Devil and his angels; who make it their business to blind the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of the Son of God should shine into them.7

From my perspective, however, the Christian message and messengers seemed so strange and at times even outlandish in the religious context of Hindi North India that it was baffling that anybody paid any 5 For current approaches to the study of non-­Western Christianity, see Paul Kollman, “Understanding the World-­Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology,” Theology Today 71, no. 2 (2014): 164–­77. Two works have had a profound influence on the direction of this work. My interest in the spatial conceptions of religion was generated by Mathew N. Schmalz, “A Space for Redemption: Catholic Tactics in Hindu North India” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998); and in bhakti’s relationship to Evangelicalism by Chad M. Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu North India, 1868–­1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 6 Awadh, or “Oudh,” was annexed by the British in 1856. 7 The Rev. John Newton, “Preaching to the Heathen,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference (Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1863), 8.

Preface — xix

attention to these foreigners and their religion, let alone was persuaded by them. It was easier for me to understand the detractors and critics of the missionary movement than those who joined it.8 How did the religious message brought by the American missionary movement connect to the religious experience of those Indians who eventually became Christians? The answer to my perplexity slowly emerged when I shifted the focus of my attention from the little I could find of what Indian Christians wrote and said (which on first reading sounded very much like what missionaries wrote and said) to who the Indian Christian converts were, socially speaking. The social and religious backgrounds of the first generation of Indian Christians bore a striking resemblance to the backgrounds of those who had been attracted for centuries to a number of bhakti groups, what British colonial ethnologists had called “Hindu sects.”9 In fact, many of the earlier converts to evangelical Christianity in Bengal—­to the east of the area of this study—­ had previously belonged to a bhakti sect, either one with a living guru or one tracing its origins to the famous poet Chaitanya.10 Krishna Pal, the first convert to Protestantism in Bengal after several years of Baptist missionary work there, came from the Kartabhaja sect, which he had previously joined and where he had been a guru.11 More than three

8 For cogent responses to the missionary message, see Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-­ Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-­Century India (Vienna: Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien, 1981). 9 The classic and still useful early work on this is Horace Hayman Wilson, Religious Sects of the Hindus (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1846, first published 1828 and 1832 in Asiatick Researches). The term “sect” can be misleading, because it can connote a group cut off from mainstream society. This was not (and still is not) the case for bhakti sects in India. For the classic definition of sect in the Western sociology of religion, see Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 2:993. 10 Eleanor Jackson, “From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey: Indian Builders of the Church in Bengal, 1800–­1894,” in Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–­1914, ed. Dana L. Robert (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 174. Chaitanya was a famous fifteenth-­century charismatic religious poet who extolled the love of God. 11 Hugh B. Urban, The Economics of Ecstasy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 46.

xx — Preface

decades later, in the latter part of the 1830s, hundreds of Kartabhajas in Bengal joined the British Baptist mission.12 Peppering the missionary reports from Hindi North India were references to various members of these bhakti sects as well as ascetics and yogis, who would come to Christian leaders, both Indian and European, to inquire about the latter’s religion. Many of these inquirers did not convert to Christianity, yet they manifested various degrees of interest in this new religious movement. These discoveries led me to look more closely at these North Indian religious groups, both their social and ideological representations, and compare them to the Evangelicalism that American missionaries were trying to import to India. My conclusion is that in its first generation, this Evangelicalism exhibited significant similarities to certain low-­status but prevalent Indian religious “sectarian” groups that lay beyond the pale of Christianity. Because it (unwittingly) mirrored and even mimicked certain salient features and because of its marginality, Evangelicalism introduced and propagated by American missionaries in Hindi North India found itself operating on the same ground as these bhakti sects.13 To continue the topographical image, I began to look at the ways in which American evangelical Christianity took root in the soil of Hindi North Indian religious traditions in the middle of the nineteenth century, and I discovered that the ideological and social spaces available to this newly introduced religious movement were those that had been cultivated by centuries of activity by various Hindu bhakti movements and groups. The central thesis of this work, then, is that in the part of British North India known as the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh, significant similarities between a fledgling American evangelical Protestantism and the well-­established but socially marginalized low status Hindu bhakti sects led the evangelicals, coming from a variety of racial, social, national, and religious backgrounds, to build their Christian Geoffrey Oddie, “Old Wine in New Bottles?” in Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia: Continuities and Change, 1800–­1900, ed. Geoffrey A. Oddie (New York: Routledge, 2016), 60–­61. 13 This is a different understanding of mimicry than the one taken in the work of Homi Bhabha, where mimicry is a form of colonial oppression and anticolonial contestation. Homi Bhabha, “Mimicry and Man” and “Sly Civility,” in The Location of Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 2004), 121–­44. See also Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-­Colonial Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), 9. 12

Preface — xxi

communities on the religious space cleared and nourished by these bhakti groups in the landscape of the region’s religions.14

14 For a discussion on the relationship between Evangelicalism and bhakti, see Pradeep Bandyopadhyay, “The Uses of Kabir: Missionary Writings and Civilisational Difference,” in Images of Kabir, ed. Monika Horstmann (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), 9–­31. Bandyopadhyay appropriately warns against seeing Kabir as a Protestant reformer, as nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century missionaries did. The thesis of this work is the opposite one: that in the Indian context, evangelical preachers (both foreign and Indian) could be seen as promoters of a kind of religion that had important similarities to Hindu movements such as those founded on the work of Kabir. For a similar conclusion regarding certain forms of Hindu bhakti devotionalism and of devotional Christianity, see Vijay Pinch, “Bhakti and the British Empire,” Past and Present 179, no. 1 (2003): 159–­96.

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Introduction

A

lexander Duff, the first missionary of the Church of Scotland to India, delivered a highly acclaimed lecture to the General Assembly of that ecclesiastical body on May 25, 1835, entitled “The Church of Scotland’s India Mission.” In it he laid down his principles for Christian evangelism, which relied heavily on educational work as its strategy. He began the lecture by narrating the typical experience of a young missionary to India, the land where “130 millions of idolaters live,” the land that “seems to be the chief seat of Satan’s earthly dominion; and . . . the grand theatre of his wildest revels.” The missionary goes forth “fired with inextinguishable zeal, and charged with the overtures of mercy” so that the gospel of Jesus Christ may be made known to the people of India. He lands in Bengal, learns the language and “having, in his own estimation, thoroughly mastered it, he eagerly issues forth to make known his proclamation.” At first things go well—­people pay him attention. “His bosom now warms with the glowing anticipation that vital impressions are about to be made.” And then something untoward occurs: “speedily he is disturbed out of his pleasing reverie. The flow of his discourse may be roughly interrupted by someone in the crowd boldly challenging him.” He finds out that his challengers are Brahmins, “the uncontrolled leaders of the people.” Moreover—­here Duff switches person for dramatic effect—­“if you are unable to cope with them, your authority goes for nought, and your religion is thrown into contempt.” Thus you, the missionary, discover that you are forced to deal with the Brahmins’ demand for evidence of your authority to proclaim your religion as truth, and “contrary to your 1

2 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

original design you are now driven from the direct announcement of your message—­you are literally driven to entertain the previous question of evidences.” You, the missionary, try one tactic after another to answer the Brahmin; nothing works. “You are now reduced to the lowest degree of helplessness.”1 Duff here reflects, perhaps with some level of hyperbole, the not-­ unusual experience of a novice Protestant missionary in India in the first half of the nineteenth century.2 The missionary arrives “with inextinguishable zeal,” and once he (and at this point in history it always was a he) has “mastered” the language, he sets off to conquer the people for his Lord, Jesus Christ, through public proclamation. At first he is pleased: he senses people responding positively to his commanding presence and message. The missionary mistakenly believes that he can operate in the religious realm as the East India Company operates in the economic and political realm—­as conqueror. However, life is not what it initially seems in the foreign land, and the missionary quickly is “literally driven” to a place, not of his choosing, but of his opponent’s choosing. Here he cannot deal with the counterthrusts of his Indian challengers, who insist that he produce credible evidence of his authority, and he ends up completely helpless in the face of the presumed Brahmin interrogators. Duff, then, depicts the missionary as occupying and being forced to occupy different spaces: first, all too briefly the conquering hero’s public podium, then “tossed to and fro without a resting-­place” in spaces of vulnerability, and finally a space of “the lowest degree of helplessness.”3 Duff’s solution to the missionary’s plight, a solution that he develops in the rest of his lecture, is meant to return the missionary to the space of conquering hero. However, this did not happen: missionaries were constantly forced to occupy spaces that were consigned to them by the political and religious powers dominant in the areas where they were operating. This is not to say that local powers were uniformly hostile to the missionary movement. In fact numerous European civil servants of the East India Company and the British Crown, and even some Indian 1 Alexander Duff, The Church of Scotland’s India Mission (Edinburgh: General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1835), 1–­4; emphasis in original. 2 Duff was, after all, trying to make an unusual argument—­English education as evangelistic mission—­and needed as much rhetorical firepower as he could muster to push the argument to its conclusion. One wonders how much of this description is actually autobiographical. 3 Duff, Church of Scotland’s India Mission, 6.

Introduction — 3

civic and political leaders, provided crucial aid for missionaries to live out their vocations. However, this assistance did not and could not in any way allow Christianity to displace Hinduism, Islam, or other local religions from their prominence in society.4 Rulers and other leaders were not in a position to force their religious preferences onto the local populace; they were acutely aware that such provocation could prove highly detrimental to their economic and political ambitions and goals. At the margins of the Indian religious and social landscape, however, there was one space where evangelical missionaries, and their very important Indian coworkers, could make their appeals credibly. This space had been claimed and cultivated by centuries of bhakti ideology and practice.5 Here communities focused their religious devotion and attention on one particular deity. This was a space where criticisms of dominant religious traditions were well known. It was a space where novel religious beliefs and practices were propagated and religious communities were born, as longstanding assumptions and ideas were both disparaged and mined for insights. Here the socially marginalized could assert authority and importance. This was a Thirdspace, in the way that Edward Soja has theorized. The Thirdspace of Edward Soja In Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­Imagined Places, which uses the work of philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefeb­ vre, Edward Soja provides a way of understanding the religious terrain of Hindi North India that evangelical missionaries were navigating.6 According to Soja, in the study of human activity, space itself needs to 4 I stress the religious dimension of Christianity because it was very influential in India in other ways. For example, Christian missions established educational institutions that catered to the elite of society, among others. Christian missions also engaged in social work and reform that significantly affected Indian society’s self-­ understanding and functioning. 5 One other space where the missionary’s message was credibly received was the mission school. In this space, Duff was right. However, the mission school turned out not to be part of the Indian religious landscape, defying the hopes of many missionaries. These schools produced very few converts, although these few provided crucial leadership to the fledgling Christian community. Most of the converts to Christianity came from spaces where bhakti was religiously important. 6 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­ Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). I am grateful to Rebekka King for introducing me to this work.

4 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

be given serious consideration along with history and sociology.7 Soja follows Lefebvre and argues that all space is produced; it is not an inert medium in which history and sociality occur.8 “[A]ll social relations become real and concrete, a part of our lived social existence, only when they are spatially ‘inscribed’—­that is, concretely represented—­in the social production of social space. Social reality is not just coincidentally spatial, existing ‘in’ space, it is presuppositionally and ontologically spatial.”9 Lefebvre and Soja think of Firstspace as the physical space in which humans live; this is called “perceived” space. Secondspace is space as imagined, conceived in the mind, so is termed “conceived” space. Thirdspace is called “lived space,” which “can be described as a creative recombination and extension [of Firstspace and Secondspace], one that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the ‘real’ material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality.”10 However, Soja does not limit theorizing about Thirdspace to the physical world. Thirdspace is “a purposefully tentative and flexible term,”11 but at its source is a desire to break away from thinking in binaries, of which the Hegelian synthesis is but an extension. Rather the third is an Other, “L’Autre,” which draws critically on the first and the second, the binary, but then adds something more (something Other) so as to create new possibilities and options for thinking and acting. Here Soja moves beyond thinking of First-­, Second-­, and Thirdspaces as spaces in the usual sense of the word, and starts to understand Thirdspace as an arena for thinking and acting socially—­especially politically—­in unusual and creative ways. Soja, Thirdspace, 2. For a helpful summary of Soja’s Thirdspace, see Liv Ingeborg Lied, “Another Look at the Land of Damascus: The Spaces of the Damascus Document in the Light of Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace Approach,” in New Directions in Qumran Studies, ed. Jonathan G. Campbell, William John Lyons, and Lloyd K. Pietersen (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 105–­8. 9 Soja, Thirdspace, 46; emphasis in original. 10 Soja, Thirdspace, 10, 6. The idea of “lived space” echoes similar ideas in Michel de Certeau; see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii–­xvi; and Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 157. 11 Soja, Thirdspace, 2. 7 8

Introduction — 5

In what I will call a critical strategy of “thirding-­as-­Othering,” I try to open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking and acting politically that respond to all binarisms, to any attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives, by interjecting an-­Other set of choices. In this critical thirding, the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing categories to open new alternatives.12

Such experimentation and creativity occurs in social space, which “serves both as a separable field, distinguishable from physical and mental space, and/also as an approximation for an all-­encompassing mode of spatial thinking.”13 One of the constituent dimensions of this expanded notion of Thirdspace for Soja is that it is a space of intellectual, behavioral, and social openness, where new ideas, practices, and (political) allegiances are conceived and tried out.14 It is a place of experimentation, where we seek “to find more flexible ways of being other than what we are while still being ourselves, of becoming open to coalitions and coalescences of radical subjectivities, to a multiplicity of communities of resistance, to . . . ‘the anarchy of difference.’ ”15 Thirdspace also both embraces and questions marginality in order to accept it, reject it, and go beyond it. Drawing on the work of bell hooks, Soja views Thirdspace as a marginal space in relation to the dominant powers in society. Yet hooks is not willing to grant the center the power it claims to define what is marginal and how one can be marginal. Rather she chooses marginality as her location, in a very real sense making it the center, and from this position creatively experiments with ways in which she can construct her identity and political practices. She “chooses a space that is simultaneously central and marginal (and purely neither at the same time), a difficult and risky place on the edge, filled with contradictions and ambiguities, with perils but also with new possibilities: a Thirdspace of political choice.”16 While Soja is concerned with political and social identity, his idea of Thirdspace is fruitful for thinking about religious identity as well. Religious persons and communities that occupy a Thirdspace both borrow from and critique the prevailing religious dichotomies, and provide a Soja, Thirdspace, 5; emphasis in original. Soja, Thirdspace, 62; emphasis in original. 14 Soja, Thirdspace, 106, 107. 15 Soja, Thirdspace, 117. 16 Soja, Thirdspace, 97. 12 13

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place where persons can experiment and play with new religious identities. They are also marginal and recognize their marginality while cultivating new ways of thinking and living that both embrace and defy that marginality.17 Thus religious Thirdspace is a marginal place for self-­ assertion, critique, appropriation, experimentation, and innovation. In the context of Hindi North India, there have been a number of socially marginal religious communities such as the Kabirpanth that have arisen from bhakti convictions, ideas, and practices and that have cultivated and occupied such a religious Thirdspace. Theologically, ideologically, and socially, they have been arenas for both recognizing and defying their marginality, for both critiquing and borrowing from prevalent religious ideas and practices, for religious and social innovation and experimentation, and for forging new identities. Evangelicalism was drawn to this space and was able to establish itself and grow there because it shared certain crucial similarities with the otherwise dissimilar bhakti movements.18 Bhakti and Evangelicalism Bhakti movements in Hindi North India and Evangelicalism shared characteristics in five important areas: theology, religious expression, reformation, social formation, and social location. Some of these similarities can be illustrated through examples of the hymnic poetry from the two movements. The first is a song poem of Kabir, a fifteenth-century “saint”19 whom both Muslims and Hindus claim; he is one of the most famous followers of nirguna bhakti, which refuses to worship God in any manifestation, so he uses the sound “Ram” to refer to the deity. 17 To what extent different communities can actually escape their severe oppression as marginal groups is a question that cannot be definitively settled, as it varies from place to place and time to time. The contemporary Dalit liberation movement cannot be understood without recognizing that marginality of oppressed groups is both embraced and defied. 18 Robert W. Hefner, “Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” in Conversion to Christianity, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3–­44. 19 Many of the bhakti poets are called sant, which is translated in academic literature as “saint.” However, the Sanskrit word sant, which has sat or truth/being at its root, points to quite different qualities than the English word “saint,” which derives from the Latin word sanctus or holy. Yet the bhakti poets are thought of as being particularly close to and in tune with the divine, which makes the word “saint” applicable to them.

Introduction — 7

The second is a song poem of Mirabai, the great North Indian female bhakti poet, a sixteenth-­century Rajput princess who so devoted herself to Krishna that she considered herself married to him, much to the dismay and ire of her in-­laws. The third is a hymn of Isaac Watts, an eighteenth-­century English hymn writer especially popular with Presbyterians, and the fourth a hymn of Charles Wesley, one of the two brothers who founded the Methodist movement in the eighteenth century. When you die, what do you do with your body? Once the breath stops You have to put it away. There are several ways to deal with spoiled flesh. Some burn it, some bury it in the ground. Hindus prefer cremation, Turks burial. But in the end, one way or another, both have to leave home. Death spreads the karmic net like a fisherman snaring fish. What is a man without Ram? A dung beetle in the road. Kabir says, you’ll be sorry later when you go from this house to that one. (Kabir)20 Sister, I had a dream that I wed the Lord of those who live in need [i.e., Krishna]: Five hundred sixty thousand people came and the Lord of Braj was the groom. In dream they set up a wedding arch; in dream he grasped my hand; in dream he led me around the wedding fire and I became unshakably his bride. Mira’s been granted her mountain-­lifting Lord: from living past lives, a prize. (Mirabai)21

20 Kabir, The Bijak of Kabir, trans. Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), 61. 21 John Stratton Hawley, Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Times and Ours (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 125.

8 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home! Under the shadow of thy throne, still may we dwell secure; Sufficient is thine arm alone, and our defense is sure. (Isaac Watts)22 Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly, While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high. Hide me, O my Savior, hide, Till the storm of life be past, Safe into the haven guide; O receive my soul at last. (Charles Wesley)23

The marked differences in style and substance between Christian and Hindu devotionalism are evident even in translation. However, the theological similarities also become apparent. Theologially, both evangelicals and bhaktas look to and worship a divine savior. For evangelicals this savior is Jesus, believed to be God in human form. For various bhakti sects, their devotion is either to a particular deity (saguna bhakti), such as Krishna, or to a pure apprehension of the divine (nirguna bhakti), which eschews all representations of the divine in the phenomenal world.24 A second theological commonality between bhakti and Evangelicalism is that the devotee has a personal, indeed intimate relationship with the divine. This relationship is imagined in the poems above in a number of ways: the god as savior from death, as husband-­lover, as help and hope, as protective lover. Third, the divine is conceived of as powerfully great: death-­defying, mountain-­lifting, a secure shelter from the storms of life. Finally, the divine is a savior, and most pointedly a savior from death. Only Ram can save one from death, says Kabir; Krishna saves Mirabai 22 The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 117. 23 United Methodist Hymnal, 479. 24 For a helpful summary of bhakti sects in Hindi North India, see John Stratton Hawley, “Hindi Religious Traditions,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 6:3983–­88. Two of the most famous nirguna poet-saints are Kabir and Nanak, the latter being the founder of the Nanakpanthi sect and what has become known as the Sikh religion. For a discussion of the limitations of the nirguna/saguna distinction, see John Stratton Hawley, “The Nirgun/Sagun Distinction in Early Manuscript Anthologies of Hindi Devotion,” in Bhakti Religion in North India: Community, Identity and Political Action, ed. David H. Lorenzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 160–­80.

Introduction — 9

from “living past lives”; God is our “eternal home,” the final “haven” for the soul, according to Watts and Wesley. In both bhakti and Evangelicalism, devotion and salvation are intimately related. The songs of bhakti and evangelical saints point to the second broad similarity between the two subtraditions within Hinduism and Christianity: in terms of religious expression, both may be described as “heart religion.”25 If religion is conceived of as having intellectual, practical (including ritual), and affective dimensions, “heart religion” emphasizes the affective dimension.26 The passions of Kabir, Mirabai, Watts, and Wesley in the hymns quoted above are quite distinct in their expression. Yet the passions are there, notably visceral, grandly exposed to the full hearing of the audience. In the poems by Mirabai and Wesley, the love for the divine is direct and explicit, rising to the level of eroticism. Kabir, more than directly praising Ram, directs withering sarcasm toward Hindus and Muslims about their approach to death. Only Ram saves from death—­otherwise we are dung beetles on the road. And Watts sings with love and praise of divine safety and security amid the dangers and destruction of life. Also common to bhakti and evangelical religious expression is a choice of vernacular rather than sacred languages, such as Sanskrit or Latin, for the articulation of theology and devotion. Both bhakti and Evangelicalism expressed and propagated a faith in languages accessible to common people.27 A third general similarity is that a reformist impulse pervades both bhakti and Evangelicalism.28 This reformation is both theological and social. Theologically, both subtraditions criticize impediments put up 25 See Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Richard B. Steele, “Heart Religion” in the Methodist Tradition and Related Movements (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001); Ted A. Campbell, The Religion of the Heart (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); John Stratton Hawley, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2. 26 Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-­Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 542. 27 See Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 2–­3. 28 In fact the proponents of “heart religion” are frequently involved in the reformation of religious thought and practice—­which belies the notion that “mysticism” or “spirituality” is simply an inward turn.

10 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

by religious authorities that prevent the devotee from approaching the divine. The bhakti poets “seem united in their conviction that one must cultivate personal experience as a way to approach God; hence they downplay and often ridicule the preoccupations of ritual religion.”29 Such ridicule is evident in Kabir’s view of Hindu and Muslim death rites in his poem quoted above. In the social realm the bhakti tradition has also criticized the institution of caste and the construction of gender in Hinduism, although these criticisms have been more apparent in theory than in practice. Yet many bhakti poets are famous for having established communities in which people of all castes, and women as well as men, could join and devote themselves to the divine. In a similar manner, eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Protestant evangelicals were reformers, stressing the importance of a personal relationship with God. They often severely criticized formalism in Protestantism, and especially Roman Catholicism’s high view of ritual in the Christian’s approach to God. Evangelicals were also famous for their deep concern for the poor in society, especially as the Industrial Revolution was creating severe economic and social upheaval in England and parts of America.30 While inconsistencies were rife in the movement, for example in the way that many American evangelicals accepted slavery (even as others fought against it), Evangelicalism wished to reform all people regardless of social status. Fourth, both bhakti and Evangelicalism stressed social formation, the shaping of distinct religious communities in which the appropriate religious devotion could be practiced, cultivated, and developed over time. In the North Indian bhakti traditions, a broad array of religious communities across the social spectrum emerged from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.31 While their founding (and official) ideology would criticize caste hierarchy, over time some of them became enclaves of high-­caste Hindu bhaktas.32 However, it was charismatic poets and Hawley, “Hindi Religious Traditions,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 6:3985. 30 See Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1:49–­85. 31 Krishna Sharma, Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2002), 1. 32 See John Milton Keune, “Eknath Remembered and Reformed: Bhakti, Brahmans, and Untouchables in Marathi Historiography” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2011). 29

Introduction — 11

leaders (gurus or sants) who were outside the high-­caste Sanskritic tradition, many of them being low caste or “Untouchable,” who founded panths and other socially disdained bhakti communities. These founders employed vernacular languages to create religious poetry that was then sung in the tradition. Uniformly, such low-­caste bhakti communities have been openly critical of caste and gender hierarchy, and have endeavored to form communities that were far more egalitarian than society at large, even when that society over time has located them on the bottom rungs of caste hierarchy. Evangelicalism, which dates back to eighteenth-­ century Britain, also stressed the formation of communities of the faithful. Probably the greatest organizer of religious communities among British evangelicals was Anglican priest John Wesley, who with his brother Charles founded the Methodist movement. After John Wesley’s death in 1791, the British Methodists withdrew from the Church of England to form their own sect. Other evangelical communities, such as the Clapham Sect, stayed within the Church of England and sought to reform church and nation from within established ecclesiastical structures. It was in America, however, that Evangelicalism flourished in a way it had not in Great Britain. In the period between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, evangelical denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists established themselves as the predominant form of Christianity, both in numbers and religious influence, in the new nation.33 Presbyterianism, one of the three historic Christian traditions in colonial North America, had experienced its own revival movements from the early eighteenth century onward.34 Thus after the Revolutionary War, Presbyterians were particularly open to the renewal impulses emanating from the evangelical movement, and evangelically inclined Presbyterians formed networks for support and growth within their established church. It was such evangelical Presbyterians in North America who spearheaded the missionary movement in their denomination. Both bhakti and evangelical movements, then, in their own distinct ways, formed and nourished religious communities where their particular 33 Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 34 See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 269–­72. Christianity in colonial North America since the early eighteenth century was dominated by Puritanism or Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, and Anglicanism.

12 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

beliefs, practices, and emotional and spiritual expressions could be cultivated and routinized. Also, both evangelicals and bhakti groups were eager to “convert” or recruit people to their movement.35 While the conversionist impulse in Evangelicalism is generally well known, the desire for bhaktas to recruit people to worship their own deity is not commonly recognized.36 The image of Hinduism as a tradition that not merely allows but encourages people to stay with their faith community was so successfully propagated by international luminaries such as Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi that its conversionist element especially among bhakti sects has been overlooked.37 Yet frequently bhaktas have not been content simply to worship their own deity; their devotion compels them to “convert” others to their own community. One amusing story to illustrate this point is told of a Shaiva saint who was so deeply devoted to Shiva and committed to converting people to worshiping him that when Shiva himself came to visit the saint in disguise, the saint insisted that Shiva follow his devotion and become a Shaiva. When the saint’s zeal was too much for Shiva, the latter tried to tell the former who he was: all in vain, for the saint insisted that Shiva convert, so Shiva “was forced on his knees for the baptism of ash.”38 The final commonality between bhakti sects and first-­generation Evangelicalism in Hindi North India, at least, is that many—­though certainly not all—­of their adherents were to be found in the lower ranks of society. While many low-­caste and Untouchable bhakti poets became extremely popular in all of North Indian society, the communities that they spawned have generally been a small and low-­caste segment in the religious hierarchy of Hindi North India.39 Evangelical groups such as the Baptists and Methodists in nineteenth-­ century Britain were also Karen Pechilis Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. 36 For example, see the converting activities of Basavanna, a twelfth-­century Kannada poet and founder of an egalitarian religious community, in A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 63–­64. 37 See Arvind Sharma, “Hinduism and Conversion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Conversion, ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles Farhadian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 429–­43. 38 Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 29. 39 One exception is the Sikhs of Punjab, who have a rather unique religious and social history. See Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 35

Introduction — 13

associated with the lower classes. In the United States, the situation was different. By the middle of the nineteenth century, evangelical Christianity had gained a significant degree of bourgeois respectability there. Yet much to the despair of missionaries, American Evangelicalism could not seem to get a toehold in reputable North Indian society, so it was relegated to small communities composed mostly (though certainly not exclusively) of the poorer and more despised castes and classes, with many Christian converts being economically and politically dependent upon Europeans for their existence. Due to similarities between Evangelicalism and bhakti movements in Hindi North India, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Indian Protestant leaders were becoming interested in the work of Kabir, one of the most popular bhakti poet-saints. For example, in 1881 Pandit Walji Bhai, who was pastor of an Irish Presbyterian congregation in Gujarat, had published his thoughts on Kabir. He not only held that contemporary Kabirpanthi doctrines and practices were quite similar to those of Christianity, but that the Kabirpanth itself had actually been instituted by Jesuits.40 The Rev. Prem Chand, a Baptist missionary in Bengal, produced an edition of the Bijak, one of the collections of Kabir’s sayings, in 1890. Then in 1903 a Christian named Sukhdev Prasad published a work in Hindi entitled Kabirjnan tika-­sahit in Allahabad, comparing certain sayings of Kabir with teachings in the Bible. By 1914 a fifth edition of this book had been published in Lucknow, testifying to its popularity among Indian Christians at least. In 1911 Chand brought out A Translation of Kabir’s Complete Bijak into English in Calcutta. The Rev. Ahmed Shah, a Christian clergyman and a convert from Islam, also produced a translation in 1917.41 Thus Indian evangelicals, and soon after them Western missionaries such as G. H. Westcott and George Grierson, produced studies and translations of Kabir, finding that his words resonated with their understandings of the Christian message.42 This interest

40 Charlotte Vaudeville, “The Discovery of Kabir,” in her A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23. 41 Vaudeville, Weaver Named Kabir, 133–­34. 42 Vaudeville, “The Discovery of Kabir,” 23–­24; George Grierson, Two Indian Reformers (Yorktown, UK: A. Bradford, 1907); G. H. Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth (Cawnpore, India: Christ Church Mission Press, 1907); F. E. Keay, Kabir and His Followers (Calcutta: YMCA Press, 1931); E. C. Davis, Kabirdas: Brief History and Teachings (Jubbulpore, India: E. C. Davis, 1933).

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in Kabir was echoed in other parts of North India with respect to other gurus and the communities formed around them.43 However, the fact that evangelical Christianity and certain North Indian bhakti movements shared several similarities does not mean that the two were essentially the same.44 It is disingenuous to view bhakti as a Protestant, or even Christian, form of Hinduism.45 More recently the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and accounts of non-­ Western Christianity have so stressed the continuities between it and preexisting religions that “Christianity is represented as syncretized to such an extent that it is in reality nothing more than traditional religion tricked up in new clothes.”46 Important differences as well as similarities marked the relationship between bhakti and Evangelicalism. In the realm of theology, bhakti was not monotheistic as this term is generally understood in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Bhakti may have been henotheistic, focusing on the worship of one divinity without denying that other divinities exist and are active in the world. Kabir’s poem suggests that for him, no manifestation of the divine was true. In general, the assumptions about the nature of the divine that arose out of the “polytheistic imagination” of Hinduism were notably different from those arising from the Abrahamic faith traditions.47 Also in the sphere of theology, the understanding and method of salvation were very different in bhakti and Evangelicalism. In the former, the theoretical and sometimes very real goal was liberation (moksha) of the devotee from the cycle of rebirth (Mirabai’s “living past lives”). However, in practice the protection and grace (prasada) of the divine could be more important for the devotee. Or the bhakta may have wished

43 See Chad Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–­1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) for the ways that Mennonite missionaries and members of the Satnami sect interacted. 44 Hawley, Storm of Songs, 33. 45 Karen Pechilis Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–­4; John B. Carman, “Is Christian Faith a Form of Bhakti?” Visva Bharati Journal of Philosophy 3–­4 (1968): 24–­37. 46 Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 30. 47 Diana L. Eck, “The Deity: The Image of God,” in The Life of Hinduism, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 46.

Introduction — 15

ultimately to surrender to the Lord, “satisfied to adore him.”48 In Evangelicalism, however, the divine offered salvation by rescuing the devotee from eternal damnation in hell through the forgiveness of sins attained by the atoning death of Jesus on the cross. Such ideas about salvation through sacrificial atonement were unknown in bhakti and, as will become apparent in chapter 5, could call forth creative interpretation. In terms of religious expression, both bhakti and Evangelicalism used vernacular languages to convey their religion and message. Yet the history and status of vernaculars in Christianity and Hinduism have been quite different. Christianity from its inception has been a religion of translation: the Bible, after all, provides the words of Jesus not in the original Aramaic but in translated Greek. While certain languages such as Greek, Syriac, and Latin were widely used for theology and liturgy among early Christian communities and thus gained a special theological status among them, theological texts continued to be produced in and translated into vernaculars. Christianity has never had one sacred language. Sanskrit, on the other hand, has been considered the sacred language of Hinduism, and the use of vernaculars for sacred language seems to have been one of the significant innovations of the first bhakti poets in the sixth century C.E. Finally, while both bhakti and Evangelicalism were reforming movements, they viewed and promoted religious and social reformation in different ways. For bhakti, it was music and poetry in a communal setting that drew the worshiper and the divine together, and it was in the bhakti community that new social arrangements could be developed. Bhakti is well known not to have practically challenged the hierarchical nature of Hindu society.49 Evangelicalism, on the other hand, asserted that religious reformation involved an emotional conversion from worldliness to holiness. Socially, its goal was the reformation of all of society—­not just the creation of holy communities. Thus there was a high degree of social activism in nineteenth-­century Evangelicalism.

48 Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid, “Introduction: Towards an Archaeology of Bhakti,” in The Archaeology of Bhakti I: Mathura and Maturai, Back and Forth, ed. Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid (Pondicherry, India: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2014), 8–­9. 49 Patton Burchett, “Bhakti Rhetoric in the Hagiography of ‘Untouchable’ Saints: Discerning Bhakti’s Ambivalence on Caste and Brahminhood,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 2 (2009): 116.

16 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

So Evangelicalism was not simply interpreted as a form of bhakti in Hindi North India. Such a naïve reading of Christianity in a new context would be historically indefensible and would not do justice to the integrity of the two movements. Rather, bhakti had created a certain kind of religious space in Hindi North India that provided credibility to some of the claims and expressions of Evangelicalism.50 Moreover, in this space Evangelicalism could use bhakti creatively and fruitfully to translate itself into its new context, employing idioms and language that were both available to it and conducive to its self-­ understanding and self-­expression.51 The lives of Indian Christians are crucial to understanding how Evangelicalism and bhakti interacted, because they are the ones who best knew their own religious terrain. Through their everyday living, in the sense developed by Michel de Certeau, they decided what sort of presence Christianity could be and would be in their locale.52 Certeau was interested in what ordinary people make or do with the productions (of all sorts) of those who are in power. Speaking of the example of Spanish colonizers in the Americas, he argued that the Native Americans “often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind.” An “ambiguity creeps into our societies through the use made by the ‘common people’ of the culture disseminated and imposed by the ‘elites’ producing the language.”53 It was local Indians who drew upon local religious ideas and practices to assimilate the foreign evangelical Christianity on their terms. This is not to say that missionaries were unaware of the similarities between Hindu sectarian communities and evangelical Christianity. In fact the Presbyterian missionaries in Punjab were highly optimistic regarding the spread of Christianity there because of the large Sikh

50 For a contemporary example of how bhakti continues to interact with devotional Christianity, see the study of a Roman Catholic charismatic and bhakti movement in Benares by Kerry San Chirico, “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, Hindus, and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2013). 51 For translation, see Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996), 1–­53; Tony K. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-­Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory,” History of Religions 40, no. 3 (2001): 260–­87. 52 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xii–­xvi; Ahearne, Michel de Certeau, 157. 53 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiii; emphasis in original.

Introduction — 17

presence.54 The Sikhs trace their origins back to Guru Nanak, a bhakti poet-saint who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Missionaries recognized the similarities between certain Sikh and Christian beliefs and practices. However, they hypothesized that Sikhs and other such communities founded on bhakti were a providential way station for the Indian population on its journey from Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism to Christianity. It was Indian Christians who worked out through their religious and social lives—­through their everyday living—­ that Christianity would be expressed in Hindi North India as a new religious tradition that would nevertheless borrow from, even as it challenged, the preexisting Indian religions. Bhakti was not a way station on their journey from Hinduism or Islam to Christianity.55 Rather, it provided the religious ground with the most fertile soil for the birth and development of this new religious tradition. The interaction between bhakti and Evangelicalism was especially prominent in the first generation of Indian evangelicals. As Joel Robbins explains, when people “convert” from their local religion to one introduced from the outside, there are two general explanations given for the change. The first is a utilitarian explanation, in which people adopt a new religion for worldly advantages, such as material goods, prestige, social status, and so forth. A second explanation stresses the theme of meaning, arguing that the new religion “renders meaningful new situations that defy the sense-­making capacities” of people’s traditional understandings of the world. This second approach can be called “intellectualist” and focuses on “cognitive attractions of conversion.”56 Conversion here may imply “the acceptance of a new locus of self-­definition, a new, though not necessarily exclusive, reference point for one’s identity.”57 The intellectualist approach also has a utilitarian aspect to it: while people are not looking for worldly goods, they are looking “for new ways to explain, predict, and control the world around them.”58 Both of these approaches have merits as well as limitations, although the strictly utilitarian one has greater difficulties in sustaining itself against a number of criticisms. 54 Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Western Foreign Missionary Society (Pittsburgh: D. and M. Maclean, 1836), 10–­13. 55 However, see the biography of Zahur-­ul-­Haqq in chap. 4. 56 Robbins, Becoming Sinners, 85–­87. 57 Hefner, “Introduction,” in Hefner, Conversion to Christianity, 17. 58 Robbins, Becoming Sinners, 86.

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These two approaches can be combined, because the utilitarian (both material and cognitive) better explains the initial embrace of religious change, whereas the meaning-making approach elucidates why in succeeding generations converts remain attached to the new religion, often in the face of difficulties, and engage it more deeply on its own terms. Thus over two or three generations, a two-­step model of conversion emerges, “one in which utilitarian concerns eventually give way to intellectualist ones as people come to understand the religion they are converting to.”59 While this model is a bit too neat and does not describe a number of other kinds of conversions—­sometimes people who have no need to convert actually do convert—­it has strong explanatory power especially in those cases where missionary or other official religious control and education remain strong after the first wave of conversions, as was the case in North Indian Protestantism into the twentieth cen­ tury.60 It explains how people first accept new religious ideas in terms that make sense in the previous religion.61 Only after the significant passage of time—­perhaps a whole generation—­do people start to use extensively the intellectual and institutional apparatus that comes with the new religion to make meaning in their lives.62 Yet even here that apparatus has been influenced and shaped in the first generation by the cultural and intellectual context in which it has been domesticated.63 Scope This study focuses on American evangelical missions in the nineteenth century in the territories the British named the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh, what today covers Uttar Pradesh and parts of Uttarakhand, Robbins, Becoming Sinners, 87. South Indian Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, has quite a different history with regard to missionary and clerical control over the Christian population, resulting in a very different expression of the faith. See Corinne Dempsey and Selva Raj, Popular Christianity in India: Riting Between the Lines (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–­1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 61 Andrew Walls, “The Translation Principle in Christian History,” in his Missionary Movement in Christian History, 35. 62 Robbins, Becoming Sinners, 115. 63 Andrew Walls, “Culture and Coherence in Christian History,” in his Missionary Movement in Christian History, 16–­25. 59 60

Introduction — 19

an area I refer to as “Hindi North India,” well aware of the importance of Urdu as a regional language. The years covered are from 1836 to 1870. The former year is when American Presbyterian missionaries first arrived in Allahabad. By the early 1870s, the Protestant evangelical movement in North India had gained enough strength in terms of human, monetary, and governmental resources that its complexion had started to change noticeably; it went from being a protest movement wildly gesticulating in the wings of the region’s religious scene to a well-recognized, if still quite minor, actor on center stage. It had successfully started to clear its own religious space. Medical missions, the women’s missionary movement, formal theological education, and the first of many “mass movements,” or group conversions to Christianity, all began in the early 1870s, signs that the Protestant missions were rapidly metamorphosing into an “establishment.”64 By then they had garnered a critical mass of Indian leaders and members, demonstrating that they were around to stay. Chapter 1 describes the religious terrain in Hindi North India in the nineteenth century, the landscape that the missionaries encountered upon arrival. Chapter 2 provides the historical context for the American evangelical missions in that part of North India, as well as a brief history of those missions. The foreign missionaries who established the evangelical missions are the subject of chapter 3, and chapter 4 explores the lives of the Indian coworkers of the American missionaries. Chapter 5 investigates a systematic theology produced by an Indian Presbyterian pastor as one example of theological innovations occurring in the missions. The final chapter describes the creation and composition of the Hindi North Indian evangelical Christian community during its first four decades, with some of its most important tensions and complexities. The conclusion summarizes the findings of the study and also points to how the earliest history of Evangelicalism continues to affect North Indian Protestantism today.65 64 See Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–­1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Here Cox argues that institutional life is the defining characteristic of North Indian Christianity, and it was bequeathed by the missionaries to Indians. 65 Andrew Walls convincingly argues that various phases of Christianity do not simply fade away when a new phase emerges, but leave their imprint on the religious tradition as it develops. See Andrew F. Walls, “Culture and Coherence in Christian History,” in his Missionary Movement in Christian History, 16–­25.

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When Christian evangelical missionaries arrived in North India in the early nineteenth century, they believed that their religion could take the space occupied by Hinduism and Islam, dislodging these traditions from their central position in Indian society. This was the premise of Alexander Duff’s speech, and the tall spires of Protestant churches in North Indian cities speak eloquently of this ambition. Yet even with the backing of high officials in the British government, as a newcomer to the Indian scene, evangelical Protestantism had to take a place at the margins.66 However, these margins were teeming with religious life, life that spilled over daily and affected the acknowledged religious centers of North Indian society. The margins were, in fact, centers of their own, Thirdspaces of religious possibilities, operating in critical dialogue with various dominant orthodoxies. It was in such religious Thirdspaces, prepared and populated by sects and movements inspired by bhakti, that the Evangelicalism introduced by American missionaries was compelled to pitch its tents. In this space it explained and recreated itself to propagate a new way of life.

66 The story of the spread of North Indian Islam, while bearing some similarities, was in significant ways quite different. For the spread of Islam in North India, see Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

—1— The Religious Context in North India Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity

A

merican missionaries to India arrived in a religiously rich and pluralistic society. Moreover, it was a society that was rapidly changing in many ways, including its understandings and practices of religion. Missionaries’ knowledge and opinions of the richness and the malleability of the religions of the communities where they landed varied. Yet missionary perceptions and attitudes alone did not determine how American Christianity was received in India. The nature of existing Indian religious traditions had a profound impact on the ways in which this new American Evangelicalism was interpreted and situated in Hindi North India. One important characteristic of Indian religion in the nineteenth century is that the boundaries between various traditions could be highly porous.1 There were Muslims who observed caste, and Hindus who venerated a Muslim saint or a saint’s tomb. Hindus and Muslims could be found living together in the same village, influencing each other’s beliefs and practices.2 Various sects combined Hindu and Muslim beliefs 1 Even though British colonialism and the nationalist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hardened religious boundaries and treated religions as mutually exclusive, the adoptability and adaptability of religions in India continues. See, for example, Peter Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mathew N. Schmalz and Peter Gottschalk, eds., Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). 2 See J. L. Humphrey, Twenty-­ One Years in India (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1905), 238; T. J. Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages in India

21

22 — Missionary Christianity and Local Religion

in creative ways, while the Brahmo Samaj had been deeply influenced by Protestantism in its reconstruction and practice of Hinduism.3 Thus while one needs to identify important markers and characteristics of various religious traditions in nineteenth-­century Hindi North India, it is important to keep in mind that religious crossing and borrowing were common features of life. Hinduism Hinduism in India, with its vast philosophical, theological, textual, ritual, and social apparatus, along with the great variety of its manifestations, resists any easy description, and even its characterization as a single religion has been much debated.4 In fact, missionaries recognized the great diversity of what was termed Hinduism, even as they were highly critical of it. “[The Hindu religion] is a huge conglomeration of philosophical speculations, poetical fancies, ancient traditions, morality, and immorality; some traces of an original revelation, mixed with a thousand jarring opinions of hundreds of different sects, all jumbled together in confusion, and varied into countless forms by vulgar prejudices and local superstitions,” wrote one nineteenth-­century Presbyterian missionary in Saharanpur.5 For Christians of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most striking contrast between their own and Hindus’ notions of the divine was the latter’s acceptance of “the polytheistic imagination.”6 The religion of the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, is “decidedly polytheistic,” and

(Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1876), 39, 132–­34. Interestingly, elsewhere Scott reports visiting a village that for five years had “not worshiped idols” (88). He does not provide the reason for this cessation of image worship. 3 W. J. Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1888), 82–­83. 4 David Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (1999): 630–­59, convincingly argues that “a Hindu religion . . . was firmly established before 1800” (631), which is the time when Protestant missionaries started to operate in North India. 5 James R. Campbell, Missions in Hindustan (Philadelphia: Board of Missions of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, 1853), 75–­76. 6 Diana L. Eck, “The Deity: The Image of God,” in The Life of Hinduism, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 46.

The Religious Context in North India — 23

the deities number in the thousands, even millions.7 Missionaries noted with despair this feature of Hinduism: “Heathen temples are all around us, and every day we witness the idolatry of the people.”8 The importance granted to any particular divinities varied not only from area to area but from group to group and even person to person. Local village divinities—­and in the nineteenth century the great majority of Indians lived in villages—­were very important to rural people. One missionary described a village shrine of deities as “stones on a low platform of earth.” They were given libations of water in the morning and “strewn with an offering of flowers.”9 Yet along with noting the profusion of divinities in India, Christians also acknowledged that at least theologically knowledgeable Hindus believed in what the former variously termed as one “Supreme Being” or “Divine Spirit” or “one self-­existing and all-­pervading spirit . . . [who] is Brahm.”10 According to missionary sources, this divine unitary principle or spirit was most widely manifest in three deities: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Each of these gods had a corresponding consort or wife: Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati/Durga/ Uma, respectively.11 Among these divinities, Brahma had only one temple (in Rajasthan), so he was not offered ritual worship; the other deities and their avatars, or incarnations, were popular and worshiped all over North India.12 In the nineteenth century, at least one Hindu reform

Alf Hiltebeitel, “Hinduism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 6:3990; Ishuree Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of North India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1860), 73; William Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos . . . , 2nd ed. (Serampore: Mission Press, 1815), 6. 8 J. J. Lucas, ed., Memoir of Rev. Robert Stewart Fullerton (Allahabad: The Christian Literature Society, 1928), 32. 9 Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages of India, 126–­27. 10 Dass, Domestic Manners, 73; Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos, i; Campbell, Missions in Hindustan, 80. 11 Wilkins, Daily Life, 107–­37; Dass, Domestic Manners, 74. 12 Ward writes that “not a single Hindoo temple, dedicated to the ONE GOD, is to be found in all Hindoosthan; nor is any act of worship, in any form, addressed by this people to God.” He either did not know about the Brahma temple in Rajasthan or did not include it in his definition of “Hindoosthan.” Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos, 5. Wilkins states that there is one temple to Brahma “where offerings are made to him.” Wilkins, Daily Life, 112. 7

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movement, the Brahmo Samaj, took up the worship of Brahma as a way to advocate for monotheism.13 In North India the most familiar pan-­Indian gods were Vishnu and Shiva, with their respective consorts Lakshmi and Devi. Vishnu had many more followers than Shiva in the Gangetic Plains, and Vishnu was best known in the region as his avatars of Krishna and Rama, in part because the religious sites most associated with these two avatars are found in Hindi North India.14 The forested area of Vrindavan, northwest of Agra on the road to Delhi, is where, according to tradition, Krishna grew up, and stories abound from his childhood and youth. The great king and god Rama, central character of the epic Ramayana, was born in and had his capital at Ayodhya, where he reigned (after great travails) with his queen Sita. Ayodhya is eighty-­five miles east of the city of Lucknow, capital of the kingdom of Awadh during the first half of the nineteenth century. Shiva, on the other hand, was said to reside in the city of Benares (Varanasi or Kashi), the city holiest to Hindus. His consort Shakti or Devi is also prominent in the region’s pantheon. Among village deities, those associated with disease and fertility—­both human and agricultural—­were very influential in people’s lives. These included Shitala, the goddess of small pox, and the divine mothers, or matrkas, who are connected with childbirth and childhood.15 Most North Indian Hindus, of whatever religious tradition or group, did not see the need to worship one particular deity exclusively, even though special worship and veneration could be accorded to one deity or a certain configuration of deities. As one missionary observed, “[T]hough each person worships more particularly some one or more of the deities, they generally acknowledge the existence and power of them all.”16 Leaving aside bhakti communities, much Hindu worship, or puja, unlike Jewish, Christian, or Muslim worship, generally is not 13 Wilkins, Daily Life, 109–­10; Dass, Domestic Manners, 73. There was a rich and complex relationship between leaders of the Brahmo Samaj and Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century. 14 Dass, Domestic Manners, 74; Wilkins, Daily Life, 113–­14. 15 See J. Wilson’s description of a religious fair centered on Sitala in “Communication from the Rev. J. Wilson,” Foreign Missionary Chronicle, March 1841, 86–­88. Also see W. J. Johnson, “Matrkas” and “Sitala,” in Johnson’s Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 203, 300; Diana L. Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 2nd ed. (Chambersburg, Penn.: Anima Books, 1985), 34. 16 Wilkins, Daily Life, 108.

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congregationally based. A visitor to a Hindu temple or other holy site could have been struck by the size of the throngs of worshipers and devotees. Yet they had not come together as one people to join in worship; Hindu worship was fundamentally a personal affair, transacted between the individual and the deity to whom one had gone for darshan, and to whom one offered gifts and sacrifices. One missionary noted that this different view of worship had resulted in different architecture for Christian and Hindu houses of worship: “The Hindu temples have no accommodation for a worshipping assembly, the great majority of them being only just large enough for the image they shelter and the priest to officiate at the altar.”17 The important exceptions to the personal nature of Hindu devotion were (and are) village festivals, where certain rituals—­such as animal sacrifices—­have been communal. Darshan literally means “seeing,” and when Hindus come before a divine image, they wish to see and be seen by that divinity. What to Jews, Christians, and Muslims is idol worship is not so for Hindus, for the latter believe that the deity is actually present in the divine form before them.18 The personal nature of communion with the divine also holds true in other religious rituals, such as bathing in sacred waters or going on pilgrimage to sacred sites. While a person may have gone to bathe or on pilgrimage with many other people, those people were not crucial to the religious activity and transaction. It is the individual’s personal devotion and practice that affect her or his life and relationship with the divine. Public worship in temples and shrines can therefore take place whenever it is convenient for the worshiper and whenever the divine image is available for the worshiper’s devotion and sacrifice. That being said, most if not all religious ritual and worship are determined by and carried out in the context of one’s social group: one’s family, caste, and society. Patterns of ritual and worship are thus deeply governed by one’s social and geographical location. Besides public worship, Hindus have engaged in domestic worship in their homes. For those of high caste or of wealth, these rituals may be highly elaborate and costly; one may hire a Brahmin priest to perform them on one’s behalf. As one nineteenth-­century Christian author put 17 Wilkins, Daily Life, 138. He goes on to write, “Even the larger temples have no seats, nor does a congregation stand long in front of the shrine: the people simply bow to the image, give their offerings to the priest, and move away.” 18 Eck, Darsan, 3–­6.

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it, “Piety of an exalted nature or such as is spoken of in the Hindoo Shasters is required only of the higher castes.”19 Or the rituals could be simple acts of worship and religious practice such as proper bathing and cleaning of oneself and one’s house or lighting incense before an image, acts that can be accomplished by the humblest person. Timing is more important in these household rituals than in visits to temples or shrines; certain acts have to be performed at certain times of day.20 Nineteenth-­century missionaries made much of what they considered inhumane Hindu rituals; these the missionaries said simply proved the immorality of “paganism” or “heathenism.”21 One cause célèbre was widow immolation, known as sati, in which a widow climbed the funeral pyre of her husband to be burned to death. The British outlawed the practice in Bengal in 1829.22 Other frequently cited examples of religious cruelty were hook swinging, which involved swinging a religious devotee through the air by means of a large metal hook inserted in his back, and deaths at the yearly festival of ratha-­yatra (literally, chariot journey), when a figure of the god Jagannath (literally, Lord of the Worlds), a form of Krishna, was pulled in a monumental cart through the city of Puri, where his temple is located. By accident and also due to devotional fervor, people were crushed under its wheels every year.23 Such rituals were deeply disturbing to evangelical missionaries, yet they made sense to the people who participated in them. Hindus believed that religious acts of mortification of the flesh—­which are certainly known in Christian and Muslim traditions—­assisted the “soul” (atman) in attaining “salvation,” which for them was liberation (moksha) from the cycle Dass, Domestic Manners, 75. For a glimpse of North Indian household rituals in the nineteenth century, see Dass, Domestic Manners, 75–­82. 21 For example, see Campbell, Missions in Hindustan, 69–­74. 22 For example, James M. Thoburn, The Christian Conquest of India (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1906), 76–­77. The literature on sati and its abolition is immense. For a basic introduction, see W. J. Johnson, “Sati,” in his Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 293. 23 For one of many descriptions of hook swinging, see Campbell, Missions in Hindustan, 69–­71; for the yatra of Jagannath, see Wilkins, Daily Life, 158–­59. Interestingly, Wilkins argues that Europeans have a completely wrong and negative view of Jagannath: “Ugly, repulsive indeed as the image of Jagannatha is, the deity whom it is supposed to represent was of all the Hindu gods one of the gentlest, and one to whom gods and men are said to have resorted for aid in their times of special need.” Also see Geoffrey A. Oddie, Popular Religion, Elites and Reform: Hook-Swinging and Its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800–­1894 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995). 19 20

The Religious Context in North India — 27

of transmigration. Regarding deaths during Jagannath’s ratha-­yatra, one missionary argued, “Occasionally men have voluntarily cast themselves under these wheels [of the cart]; but it is because they are weary of life, and imagining that their sins are removed, and fearing lest on their return to ordinary life they should again do evil, they think that it is well to put an end to it at such a holy place.”24 The communal dimension of Hinduism has been most manifest in religious holidays and festivals. In the nineteenth century, these varied from region to region; it should not be assumed that the same festivals were important in Bengal as in the North-­Western Provinces. In Hindi North India, the festival of Holi was perhaps the greatest religious holiday of the year.25 It is associated with Krishna and his “love-­sport with the gopis,” and also with the vanquishing of the demoness Holika.26 In the nineteenth century, its most conspicuous public manifestation was celebrants throwing colored powder at passersby. Ishuree Dass, writing in the middle of the century, also reported that people lit bonfires as part of the celebrations, and he likened it to Christmas for Christians as far as the amount of celebration that occurs.27 The other festival that Dass explained at some length is that of Divali, “the festival of Lamps,” which he claimed “is celebrated in honour of Lakshmee, wife of Vishnoo, and the goddess of wealth and prosperity; and also in commemoration of a victory that Vishnoo had over a great giant.”28 He continued, “[W]hen the day arrives, [people] bathe themselves, put on clean clothes, and in the evening illuminate their houses with lamps.” Sweets are plentiful during Divali, and the

Wilkins, Daily Life, 159. See also Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos, 317, who offers up a similar assessment. 25 McKim Marriott, “Holi: The Feast of Love,” in Hawley and Narayanan, Life of Hinduism, 99. 26 Campbell, Missions in Hindustan, 68–­69; quote from W. J. Johnson, “Holi,” in his Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 143–­44. 27 Dass, Domestic Manners, 108–­9. 28 Dass, Domestic Manners, 110; emphasis in original. According to contemporary accounts, however, Divali commemorates the return of Ram from fourteen years of exile to take his rightful place on the throne of Ayodhya; see Om Lata Bahadur, “Divali: The Festival of Lights,” in Hawley and Narayanan, Life of Hinduism, 92. It is not clear whether Dass was mistaken or he simply was drawing on another tradition regarding Divali’s origins in his time and place. 24

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festival “is particularly devoted to the goddess of wealth and prosperity, for which pooja is performed and invocations made.”29 One other type of communal event in Hinduism is the mela, often translated as “religious fair,” that is held in conjunction with pilgrimages to sacred places such as shrines or certain locations at rivers.30 At various times of the year, pilgrims gather at appointed sacred sites to bathe in sacred rivers and perform rituals of religious devotion, as well as engage in commerce, sightsee, and visit local places of interest—­what is called tourism today. In the melas at least, “a clear distinction between sacred and secular journeying is often impossible to draw.”31 Some of the most important pilgrimage and mela sites in Hindi North India are found in Allahabad (Prayag), Benares, Hardwar, Ayodhya, Mathura, and Vrindaban. The famous Magh Mela was held yearly in Allahabad, drawing large numbers of pilgrims.32 The melas were magnets not only for Hindu pilgrims, ascetics, and business people, but also for missionaries and Indian evangelists, who saw them as convenient sites for preaching and for distributing Christian literature to great numbers of people. Yet missionaries and evangelists debated the efficacy of such activity, and it worried East India Company officials.33 Hinduism, like many religious traditions, has authoritative texts or scriptures, and the foundational scriptures (both historically and ideologically) are the Vedas.34 The Vedas are compilations of sacred oral material, and the term refers to the earliest written compilations, first three and then four books, as well as to later collections such as the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads, which further add material to the earliest scriptures.35 A variety of other texts, such as collections Dass, Domestic Manners, 110–­11. These are known as tirtha. 31 C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 205. 32 Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908–­1931), 231. For a study of the Kumbh Mela during the British colonial era, see Kama Maclean, Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765–­1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 33 Penelope Carson, “An Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, no. 2 (1990): 169–­90. 34 Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 12–­13. 35 W. J. Johnson, “Vedas,” in his Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 346–­47. 29 30

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of historical stories (Puranas), epics (the Mahabharata and Ramayana), and poetry and ethical and legal books, have been regarded as sacred for centuries. The importance of various sacred texts has varied from sect to sect, caste (jati) to caste, and region to region. In the nineteenth century, many North Indian Hindus, from a variety of backgrounds, would have recognized the Vedas as authoritative texts, whose efficacy was located in their sound and therefore their chanting, rather than their meaning. The majority of Hindus would have been much more familiar with the contents of other sacred writings such as the Puranas and epics. For a variety of reasons, early American evangelical missionaries generally did not undertake the rigorous study of Hindu sacred texts. For a tradition that is itself scripturally based, this may seem surprising. However, the missionaries had enough difficulty learning local vernaculars, and the great majority of them did not have the time or the talents to learn Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, as well.36 This is not to say that all Protestant missionaries in India eschewed the study of Sanskrit; indeed, a number of them not only studied but also wrote in Sanskrit and translated Christian material into the sacred language.37 However, American evangelicals were not among the Christian scholars of Sanskrit. American missionaries were also dealing with Hindu populations who themselves were quite far removed from the Sanskrit of the Vedas; these were to be read only by Brahmins and heard only by males of the three upper castes. Finally, unlike Orientalists of a previous generation like Sir William Jones, the aim of mid-­nineteenth-­century missionaries was not to understand Hinduism but rather to undermine it to convert people to the Christian faith. American missionaries gleaned what was necessary for their polemical purposes from scholars of classical Hinduism, rather than study the Scriptures on their own.

Campbell, Missions in Hindustan, 105–­6. The nineteenth-­century British Baptist missionary William Carey, who lived in Serampore in Bengal, learned Sanskrit to undertake translation work. For other Christian apologists who wrote in Sanskrit, see Anand Amaladass and Richard Fox Young, The Indian Christiad: A Concise Anthology of Didactic and Devotional Literature in Early Church Sanskrit (Anand, Gujarat, India: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 1995). See also Richard F. Young, “Church Sanskrit: An Approach of Christian Scholars to Hinduism in the Nineteenth Century,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens 23 (1979): 205–­ 31; Richard F. Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-­Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-­Century India (Leiden: Brill, 1981). 36 37

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Along with a great variety of rituals, liturgies, festivals, and texts, Hinduism has a strong ascetic tradition. Renunciation of this world, although not a practical goal for the majority of the population, is an ideal that has been much admired. The ascetic ideal has meant two things for Hindu populations. First, it has engendered groups of people (almost always male) called sadhus or sannyasins, who actually have lived an ascetic lifestyle. Singly or in groups, these ascetics have practiced any number of renunciations, including “celibacy, bodily mortification, homelessness, mendicancy, and fasting.”38 Missionaries were both fascinated and repulsed by the extreme bodily mortification of some renunciants. “Only a few years ago the writer witnessed a spectacle of incredible voluntary torture which he has often wished could be banished from his memory,” wrote one Methodist missionary. He then proceeded to describe in vivid detail the practices he observed.39 Ascetics lived either alone or in groups. All renouncers did not live ascetic lifestyles, however. Groups of renouncers could, over a long period of time, “be drawn back into the world’s affairs, and many of them actually command[ed] considerable power and wealth.”40 Ironically, it was the respect accorded to the renouncers that made them trustworthy in worldly matters. The second effect of the ascetic ideal was that various forms of self-­ denial were built into quotidian Hindu life. Householders could voluntarily take temporary ascetic vows, such as celibacy or fasting, so as to make spiritual progress and/or achieve particular “worldly” goals.41 Abstaining from certain foods like meat and alcohol also increased one’s purity.42 Finally, in the human life cycle, the fourth and final stage (after student, householder, and forest dweller) is that of sannyasin, or renouncer, who leaves behind all the attachments (both duties and pleasures) of human society and wanders about as an ascetic moving toward salvific liberation. One much discussed characteristic of Hinduism is the way people are grouped into castes. The term “caste” is of Portuguese origin and was used by the Iberians when they arrived in the sixteenth century to describe the system of religious and social divisions and hierarchy that

W. J. Johnson, “Asceticism,” in his Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 30–­31. Thoburn, Christian Conquest, 116. 40 Fuller, Camphor Flame, 17–­18. 41 Johnson, “Asceticism,” 31. 42 W. J. Johnson, “Food,” in his Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 117–­19. 38 39

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they perceived among the Hindu people around them.43 In the nineteenth century, caste could be simply defined as “any of the classes or divisions of Hindu society.”44 Indian castes have been ranked hierarchically, and thus scholars and missionaries in British colonial India (and afterward) spoke of a caste system. However, in practice the hierarchy has always been a contested one, and its fluidity and rigidity have varied significantly over time.45 There are two indigenous Indian terms that correspond to “caste”: varna and jati. Theoretically, there are four major castes, or varna; the highest is the brahmin (priest), followed by kshatriya (warrior), vaishya (commoner), and finally shudra (servant). However, the actual functioning groupings in Hindu society have been the jati, which is one’s birth group, with various jati assigned, especially in the nineteenth century, to one of the four varna.46 For this reason the term jati is sometimes translated as “subcaste” or even “sub-­subcaste.” In the nineteenth century, authors connected with Christian missions tended to see the caste hierarchy as a unique case of general human social hierarchy. As the missionary John Wilson put it, “Pride of ancestry, of family and personal position and occupation, and of religious pre-­ eminence, which . . . is the grand characteristic of ‘Caste,’ is not peculiar to India.” However, Wilson went on to argue that it is among Hindus that the “imagination of natural and positive distinctions in humanity has been brought to the most pernicious and fearful development ever exhibited on the face of the globe.”47 For Wilson, it was race (rather than ritual purity, for example) that was the source of caste distinctions. The fairer-­skinned Aryan invaders placed themselves in the upper echelons of the caste hierarchy, with darker-­ skinned indigenous inhabitants beneath them. Intermarriage

43 John Wilson, Indian Caste (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1877), 12–­13. 44 Wilson, Indian Caste, 14. 45 See, for example, D. H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: An Ethno­ history of the Military Labour Market of Hindustan, 1450–­1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 46 Thus the missionary W. J. Wilkins, writing in the latter part of the nineteenth century, observed that in Bengal there were only two castes, the Brahmins and Shudras, and all the many jati were assigned to one of these two varna and were hierarchically arranged within them. W. J. Wilkins, Modern Hinduism (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), 158. 47 Wilson, Indian Caste, 9, 10–­11.

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created a great variety of color and racial distinctions.48 Such an explanation of the caste hierarchy at least partly reflected contemporary European preoccupations with race and racial theories. One final characteristic of traditional North Indian Hinduism that was operative in the nineteenth century is the varnashramadharma “system.” Varna refers to the four major caste groups, ashrama refers to stages in the life of a human being, and dharma refers to one’s duties and responsibilities in life. According to important sacred texts the Dharmasutras and Dharmashastras, there are four prescribed life stages of the (males of the) three higher castes: student (brahmacharin), householder (grhasthin), forest dweller (vanaprasthin), and renunciant (samnyasin). Each of these life stages has dharma, or duties, particular to it, and moreover the duties in each life stage differ according to one’s varna as well as other factors “like sex, family, region, and the quality of the times.”49 So each person’s dharma was at least in theory—­and to varying degrees in practice—­dictated by one’s varna and one’s ashrama, the whole complex being termed the varnashramadharma system. In practice, the great majority of people did not go beyond the householder stage. Moreover, the student stage was most pertinent to Brahmin males, who were supposed to spend more time than males of any other varna in study. Still, varnashramadharma provided individuals and groups specific duties and responsibilities in life, all while organizing society according to spiritual, caste, and gender hierarchies. Bhakti and Hindu Sectarian Movements Despite the power and pervasiveness of Hindu religious and social hierarchy in North Indian society, a wide variety of sectarian bhakti groups arose that were indifferent to or even critical of this hierarchy.50 Bhakti posits that devotion to or participation in the divine is the true path to salvation.51 In bhakti “the devotee’s love for God, just like God’s love for the devotee, transcends distinctions of birth and social class. . . . [F]rom the beginning, bhakti has by-­and-­large been spiritually egalitarian in

Wilson, Indian Caste, 13, 51. Hiltebeitel, “Hinduism,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 6:3995. 50 Karen Pechilis Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9. Prentiss argues that participation is a better way than devotion to understanding the core of bhakti. 51 John B. Carman, “Bhakti,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2:856. 48 49

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theory.”52 In book 9 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, “For whoever depends on me, Partha, however low their origins—­whether they are women, farmers and merchants, or even labourers and serfs—­ they go by the highest path.”53 This does not mean, by any means, that all bhakti-­inspired communities and practices of religious devotion have disregarded caste and other forms of stratification. Any number of individuals and communities have interpreted bhakti so that it becomes amenable to the observance of social and religious hierarchies. So there can be a “running conflict between the world of devotional freedom that bhakti authorizes and the brahminical culture with which it continues to interact.”54 Yet at its foundation bhakti posits religious equality for all devotees, regardless of their background. Members of a number of religious groups inspired by bhakti in Hindi North India “were united in their commitment to the value of personal experience in religion. Therefore they questioned the ex opere operata ritualism characteristic of the sort of Hindu worship superintended by Brahmins, and they often criticized the caste conceits that went with it.”55 Sectarian groups founded on bhakti that criticized inherited orthodoxies and hierarchies, and imagined and formed new kinds of communities, created a religious and sociological Thirdspace in their society. The word bhakti comes from the Sanskrit root bhaj, meaning “to divide or distribute, to share, to partake of, or to love.”56 This root points to the importance of an intimate relationship with the divine, which is only possible when the divine and the human are divided from 52 Patton Burchett, “Bhakti Rhetoric in the Hagiography of ‘Untouchable’ Saints: Discerning Bhakti’s Ambivalence on Caste and Brahminhood,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 2 (2009): 116. See also Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-­ Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 492–­93. 53 The Bhagavad Gita, trans. W. J. Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 43. 54 Hawley, Storm of Songs, 145–­47; quote from p. 145. Hawley terms the conflict a “bhakta-­Brahmin tension.” 55 John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India, rev. ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6. 56 Kerry San Chirico, “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholic Hindus, and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012), 50; Carman, “Bhakti,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2:856.

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each other and are not seen as essentially a unity. Bhakti is an “enthusiastic, often congregational kind of religion” that emphasizes the cultivation of an ardent devotion and love to a supreme god, in the hope or faith that this god will grant salvation to the devotee.57 This form of religion does not look for salvation solely in the performance of ritual and social duties pertaining to caste Hinduism nor in ascetic withdrawal from society—­even though duty-­conscious Hindus and world-­denying ascetics embrace bhakti as well.58 It opens the possibility of salvation to everyone in society, including women and persons from the lowest rungs of the caste hierarchy, who, according to the norms of caste Hinduism, cannot attain salvation at the end of this life but must wait for reincarnation into a male of one of the three higher castes.59 This is probably one of the reasons that a number of bhakti-­inspired religious communities have drawn from persons belonging to low-­caste communities. Finally, bhakti shifts religious authority from the Brahmin priest who is versed in the Sanskrit scriptures to a religious leader, such as a guru or poet-­saint, whose personal charisma, manifest in his religious knowledge and lifestyle, draws followers to him.60 John Stratton Hawley describes bhakti as follows: “Bhakti,” as usually translated, is devotion, but if that word connotes something entirely private and quiet, we are in need of other words. Bhakti is heart religion, sometimes cool and quiescent but sometimes hot—­the religion of participation, community, enthusiasm, song, and often of personal challenge, the sort of thing that coursed through the Protestant Great Awakenings in the history of the United States. It evokes the idea of a widely shared religiosity for which institutional superstructures weren’t all that relevant, and which, once activated, could be historically contagious—­a glorious disease of the collective heart. It implies direct divine encounter, experienced in the lives of individual people.61 Hawley and Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India, 4. Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid, “Introduction: Towards an Archaeology of Bhakti,” in The Archaeology of Bhakti I: Mathura and Maturai, Back and Forth, ed. Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid (Pondicherry, India: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2014), 5–­6. 59 John Stratton Hawley, Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Times and Ours (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 48. 60 Karine Schomer, “Introduction: The Sant Tradition in Perspective,” in The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, ed. Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987), 1. 61 Hawley, Storm of Songs, 2. 57 58

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The traditional scholarly consensus, which has recently been questioned, is that bhakti as a mode of religious expression originated in the Tamil area of South India somewhere between the fifth and the seventh century of the Common Era and gradually spread westward and northward until it swept over Hindi North India and Bengal beginning in the fifteenth century.62 The ever-­expanding bhakti movement—­the term, however, should not be taken to mean a unified, singular, and clearly defined development—­has produced numerous religious leaders, trajectories, groups, and traditions over the course of one and a half millennia. So perhaps it is better to speak of a bhakti network rather than a movement.63 In the first half of the nineteenth century, Horace Hayman Wilson catalogued and described a number of the “religious sects of the Hindus,” as he called them. He based his work on two Persian sources authored respectively by Sital Sinh, munshi, or secretary, to the Rajah of Benares, and by Mathura Nath, librarian of the Hindu College in Benares. These sources were supplemented and corrected by “oral report,” according to Wilson.64 Some of the bhakti-­inspired groups are dedicated to the god Shiva, others to Vishnu, others to the goddess Shakti, whereas some have focused their devotion on a supreme ineffable god that is beyond all manifestations.65 The bhakti sects have also embraced a wide range of religious ideas and insights available in the Indian context.66 And as far as worship and devotion are concerned, the different bhakti traditions again have shown great variety, from a rejection of all external objects for worship to elaborate religious rituals revolving around different 62 Schomer, “Introduction,” in Schomer and McLeod, Sants, 1–­9; John Stratton Hawley, The Bhakti Movement—­From Where? Since When? (New Delhi: India International Centre, n.d.); John Cort, “Bhakti in the Early Jain Tradition,” History of Religions 42, no. 1 (2002): 82–­86; Hawley, Storm of Songs, 13–­58. 63 Hawley, Storm of Songs, 310. 64 Horace Hayman Wilson, A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1846), 6. 65 Wilson divides the groups into Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas, and “a fourth or miscellaneous class.” Interestingly, he does not mention nirguna bhakti, or devotion to the divine without any qualities. Of the two most famous followers of nirguna bhakti, he classifies Kabirpanthis as a Vaishnava sect because of Kabir’s connection to Ramanand, although in his description of the Kabirpanthis Wilson writes that “it is no part of their faith . . . to worship any Hindu deity” (Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, 48). Wilson classifies the Nanakpanthis, or Sikhs, in his fourth, miscellaneous group (173). 66 Schomer, “Introduction,” in Schomer and McLeod, Sants, 2.

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manifestations of the divine. What is common to all bhakti worship, however, is devotion to—­or perhaps more accurately participation in—­a particular manifestation or understanding of the divine.67 In Hindi North India, bhakti formed the foundation or “core” of what John Stratton Hawley has termed “Hindi Religious Traditions.”68 Translators and composers of religious and devotional poetry who worked in the vernacular languages rather than Sanskrit founded these traditions. The first written religious literature in these vernaculars seems to have been translations and adaptations of the great Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in the first half of the fifteenth century.69 Translations of the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana followed a century and a half later. A further departure from Sanskrit and its implied orthodoxy was accomplished by popular poet-­saints of Hindi North India who, beginning in the fifteenth century, started composing their own religious poems and songs in the vernacular languages. The best known and hence culturally and religiously significant of these were Kabir, Nanak, Surdas, Ravidas, and Mirabai—­the last being the most renowned woman in the pantheon of Hindi North Indian poet-­saints. The songs and poems were composed and transmitted orally. At some subsequent point, some of them were committed to writing, even as collections attributed to various authors were enlarged by other poems over time. The poetry, personalities, and popularity of the bhakti writers, poets, and saints led to the formation of numerous religious communities that embraced both householders and ascetics. While some of the religious sects or groups formed on the basis of bhakti have criticized the caste hierarchy and its resulting exclusiveness, “bhakti theory has rarely if ever been translated into actual social reform or sustained egalitarian bhakti practice.”70 This is not simply a failure of theory to realize itself in social reality; rather, it is due to an ambivalence within bhakti itself regarding the purity and primacy of the Brahmin male.71

Prentiss, Embodiment of Bhakti, 1–­6. John Stratton Hawley, “Hindi Religious Traditions,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 6:3983–­88. 69 Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 70 Burchett, “Bhakti Rhetoric,” 116. 71 Burchett, “Bhakti Rhetoric,” 117. 67 68

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Traditionally, scholars have proposed two main bhakti streams, the saguna and the nirguna (literally, with and without attributes, referring to how the divine is apprehended), although scholars debate the usefulness of this division in understanding the workings of bhakti.72 The former, saguna bhakti, believes that “God can appropriately be worshiped through divine attributes and forms that make themselves felt in the phenomenal world, hence through myth and image.”73 The traditions of bhakti devoted to Krishna and to Ram are thus saguna in nature. Nirguna bhakti, however, believes that “the purpose of the religious life is to discard such earthbound symbols and attain a purer apprehension of the divine; this teaching is at the heart of the message of poets such as Kabir and Nanak.”74 The nirguna poet-­saint has been known as a sant, a term derived from the Sanskrit word sat (“truth, reality”), which means “one who knows truth” or “one who has experienced Ultimate Reality.”75 Even though the etymologies of the English word “saint” and the Sanskrit word sant are quite different, the former is generally used to translate the latter into English. The sant tradition has an important place in the religious imagination and ethos of the population of Hindi North India. The sants were uncompromising in their rejection of any form of “orthodox” theology. Being of the nirguna persuasion, they did not worship any of the incarnations of Vishnu such as Krishna or the heroic warrior king Ram. Moreover, they did not accept any of the Vaishnavite Scriptures and did not associate with the orthodox bhakti orders, or sampradays.76 They also did not recognize the authority of the Vedas or the brahminical priesthood nor any form of devotion connected to saguna bhakti. The sants (or their disciples) founded communities called panths that have in theory been uncompromising in their rejection of caste. However, in the nineteenth century, panthis generally lived in society as members of their own jatis, occupying their low status in the caste

Prentiss, Embodiment of Bhakti, 21–­22. Hawley, “Hindi Religious Traditions,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 6:3984–­85. 74 Hawley, “Hindi Religious Traditions,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 6:3985. 75 Schomer, “Introduction,” in Schomer and McLeod, Sants, 2. 76 For sampradays, see Hawley, Storm of Songs, 99–­147. 72 73

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hierarchy.77 While panths drew heavily from low-­ caste and outcaste groups in the composition of their membership, members of the upper castes also joined them.78 The panths represented a very small proportion of the population of Hindi North India: for example, there were 843,171 Kabirpanthis in the British United Provinces according to the 1901 Census of India.79 The marginality of panths meant that they functioned in the nineteenth century as a religious and sociological Thirdspace in Hindi North Indian society.80 The panths were crucial to early Christian evangelical communities. Some of the earliest group movements into the Presbyterian and Methodist churches were from various panths. For example, 33 Kabirpanthis representing a number of Kabirpanth communities joined the Presbyterian mission in Dehra Dun in 1860, and between the 1860s and 1880s the entire community of a few thousand Mazhabi Sikhs in the Moradabad district joined the Methodists.81 Likewise, later in the century, significant numbers of the converts of the Disciples of Christ, another American Protestant mission, came from the Satnampanth.82 Wilson, Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, 48; G. H. Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth (Cawnpore, India: Church Mission Press, 1907), 63. 78 Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth, 62–­63; Schomer, “Introduction,” in Schomer and McLeod, Sants, 4–­8; Lorenzen, “Traditions of Non-­Caste Hinduism,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 21 (1987): 264. 79 Quoted in Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth, 2. However, Westcott believes this number is low. 80 There have been several excellent studies of the history and life of particular panths: Mark Juergensmeyer, Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); idem, Religion as Social Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); idem, Caste and Sect in Village Life: The Satnamis of Chhatisgarh, 1900–­1950 (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993); William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth. 81 For the Presbyterians, see John C. B. Webster, The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century India (Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1976), 48; and also “Recent Intelligence,” in The Home and Foreign Record of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, June 1859, 141. For the Methodists, see James M. Thoburn, India and Malaysia (Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts, 1892), 266–­67. This echoes the early Protestant experience in Bengal: Eleanor Jackson, “From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey: Indian Builders of the Church in Bengal, 1800–­1894,” in Converting Colonialism, ed. Dana L. Robert (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 174. 82 Chad Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–­ 1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 77

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Besides religious impulses derived from Hinduism, Islam is also thought to have played a part in the inception of the panths. Muslim holy men, generally sufis, were also active in Oudh, Bihar, and Bengal beginning in the thirteenth century, and their message and ideas can also be found in the message and ideas of the founders and leaders of the panths.83 Thus there was sufi influence on the sants of Hindi North India, so that devotional Islam blended with devotional Hinduism to produce the work of at least two of the most famous Indian sants—­ Kabir and Nanak.84 The influence of the panths is significantly greater on popular thought than their numbers suggest. Perhaps the most popular of all the sants is Kabir, whose ideas have pervaded Hindi culture through his verse and pithy sayings, and whom Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore popularized in the twentieth century. Kabir was most probably born in the early fifteenth century into a caste of poor weavers, the Julaha, who had recently converted to Islam.85 Even as he took up the family occupation (a number of his poems have weaving metaphors), he studied with a Hindu guru, learning meditative and devotional practices. He was most probably illiterate and did not have access to Sanskrit literature or knowledge. His sayings are in a rough, unrefined style, which makes them greatly appealing to the common folk of Hindi North India but also suits his iconoclastic and irreverent thought. Their content is such that both Hindus and Muslims claim him as their own. There is a certain irony in this because Kabir was caustic in his criticism of both religions. Horace Hayman Wilson noted Kabir’s great popularity in the nineteenth century: With an unprecedented boldness he assailed the whole system of idolatrous worship, and ridiculed the learning of the Pandits, and doctrines of the Sastras, in a style peculiarly well suited to the genius of his countrymen to whom he addressed himself, whilst he also directed his compositions to the Charlotte Vaudeville, “Introduction,” in her A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72. 84 Bruce B. Lawrence, “The Sant Movement and North Indian Sufis,” in Schomer and McLeod, Sants, 359–­73; Hawley, Storm of Songs, 91–­92. Velcheru Narayana Rao argues that nirguna bhakti developed due to Islamic theology introduced into the South Asian religious context (personal communication with the author). 85 Vaudeville, Weaver Named Kabir, 11–­13; Linda Hess, “Introduction,” in Kabir, The Bijak of Kabir (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), 3; idem, Bodies of Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5. 83

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Mussalman, as well as to the Hindu faith, and with equal severity attacked the Mulla and the Koran.86

Followers of Kabir who have worshiped him as a divine figure are Kabirpanthis. For several centuries they have been organized into a sect with various different establishments or maths (often translated into English as “monasteries”), which today are organized in many different places with subsets “under different leadership, some bearing friendly relations to each other, some tending to be rivals.”87 A number of different divisions or branches of the Kabirpanth existed in North and Central India in the nineteenth century.88 At Maghar, where Kabir died, there were both Hindu and Muslim maths of the Kabirpanth at the turn of the twentieth century.89 Kabirpanthis were basically of two classes: those who lived in their homes and everyday society, and those women and men who “renounce[d] the world and attach[ed] themselves permanently to one of the Monasteries belonging to the order.”90 These renunciants were called Bairagis and lived at the math, where religious rituals connected with that branch of the panth were conducted.91 Wilson described the Kabirpanthis’ “moral code” as short, but admirable. Because life is God’s gift, it should be respected—­the shedding of human or animal blood is criminal, and kindness is to be demonstrated to all creatures. Truth is also a cardinal virtue, and all the problems of the world, as well as ignorance regarding God, are attributable to falsehood. The desirable state of life is one of withdrawal from the duties Wilson, Sketches of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, 44. Wilson’s assessments of Kabir and other bhakti saints should be read with caution, because he and other Orientalists such as Westcott saw them as prototypes of Protestant Christian leaders: Prentiss, Embodiment of Bhakti, 3. 87 Vaudeville, Weaver Named Kabir, 13; The Bijak of Kabir, trans. Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), xi. No one is sure where or when the Kabirpanth was founded. Linda Hess offers P. N. Tivari’s guess of the first half of the seventeenth century somewhere in northeastern India. 88 Horace Hayman Wilson, writing in the middle of the century, records twelve divisions, whereas H. G. Westcott over a half century later claims that there are only two main “divisions of the Panth,” one headquartered in Benares and one in Chhattisgarh, although he does go on to say that there are other branch maths. Wilson, Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, 64; Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth, 57. 89 Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth, 57–­58. 90 Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth, 70. 91 Westcott, Kabir and the Kabir Panth, 57–­60. 86

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and business of the world, in order to calm one’s passions and desires, which give rise to one’s hopes and fears, so that one can meditate in tranquility and with a pure spirit on God and the human condition. Finally, one needs to devote oneself “in word, act, and thought” to one’s guru. However, for the Kabirpanthis, this devotion is not to be undertaken unreflectively; rather, the student should carefully study the teachings and practices of the guru to judge whether he is indeed as wise as he claims to be, before submitting to him.92 One last point to make about bhakti in Hindi North India is that it has a dialectical relationship with asceticism. On the one hand, bhakti can be seen as the polar opposite of renunciation: whereas the ascetic renounces life in the world, especially its passions, the bhakta affirms life with the embrace of passion. Yet, on the other hand, both bhakti and asceticism aim to achieve the same goal, which is to banish the attachment to the things of this world to attain liberation from the rebirths of this world.93 The dual themes of both asceticism and love therefore can run simultaneously through bhakti poetry. Mirabai, for example, sometimes is portrayed as a yogini longing for her yogi, Krishna.94 Further, Krishna’s loving gopis, sometimes viewed as the epitome of the bhakta, can also be described as yogis due to their singular focus on Krishna.95 And the Kabirpanthi Bairagis, or renunciants, mentioned above provide another example of how bhakti and asceticism can be conjoined.96 Islam Muslim presence in South Asia dates back to the seventh century, as Muslims traded and settled on the western seaboard of India. In fact, for many centuries (pagan) Arabs had extensive contacts with South Asia due to commercial interests: there were settlers from Yemen and Hadhramaut in what is now Sri Lanka in the first century C.E.97 In the eighth century, parts of Sind and Punjab were conquered by Arab armies, this Wilson, Sketches of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, 63. Prentiss, Embodiment of Bhakti, 19. 94 John Stratton Hawley, “Mirabai as Wife and Yogi,” in Hawley’s Three Bhakti Voices, 117–­38. 95 Hardy, Viraha-­Bhakti, 539. 96 See also Antoinette E. DeNapoli, Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 97 Jamal Malik, Islam in South Asia: A Short History (Boston: Brill, 2008), 38. 92 93

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area being of great economic importance. It was only in the last decade of the twelfth century that the Ghorid Empire moved eastward to capture Delhi, and in 1206 the Sultanate of Delhi (1206–­1525) was established and extended itself eastward into the Indo-Gangetic Plain, where Muslim communities began to appear.98 These communities had several notable features. First of all, Muslims had come as raiders and conquerors but stayed on as rulers, and in the process established “a rich and versatile immigrant civilization.”99 Naturally, they also absorbed important elements of the Hindu religion and society in which they settled, and North Indian Islam is thus in some ways a unique tradition in the family of Muslim traditions, although not unusual in having absorbed local influences.100 Second, the Muslims who came as conquerors and then settled in North India from the twelfth century onward were not primarily Arabs but at first “Perso-­Afghan-­Turkic” peoples to which were added, at the advent of the Mughal Empire in the middle of the sixteenth century, Central Asians of Mongolian descent.101 Even during the three centuries of Mughal rule (1555–­1857), Muslim warriors from Persia and Afghanistan continued to migrate to India in search of work and wealth. So Persian was the language introduced by Muslims into North Indian societies, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Persian gave way to Urdu—­a blend of Persian and Hindi—­as another important language in Hindi North India. But it was not only the language of Muslim rulers that was Persian; their cultural and bureaucratic organization was self-­consciously Persian and Turkic and in some ways distinct from Arabic culture.102 This cultural distinction emerged in the first centuries of Islam (eighth to tenth centuries C.E.). As the religion was adopted by Persians, it “reflected a great deal of the culture that had been in place before the coming of Islam.”103

98 Bruce Lawrence, “Islam: Islam in South Asia,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, ed. John L. Esposito, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3:110, 115. 99 Malik, Islam in South Asia, 67. 100 See Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44–­65, for a discussion on this matter. 101 Lawrence, “Islam,” 3:110. 102 Malik, Islam in South Asia, 68–­70; Lawrence, “Islam,” 3:115–­16. 103 Robert L. Canfield, “Introduction: The Turko–­Persian Tradition,” in Turko-­ Persia in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert L. Canfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4. See also Francis Robinson, “Perso-­Islamic Culture in India

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Third, Sufism has had a very strong influence on North Indian Islam, and the mystical tradition of the sufis allowed for a wide variety of practices to exist and flourish, “in particular those which accommodated local social beliefs and customs.”104 However, some Muslim reformers challenged this accommodating Islamic tradition in the nineteenth century. Fourth, because of the strength of Sufism, the Islamic theology that predominated in North India, at least until the nineteenth century, drew inspiration from Ibn ‘Arabi’s (d. 1240) doctrine of “oneness of being,” or wahdat al-­wajud. This doctrine viewed all phenomena as manifestations of a single being. Ibn ‘Arabi argued that “all is God,” which allowed Muslims “to tolerate and accept Hindus, and to look for shared beliefs and understandings.”105 Finally, the sufi shaikh, or holy men, were not the only leaders of the Muslim community; there were also the ulama, or learned men, teachers well versed in the Qu‘ran, the traditions, and the law. The ulama focused on how Muslims should behave socially—­how they should realize their religion in their quotidian practices. The sufi were experts in spiritual progress, teaching Muslims how to develop their religion in their hearts. While these two kinds of leaders had very different, indeed at times opposing, views on the ideal and practice of Islam, in reality they could be embodied in one and the same person, “being no more than the two sides of a fully rounded Islamic personality.”106 The expansion of Muslim rule and communities was slow and uneven. Foreigners identifying as Muslim came for a variety of purposes: to conquer lands for economic and political reasons, to trade, and to establish mosques, madrasas, and other centers for Islamic worship, devotion, teaching, and social life.107 In North India, as immigrant Muslims settled down in a particular locale, they formed a qasbah, a garrison from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” in Canfield, Turko-­Persia in Historical Perspective, 104–­5. 104 Claudia Liebeskind, Piety on Its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31. See also Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 27–­28. 105 Liebeskind, Piety on Its Knees, 31; Robinson, “Perso-­Islamic Culture in India,” in Canfield, Turko-­Persia in Historical Perspective, 108. 106 Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, 51. 107 Richard Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–­1700 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 39. Eaton’s description is of Muslim penetration in the Deccan peninsula in the medieval era, but it gives an idea of the variety of reasons for Muslim settlement in India.

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town and marketplace, where they could develop their own religious, artistic, economic, political, social, judicial, and bureaucratic life in a predominantly Hindu milieu. The qasbahs of North India became “the bases of a great regional cultural system.”108 Over time, the qasbahs expanded their size and reach and became centers where ulama could provide authoritative interpretation of Muslim law and practice.109 This expansion occurred because over the centuries qasbahs were locales to which Muslims emigrating from other areas gravitated and then settled down. In addition, the qasbah became a locus for not only Muslim life but also religious outreach and conversion. While marriage to locals and the generation of families was one factor in the expansion of Islam, it was not an overly important one. Much more influential was the village judge, or qadi, who “played a role in establishing a measure of uniformity among the various rural folk who, for various reasons, adhered to Islam.”110 The qadi was appointed by the central or provincial government in all towns and villages where there was a Muslim population. While in theory qadis applied Islamic law only to this population, they also settled cases involving Muslims and non-­Muslims, and so drew the latter into the social and legal orbit of Islam. However, the most important person in the expansion of Islam as a religion was not the Muslim ruler or the legal expert, but the Muslim holy man, or sufi, who embodied and exuded the authentic religious life. This is not because the sufi was intent on converting the Hindu population of India.111 Rather, sufis became seen as local holy men who could dispense blessings and thereby drew members of the local population, especially those who were not strongly tied to Brahminic Hinduism, into the world of Islam. One reason they could do this is that Muslim sufis adopted yogi traditions available in translation early on, and the holy men thus became integrated into the religious life of India more easily.112 Moreover, once a sufi who had been recognized as a saint by the local Robinson, “Perso-­Islamic Culture in India,” in Canfield, Turko-­Persia in Historical Perspective, 106. 109 Malik, Islam in South Asia, 74. 110 Richard Eaton, “Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India,” in Religious Movements in South Asia 600–­1800, ed. David N. Lorenzen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 116. 111 Eaton, “Approaches,” in Lorenzen, Religious Movements, 117. 112 Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 77–­81. 108

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population died, his baraka, or charisma, was transferred to his tomb, and the tomb exerted a powerful influence over generations.113 The conversion of non-­Muslim people and communities to Islam was a long-­term process of accretion and reform. The accretion phase “sees a people either adding new deities or superhuman agencies to their cosmological stock, or identifying new deities or agencies with existing entities in their cosmology.” In this phase, “the original cosmology is essentially retained.” On the other hand, during the process of reform, “Islamic supernatural agencies are not only distinguished from the preexisting cosmological structure, but the latter is firmly repudiated.” These two aspects of conversion are not necessarily sequential or irreversible, and individual and group conversions are complex and messy matters. Yet as a general trend, this is how conversion to Islam has occurred in South Asia.114 Muslim communities in Hindi North India in the middle of the nineteenth century were formed by three important developments: the rise and decline of the Mughal Empire, the formation of independent Muslim states, and the rise of the British Empire. The founder of the Mughal dynasty was a Chaghatay Turk named Zahir al-­Din Babur, or simply Babur (r. 1494–­1530), ruler of Kabul and ostensibly a descendent of Timur on his father’s side and of the Mongolian Genghis Khan on his mother’s side. Babur conquered Delhi in 1526 and kept marching eastward, reaching Bihar in 1529.115 Although his son Humayun (r. 1530–­ 1556) was forced out of Delhi by the Afghan Sher Shah, Humayun retook the city in 1555 from his base in Kabul with the aid of forces from Iran, who reinforced the existing Persian court culture of the Mughals. Humayun’s son Akbar (r. 1556–­1605) consolidated, strengthened, and expanded the empire so it reached from Kabul in the west to Bengal in the east and from Kashmir in the north to the northern half of the South Indian plateau known as the Deccan. Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605–­1627) quelled rebellions at the frontiers of the empire and took particular interest in the cultural life of the court. Shahjahan (r. 1628–­1658) is probably most famous for building the Taj Mahal, one of many monumental buildings erected during his reign, in the city of Agra. Eaton, “Approaches,” in Lorenzen, Religious Movements, 117. Eaton, “Approaches,” in Lorenzen, Religious Movements, 111. 115 This information is from Malik, Islam in South Asia, 158ff.; Hardy, Muslims of British India, 12ff.; and Lawrence, “Islam,” 3:110ff. 113 114

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The emperor continued his father’s and grandfather’s policy of internally strengthening and externally expanding the empire, until his son, Aurangzeb (1658–­1707), ruled almost all of the peninsula, with just the southern tip of the subcontinent outside the empire’s realm. This, however, was to be the zenith of the empire as a unitary political formation, due to the rising strength of regional political powers headed by leaders from diverse religious backgrounds. These included regional Muslim rulers, Sikhs in the Punjab, Marathas who brandished a Hindu identity and were active over much of the subcontinent, and Rajput Hindus in north central India who were mostly Vaishnavite.116 Over the next century, the power of Muslim rule shifted from an imperial center to the provinces, where regional governors of the Mughal Empire were able to establish themselves as autonomous rulers. In Hindi North India, the strongest state to emerge over the course of the eighteenth century was Awadh (also spelled Oudh), ruled by a succession of nawabs. This princely state “passed from the status of a Mughal province through a period of complete autonomy, during which it doubled its original size, attained great economic and military power, and began to develop its own cultural and historical identity.”117 Hindu and Sikh rulers were establishing their own kingdoms during this time. However, Indian rulers were not the only contestants for economic riches and political power. European nations joined the fray, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British had become paramount in the South Asian subcontinent. While Mughal emperors and local nawabs were Muslim, they did not aim to establish Islamic realms. This was not simply a pragmatic consideration, given that they were governors of largely Hindu populations. Rather, they harbored no ideological need to convert the masses of their respective realms to their own faith. Each ruler, however, differed in his approach to his own faith and his religious policies. Akbar (r. 1556–­ 1605) was probably the most ecumenical and the most idiosyncratic in his religious views.118 Early in his reign, he patronized the famous sufi saint Shaykh Salim Chishti (d. 1571), whose tomb was incorporated into the royal city of Fatehpur Sikri, which Akbar built outside Agra David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 26; personal communication from Scott Kugle. 117 Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British 1720–­1801 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 2. 118 Malik, Islam in South Asia, 163ff. 116

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and used as the Mughal capital from 1570 to 1585. The emperor married women from different religious backgrounds to forge political alliances with different peoples in his empire; for example, a Hindu Rajput became the mother of Jahangir and grandmother of Shahjahan. He also wanted harmonious interactions between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and other religious groups, and encouraged civil discussion and debate between intellectuals from different traditions. His policy, which had obvious pragmatic and political benefits, was to soften the distinctions between the religions so that his subjects could be united in his realm. In 1564 he issued a policy against the discrimination of Hindus on religious grounds. As he grew older, he increasingly located religious authority within himself and is said to have created a new syncretic religion called Din-­i-­Ilahi. Akbar sought to establish a religiously pluralistic empire, and this “in the long run became a solid pillar of the Mughal ideology of power.”119 The other long-­lasting effect of Akbar’s reign is that the influence of the Shi‘ite tradition of Islam, imported from Iran, spread all over the subcontinent. For example, the princes of Rampur and Awadh, when Mughal rule broke down, were Shi‘ite. Akbar’s son and grandson continued his policy of religious accommodation, with varying degrees of allegiance to orthodox Islam. Shahjahan, for example, “patronized an intellectual movement, which tried to bridge the gap between Hinduism and Islam, and sought to evolve a common language for the representatives of both traditions.”120 However, this liberalism created a reaction from more orthodox leaders of Islam, who were uncomfortable with the religious relativism of the Mughals, and some religious leaders were energized to write and teach and mobilize Muslims in order to uphold the supremacy of their faith. Paradoxically, Mughal rulers after Akbar also supported this resurgent Islam. Again, a mixture of political and personal reasons led to this stance: rulers needed the support of their Muslim courtiers and subjects, but Jahangir and Shahjahan were also personally more devoted to a stricter version of Islam than was Akbar. Upon the death of Shahjahan in 1658, there were two coexisting but conflicting streams of Islamic thought and practice functioning at the court: one inclusivist that sought connections between Islam, Hinduism, and other religions, and the other exclusivist, which saw Sunni Islam as the one true and legitimate Malik, Islam in South Asia, 165. Malik, Islam in South Asia, 175.

119 120

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religion. According to much current historiography, Shahjahan’s eldest son, Dara Shikoh, stood firmly in the inclusivist tradition, whereas his third son, Aurangzeb, was not only a firm exclusivist, but he, after gaining the throne by defeating his brothers, vigorously promoted religious orthodoxy throughout his empire, even to the detriment of his Hindu subjects. Aurangzeb is therefore remembered as the most intolerant of the great Mughal emperors. However, this historiography is deeply problematic and needs critical examination.121 The death of Aurangzeb in 1707 initiated the breakup of the Mughal Empire.122 While the imperial line continued at Delhi, rival claimants to the throne continually contested it. Military invasions from Persia and Afghanistan further weakened the already fractured empire and allowed political power to migrate to regional centers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Muslim rulers of Bengal, Awadh, and Hyderabad had established independent kingdoms, while Marathas, Jats, Sikhs, and Rohillas (immigrants from Afghanistan) had created new dominions for themselves. Of these kingdoms, those of Awadh and Rohilkhand (established by the Rohillas) were part of the territory first settled by Presbyterians and Methodists in Hindi North India. In 1764 the forces of the British East India Company defeated the combined armies of the Nawab of Awadh, the former Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor. Consequently, the British became the de facto rulers of the region between the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, controlling the levers of power in Awadh and Bihar. By 1803 the British were thoroughly ensconced in North India from Bengal to Delhi. Paradoxically, the decline of Muslim political strength in the center made possible a shift in power to local Muslim religious leaders, both the ulama and sufi pirs, or holy men, even though the British colonial state could also impinge on their authority.123 The difficulties and 121 For example, see Richard Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-­Muslim States,” in Piety and Politics in the Early Indian Mosque, ed. Finbarr B. Flood (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 64–­96. 122 The following is taken from Barbara Daly Metcalf, “Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–­1900,” in India’s Muslims: An Omnibus, by Barbara Daly Metcalf, Rafiuddin Ahmed, and Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), chaps. 1 and 2. 123 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 25. See Liebeskind, Piety on Its Knees, for examples of sufi traditions that were weakened due to the imposition of the modern colonial state.

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depredations visited upon the Mughal Empire were taken to be a sign of divine judgment, and thus the religious leaders who possessed charisma and access to divine power came to hold increasing influence on the affairs of ordinary people who were living in uncertain times. The weakening of central power also enhanced the power of local sufi pirs because either they held political power themselves or they mediated between their followers and local political authorities and powers. The ulama did not generally have the political clout of the pirs. However, the ulama called for a return to greater and stricter observance of the law (sharia); for them, the solution to the political and economic crises of the day was a religious reformation. In Lucknow, Islamic ulama at the famous Islamic school called the Farangi Mahal (French or Foreigners’ Abode) systematized a new curriculum during the first half of the eighteenth century “which, with modifications, has dominated religious teaching in South Asia to the present,” and which consisted of “both religious and secular subjects.”124 The scholars at the Farangi Mahal were concerned with upholding and promoting the Islamic intellectual tradition of the ulama during a time of political uncertainty. They also promoted a tradition of combining scholarly and mystical learning, in effect combining the traditions of the ulama and the sufi pirs. They prepared students for not only religious leadership but political rule as well; students came to prepare for service in the various princely states of India. The Muslim courts in India, in fact, did not discriminate greatly between the religious and the secular; they often provided the resources for religious scholarship and devotion. In general, then, over the course of the eighteenth century and into the first decades of the nineteenth century, Islam in Hindi North India entered into a phase of vigorous and serious religious reform. First, the reformers and their followers interpreted the troubles of their world religiously, because “Islam is a religion that takes all of life in its purview.”125 Second, they placed the blame for their predicament not on outside forces but on Muslims’ moral corruption: “The enemy would not be strong if one were oneself strong.”126 Third, in order to return to true 124 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 31. 125 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 5. 126 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 5.

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Islam, reformers disapproved of local customary practices of Muslims, calling instead for a return to scriptural norms in belief and practice, to the written words of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet. In so doing, the reformers assumed that the time period of the Prophet and the first years of the religion’s history supplied the normative patterns of belief and practice for all times and places. Finally, Islamic reform movements were led by religious leaders, “men of learning and piety who symbolize the aspirations of the community and who come to the fore in what are seen as times of crisis.”127 Turning specifically to religious reform in nineteenth-­century Hindustan, there was a wide variety of responses to the onset of British power. Some Muslims, like Sayyid Ahmad of Rohilkhand in the first three decades of the nineteenth century and various leaders of the 1857 Uprising against British rule, engaged in a jihad of armed conflict to restore Islamic rule in North India. Others, like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in the latter part of the nineteenth century, urged their coreligionists to cooperate fully with their British overlords and indeed learn and adopt as much as possible from European civilization with the goal of nurturing Islam and Muslim social identity in a new context.128 Then there were the ulama who turned inward to find religious solutions to their troubling external context. “Their sole concern was to preserve the religious heritage . . . and to disseminate instruction in authentic religious practice and belief.”129 Some were becoming “oppositional Muslims.” Their religion was “self-­conscious, formulated often against the pirs of the sufi shrines, against other Muslim ulama, and against non-­Muslims, both Indian and British.”130 However, generally speaking, and with the great exception of the rather brief but intense 1857 Uprising, Muslims in Hindi North India chose not to confront or attack Christian missions and missionaries directly; rather, they focused their energies on the 127 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 6. Comparisons with Christian history come to mind. The sixteenth-­century Protestant Reformation was driven by a desire to return to the Bible and early Christianity in order to reform church and society. 128 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 52–­63, 80–­81, 317–­35. See Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation. 129 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 11. 130 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 12.

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renewal of their own community.131 Christian missionaries could sometimes provide helpful methods for disseminating the faith, for example by the use of the lithographic press and of public debate and preaching. Yet the purpose of Muslims borrowing these was not so much to oppose the Christian enemy as it was to strengthen the Muslim faithful.132 By the mid-­nineteenth century, Muslims were about one-­fifth of the total population of all of British India, and their concentrations were uneven. The region with the highest proportion of Muslims, three-­ quarters of the population, was the Sind. They constituted about half the population in Bengal and Punjab, although western Sind and eastern Bengal (further away from the centers of power in Delhi and Luck­ now) were predominantly Muslim. In the North-­ Western Provinces and Awadh, they constituted about 10–­15 percent of the whole. In this region about a third of town dwellers, as opposed to the rural population, were Muslim.133 First Presbyterian and then Methodist missionaries established themselves in important centers of Muslim politics and learning in the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh. Christians already residing there had called the missionaries to establish stations; the Christians were there because the British were intent on occupying key political centers in North India to expand and consolidate their rule. Christianity at the Beginning of Nineteenth-­Century North India When surveying the religious landscape of North India around the year 1800, it is not unusual to claim that Christians were practically non­ existent in the region at this time.134 The generalization tends immediately to be qualified by noting the anomalous case of the jagir, or small kingdom, of Sardhana in what is now the Meerut District of Uttar Pradesh, where a Roman Catholic reigned as begum, or queen, in “an

131 See Avril Ann Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-­Mutiny India (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1993). 132 Metcalf, “Islamic Revival,” in Metcalf, Ahmed, and Hasan, India’s Muslims, 198. The aim of destroying the enemy by means of the press and preaching was in fact a Christian missionary idea. 133 Hardy, Muslims of British India, 2–­4. 134 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 3. In the following discussion, what is true of Hindi North India is generally true of North India at large.

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enclave of Roman Catholic prosperity.”135 The Begum of Sardhana, in this view, is the exception that proves the rule of Christian absence in North India at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Such a view of Christian absence is completely natural if one approaches the history of Christianity in India as primarily a history of European mission or of the indigenous Indian church. The Begum Sumru, as she was known, was neither foreign missionary nor Indian church worker. She was, rather, the politically, militarily, and administratively astute widow of an Austrian soldier of fortune.136 As such, she is perhaps an embarrassment to Indian and missionary church history, as her Christian conversion and conviction are open to grave questions of sincerity and faithfulness. Yet it is the Begum who points the historian to the existing Christian community, some of it Protestant, in North India in the early nineteenth century.137 The Begum does this by indicating where to look for Christians: not in the lives of missionaries or evangelical East India Company chaplains whose eyes were fixed on the heathen masses of India they wished to convert, but in the lives of European soldiers and bounty seekers whose eyes were fixed on acquiring by all sorts of means the material wealth of the incredibly rich subcontinent. These Christians were a great embarrassment to their more devout and observant coreligionists. Fortunately, they were not such an embarrassment to Reginald Heber (1783–­1826), the congenial Anglican bishop of Calcutta from 1823 to 1826, who described some of them in the diaries he kept of his

Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1707–­1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 284. 136 There are numerous accounts of the Begum’s highly colorful life. The standard earliest account is by the Rev. W. Keegan, Sardhana and Its Begum, first written in 1879. See also M. Gentil, “Bégoum-­Somrou,” in Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, ou Empire Mogol, by Jean Baptiste Joseph Gentil (Paris: Petit, 1822), 381–­84. Brajendranath Banerji wrote Begum Samru in 1925; it was reprinted by Mittal Publications in 1989. Two recent historical works are by Mahendra Narain Sharma, The Life and Times of Begam Samru of Sardhana (Sahibabad, U.P., India: Vibhu Prakashan, 1985), and by John Lall, Begam Samru: Fading Portrait in a Gilded Frame (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997). Patrick Nair’s Sardhana: Its Begum, Its Shrine, Its Basilica (Meerut: President Press, 1963) gives a good—­if hagiographical—­summary of her life. See also Peter Tete, S.J., A Short History of the Expansion of the Catholic Missions in North India (Ranchi, India: St. Albert’s College, 1997), 123–­37. 137 Webster does note that the Indian Christians “saw themselves as belonging to a distinctive community, qaum or log (people).” Webster, Christian Community and Change, 8. 135

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travels through North India in the last year of his life.138 The vast majority of these Christians were neither missionaries nor converts because of missionary work.139 A few of them were Greek, Russian, and Armenian Christians carrying on some sort of trade.140 There were also other European Christian civilians in North India: business people; civil servants of European trading companies such as the East India Company; employees of local rulers (such as at Lucknow); professionals such as doctors, builders, and engineers; and family members of European men working in India. Almost all of them lived in metropolitan areas of the country.141 Bishop Heber did meet some Indian converts to Christianity, although he judged that the great majority of them were wives of British soldiers. A few individuals had converted due to the work of evangelicals such as the East India Company chaplain Daniel Corrie, who devoted himself to missionary work among Indians.142 In short, the Christians in North India were not, by and large, North Indian Christians.

138 It is interesting that Heber’s diaries are often read for what they tell us about Indians who are not Christians, rather than the Christian community that he was visiting. For example, the published excerpts of Heber’s diaries deal with his impressions of non-­Christians. Reginald Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India: Selections from Heber’s Journal, ed. and selections by M. A. Laird (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 139 Stephen Neill hazards a guess as to the number of Christians in all of India in 1858. He estimates there were about 600 Protestant missionaries and wives and 2,400 Protestant Indian mission workers living mostly in the larger cities and towns of India. In addition, there were around 120,000 baptized Indian Protestant Christians. “The great majority” of Indian Christians were Roman Catholics, and Neill thinks there were about 750,000 of them. He estimates the Thomas Christians’ numbers at 60,000. Europeans and Anglo-­Indians, “the majority of them Anglicans but with a considerable Roman Catholic minority, may have numbered in all about 200,000.” Thus there were about 1 million Christians in a population of about 180 million in 1858. Most of these Christians would have been living in South India; however, because much of the warfare in the early nineteenth century was concentrated in North India, the European soldiers and their wives, children, and servants would be found mostly in the North. Neill, History of Christianity in India, 361–­62. 140 Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–­1825, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828), 1:67, 152, 281–­82. 141 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:338, 476–­77; Rosie Llewellyn-­Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow, in The Luck­ now Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22–­23. 142 Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, 146; Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:225.

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A significant number of Christians in this part of the country were Roman Catholic Goanese and South Indians who lived and worked away from home. For example, the cooks and other personal servants of European soldiers were frequently Goanese Christians.143 Certain work was specifically reserved for Christians; the drummers and other musicians attached to the East India Company regiments were, as a rule, Eurasian and Christian.144 The Eurasian or “East Indian” community, produced by the union of European men and Indian women over the previous centuries, was predominantly Christian. From references made by missionaries, most of them critical, Eurasians made up a significant segment of self-­identified Christians in North India.145 The other large segment of the Christian community in North India consisted of European soldiers—­the American Presbyterian missionary Joseph Warren puts the number at six thousand in 1855—­many of them working for the British East India Company, others working for Indian rulers, and typically living in ways that Christian missionaries would condemn as unchristian. “They are recruited from the worst classes [of British society],” wrote Warren, “and in India they are almost entirely freed from the moral restraints that surround them . . . at home. Drunkenness and licentiousness strongly mark their conduct, whenever they can escape from the immediate restraints of military discipline.”146 Neill, History of Christianity in India, 421; Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:339. 144 Joseph Warren, A Glance Backward at Fifteen Years of Missionary Life in North India (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856), 104; Christopher J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–­1883 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1996), 40. 145 Hawes, Poor Relations, 15–­16. Hawes estimates tentatively that there were 20,000 Eurasians in India in 1830; these were spread all through the subcontinent. Whether they were legitimate offspring or not, in general Eurasian children were baptized at least in the Presidency cities of Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay. Hawes, Poor Relations, 4. 146 Warren, Glance Backward, 214. Bishop Reginald Heber wrote in his journal while traveling through Rajputana, “None of the King’s regiments have yet been sent here, and few Europeans of any description except officers. They have, therefore, seen little of the drunkenness and violence of temper which have made the natives of our own provinces at once fear and despise a Feringee soldier.” Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, 279. For an example from South India, see the complaint of Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg about European Christians in Tranquebar early in the eighteenth century: “The name of Christ has become so hated and despised among [the Indians] because of the offensive and shameful life of the Christians that they think a worse people could not be found in the whole world than the Christians.” 143

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So in the first half of the nineteenth century, Christianity in Hindi North India was associated with South Indian immigrants, Eurasians, and foreign warriors and rulers. This is what made the Christians a distinct religious group here: though very small in number, their religion was not a protest against Hinduism or Islam, but was ideologically and socially self-­standing, and in many cases closely identified with European racial and civilizational heritage.147 This is one reason why Indian soldiers in the 1857 Uprising attacked both Indian and foreign Christian civilians along with British soldiers.148 While many Christians in Hindi North India would have not been religiously observant, some were dedicated to their faith. Eurasian William Bowley was such a man. He first came to the notice of the Anglicans while he was living and working in secular employment in Meerut in the first decade of the nineteenth century. According to the records of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), he was “a zealous voluntary worker in connexion with the small nucleus of the Native Christian Church there.” In 1815 he came to Chunar, a British garrison town, where he “laboured with great zeal and success in evangelistic and school work.”149 Because the Anglican bishop Thomas Middleton claimed that he did not have the authority to ordain Indians, Bowley was ordained by the Lutheran church in 1820. That same year the CMS employed him to be a catechist in Chunar. In 1824 Bowley completed a revision of the Urdu New Testament in simpler language so that it was Quoted in D. Dennis Hudson, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706–­1835 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 22. 147 This is not to ignore the large Syrian Orthodox Christianity on the subcontinent, but simply to say that as far as North India was concerned, Syrian Orthodoxy did not figure significantly in the Christian community at this time, because Syrian Christians were established in South India. However, there were a few non-­ European Christians to be found in North India, as Bishop Heber’s journals make clear. In Dacca, the bishop had two visits from an Armenian archbishop, “who, attended by one of the suffragans of the patriarch of Jerusalem, is making a visitation of all the different churches of their communion in Persia and India.” There was one Orthodox congregation in Dacca, according to Heber. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:152. 148 Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 268. Rebelling soldiers killed people from other religious groups as well, depending on the identity of combatants in any local area. See Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 86. 149 Church Missionary Society, Register of Missionaries (Clerical, Lay, & Female), and Native Clergy, from 1804 to 1904 (Printed for Private Circulation), 21.

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serviceable for ordinary people.150 He then started working on a translation of the Old Testament. The following year Bishop Heber (who was open to ordaining Indians) ordained him deacon in Calcutta. In 1833 Bowley engaged in public controversy with Muslim scholars in Luck­ now, where he did not fare well due to his dearth of formal education and his completely negative assessment of Islam.151 William Bowley died in 1843 at Chunar, after twenty-­five years of service as a clergyman.152 His life demonstrates that with appropriate institutional support and encouragement, the Indian Christian community could produce its own ordained leadership—­a much debated issue in the British community of the nineteenth century. Bishop Heber’s travels brought him into contact with a number of Christians in Hindi North India. They lived in localities such as Chunar and Lucknow where British soldiers and (other) employees of the East India Company were stationed and where other foreigners lived and worked. Chunar lies fifteen miles southwest of Benares, and Bishop Heber arrived there on September 10, 1824. The town had a famous fort, which the British had captured from the Nawab of Awadh in 1764, a hospital and infirmary for East India Company troops, and an Anglican school run by the CMS.153 There were two CMS missionaries at Chunar in 1824: William Greenwood, an Englishman, and William Bowley.154 The first of the bishop’s ecclesiastical duties at the city was a confirmation service, a rite during which previously baptized persons affirm their commitment to the Christian faith. He confirmed “nearly 100 persons, 57 of whom were natives, chiefly, as at Benares, soldiers’ wives and widows, but all unacquainted with the English language, and perfectly Oriental in their dress habits.”155 Bishop Heber was much impressed with their reverence and emotion during the ceremony. He goes on to The Urdu translation had been undertaken by Henry Martyn. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 128–­31. 152 Church Missionary Society, Register of Missionaries, 21. 153 Edward Thornton, A Gazetteer of the Territories under the Government of the East-­India Company, and of the Native States on the Continent of India (1858; repr., Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993), 215–­16; Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:262–­64. The troops in the infirmary were both European and Indian. 154 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:263. 155 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:266. Bishop Heber started picking up Hindustani and using it on his itineration. In Chunar, he was pleased that he could “follow the argument” of Mr. Bowley’s sermon “with far more ease” than he had expected (1:243, 268). 150 151

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report that the older women and all the men “who offered themselves” had been converted to Christianity through the ministry of evangelical chaplain Daniel Corrie. The younger women had been Hindus, Muslims, or Roman Catholics before they entered the Anglican Church. The following day Bishop Heber, accompanied by four other clergymen and two catechists, led the service in the church. The congregation was quite large. “The Invalids of the garrison who attended, amounted to above 200 Europeans, besides the officers and civil servants and their families, and I should think 100 natives. About 130 staid [sic] the Sacrament, of which the natives amounted to nearly 70.”156 The fact that about 70 percent of the native Christians stayed for communion, while only about 30 percent of the Europeans did, probably reflects different understandings of the rite: Europeans would not partake of the communion if they believed they were “unworthy,” whereas for Indians receiving the sacrament probably meant receiving holy food that was endowed with spiritual potency.157 The bishop noticed that during the reception of the communion elements, the women who had been Muslim “pertinaciously kept their veils down, and even received the bread on a corner of the muslin, rather than expose the bare hand.” One young woman did not extend her hand but “threw back her veil, and opened her mouth,” by which the bishop guessed that she had been brought up a Roman Catholic. “All were very devout and attentive,—­some shed tears, and the manner in which they pronounced ‘Ameen’ was very solemn and touching.”158 After dinner they again attended church, first for a prayer service in Hindustani and afterward for an English service. The Hindustani service was attended by two hundred people, many of them Hindus and Muslims, “who distinguished themselves by keeping their turbans on.” The bishop opined that Mr. Bowley “preached a very useful and sensible sermon” in Hindustani, which he spoke “with the fluency of a native.”159 A month after visiting Chunar, Bishop Heber visited Lucknow, the capital of the kingdom of Awadh (or Oudh, as it was known). Luck­ now was a center of politics, trade, and religious activity. Awadh was a Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:268. For such an understanding of the bread and wine of communion, see Mathew Schmalz, A Space for Redemption: Catholic Tactics in Hindu North India (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998), 30–­31. 158 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:268. 159 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:268. 156 157

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reluctant ally of the East India Company since 1765, and since then had been increasingly subject to Company control, which the Company’s representative or resident personally and directly exercised from the Lucknow Residency.160 Heber found “a considerable number of Christians of one kind or another” there.161 The British Residency, of course, had numerous Christian “dependents,” including members of the military employed by the Company, but the King of Awadh also had “a great many Europeans and half-­castes in his employ.” The resident himself, Mordaunt Ricketts, led Sunday services at the Residency. Yet Christians who were not attached to the residency requested the bishop for someone to lead them in worship elsewhere in the city, because the Awadh government was “very jealous of their attending at [the residency],” and they expressed “great anxiety to establish a similar meeting for devotional purposes among themselves.” There were also Christian tradesmen, both European and Eurasian, “and a strange medley of adventurers of all nations and sects, who ramble hither in the hope, generally a fruitless one, of obtaining employment.”162 The Europeans were “freelancers who included soldiers, artists, traders, indigo planters and shopkeepers.”163 So in a cosmopolitan Indian city such as Lucknow, Anglicanism and Catholicism were not the only variety of Christianity available. The Roman Catholics, most of them Portuguese and their descendants, had a small chapel with a Franciscan priest.164 The two Sundays that he was in Lucknow, Heber led worship services for “numerous congregations, both at the Cantonments and the Residency.” At least some of those services were in Hindustani.165 The composite picture that emerges from the bishop’s journal descriptions of the Christian community in the British North-­Western Provinces and Oudh in the first quarter of the nineteenth century has several distinguishing features. First, the laity provided most of the initiative for the religious vitality and life in these communities and ensured that the communities survived. Repeatedly the bishop reported about M. A. Laird, “Introduction,” in Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, 30. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:338. For a description of the European community in Lucknow, see Llewellyn-­Jones, Fatal Friendship, 17–­40. 162 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:338–­39. 163 Llewellyn-­Jones, Fatal Friendship, 17. 164 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:339. The prejudices of the bishop come through here: he writes of the “Portuguese, or their degenerate descendants.” 165 Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:338. 160 161

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groups of lay Christians, such as those at Lucknow, meeting in one town or another across Hindi North India, petitioning appropriate ecclesiastical authorities for clerical presence and leadership when an ecclesiastical authority passed through town. It was the resident laity in Allahabad and Bareilly that provided the impetus for Presbyterians and Methodists, respectively, to initiate their work in those cities. Second, the Christians were a multiracial and socially diverse group that included Indians, Eurasians, Europeans, and occasionally other foreigners such as “Greek, Syrian and Armenian Christians” from a variety of backgrounds.166 The balance of foreigners, Indians, and Eurasians varied from place to place, as did the social location of Christians. Joseph Warren, for example, depicted a Christian population with rather sharp racial, social, and ecclesiastical divisions. There were Europeans who belonged to the class of “gentlemen” and those who did not. Eurasians, with a few exceptions, were not of the upper class.167 Europeans who went to church and those who did not were also divided; the latter may have known nothing of the religious activities of the former in a city with a large expatriate population, although in smaller places all the Europeans knew each other. In cities like Allahabad and Agra, there were many European Christians who had “never encountered any native Christians.” Others in the European community tended to be liberal toward ecclesiastical projects such as church construction.168 What Warren portrayed was not one Christian community but a number of social and ecclesiastical communities whose members were somehow identifiably Christian. Third, even with their social variation, the majority of Christians living in North India—­whether Indian, Eurasian, or European—­were poor and among the lower classes of Indian society. In Allahabad, the Eurasian children lived by begging when the Presbyterians first arrived, and in Calcutta Bishop Heber found that the Anglican church serving the poorest population of Christians “contained a large number of half castes.”169 Most British soldiers came from the lowest classes of European society and lived what respectable strata of Indian society would characterize Warren, Glance Backward, 145. Hawes agrees with this assessment. Hawes, Poor Relations, 52–­54. 168 Warren, Glance Backward, 189–­93. 169 Walter L. Allison, One Hundred Years of Christian Work of the North India Mission of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Mysore City, India: Wesley Press, 1941?), 4; Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:63. 166 167

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as immoral and polluted lives—­the latter due to alcohol and meat consumption.170 Goanese also consumed meat and alcohol, and one of the problems facing Christian evangelists was that some Muslims wanted to convert to Christianity in order to join a community in which alcohol consumption was not simply permitted but obviously enjoyed.171 Warren severely denounced the Indian Christian community of the 1840s in his recollections of 1855: Fifteen, even ten years ago a native Christian was esteemed a monster. A convert was not said to have changed his religion, but to have lost it—­to have become an infidel, or worse. . . . Once they [native Christians] were reviled, pushed away from the wells and other public places, and were a proverb for everything low. To become a Christian, was, in the estimation of the public, to throw off every restraint, to indulge every evil propensity, and to wallow in all degradation. The Christian was known to regard no kind of food as unholy, and therefore he was considered as worse than even the Chamárs, who acknowledge some restraints, though they eat cattle that die of disease.172

Bishop Heber, the congenial cleric who “developed a warm liking for the people [of India],” corroborates this negative portrayal of the existing Christian community at least in part.173 The Christian communities of North India in the first half of the nineteenth century were not without their inner tensions and contradictions. The racial and class differences in Indian and European society were also endemic to the Christian communities, and the natural tendency of Christian communities was to organize themselves along those prevalent racial, class, and caste lines. Yet social and racial differences were being contested and challenged by some Christians, in both obvious and subtle ways. European chaplains worked with and ministered to Indians. Many European soldiers married Indian women although, at least according to one European observer, the Indian women who could Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, 283; Hawes, Poor Relations, 12–­14. Warren, Glance Backward, 55. 172 Warren, Glance Backward, 234; emphasis in original. 173 Laird, “Introduction,” in Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, 32. See Heber’s criticisms of British soldiers above (279). Heber also saw the Eurasian population as problematic: “I never met with any public man connected with India, who did not lament the increase of the half-­caste population as a great source of the present mischief and future danger to the tranquility of the Colony.” Quoted in Hawes, Poor Relations, 20. 170 171

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“form connexions” with European soldiers “were of the lowest caste,” and “Sepoys, and respectable natives in general, kept their women out of [Europeans’] way as much as possible.”174 While many Eurasians were disparaged in Indian and European society, there were those like William Bowley who were given a degree of praise and official recognition by European church leaders for their good work. So some Christians reached out across socially recognized and accepted boundaries to build bridges of faith and fellowship with other believers. A number of sociological and theological forces pushed some in the Christian community to be more fluid and inclusive. Even though Christianity was deeply identified with European heritage, paradoxically Christians in North India formed a multicultural population. Christians included British soldiers’ Indian wives and other converts from Hindu, Muslim, and Christian backgrounds; Catholics from Goa and Ireland; Protestants from England and Bengal; persons from the growing Eurasian community; Europeans who had lived in India for their whole life, or the greater part of their life, and thus were culturally Indian; and foreigners from England, Ireland, France, and other European as well as Middle Eastern countries. All of these groups brought different customs, practices, and ways of living out their Christianity. Unlike the tribal Christianity of Europe, Christian communities in North India brought together persons from a variety of religious backgrounds, as Bishop Heber’s reports indicate.175 Finally, despite the great internal variety of those identified as Christian, to be Christian in nineteenth-­century North India meant to be part of a clearly recognizable segment of society. Class, caste, and race stratified North Indian society, and so did religion. Religious boundaries, as noted at the beginning of the chapter, tended to be porous and flexible in nineteenth-­century North India. One can imagine that the British soldiers’ Indian wives who had converted to Christianity still kept good relations with their natal families. Yet religious boundaries did exist, with all their pliability and permeability. In other words, to be a Christian in North India was both a sociological and a religious fact. The presence of various Christian communities in Hindi North India in the early part of the nineteenth century means that American Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, 283–­84. In fact, at least in Chunar not all the worshipers at a Christian liturgy were Christian. 174 175

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missionaries were not the ones who introduced Protestantism into that region of the subcontinent. In fact, no American missionary ever began work in Hindustan where there was not already an active Christian community present. The American Presbyterians began their work in Allahabad in 1836 when they accidentally landed there on their way to Ludhiana, and the local Christian community pleaded with them to stay.176 From the perspective of Presbyterian missions or of the current Church of North India, the coming of the missionaries to Allahabad would seem to be the singularly important event for Protestantism there. From the perspective of Christian presence and life in North Indian society, however, what is even more important is that there was an active community of Protestant Christians in Allahabad striving to form their own identity in a multireligious society. Presbyterians and Methodists built on foundations that were already present, even as their work greatly strengthened those foundations.

176 Arthur Judson Brown, One Hundred Years: A History of the Foreign Missionary Work of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1936), 572. The Methodists chose Bareilly as their first station because of a British presence and the invitation of a British judge to commence work there. John N. Hollister, The Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1956), 1.

—2— The Religious Context in North India American Evangelicalism

O

ver the course of the nineteenth century, a new religious movement known as evangelical Protestantism, or simply Evangelicalism, was able to promulgate and establish itself in Hindi North India. It was new in two ways. First of all, it was new to the Christian tradition. Evangelicalism was birthed in Britain and its North American colonies only in the eighteenth century, although it drew upon various strands of historic Christianity for its identity and self-­understanding.1 Secondly, it was new to the Indian subcontinent, a region of the world where other forms of Christianity had been in existence for one and a half millennia or more. Somewhere between the first and fourth centuries of the Common Era, Mesopotamian varieties of the Christian religion planted themselves in South India, where they adapted to the local culture, grew, and have flourished to this day. Roman Catholic communities were founded beginning in 1500, first in Goa and then in other parts of South India, with the one small, short-­lived North Indian outpost in Sardhana. Continental European Protestantism was introduced to South India in the 1 Admittedly, it is difficult to draw distinctions between Evangelicalism and earlier, or even other, forms of Protestant renewal, such as Pietism. This study follows David Bebbington and Mark Noll in placing the origins of Evangelicalism in British Protestantism. See Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–­1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–­10; Timothy Larsen, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2003), 1.

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early eighteenth century, where it soon fostered Indian Protestant communities. British troops stationed in various parts of India from the seventeenth century onward brought in their trail Anglican chaplains who focused their attention not only on their compatriots but also on the Eurasian families that had resulted from the resident foreign military.2 So the religiously pluralistic Indian subcontinent was certainly not bereft of Christian presence. Yet these various traditions of Christianity had scarcely touched the vast North Indian population before the nineteenth century. It was Evangelicalism that was first able to develop an enduring North Indian Christian following. Although a powerful religious force, Evangelicalism is notoriously difficult to define. David Bebbington has provided the most popular description of the movement. He argues that Evangelicalism is defined by four characteristics working in tandem: biblicism, conversionism, crucicentrism, and activism.3 Biblicism points to the high regard that evangelicals have had for the Bible as a source of their faith.4 Conversionism alludes to the strong conviction that all human beings need to repent of their sins and embrace an evangelical Christian life. Crucicentrism refers to the great emphasis evangelicals have placed on the belief that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross atones for humanity’s sins, and that God’s forgiveness is available to those who believe in this atoning sacrifice. Finally, evangelicals have been vigorous activists in both religious and secular realms, assuming that the Christian faith needs to be expressed in daily affairs on both the individual and social levels. To these four features should be added a descriptor of Andrew Walls: “Historic evangelicalism is a religion of protest against a Christian society that is not Christian enough.”5 This insight helps to explain Daniel O’Connor, The Chaplains of the East India Company, 1601–­1858 (London: Continuum, 2012). 3 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–­19. See the discussion on Evangelicalism in Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2003), 17–­21. 4 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 12. It is important to remember that sacred scriptures can be important but function very differently in different religious traditions and in fact within different branches of the same tradition. 5 Andrew Walls, “The Evangelical Revival, the Missionary Movement, and Africa,” in his The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996), 81. In this essay Walls makes an important point: that Evangelicalism started off as a reform movement within Christianity, rather than as an 2

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one of the conspicuous traits of the first generation of evangelical missionaries in India: they tended to be censorious. Finally, Mark Noll has emphasized that Evangelicalism was as much about “individuals, associations, books, practices, perceptions and networks of influence shared by the promoters of eighteenth-­century revivals and their descendants” as about particular religious convictions.6 The combined descriptions of Evangelicalism—­namely a set of convictions, a judgmental view of society, and a connection of people, ideas, and materials involved in religious revival—­provide a good way of highlighting what was new in this Christian movement to North Indian society. Evangelicalism for most of the eighteenth century was not very concerned with overseas Christian missions. Rather, as Walls’ definition implies, it was focused on renewing and revitalizing British Christianity. There were exceptions to this rule.7 Yet on the whole, evangelicals did not get interested in mission work beyond Christendom until they were influenced in that direction by the Moravians in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.8 Evangelicalism was transported to the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century by committed evangelicals, both lay and clergy, who were working for the British government or for evangelical missionary societies. In the government of the East India Company, evangelical chaplains such as Henry Martyn and Daniel Corrie endeavored to spread their form of Christianity among soldiers and even, at times, native Indians.9 As the nineteenth century progressed, small but increasexport product for the rest of the world. Only later did evangelicals (forever activists) set their sights on populations beyond the borders of Christendom. Moreover, Walls, quoting William Wilberforce, provides a somewhat different (though not contradictory) description from Bebbington of the marks of Evangelicalism. Evangelicals believed that their society was defective with regard to three Christian doctrines: “original sin and consequent human depravity; the atonement of Christ; and the sanctifying power of the spirit in the believer’s life” (82). 6 Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 18. 7 John Wesley undertook an unsuccessful mission to convert Native Americans in Georgia in 1736 and 1737. Presbyterian David Brainerd also worked as a missionary among Native Americans in the 1740s. George Leile, a manumitted slave and Baptist minister in Georgia, carried the gospel to Jamaica in 1783 and worked for decades among the slave population there. Yet even in these cases, missionary work was not carried out among people who were outside British territory; the missionaries were planting and renewing Christianity within their nation’s boundaries. 8 Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 223–­32. 9 O’Connor, Chaplains of the East India Company, 10–­13.

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ing numbers of civil servants and officials in the British government were either evangelicals or sympathetic to their cause. Evangelical foreign missionary societies started to form in the last decade of the eighteenth century in both Britain and North America.10 Some of these were identified with particular denominations, whereas others were ecumenical. The first British evangelical missionary to reach northern India was the Baptist William Carey (1761–­1834) in 1793; his relatively long and very productive life has left a deep impression on the history of Indian Christianity. Other evangelical missionaries, from both Britain and North America, followed Carey into the northern part of the subcontinent over the course of the nineteenth century and started to spread themselves out westward and eastward from Calcutta into territory that was either controlled by the British or whose rulers were British allies.11 The North American Presbyterians arrived in India in the 1830s, the Methodists in the 1850s. While these two groups had their theological differences, once they reached India, with its miniscule Christian population, theological niceties did not matter nearly as much as broader religious attitudes and affections.12 In these, the Presbyterians and Methodists shared a great deal, because they both came from evangelical backgrounds. Evangelical missionaries and their supporters arrived in India at a pivotal moment in the history of the subcontinent. The eighteenth century had been a time of intense political and military struggle in India. Various factions competed to assert control in the wake of the disintegration of the Mughal Empire, which had reached its zenith—­at least in terms of territorial expansion—­at the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707. One century later, the British East India Company had emerged as the undisputed victor in a multinational contest to control India. This paramountcy was demonstrated in the British conquest of Delhi in 1803, at which time the Mughal emperor was confined to his palace as 10 For the Presbyterians, see Robert E. Speer, Presbyterian Foreign Missions (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-­School Work, 1901), 9–­14. 11 For early evangelical missions to Northeast India, see Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-­East India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 12 The Presbyterian missionaries in India were formed, by and large, by the Old-­School Princeton Theology, whereas the Methodists came from a tradition that proudly proclaimed itself to be Arminian. See E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 262–68, 377–89.

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a pensioner of the Company. In 1818 the Company forces defeated the Maratha Confederacy, which meant that the whole subcontinent except the northwest was under British control. In the 1840s, the northwest up to the Khyber Pass would also succumb; it was the Afghans who stopped the expansion of British power in southern Asia.13 The British East India Company had been established in London on the last day of 1600, and in 1612 was allowed to set up a few trading posts in the Mughal Empire. Over the course of two centuries, this small import-­export business venture grew to be the most politically powerful force in the Indian subcontinent. Simultaneously, the Company gradually transformed itself from a purely economic institution to an instrument of British imperialism. This development was formally recognized in the eighteenth century in a series of acts of Parliament, culminating in Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which gave control of the Company’s affairs in England to Parliament, although the administration in India was left in the Company’s hands.14 Thus evangelical missions in Hindi North India were founded, for the most part, under the rule of a newly emergent and extremely self-­confident British Empire. However, the association of the British Empire and evangelical missions in the nineteenth century was a somewhat unexpected development, because from about 1770 the East India Company had resisted missionaries in its North Indian territories, assuming (with good reason) that such religious mavericks would upset the local population and thus arouse suspicion of and opposition to the Company’s presence and business.15 So when William Carey arrived in Bengal in the 1790s, he had to establish his mission station in the Danish enclave of Serampore, north of Calcutta. It was only in 1813 that evangelicals in the British Parliament were able to insert a “pious clause” into the Company’s charter when it came up for renewal, allowing missionaries to work in British-­controlled territories in North India. 13 For a brief history of the time, see Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 44–­91. 14 Ainslee T. Embree, “British East India Company Raj,” in Encyclopedia of India, ed. Stanley Wolpert (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006), 180. 15 However, the Company was quite content to let Continental European missionaries continue working in its South India territories for a variety of reasons, which included its suspicions of specifically evangelical missionaries. See Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–­1858 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), chaps. 2 and 3.

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Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British rule became increasingly embedded in Indian life. Through success in its military and economic ventures, the Company added more and more territory to its domain. Borrowing partly from Mughal precedents, it established an extensive administrative apparatus, the Indian Civil Service, to govern its territories and collect revenue—­which remained its chief goal until the 1830s when the reform of Indian society along the lines of emerging British norms also became an important concern. In territories that were still under the control of Indian rulers, the expanding British Empire (or Raj) insinuated itself into native courts and administration, trying to ensure that the local regimes were not merely sympathetic to it but were as much as possible pliant tools of its economic and political ambitions. To realize these ever-­expanding ambitions, the Raj had to amass an increasingly large military, made up mostly of Indian soldiers called sepoys, from the Persian sipahi, because it was not possible to build armies in India from scarce and expensive European recruits. Ever alert to the possibility of upheaval and rebellion in the military, the Company from the eighteenth century on was considerate of caste and religious differences, making accommodations for dietary restrictions among the troops and officially allowing the observation of major Indian festivals in the barracks. Along with the establishment of British paramountcy, the turn of the nineteenth century brought a new attitude among British rulers toward Indian people and cultures. During the eighteenth century, the Company had been eager to learn as much as possible about the lands and populations that it was subjecting to its rule, in order to be able to govern conquered territories with as much efficiency and as little local resistance as possible.16 One perhaps unintended consequence of this policy was that it engendered among the British Orientalists who were at the forefront of British learning an appreciation, sometimes deep, of Indian history, religions, literatures, and cultures. To be sure, what the British academics and administrators read, studied, and learned was limited in scope. Yet the appreciation—­tempered no doubt with disapproval—­was evident. One of the many insights gained in the late eighteenth century was that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin had deep connections to each other, which led to the positing of an Indo-­European family of languages stretching from eastern India to western Ireland, and consequently a shared archaic past. Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History of Modern India, 62–­64.

16

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The advent of the nineteenth century started to bring a new generation of British administrators, including some who were evangelical, for whom the thought of shared commonalities between Indians and Europeans was problematic, because of what they saw as the inherent inferiority of Indian cultures and societies. Over time, the sympathetic view of India’s histories, peoples, and cultures receded, with the belief in British superiority gaining ascendancy, to the point that theories of biological difference between European and Asian (not to mention African) peoples became popular later in the century. Evangelical missionaries bought into the assumptions of the great superiority of Christian religion and European civilization and even climate over Indian ones. Yet their religious beliefs kept them from positing biological differences between races, if for no other reason than such assumptions would have undercut their mission of converting Indians to the Christian faith.17 On June 17, 1812, the first American missionaries to India, Adoni­ ram and Ann (Hasseltine) Judson and Samuel and Harriet (Atwood) Newell, landed in Calcutta. Almost two months later, they were joined by the other four members of their party.18 The missionaries were sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a New England mission agency formed in 1810 by leaders of Congregational churches there.19 The men of this initial missionary venture to India had been part of a small cadre of theological students at Andover Seminary in Massachusetts who had been gripped by the desire to go overseas as missionaries. In 1810 the students successfully petitioned an organization of mostly Congregational clergy in New England to found a foreign mission agency.20 The ABCFM thus became the first—­ 17 Brian Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization in English Evangelical Mission Thought, 1792–­1857,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 169–­70. 18 For a discussion of the women in the group, see Dana Lee Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996), 39–­48. 19 Sushil Madhava Pathak, American Missionaries and Hinduism (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967), 34–­36; Alice C. Hunsberger, “From Brimstone to the World’s Fair: A Century of ‘Modern Missions’ as Seen through the American Hume Missionary Family in Bombay,” in The Role of the American Board in the World, ed. Clifford Putney and Paul T. Burlin (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 102. 20 The ABCFM was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1812. Douglas K. Sho­ walter, “The 1810 Formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” in Putney and Burlin, Role of the American Board in the World, 3–­6.

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and for decades the most important—­of a host of American mission agencies, many of them denominational, that sent thousands of missionaries into the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.21 Yet the ABCFM also marked the culmination of a growing tide of American Protestant interest in foreign missions that began in the eighteenth century. While pioneers such as John Eliot (1604–­ 1690) and Roger Williams (1603–­1683) in New England undertook missionary work among Native Americans in the previous century, it was the flicker of mission work among this population in the eighteenth century that, fanned by the winds of the Evangelical Revival, became a fiery zeal for foreign mission. Ironically, it was the “unhappy and largely ineffectual” David Brainerd (1718–­1747), missionary to Delaware Indians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, who generated some of the most avid evangelical interest in Protestant foreign missions.22 The interest was enthusiastically promoted by the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, who soon after Brainerd’s demise published a biography of him consisting mostly of extracts from his diary.23 Edwards’ Life of Brainerd profoundly stimulated Protestant foreign missions on both sides of the Atlantic for a century (and beyond) after its first publication in 1749.24 The eighteenth-­ century American Protestant missions to Native Americans formed one bridge between evangelical concern for rejuvenating national Christianity and its concern with Christianizing the world.25 For the Native Americans to whom Brainerd was sent were part of the population of “the provinces of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.” They, in their “deplorable and perishing state,” belonged to the 21 William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 45–­46. 22 Hutchison, Errand to the World, 31. Other evangelical missionary heroes were John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew (1593–­1682). American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, First Ten Annual Reports of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, with Other Documents of the Board (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1834), 21, 27. 23 David Brainerd, Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd; Missionary to the Indians on the Borders of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, ed. with an introduction by Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: S. Converse, 1822), 6–­7. 24 For example, see Ian Douglas Maxwell, “Civilization or Christianity? The Scottish Debate on Mission Methods, 1750–­1835,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 123–­25. 25 The other bridges were also formed by British imperialism, which incorporated foreign peoples (such as African slaves in the West Indies and North America) into British territories.

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Christian nation.26 Later in the century, other missionary societies were formed “to Christianize the heathen in North America,” as well as to cultivate the faith among the European population of the United States.27 So Native Americans were Americans but simultaneously foreign to the European Christian population, speaking very different languages, living in very different cultures. Thus the work among “foreigners” in a Christian nation (even though, of course, it was the European population that was foreign in North America) spurred evangelicals eventually to throw their energies behind foreign as well as domestic missions. The evangelical inspiration for foreign mission crisscrossed the Atlantic. While John Wesley and William Carey were both inspired by Edwards’ Life of Brainerd, the work and writings of British evangelicals such as Carey and Claudius Buchanan aroused much interest in North American evangelical circles.28 After the American Revolutionary War, religious revival intensified in what is sometimes known as the Second Great Awakening, affecting both populist and genteel manifestations of Protestantism in the new and expanding nation. On the one hand, the fiery, anti-­intellectual Methodist and Baptist preachers that were rapidly proliferating across the American territories helped propel populist religion to numerical dominance in the United States. On the other hand, figures such as Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, led the offensive to recruit evangelically inspired and well-­educated ministers for the new nation. The founding of Andover Seminary in 1808 was an important piece of this regenerative orthodoxy.29 Christian missions, both at home and overseas, were built on the outpouring of multidimensional revivalism, even as they stoked and fed it. The ABCFM missionaries landing in Calcutta in 1812 arrived at a particularly inopportune time to commence mission work in India, which by this time was quite firmly under British power. Not only was the British Parliament embroiled in a political controversy regarding the operation of Christian missions within the East India Company territories—­an enterprise that was still forbidden—­but the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States was launched in June of that Brainerd, Memoirs of Brainerd, 3. Pathak, American Missionaries and Hinduism, 30–­31. 28 Pathak, American Missionaries and Hinduism, 32–­33. 29 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 17–­18. 26 27

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year. So the American missionaries were asked to leave Calcutta after arriving there. The Newells left for the Isle of France (now Mauritius); the Judsons, who had converted to the Baptist strand of Evangelicalism on the long journey to India, went to the Danish colony of Serampore in Bengal and from there to Rangoon in Burma, where they became one of the most famous American missionary couples of the nineteenth century. Other ABCFM missionaries learned that the new governor of western India was also an evangelical, so they managed to steal into Bombay where they were allowed to begin what eventually became the American Marathi Mission.30 Until the appearance of the Presbyterians in 1833, the ABCFM, with its base in Bombay, was the only American Protestant mission in all of India. The first American Christian mission to begin work in the British North-­Western Provinces was that of the Presbyterians.31 In 1831 the Synod of Pittsburgh of the Presbyterian Church in America founded the Western Foreign Missionary Society to promote missionary work outside the United States. The Society decided to focus its energies on Western Africa and India, and in consequence sent letters to two Presbyterian seminaries asking for volunteers for missionary work. William Reed and John C. Lowrie from Allegheny Seminary in Western Pennsylvania offered their services to the new Society and were chosen to go as missionaries to India. After their ordination, the two set sail with their wives for India on May 30, 1833, from New Castle, Delaware, landing in Calcutta on October 15 of that year.32 The American Presbyterians commenced mission work in 1833, the year that the charter of the East India Company was again amended so that missionaries no longer had to be licensed by the Company to carry out their activities in its territories.33 This change in the charter Hunsberger, “From Brimstone to the World’s Fair,” 102–­3. India was not their first “foreign” mission field; they had a history of evangelistic and civilizing work among Native Americans, dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century. Helen H. Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions, Historical Sketches of the India Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Allahabad: Allahabad Mission Press, 1886), 103. 32 Elwood M. Wherry, Our Missions in India, 1834–­1924 (Boston: Stratford, 1926), 1; Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 106. 33 John C. B. Webster, A Social History of Christianity: North-­west India since 1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40. 30 31

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accepted the religious situation on the ground in North India, where an increasing number of evangelically inclined British officials were welcoming missionaries to the cities and districts where they were posted.34 Thus Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries invariably began “new” work in cities and districts where they had been urged to come by some Company officer. When deciding where to initiate their mission work in India, missionaries and mission societies used two principal criteria. The first was to locate lands where no other Protestant missions were active. This would avoid duplication of efforts to Christianize the population and would also prevent friction between different mission societies. It also fit into the missionary mindset that envisioned an imminent Christianization of the whole world with the strategic placement of Christian missionaries around the globe. The second criterion was to identify friendly Christian communities or at least friendly Christian officials in potential missionary fields. These resident Christians would provide crucial support for the establishment of the mission; they were the true foundations on which the missions were built. Europeans living in India who were involved in or sympathetic to mission work provided the information needed to make decisions regarding the location of new missionary ventures. Unsurprisingly, not all these local friends were of one mind about the best places and methods for new missionary undertakings. After “careful inquiry and prayerful consideration,” as one history puts it, the American Presbyterian missionaries decided to begin work in the city of Ludhiana in the Punjab, where there was no Christian mission work and where there was “a great military station of the East India Company’s forces.”35 However, John C. Lowrie had to travel up the Ganges River from Calcutta to Kanpur and then overland without any missionary companions, because his wife Louisa died soon after landing in Calcutta, and the Reeds had to return to America after a few months due to William Reed’s deteriorating health. He died at sea on his way home. Lowrie survived the twelve-­ hundred-­ mile journey from Calcutta in Bengal to Ludhiana in the Punjab, spending time in Delhi and Agra 34 Sometimes it was wives of Company officers who provided enthusiastic and crucial support for missionary activity; see Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-­Mutiny India (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1993), 120. 35 Wherry, Our Missions in India, 3–­4.

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along the way. On November 5, 1834, he arrived at his destination and was welcomed by the British political agent Capt. C. M. Wade, who assured the novice missionary that “he [Wade] would render such assistance as was in his power.”36 Lowrie then began his work, preaching and holding worship services and teaching in an English medium school that had been started by Captain Wade. The next year a group of four missionaries—­ two married couples—­ arrived in the Punjab to assist Lowrie. In the meantime, however, the pioneer missionary had been struck by illness, and in January 1836, fourteen months after arriving in the Punjab, John C. Lowrie left India permanently. It was the third party of Presbyterian missionaries, consisting of five married couples who, arriving in Calcutta in April 1836, initiated work in the British territory of the North-­Western Provinces. Traveling up the Ganges in July 1836 to their destination in the Punjab, the group was hit by a violent storm, in which they lost part of their luggage. This included books, printing paper, and some parts of a printing press. The missing parts for the press could only be obtained in Allahabad, so one member of the party, the Rev. McEwen, returned to the city to procure lost parts and to hire a printer. While there the resident Christians asked him to conduct worship service, and then pressed him to settle with his wife as resident missionaries. When McEwen returned to his companions and discussed the proposal with them, they decided that he and his wife should go immediately to Allahabad and begin work, pending a decision from the full body of Presbyterian missionaries meeting in Ludhiana. The Mission agreed to this arrangement, and so Allahabad in the North-­Western Provinces became a new location for Presbyterian mission work. At the same meeting in Ludhiana, the Presbyterians also set up a mission station in Saharanpur, also in the North-­Western Provinces, yielding to a request for missionary work from that city’s British Collector and Magistrate. They also sent two missionary couples to the hill station of Subathu, now in Himachal Pradesh, in response to a letter from the British surgeon of the Gurkha Regiment stationed there, promising favorable living and working conditions.37

36 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 107. 37 Wherry, Our Missions in India, 26–­ 28; Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 109.

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When the McEwens arrived in Allahabad, they immediately began work that was typical for the Presbyterians in Hindi North India: pastoral work with the resident Christian population, educational work, and running an orphanage. To these activities the Presbyterian missionaries would add evangelistic work (mainly preaching and distributing vernacular literature) with the non-­Christian population, publishing endeavors, and the cultivation of Indian congregations and church leaders. Mrs. McEwen established a day school for Eurasian and European children and youth, as well as a few Indian adults who understood or were interested in learning English.38 The McEwens also opened a boarding school, chiefly of orphans who had already been gathered together by the Christian population in Allahabad. The Rev. McEwen began worship services in English for Europeans and Eurasians, and within a few months had organized a congregation consisting of twelve members.39 Although the McEwens had to leave India in less than two years due to his ill health, their replacements continued and expanded the work they had initiated. It was only after four years of work, in 1840, that the first baptism of a convert from Hindi North India took place.40 That year a “native church” was organized, with six Indian adult members and worship services in Hindustani. The congregation at these services varied from eighty to a hundred persons, evidence that there was interest in this new form of religion beyond the very small circle of Indian Presbyterians. Eighteen children from the boarding school were also baptized that year.41 Walter L. Allison, One Hundred Years of Christian Work of the North India Mission of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Mysore City, India: Wesley Press, 1941?), 3. 39 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 109; Allison, One Hundred Years, 4. The McEwens, although working with the Presbyterian Church in America, were technically missionaries of the Associate Reformed Church of America. 40 The first baptism of an Indian was in June 1837, when “Ram Singh, a native of Madras, after five months training, received Christian baptism and was given the new name Elisha Swift” (Allison, One Hundred Years, 4). According to Holcomb, in 1840 “the ordinance of baptism [was] at the beginning of that year administered for the first time by our missionaries of that city, to a native of the country, on profession of faith” (Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 112). Given Ram Singh’s earlier baptism, “native of the country” must refer to a North Indian. 41 The Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America. 1841 (New York: The Board 38

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The mission at Allahabad presents in microcosm the work and development of the Presbyterian mission throughout the North-­Western Provinces. From the beginning, the mission was generously supported by local Christians, most of whom were Europeans. Buildings, lands, and money were donated to the mission for its use as needs arose. For example, a Christian “young man” attending the initial worship services in Allahabad donated the first missionary residences to the Presbyterians. The first church was constructed in 1840 on land donated by the East India Company and fully paid for “by people of Allahabad and other friends in India.” A second chapel was built in 1844 “with funds from a legacy left by a woman-­convert from Islam.”42 These buildings functioned as sites for Christian worship, for evangelistic meetings, and for schooling during the week. The main mission land along the Jamuna River, which has remained church property, was purchased “for a song” from the East India Company in 1840.43 Allahabad was the center for much Presbyterian educational work; the annual reports speak of schools being opened in various parts of the city with Hindu and Muslim teachers. While a debate raged in India in the 1830s as to whether mission education should be in English or vernacular languages, the Presbyterians in Allahabad undertook both, depending upon the needs and demands of the local population. Mrs. Wilson reported in April 1840 that “there were seventeen girls and thirty-­six boys in the boarding schools. They were reading both the Hindi and Roman characters.”44 An English medium high school for boys was opened in 1843, and in 1846 collegiate classes were added, thanks to a decision by the East India Company to close its college in Allahabad that year and transfer the buildings, land, and equipment to the Mission. By 1855 there were 550 students in high school and college.45 Presbyterians worked with orphans from the very beginning of their stay in Allahabad. When the Jamuna property was purchased, two buildings were dedicated for a girls’ and boys’ orphanage, respectively. The missionaries, with the assistance of Indian employees, ran the of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America, 1841), 14. 42 Allison, One Hundred Years, 7. 43 Allison, One Hundred Years, 4–­6. 44 Allison, One Hundred Years, 5. The Roman characters were for reading Hindi and Urdu, not English. 45 Allison, One Hundred Years, 9.

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orphanages as boarding schools, although they were never very large; for example, there were twenty-­six boys and twenty girls in the orphan schools after a decade of work.46 Because many orphans were baptized at some point during their stay in the orphanage, they comprised a vital element of the Indian Presbyterian presence until 1870.47 In the middle of 1846, the missionaries also took over the work at Allahabad’s Blind and Leper Asylum, which had been run by the Baptists.48 Generally speaking, though, ministry with physically diseased and incapacitated populations was not pursued in most Presbyterian mission stations in the middle half of the nineteenth century, and specialized medical missions did not become common until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The first and second generation of American missionaries assumed (correctly) that they could avail themselves of the services of doctors among the British army surgeons, many of whom would render their services to the missionaries for free, and some of whom were staunch supporters of Christian missions. Yet once missionaries started working in India, they realized that some medical knowledge and medicines were necessary “to relieve the awful suffering among the people.”49 Many of them therefore acquired medical knowledge from books and doctors in India and treated local people as they could. The one missionary physician among the Presbyterians before 1870 was John Newton Jr., M.D. He went to India independently in 1858 but became a member of the Mission in 1860, serving first in Kapurthala and then Subathu, where he made the study and treatment of leprosy his specialty.50 Allahabad was one of the two publishing centers for the Presbyterian Mission, the other being Ludhiana in the Punjab. A mission press was set up in 1839 in the home of the Warrens, who had arrived that year in Allahabad, because Joseph Warren had a keen interest in printing. Soon a separate building was constructed for the press, which within 46 The Eleventh Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America. Presented to the General Assembly in May, 1848 (New York: The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America, 1848), 29. 47 John C. B. Webster, The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1976), 47. 48 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 116. 49 Wherry, Our Missions in India, 170. 50 Wherry, Our Missions in India, 172–­73.

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a few years was producing a variety of published material. Some of it was commercial: the first customer of the new press was the British Collector of Gorakhpur. Most, however, was religious literature for Indian audiences: both original compositions in Urdu and Hindi and translations of English works. Both foreign missionaries and Indian Christians produced this literature. In 1843, scarcely five years after its opening, the press published over 4,250,000 pages of material, almost all of it in Hindi and Urdu, using Nagari, Arabic, Persian, and Roman scripts.51 Of course, what Indians did with this material was not under the missionaries’ control: considerable paper from the mission presses was used for mundane purposes in Indian households and markets.52 When the North India Bible Society was formed in 1844, Presbyterian missionary James Wilson was elected its first secretary. Finally, the press was seen not only as a source of Christian literature but also as a source of work for poorer Christians. Publishing was therefore important for the Presbyterians as a source of income for the mission and for indigent Indian Christians, as well as a vital element in its evangelistic mission. The distribution of religious literature was only one method for evangelizing the population of Hindi North India. Historically, in Christianity and especially Protestantism, preaching has been viewed as the primary method for spreading the Christian faith, and therefore missionaries verbally proclaimed their message in a variety of settings. Preaching to Indians required language skills, so preaching was one of the last types of mission work that missionaries actually engaged in, even though in terms of importance it was seen as primary. Perhaps the most crucial site for preaching was the mission church or chapel, where curious or interested persons could come and hear or overhear missionaries and their Indian assistants explain the Christian faith to the uninitiated. The annual report from Allahabad for 1850, for example, describes services at two chapels in the city as follows: 51 The Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America. May, 1844 (New York: The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America, 1844), 24–­25. Hindi Nagari: 1.956 million pages; Urdu Arabic: 985,000 pages; Urdu Persian: 605,000 pages; Urdu Roman: 710,000 pages; and English: 7,840 pages. 52 Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 163–­64.

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The congregation at Kydganj is composed of the native Christians connected with the printing press and bindery, the scholars of the two bazaar schools, and persons from the neighborhood; at Kattra the congregation embraces also the scholars of two bazar [sic] schools and persons from the neighborhood, with a number of East Indians, and some of the College students.53

Besides preaching in their chapels, missionaries and their Indian coworkers preached in the open air. During the winter months, they would travel from village to village, preaching, teaching, and distributing literature to the literate.54 In towns and cities, sometimes they would preach in the public squares; however, the opposition generated tended to discourage such “bazaar preaching.” Sometimes the evangelists in Allahabad would go out “to the landings on the river, and other places of concourse, to converse with those who are thus accessible.”55 Such open-­air preaching, one missionary reflected, “in a hot climate, and in the dusty streets of the towns” was extremely fatiguing. The one ameliorating factor was the “native assistants” who would take turns with the missionaries “in reading and sometimes in speaking to their countrymen.”56 A favorite venue for missionary preaching was the religious fair, or mela. During Hindu and Muslim festivals, people would gather at sacred sites for ritual and social activities, and missionaries and their Indian assistants would read, sing, and preach to the crowds. Allahabad, which is at the confluence of three sacred rivers in North India, is famous for its annual Magh Mela, and Christian missionaries made a special point to be present and active during these fairs. In his report of 1838, the Rev. James Wilson told of attending a mela where forty to fifty thousand people had gathered; they were carrying water from the Ganges “in small earthen vessels, and throwing them against the temple.” He talked and The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in The United States of America. Presented to the General Assembly in May, 1851 (New York: The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in The United States of America, 1851), 31. 54 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions, 32. 55 The Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America. May, 1842 (New York: The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America, 1842), 17. 56 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions, 32. 53

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read “with a large number under the shade of a Tamarind tree, and distributed tracts to a few that could read.” On May 13 he attended a mela where the people were “chiefly Mohammedans.” While some listened to the missionary “with a tolerable degree of attention,” others reacted with a variety of objections to his claims. The next day Wilson attended yet another mela: The Musalmans and Hindus seem to mingle in the Melas. The same flags and standards, and tawdry ornaments, or nearly the same, serve for both; and almost the same people attend them. I had more conversation, and especially more opposition from Mohammedans than on yesterday, though we had less satisfaction in talking with the people.57

The degree of positive or negative response to missionaries at melas varied from year to year and even day to day; audiences could be combative, curious and attentive, or indifferent. The mention of Indian assistants in mission reports points to another aspect of missionary work in all the stations: the care and development of Indian Christian congregations and leaders. Due to their evangelistic, educational, and orphanage work, missionaries were able to draw certain Indians into their church’s fold. Some of these were Christians who had come from other traditions and denominations. Others were orphans raised by missionaries, whereas a few persons became Christian by conversion from another religious tradition. This diverse group of Indian Christians required various kinds of pastoral care, which missionaries provided. Because Indian Christians were so few in number, missionaries were also continually on the lookout for dedicated and thoughtful native and Eurasian members of their churches to become assistants and even coworkers. As one history puts it, “In the early days of the Missions in India, it was natural that almost every convert became a prospective candidate for the work of teaching and preaching.”58 Missionaries in all the stations, both women and men, devoted some of their efforts to the development and cultivation of local Christian leadership. Such leaders The Second Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in the United States of America. May, 1839 (New York: The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in The United States of America, 1839), 12–13. 58 Wherry, Our Missions in India, 195. 57

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were crucial for the task of translating and interpreting the faith of the missionaries to local populations. From 1836 to 1870, Presbyterian missions gradually grew in terms of stations, personnel, institutions, and outreach, albeit with a serious break from about 1857 to 1863, due to the Uprising to be discussed below. The following is a list of towns and cities in the North-­Western Provinces where Presbyterians established missions, with the dates of establishment in parentheses: Allahabad (1836), Saharanpur (1836), Farrukhabad and Fatehgarh (1838—­these towns are adjacent to each other), Mainpuri (1843), Agra (1845), Dehra Dun (1853), Fatehpur (1853), Roorkie (1856), and Etawah (1863).59 To give an idea of the increase in foreign missionaries, the foreign male and female personnel at the above stations totaled twenty in 1846, twenty-­six in 1856, twenty-­seven in 1866, and thirty-­five in 1870.60 The second American evangelical mission to begin work in Hindi North India (outside western India) came from the Methodist Episcopal Church, the northern branch of a divided American Methodism. The Methodists arrived in the region in 1856, twenty years after the Presbyterians initiated their work there. William and Clementina Butler were the pioneering missionary couple for the Methodist work in India, although they were soon joined by a number of recruits. Some of these, such as James Thoburn and Edwin Parker, worked in India into the twentieth century and became highly successful at promoting and expanding the Methodist mission in the country. Clementina (Rowe) Butler and Lois (Lee) Parker were instrumental in the formation of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society in 1869 in Boston. This Methodist society rapidly grew to become a formidable missionary force in numbers and scope in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. William Butler was born in Ireland in 1818, where he grew up and worked as a Methodist preacher until 1850. He then immigrated to the United States with his wife and child and became a preacher in New 59 Walter L. Allison, One Hundred Years, 1–­50; John Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 7–­15; Webster, Christian Community and Change, 15. 60 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 174–­77; The Thirty-­Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church of The United States of America. Presented to the General Assembly, May, 1871 (New York: Mission House, 1871), 54–­55.

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England. Widowed soon after, in 1854 he married Clementina Rowe, two years his younger and also from Ireland, and the next year he offered his services to become the superintendent of the Methodist Mission in India.61 The Butlers, with two children, sailed for Calcutta in 1856, stopping in England along the way.62 After consulting with mission supporters about the location of their new mission, they decided to start work in the territories of Oudh and Rohilkhand, and then proceeded to Lucknow. The commissioner in Lucknow actively discouraged the Butlers from opening a mission there, so the couple went on to Bareilly, where on December 7, 1856, they were warmly welcomed by the British judge in the city.63 The missionaries stayed with him until they could rent a house early in 1857. Within the first month of their arrival, they were able to recruit from the Presbyterian mission in Allahabad an Indian Christian, Joel Janvier, to work with William Butler. One of Janvier’s many gifts was that he was bilingual. While Methodist histories have long portrayed William Butler as a great missionary pioneer, in fact as a superintendent he was a poor organizer.64 James Thoburn wrote the following impressions of the Methodist mission’s annual conference in 1859: The annual meeting of our mission began its sessions today. I was quite surprised and much grieved to find that there is and has been a great want of harmony among the members of the mission. Dr. Butler’s ardor it seems has frequently carried him beyond the strict letter of the Discipline as well as American Methodist usages, neither of which he seems to understand thoroughly. He has also acted too much on his own responsibility and ignored the opinion of his brethren in the mission. The consequences are that we

61 J. E. Scott, History of Fifty Years (Madras: Methodist Episcopal Press, 1906), 5–­6. William Butler had been twice widowed before he married Clementina, and had three children from previous marriages. Clementina Butler, Mrs. William Butler: Two Empires and the Kingdom (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1929), 23–­28. 62 Two other children were left behind in New England. John N. Hollister, The Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1956), 1. 63 Scott, History of Fifty Years, 11–­19; Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 40–­41. 64 See the paean to Butler in Hollister, Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia, 37.

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have a great many disagreeable questions to settle at this meeting, which amid mutual misunderstandings will be attended with no small difficulty.65

As soon as the India Mission Conference was organized in 1864, the presiding bishop, Edward Thomson, transferred Butler to the New England Conference. His departure from India in early 1865 probably did much to advance the cause of the Methodist work, which was left in more capable hands. Yet William Butler’s initiatives for his mission were continued after he left, and his wife Clementina Butler went on to be a strong advocate for and organizer of women’s missions in the United States. After the 1857 Uprising, the Methodist work expanded rapidly over Hindi North India. Following is a list of Methodist mission centers and the dates they were started, up to 1870: Bareilly (1856), Naini Tal (1857), Lucknow (1858), Moradabad (1859), Bijnor (1859), Shahjahanpur (1859), Budaon (1860), Lakhimpur/Sitapur (1861—­ these two towns formed part of one station), Pilibhit (1862), Gonda (1863), Paori, Garhwal (1864), Rae Bareli (between 1862 and 1864), Sambhal (1865), Khera-­Bajhera (1866), Nawabganj (1866), Amroha (1866), Bahraith (1867), Hardoi (1868), Barabanki (1870), and Kanpur (1870).66 In 1865 the Methodists had 14 churches, 19 ordained missionary men (almost all married), 1 ordained Indian minister (married), 34 Indian workers (2 of them women), 157 church members, and 108 probationers (those being prepared for membership).67 By 1871 the American Methodists had 40 men and women in their missionary force, 6 ordained Indian ministers, 1,835 Indian members of their churches, 1,074 communicants, and numerous native pastors, teachers, evangelists, and catechists.68

“Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 5 September 1859 entry, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College. 66 These have been garnered from various histories and the annual reports of the North India Missionary Conference, 1864–­1872. 67 Minutes of the Second Session of the India Mission Annual Conference, Held at Moradabad, February 1866 (Bareilly: American Methodist Mission Press, 1866), 17, 30. 68 Brenton H. Badley, Indian Missionary Directory and Memorial Volume (Luck­now: American Methodist Mission Press, 1876), 204. 65

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The Methodists engaged in the same kind of work as their fellow American Presbyterians: preaching, gathering congregations of Indian Christians, setting up schools, running orphanages, establishing a printing press, and training “native agents.” The difference in the work of the two missions was mostly a matter of emphasis: Presbyterians were more invested than the Methodists in education in these early years, whereas the Methodists tended to focus more than the Presbyterians on converting Indians to Christianity. While the missions increased in personnel, members, institutions, and material over the nineteenth century, the whole Protestant missionary enterprise in Hindi North India was severely tested—­and almost destroyed—­by the 1857 Uprising. The rise of British political, military, and economic power; the emasculation and displacement of Indian political authority (such as the annexation of Oudh); the assertion of English cultural and linguistic superiority through Company policy and rule; and the haughtiness of increasing numbers of Europeans in India led to a massive military and political revolt in North and Central India in 1857 and 1858. Called anything from the Sepoy Mutiny to the First War of Indian Independence, the 1857 Uprising was more than a mutiny because it involved far more people than the soldiers of the East India Company. However, it was less than a war of Indian independence because there was no overarching political organization directing the belligerence against British rule. The 1857–­1858 Uprising did indeed begin as a mutiny among the sepoys of the Bengal Army. The proximate cause was the new Enfield rifle, which required its user to bite off the end of each cartridge, which in turn was reputed to have been greased with cow or pig fat, polluting both Hindus and Muslims. On May 10, 1857, aggrieved sepoys in the city of Meerut, who had seen 85 of their comrades publicly humiliated for refusing to use the new cartridges, arose at night, killed their officers and other English residents of the town, and marched on to Delhi, which was 30 miles away. There they intended to rehabilitate the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was living under virtual house arrest by the British. The mutiny spread quickly to other military centers and, as the British lost control of the military, to the countryside as well, unleashing a tremendous amount of violence on all sides.69 69 See Sekhara Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), 169–­80.

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Princes, small rulers and merchants, peasants and landlords, and soldiers under various rulers took up arms for their own reasons, attacking their perceived enemies, defending their professed allies, sometimes shifting allegiances as necessary, at other times standing firm for their causes, comrades, and interests. On June 19, 1857, Governor General Lord Canning wrote, “In Rohilcund and the Doab from Delhi to Cawnpore and Allahabad the country is not only in rebellion against us, but is utterly lawless.”70 The Uprising was put down in subsequent months by British troops as well as loyal Indian regiments, such as those of Sikhs and Gurkhas, commanded by British officers. In certain parts of the country, it took a year for British rule to be reestablished. While the British were ultimately victorious, the East India Company was not. Company rule was abolished, and the British Crown took over the government of India. Christians and Christianity were deeply implicated in the 1857 Uprising, even if one assumes that the religious rhetoric was a cover for deeper economic, political, and personal causes.71 With the parallel growth in strength of empire and of evangelical missions, there was a belief circulating that the British were trying to convert all their subjects to Christianity.72 As Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a faithful employee of the British government, put it, “There is not the smallest doubt that all men whether ignorant, or well-­informed, whether high or low, felt a firm conviction that the English Government was bent on interfering with their religion and with their old established customs. They believed that Government intended to force the Christian religion and foreign customs upon Hindu and Mussulman alike.”73 Partly due to this perception, Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation regarding the new British rule explicitly renounced any “desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects” and instructed “all those who may be in authority under us” to desist from interfering with religious belief or worship.74 Quoted in Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition, 171. This seems to be the view of the Metcalfs. Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History of Modern India, 101. 72 Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition, 171. 73 Sayyid Ahmad Khan, The History of the Bijnor Rebellion, trans. with notes and introduction by Hafeez Malik and Morris Dembo (Delhi: Idarah-­i Adabiyat-­i Delli, 1982), 161. 74 Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History of Modern India, 105. 70 71

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Due to the religious factors in the Uprising, European missionaries suffered violence at the hands of rebelling Indians. Among the Americans, the Presbyterians suffered several casualties; four missionary couples along with two children were executed in Kanpur. The American Methodist missionaries were able to escape to the safety of Naini Tal. A total of thirty-­eight European Protestant missionaries and family members died in the Uprising.75 The effect of the 1857 Uprising was more varied among Indian Christians. Certainly there were those who were hunted because of their religion and their association with Europeans. On the side of the American Methodists, one Eurasian young woman was killed in Bareilly. Among the American Presbyterians, the headmaster of the mission school in Fatehpur, and a teacher, his wife, and four children in Fatehgarh, were killed by anti-­British forces.76 Other native and Eurasian Christians were also killed or died of starvation. Many others, however, escaped with their lives and were aided in their search for safety by local people in Indian cities and villages, especially by members of the lower castes.77 While being Christian was a liability for a number of Indians during the 1857 Uprising, it was not universally so. The effect of the 1857 Uprising on the American Presbyterian and Methodist missions was not uniform. Presbyterian work was severely damaged, and the destruction of life and property was greatly demoralizing.78 Almost all the Presbyterian mission property in the North-­Western Provinces was pillaged and destroyed.79 In Mainpuri, for example, the mission chapel “was left a ruin, the mission house was plundered and burned, the grounds appropriated by the Raja and zamindars [land owners]. . . . The new school building escaped the general destruction as it suited the Raja . . . to use it as his court of justice.”80 Presbyterian missionaries and Indian workers along with their families were killed. 75 Matthew Atmore Sherring, The Indian Church During the Great Rebellion (London: James Nisbet, 1859), 17–­20. 76 Sherring, Indian Church, 21–­22. 77 Wherry, Our Missions in India, 111–­16. 78 J. J. Lucas, Memoir of Rev. Robert Stewart Fullerton (Allahabad: Christian Literature Society, 1928), 259. 79 Arthur Judson Brown, One Hundred Years: A History of the Foreign Missionary Work of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1936), 584–­86. 80 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 126.

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Presbyterians therefore had to spend valuable time, money, and personnel rebuilding after 1858. It took about five years for the Presbyterian mission to recover. In 1863 the Presbyterians opened a new mission in Etawah, a sign that they were ready to forge ahead once again. By 1870 the American Presbyterian Mission was on a secure footing once again in Hindi North India, expanding its work and base across the land. However, the Methodists, having barely begun their work at the time of the 1857 Uprising, could focus on expansion rather than rebuilding after the cessation of hostilities. They had only one piece of mission property, which was destroyed, and none of their official church leaders were killed, so they could add mission stations and circuits with rapidity. For both missions, the passing of British government to the Crown brought stability that allowed them to prosecute their work in relative security. Besides the differing consequences of the 1857 Uprising, there are other reasons why Methodist work in the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh expanded so rapidly in the first fifteen years (and beyond). First, their late arrival proved to be advantageous to the Methodists. They could build on the work already accomplished by the Presbyterians; for example, the first Indian Methodist preacher was raised and educated by the Presbyterians in Allahabad, and the Methodists could avail themselves of extant vernacular religious publications. Second, there was a rapid influx of Methodist missionary personnel beginning in 1859. Third, the Presbyterians were also active in the Punjab, so the area in which they worked was much vaster than that of the Methodists. The Presbyterians were also more reluctant to start new work without properly qualified workers, which limited their ability to open new centers of activity. The Methodists, however, opened new mission stations with any male whom they judged to be an able and faithful leader, whether as a preacher, catechist, evangelist, or school teacher. This course of action led them to grief on more than one occasion, but it also gave them far greater mobility and ability to respond to requests.81 However, both Presbyterians and Methodists employed Indian preachers, teachers, and catechists; the Methodists were simply open to using them more liberally. Racial discrimination also held back the Presbyterians. Early 81 For example, see James M. Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1884), 93–­95, 97 for costly mistakes made by both Europeans and Indians who had been thrust into leadership roles too quickly.

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in their work, the Methodists decided not to make any difference in status between Indian, Eurasian, and European clergy, which allowed them to staff more mission stations. The combined efforts of American Presbyterians and Methodists, then, show a pattern of steady expansion of Evangelicalism in the first four decades of American missionary work in Hindi North India.

—3— The Missionaries Religious and Social Innovators

A

merican evangelical missionaries appeared on the scene in Hindi North India as foreigners in all sorts of ways. Their culture was foreign; their message was foreign; their profession was foreign. Yet a small number of the local population responded positively to their message about life in this world and in a world beyond. This response was possible because certain features of missionary life and work made sense in the space created by low-­status bhakti groups. First of all, missionaries presented themselves as religious experts, regardless of whether their claims to this status were recognized as valid. Secondly, missionaries were critics of the religious and social status quo. Finally, missionaries offered the possibility of a new kind of religious and social community. This chapter describes these features of the American evangelical missionaries and relates them to regional bhakti sects. The Missionary as Foreign Change Agent

That the first generation of American missionaries to India thought and behaved as foreigners was forthrightly admitted by many missionaries themselves, as well as their Indian coworkers. At a missionary conference in 1862–­1863, the Rev. David Herron of the American Presbyterian Mission confessed, “as a general thing, there do not exist, between the Native and foreign members of our mission churches, the affectionate freedom, the warm, confiding, brotherly feeling, and the intimate and

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sweet communion, which should be found among brethren in Christ.”1 His Indian coworker, the Rev. Goloknath, concurred in this assessment: “[T]he social position of the missionary, his intellectual and spiritual attainments, his highly civilized ideas, and his cultivated, refined feelings, must place him so far above his converts, generally, that there can scarcely be any fellow-­feeling between them.”2 Other Indians at the conference reckoned that not all missionaries were the same: some indeed had “by their kindness, affectionate temper and disposition, and familiarity” been able to gain the “sympathy and affection of their native brethren.”3 Indeed, it is possible to overstate the differences between foreign missionaries and the Indian population.4 However, missionaries themselves constantly kept commenting with dismay on the distance between them and Indians. Such distance is not simply a feature of the nineteenth century; contemporary readers may also find missionaries quite incomprehensible.5 Their vitriolic denunciations of other religions, their disparaging remarks about Indian people and their worldviews, their eccentric practice of preaching in the middle of Indian marketplaces (bazaars),6 their anguish over the millions of non-­Christian souls plunging daily to eternal hell, their supreme confidence in the divine sanction of British rule—­these aspects of their lives can come across as decidedly alien. While such rhetoric and attitudes are still evident today, the difference is that the missionaries did not perceive of Indians as their enemies; in 1 David Herron, “Essay on Sympathy and Confidence,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, December and January 1862–­63 (Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1863), 159. 2 Goloknath, “Essay on Sympathy and Confidence,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 166. 3 J. C. Bose, “Remarks on Sympathy and Confidence,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 174. 4 Terence Ranger, “The Local and the Global in Southern African Christian History,” in Conversion to Christianity, ed. Robert Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 65–­98; Jeffrey Cox, “Sing Unto the Lord a New Song,” in Europe as the Other: External Perspectives on European Christianity, ed. Judith Becker and Brian Stanley (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 149–­63. 5 “No liberal intellectual can feel at ease with the distasteful arrogance and intolerance inherent in any attempt to bend the minds of others to a new set of beliefs.” Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact, and Conversion in Late-­Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 6 See John C. Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1850), 84–­85 for a description of such bazaar preaching.

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fact, Indians were perceived as helpless people who needed American sympathy and support. Peter Brown has remarked that scholars who study the ancient world, in particular the Roman Empire, find that their subject of inquiry looks quite familiar as they survey it from a distance. Only when they get up close to it do they notice the cavernous gap between them and that which fascinates them. They realize, on close inspection, that they are “looking at this world from across a sheer, silent drop of two thousand years.”7 In the study of the first generation of American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries in India, the reverse process is more typical: the initial views from a distance usually produce bafflement rather than understanding, and it is only on close inspection that similarities between the missionaries and contemporary activists become apparent. The American missionaries who went out to India after the 1820s comprised the first of ongoing waves of Western-­trained international change agents, those who are deeply committed to making the world a better place according to the tenets of Enlightenment rationality.8 The hundreds of thousands of dedicated workers today in governmental, nongovernmental, and religious agencies—­such as the Peace Corps, the United Nations, and World Vision—­who are spread out all across the world, striving to bring relief and development to “undeveloped” communities, societies, and nations, are the ideological descendants of the early Anglo-­American Protestant missionary movement.9 This movement was characterized by a deep suspicion of traditional hierarchy (manifest in missionary denunciations of caste); an assumption about 7 Peter Brown, “Rome: Sex & Freedom,” New York Review of Books, December 19, 2013, 48. 8 See Brian Stanley, “Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 1–­21. In fact, the effort to convert others was seen as philanthropy. John Breckinridge, “The Claims of Foreign Missions,” Biblical Repertory and Theological Review 2, no. 4 (1830): 596. 9 Lisa Joy Pruitt also makes this point in A Looking-­Glass for Ladies (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005), 188–­90. In contrast to Protestants, Roman Catholics had extremely vigorous and extensive missions beginning in the late fifteenth century, which permanently changed the face of societies and nations. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, Roman Catholic missions “were in the doldrums” and were revived only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Stanley, “Christian Missions and the Enlightenment,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 2.

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the fundamental equality of human beings (epitomized by missionary ire over Indian gender roles); a Western scientific approach to analyzing, diagnosing, and correcting the world (typified by missionary attacks on the superstition and fatalism of Indians); and an unshakeable belief in the righteousness of their cause (evident in their ability to stay their course even when massive evidence around them called into question the viability of their project). The crucial difference between the missionaries of the mid-­nineteenth century and social change workers today is that the former perceived the world through religious and theological lenses, whereas contemporary workers either have a secular worldview or (as is frequently the case even in secular organizations) see the world through bifocal lenses—­both secular and religious.10 Thus missionaries were extremely exercised by the thought of millions of non-­Christian souls plunging daily into hell—­a concern that has metamorphosed into current campaigns by all sorts of service agencies to save physical (rather than spiritual) lives and forestall the deaths of individuals all across the earth for as long as possible.11 Missionary work, then, was a campaign to save the world from its own (non-­Christian) depravity. This campaign resulted in a multidimensional attack on the evils of nonevangelical societies. The goal of all missionary work was, on the face of it, rather straightforward; it was to Christianize the nations according to evangelical tenets. So the primary work of missions was preaching to non-­ Christians, baptizing converts, and starting new churches—all men’s work. Technically speaking then, among American Protestants of this era, only men were missionaries. All other mission activities, especially those of women, were meant to support that particular work, although reality had a way of confounding theory. Until women’s societies started sending their own missionaries, women went 10 Moreover, social change agents today at least subscribe to the theory that local cultures need to be respected, although their penchant for universal solutions to what they see as universal problems often belies their theoretical position. For studies of the religious nature of secular nongovernmental activity, see Haemin Lee, “International Development and Public Religion” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2013). 11 Among the earliest American missionaries, there were certainly exceptions: those who viewed Indian people, religions, and societies sympathetically. George Bowen, an early Methodist missionary in Bombay who “went native” to proclaim the gospel, is one example. See Creighton Lacy, “Bowen, George,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan Reference USA, 1997), 82–­83.

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to the mission field only as missionary wives or as assistant missionaries if they were unmarried. However, once in India it became clear that women were as much a part of the missionary force as men.12 The first task for new arrivals was to engage in language study, under the supervision of a local munshi, or pundit.13 This allowed the foreigners to learn about the local culture and customs from their teachers and gain some Indian perspectives on society and religion. The division of labor between missionary women and men was immediately called into question in this preparatory stage of missionary life because the women could be superior to the men in linguistic ability.14 Even while undertaking language study for a year or more, missionaries engaged in a variety of activities. Education in English and the vernacular was usually the mission product most in demand by local Indians—­at least for the male members of society. Middle-­and upper-­ class Indians especially sought English education for employment in the British government.15 So in this area of work, the foreign origins of the missionaries proved to be a boon in their attempts to connect to local populations. While education was the easiest and most productive mission activity to pursue, it conflicted with the command to preach, which caused much discussion and some dissension in the missionary community. Education was also the arena in which the women of the missionary force contributed greatly to the mission’s official work. Women started and maintained schools in their residences or in rudimentary schoolhouses, which were frequently but certainly not exclusively for girls and women. The running of orphanages was an unforeseen but 12 Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power, 1818–­ 1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 41–­42. 13 Geoffrey A. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–­1900 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006), 123–­34; Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 53–­55. 14 For example, Emily J. Humphrey, wife of J. L. Humphrey, was renowned among the Methodist missionaries for her abilities with the vernacular. She undertook the first translations of English Methodist hymns into Hindustani. Clementina Butler, Mrs. William Butler: Two Empires and the Kingdom (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1929), 92. She also translated Zahur-­al-­Haqq’s autobiography into English. 15 Elwood M. Wherry, Our Missions in India 1834–­1924 (Boston: Stratford, 1926), 21. The first generation of missionaries had an extremely difficult time convincing Indian families that their daughters should be educated. The exceptions were the girls of Eurasians and other Christians in India. It took several years for girls’ and women’s education to become accepted in Indian society.

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early development in mission work; famines created many homeless and destitute persons. Women missionaries were often more important than the men in the operation of orphanages, given that this was viewed as a domestic activity.16 The missions also quickly established publishing ventures because the production and distribution of religious material was viewed as a part of evangelism, and publishing establishments could also generate income. Male missionaries engaged in preaching, some of it in public in the local bazaar, some in Christian chapels built for that purpose, some in missionary homes. Bazaar preaching was always controversial, both in the public’s eye and within mission circles. It tended to foment hostility in society against the missionaries, who regarded that hostility as either a badge of honor or as an unnecessary self-­inflicted wound on their movement.17 While women missionaries did not technically preach, they visited with groups of Indian women and, in the process of explaining the Christian message, engaged in activity that was labeled teaching but can just as easily be construed as a form of preaching. So in 1866 James Thoburn noted in his diary, “This morning we drove to a large village three miles distant where a large number of Chumars [an Untouchable community] live. Mrs. Parker had an immense crowd of women to hear her while Bro P[arker] and I preached to about 50 men.”18 During the winter months, missionaries followed the example set by government officials and itinerated in the countryside with their whole family. They would pack up their household and, along with several servants and native Christian helpers, travel from village to village to preach and teach, camping as they went along.19 During these tours women missionaries did their best to visit village women.20 J. E. Scott, History of Fifty Years (Madras: Methodist Episcopal Press, 1906), 259. 17 See the discussions on public preaching in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 13–­30; and on bazaar preaching in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 1872–­73 (London: Seeley, Jackson, & Halliday, 1873), 38–­52. Among others, Thoburn disapproved of it. James P. Alter and John Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand: North Indian Christianity, 1815–­1915 (Delhi: I.S.P.C.K., 1986), 178. 18 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 13 February 1866 entry, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College. 19 For an extended description, see T. J. Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages in India (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1876). 20 Scott, History of Fifty Years, 259. 16

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While living in their mission stations, women took it upon themselves to run their households, which could include several Indian Christians.21 This domestic work was seen not simply as support for the missionary men who were preaching and running congregations and schools but as a mission activity in and of itself. It demonstrated in a “heathen” society what a Christian household looked like.22 Finally, missionaries became pastors and pastors’ wives for their Christian communities in India. Pastoral work embroiled them in the lives of Indians to an extent that they had not anticipated and in ways that they could find highly irritating. Figuring out exactly what it meant to be a Protestant Christian community in North India was a process that involved a great deal of social experimentation on the part of both Indians and foreigners, with frequent accompanying controversy. The Christian community will be discussed in chapter 6. The Missionary as Religious Specialist The Call to Missionary Life

It is common, when considering and evaluating missionaries, to focus on what they did—­what they accomplished, for good or for ill. Yet what missionaries did flowed out of a deep sense of who they were, and they were first and foremost religious people.23 This religious identity was foundational for them, and it was important to some Indians. There is no better place to start understanding the religious identity of missionaries than with an examination of the call to the missionary vocation. There were many ways in which individuals discerned a call to missionary service. A persistent thought, a sermon, an article in a church publication, a suggestion from a pastor or some other influential fellow Christian were all means by which a call was perceived, and certain men and women responded to that call. The call had two dimensions: the For a more thorough investigation into the role of the American missionary wife in India, see Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–­1940s) (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 77–­103. 22 For American women’s mission theory, see Dana Lee Robert, American Women in Mission (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997). 23 A number of missionaries left the profession for other pursuits; for example, Methodist missionary physician Dr. Clara Swain became a court physician in Rajasthan. 21

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affective and the intellectual. Both of these needed to be compelling to those who responded, although their respective importance varied from case to case. Below are accounts of the call of three missionaries—­two Presbyterians and a Methodist; a woman and two men. The gradually progressive nature of the call of Walter M. Lowrie (1819–­1847), a young man from Pennsylvania who would go on to become a Presbyterian missionary to China (as his older brother John had been to India), reveals how a number of different appeals could lead someone to volunteer for service. Brought up in a religious home, Lowrie was “converted” at the age of fifteen while a student at Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. “I have experienced the love of Christ shed abroad in my soul,” he wrote to his father, “and the renewing and sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit.” Conversion in his case meant progress from a state where he lacked “being assured of salvation” to a condition where he felt “inexpressibly happy,” “peaceful, and willing to commit myself to my Saviour, to do with me just as he pleases.”24 A year later he wrote to his father about a persistent idea that had planted itself in his mind: “It may be all fancy, but something seems to be constantly telling me, when I think of you all, ‘that I must endeavor to spend as much time with you as I can now, for after I am settled in life, I shall have very few opportunities of being with you.’ ”25 A few days later, he described in another letter a chance conversation with an African American woman: This evening I was walking out into the countryside for exercise, and on my return I passed the cottage of a Negro woman, commonly called “Old Katy.” She was out in the road, when I passed her. I shook hands with her, and spoke a few words with her. Before we had spoken three sentences, she was talking about religion. She is a most eminent Christian, and stood about ten or fifteen minutes there talking. She soon got to speaking about the missionary cause. Her heart was in the matter, and she said, “I am very poor, but as long as I live I will be something to it. I have often given a little to it, and I never laid out any money better. I could not do it. I never lost a cent by it.”26

24 Walter M. Lowrie, Memoirs of the Rev. Walter M. Lowrie, Missionary to China (New York: R. Carter & Bros., 1849), 3. 25 Lowrie, Memoirs of the Rev. Walter M. Lowrie, 10. 26 Lowrie, Memoirs of the Rev. Walter M. Lowrie, 11.

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When Lowrie was in a vocationally liminal space, seeking guidance for an unknown future, he was moved by a socially liminal person. Two months later Lowrie wrote of the impression a visiting preacher made upon him: Yesterday Mr. E., an agent of the American Board of Missions, preached a sermon in the forenoon with which I was highly pleased, on the text “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” At night he preached again; subject, the debt we owe the heathen. He proved in it, that we owe a debt to the heathen that we are able to pay; that the time had come; and concluded with a number of most thrilling, interesting facts. . . . If ever I desired to be a minister and a missionary, I did last night.27

Here proof and argument—­the intellectual appeal—­were important for the young man. After college, Lowrie went on to study at Princeton Seminary and then offered himself for missionary service and was sent to China.28 For women, the call to missionary service contained many of the same elements as the call of men—­a religious upbringing, an evangelical conversion experience, and a desire to serve in the mission field. However, the call itself often came in the form of a marriage proposal from a missionary candidate. Louisa A. Wilson, born in 1809, lived as a young woman in her brother’s religious household in Morgantown, Virginia (later West Virginia). According to her testimony, she spent her later teenage years “occupied with vain and trifling amusements,” forgetting her “soul’s eternal interests,” although with some misgivings that she was “transgressing the laws of God” by attending parties and dances and taking delight in fine clothes and “putting on appearances.”29 Following her nineteenth birthday, influenced by a friend who made a “public profession of religion,” she determined to become a committed Christian, and after a period of sorrow for her sin, she was led to an “abiding peace in believing.”30 She described her gradual conversion in Lowrie, Memoirs of the Rev. Walter M. Lowrie, 12–­13. The call to missionary service was often the end point of the conversion. See Bruce Hindmarsh, “Patterns of Conversion in Early Evangelical History and Overseas Mission Experience,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 71–­98. 29 Louisa A. Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie of the North India Mission, 2nd ed., comp. Ashbel G. Fairchild, intro. Elisha P. Swift (Philadelphia: William S. Martien, 1837), 22–­24. 30 Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie, 25. 27 28

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her journal: “I expected to have some sudden illumination: something like a vision, revealing to my view the Redeemer as the Son of God, and yet the friend of sinners. For this I waited in vain. But, imperceptibly, a love to Christ, and a reliance on his merits and intercession, took possession of my heart.”31 Thereafter she became much more serious and committed religiously, meditating on her life in God, and joined the Presbyterian Church in Morgantown at the age of twenty.32 She soon became concerned about the fate of the “heathen.” At the age of twenty-­two, she wrote to her brother, “For more than a year past my thoughts have dwelt much on the condition of the heathen of the world. My heart has been deeply affected, when I have read and reflected upon their darkness and denigration; I have felt strong desires to do them good.” Here intellect and affections combined to propel Wilson toward missionary service. She went on to recount how she searched for ways to assist foreigners, believing that “it was the evident duty of every Christian to do all in his power for the conversion of the heathen.” She came to the conclusion that she should give herself to missionary work—­“to go to them and labour personally for their salvation.” The opportunity for missionary service presented itself in a marriage proposal from John C. Lowrie, who had committed himself to go to India as a Presbyterian missionary.33 After much struggle with the decision, with friends and family giving conflicting advice, and her own mind considering the drawbacks and benefits of Christian service in a foreign land, Louisa Wilson married John C. Lowrie and sailed to India as a missionary’s wife. Unfortunately, but not atypically for her generation, she died soon after arrival in Calcutta. The call of Methodist James Thoburn to missionary life followed a pattern similar to that of Presbyterian evangelicals, consisting of a series of ideas, conversations, and serendipitous encounters. When he was eighteen years old and a teacher in a country school, he read a passage in a book that created a “clear impression” on his “mind and heart” that his vocation was that of a missionary.34 Unlike Walter Lowrie, Thoburn had Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie, 28–­29. Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie, 45–­47. 33 Quotations in this paragraph are from Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie, 91–­94. 34 The passage argued that rather than a middle-­aged pastor, a young man was the ideal candidate for missionary service. “He has nothing to unlearn. He is pliable and plastic, ready to be molded into any form of physical and mental activity 31 32

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not yet been “converted” when he was convinced that he was going into missionary service; the “witness of the Spirit,” the experience of “spiritual communion” with God, would come eighteen months later. Two years after his conversion, Thoburn began to preach in local Methodist churches, and by “a very slow and cautious process of prayer, reflection, and observation of special indications of Providence,” he came to the conclusion that he would be “a messenger of Jesus Christ to men.” A key experience in this process was a walk in the woods one day where he knelt “alone among the branches of a fallen maple tree” and prayed, and there received the “clear and distinct commission to go and preach his Gospel to dying men.”35 Thoburn’s emotional experience in nature recalls Lowrie’s revelatory conversation with “Old Katy” while he was out for a walk in the countryside.36 At the end of one year, a “definite and disquieting conviction” (reminiscent of Lowrie’s “persistent idea”) came over Thoburn that he was to leave his home in Ohio. He then read a Methodist appeal for six young men to go to India as missionaries. He immediately vowed to go to India if God “would make it clear that he sent me.”37 Thoburn went to speak with his supervisor, who without prompting asked him to volunteer as one of the six. Taking this as a clear sign from God, Thoburn wrote, “I went up stairs to the little prophet-­chamber and knelt down to seek guidance from above, but I could not pray. God poured out his Spirit upon me from on high, and my heart so overflowed with a hallowed feeling of love and joy that I could not utter a word. Before I could ask, God had answered.”38 A number of authors have rightly warned against viewing descriptions of such divine calls as unvarnished records of unmediated personal experiences.39 Conversion and call were recorded according to certain which the exigencies of the times may demand.” James M. Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1887), 7. 35 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 7–­10. 36 These experiences are a testament to how the Romanticism of the day wove itself into the missionary movement. M. A. Laird, “Introduction,” in Reginald Heber, Bishop Heber in Northern India, ed. and with selections by M. A. Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 24. 37 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 11. 38 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 14. 39 Avril A. Powell, “Processes of Conversion to Christianity in Nineteenth-­ Century North-­Western India,” in Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia: Continitites and Change, 1800–1900, ed. Geoffrey A. Oddie (New York: Routledge,

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evangelical templates. As early as the mid-­eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards recognized the importance of a generally accepted script in helping persons make sense of what was a profusion of emotions and sensations.40 Edwards rightly perceived that these templates and scripts governed not simply the reporting of conversions and calls but also the experience of them. The expectations of what a person should experience play a powerful role in how the event actually is experienced, and not simply reported. The three missionary calls have also demonstrated that a call to missionary service was not simply a private decision between God and an individual. Individuals may have perceived the call to missionary service as coming directly to them from God, but that call was cultivated in a culture that greatly encouraged the work and support of foreign missions, as an 1830 sermon famous in Presbyterian circles illustrates.41 The sermon begins with the command of Christ to go into the world, and warns that ignoring this command is “a continued and wilful sin.” Then the preacher describes the claims made on Christians by the depraved “spiritual state and prospects of the heathen,” with a criticism of “the great body of professed Christians” who “hardly apprehend [the heathen’s] exposure to eternal ruin: they scarcely believe it.” Next, foreign missions are shown to be in “the best interests of the church of Christ at home,” which flourishes when it is engaged in mission. The preacher then argues that the world is in a state of crisis and of drastic change, which provides great opportunities for Christian mission in the world. It is an age of enterprise, of political and ideational revolution, of public and concerted action, of great advances in technology and culture. “The spirit of the age is ripe for action.” It is a time particularly for American action in the world because Americans realize that their unique political and social institutions are a blessing for the world’s “oppressed nations,” and Americans possess “a fervid desire to impart to others the 2016), 15–­56; Hindmarsh, “Patterns of Conversion,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 71–­98. 40 Hindmarsh, “Patterns of Conversion,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 76. 41 The sermon is referred to in the standard centennial Presbyterian history of Arthur Judson Brown, One Hundred Years: A History of Foreign Mission Work of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1936), 18. In the sermon, the political and nationalistic elements are interwoven with the religious ones in the missionary call and motivation.

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blessings we enjoy.” America is “a nation of philanthropists; a depository of civil and religious liberty for the population of the earth.” However, for the blessings of Christian civilization to reach the nations of the world, Christians must act; they must not assume that God is going to do this work alone: “God demands of us . . . that we should co-­ operate with him in a positive, direct, and intentional instrumentality.” Therefore the church needs a “DECIDED MISSIONARY SPIRIT.” The preacher is aware that besides the sin of apathy, the missionary spirit has also resulted in abuse. “We remember the crusades of one age, and the fanatical zeal of others.” The “true gospel plan” lies between the extremes of indifference and overzealousness. And it is the Presbyterian Church, the preacher concludes, that is wonderfully poised to carry out missionary activity properly. “The organization, the numbers, the character, and the influence of the Presbyterian Church in the United States have justified the expectation of a noble effort by her in the cause of foreign missions.”42 The accounts of the missionary’s call do not seem to have been publicized in India. This is not surprising, because such a script regarding divine encounter is quite alien to the Indian religious context. What the call did was to provide missionaries with a particular self-­understanding and therefore a public persona as persons on a divine mission. They claimed to be experts in religion. When their message was heeded in India—­ whether by detractors, admirers, or the uncommitted and curious—­it was this understanding of missionary as religious professional that could play a crucial part in the Indian assessment of evangelical Christianity. In an article describing his work in the mela at Hardwar in 1844, Presbyterian missionary J. Caldwell casually remarked that “most missionaries in India” find that “the several sects of religious mendicants are generally more disposed to listen to their preaching and to take books than any other class of natives.” At Hardwar that year, for example, when Christians conducted preaching from a large tent, a “large proportion” of the Indians who attended were “religious mendicants; and it was uniformly observed, that this class of hearers, especially the sect called Gusains [a Vaishnava sect], were very attentive listeners.”43 Yet Breckinridge, “Claims of Foreign Missions,” 590–­600; emphasis in original. J. Caldwell, “First Annual Report of the Station at Merath: October 31, 1844,” The Foreign Missionary Chronicle, June 1845, 85. The missionary believed 42 43

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what the auditors absorbed of the missionary message could surprise and distress the messenger. Again at Hardwar, in 1860, the Presbyterians reported that a fakir with a half ­dozen disciples was situated not far from their tent. The Christian evangelists noticed that in his chanting the fakir included the name of Jesus in a phrase, “The name of Jesus is my talisman.” The fakir—­who “seemed to be quite an intelligent man”—­ claimed, at least to the Christians, that he and his disciples were Christians. However, because the fakir and his disciples “sang the praises of false objects of worship more frequently than the praise of the one true God,” the Presbyterians “could place but little confidence in their professions of belief in the true religion.”44 The Double Desire of Missionaries and Its Fulfillment

The Presbyterian and Methodist women and men who volunteered for foreign missionary service and set sail for distant parts of the globe were driven by a double desire: a desire to respond to a divine summons to religious service and a desire to save foreign people and societies from what the missionaries perceived were the greatest perils besetting those people. The one desire was to fulfill a deeply personal calling; the other desire was to aid a huge swath of humanity. These two strands of desire were tightly interwoven, one often being explained in terms of the other, yet they were also distinguishable. It was the mission field, in fact, that loosened the bond between service to one’s soul and service to others, demonstrating that the fulfillment of one did not necessarily entail fulfillment of the other. There it became clear that just because one held a deep conviction that God had called one to missionary service did not mean that one could effectively minister to other people and societies. Conversely, it also became clear that persons who had little or even no sense of being divinely called to Christian service could contribute significantly to it. That responding to God’s call did not automatically equip a person to help others was brought home tragically in the periodic untimely deaths of missionaries and their family members in India. Why God that his auditors were interested in his message for religious reasons; there is no way to make an independent judgment. 44 “Dehra,” in Twenty-­Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New York: Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1861), 59–­60.

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would have called such people to service, made it possible for them to raise the money to go overseas, given them the strength and forbearance to make the long and difficult journey to India, and then quickly allowed them to die was a question that was voiced with deep anguish. The answer was usually provided by reference to the inscrutability of God’s ways.45 Just as heart wrenching to the missionary community and its supporters were the numerous deaths of missionary children, often in infancy.46 Even when missionaries did survive the initial shock of adapting to a radically different climate and culture, they sometimes lasted only a year or two before being sent back home to recover from exhaustion.47 Finally, those missionaries who stayed on in the field for several years were not equally capable of reaching out helpfully to the Indian population. In these ways missionaries could become painfully aware that a personal desire to respond to a divine calling to help complete strangers in a different country did not necessarily result in the desire or ability to help them.48 Missionaries in India found that the converse was also true: those who willingly supported their work did not necessarily believe in God as the evangelicals did. For example, there were Indians of other faiths who contributed to various mission projects. This information was sometimes difficult to relay back to the public at home, which was trained by ecclesiastical rhetoric to see the “heathen” as being “degraded idolaters” and

45 For example, see the obituary of Louisa (Wilson) Lowrie in Western Foreign Missionary Society, Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Western Foreign Missionary Society (Pittsburgh: D&M Maclean, 1834), 7. It is interesting how often missionaries disparaged Hindus’ and Muslims’ purported “fatalism,” which saw God’s will being inexorably worked out in the ways of the world. 46 For example, see the letters of Rachel and William Johnson at the death of their year-­old firstborn child, in Barbara Mitchell Tull, ed., Affectionately, Rachel (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1992), 183–­87. 47 This was the case of Rev. John C. Lowrie, who began the Presbyterian mission in North India but had to leave after two years and three months, never to return again, due to ill health. He did, however, continue to serve the missionary cause in his capacity as the secretary of the Presbyterian mission board in Philadelphia. Brown, One Hundred Years, 565. 48 The most famous early Methodist missionary to be filled with holy desire to be a missionary yet fail quite miserably in the prosecution of his duties was the pioneer William Butler, as described in chap. 2.

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even in league with Satan.49 However, buried in documents are reports of Indians beyond the Christian community contributing, at times generously and in significant numbers, to missionary causes: There is probably not a station in our Mission, and perhaps not a single missionary, that has not experienced the friendship and kindness of both Europeans and influential natives; especially the former; though in some cases the friendship of the latter has been very marked. For example, a native builder at Lahore, named Sooltan, erected a building for the Mission at a cost of Rs. 1,200, while yet he took from the Mission only Rs. 800. And similar generosity was shown by his brother to the Mission at Rawul Pindee.50

Among the Methodists, one of the greatest early Indian contributions to the mission came in 1871 from the Nawab of Rampur, Kalb Ali Khan Bahadur. The previous year the Methodists had welcomed to Bareilly their first missionary medical doctor, Dr. Clara Swain (1834–­1910), who was one of the first two missionaries sent to India by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.51 She had come to Bareilly to offer medical services to girls and women, a project that was greatly encouraged by the Bareilly bourgeoisie. It is no wonder, then, that most of her clientele and local support were from Bareilly’s upper classes.52

49 The phrase “degraded idolaters” is found in the death notice of Louisa A. Lowrie cited in note 45; India as “the chief seat of Satan’s earthly dominion” is taken from Alexander Duff, The Church of Scotland’s India Mission (Edinburgh: General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1835), 1. 50 John Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions, Historical Sketches of the India Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Allahabad: Allahabad Mission Press, 1886), 82. 51 Dr. Swain, incidentally, was the first fully accredited female medical doctor to be sent out as a missionary. She had graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1869 and sailed for India that same year, arriving in Bareilly in January of 1870 to begin medical work among girls and women. 52 Mrs. Robert Hoskins, Clara A. Swain, M.D. First Medical Missionary to the Women of the Orient (Boston: Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, 1912), 14. She wrote in a letter home, “Quite a number of native gentlemen have called to pay their respects, as they say. Some of them have told me that they appreciate my having left my native land and all my friends to come here to care for their women who can never see a physician of the other sex.” Clara A. Swain, A Glimpse of India (New York: Ginn, 1910), 29.

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As Dr. Swain’s work rapidly grew, it became evident to her that she needed a building and some land for a hospital and dispensary. Her eye was on a piece of property owned by the Nawab of Rampur, the Muslim ruler of a small neighboring North Indian state.53 In September 1871, during a royal audience with members of the Methodist mission, the Nawab donated to the mission his Bareilly estate consisting of forty acres of land with a large mansion on it for the purposes of a hospital.54 The Nawab’s gift was received with “joy and gratitude” by the missionaries, and not unsurprisingly by “some of the native gentlemen of the city” as well, and by the year’s end Rs. 700 had been pledged by “native people” for the hospital’s establishment.55 Through such projects influential Hindu and Muslim Indians significantly aided missionary work. The motivations of the many Indian supporters of American missions are not always made explicit. They could have ranged from shrewd personal, political, and business calculations to religiously inspired liberality. The gentlemen of Bareilly wanted medical care for the women of their households. As far as the Nawab of Rampur is concerned, his dynasty was beholden to the British for its survival, and his father had come out decisively for the British during the 1857 Uprising. Yet the Nawab also claimed that he had gained religious merit by this gift.56 Of course, the political and the religious interests are not mutually exclusive. Mission philanthropic undertakings such as schools and medical facilities were the favored recipients of local largesse in Hindi North India. Even if the missionaries were slow to distinguish between service to God and service to humanity, many Indians were not. The latter were quite capable of generously supporting mission work and missionaries without completely believing the religious message that came attached to the foreign aid. Finally, missionaries felt in their own lives the possible disjuncture between divine and human service. The diaries of Methodist James Thoburn sometimes reveal just such a gulf between inner conviction and outer commitment.57 On June 29, 1860, he recorded in his diary that the work of his mission school was improving: he had received funding from Swain, Glimpse of India, 65. Swain, Glimpse of India, 65–­70. 55 Swain, Glimpse of India, 69. 56 Hoskins, Clara A. Swain, 18. 57 Thoburn is in some ways an ideal person to illustrate the disjuncture between missionary calling and missionary service because his writing can be deeply 53 54

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the government for another year, a new teacher was coming up to help him, and a couple of men had visited him to talk about religion, which gave him “much hope.” Yet the state of his spirit was quite a different matter: “Spiritually I am cold—­nearly dead. In looking over my past diary I find the usual entry. No word of spiritual triumphs, but one long record of failures.”58 Almost the opposite conditions prevailed in March 1868, when his work was going poorly and his spiritual life was vibrant. “The more I hear of the Moradabad [church] scandal,” Thoburn writes, “the more my heart sinks within me. And yet my faith in God is strong. My soul is filled with power. . . . It is very long since I have felt so near the Savior.”59 Dedication to God and dedication to helpless humanity, so clearly joined in the initial missionary call, could become disconnected in the mission field. And Indians could pick up on one or the other of these motivations—­as well as both or neither of them—­in their response to missionary presence. Missionary Zeal and Compassion

The reflections of Thoburn disclose two different qualities—­ flowing from the double desire to serve God and the godless—­that were considered necessary for a missionary. The first quality was zeal and determination: a strong, even fierce stance toward the world, which would keep the missionary from losing his or her commitment to the call of God to service. The second was compassion and love: an approach full of pity and tenderness to the hundreds of millions who were living in sin and were in imminent danger of going to their eternal damnation in hell. These two missionary characteristics were dramatically articulated by Alexander Duff, who asked his Scottish audience in 1835 to imagine the missionary who travels to India, “fired with inextinguishable zeal, and charged with the overtures of mercy—­overflowing with compassion toward perishing souls, and resolved as directly as possible, to proclaim the gospel message.”60 For James Thoburn, the combination of zeal and compassion ran like a leitmotif through his life. He wrote about his farewell service in America: “A good farewell meeting, with manly introspective, especially in the first decade of missionary life, telling us a great deal about the state of his psyche. 58 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 29 June 1860 entry. See a similar comment on 29 July 1866. 59 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 13 March 1868 entry. 60 Duff, Church of Scotland’s India Mission, 1–­2.

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Christian addresses, and tender words of encouragement, is worth much to one who is going forth to a life-­work in a strange land, and is often worth very much to those who remain behind.”61 Manliness and tenderness, resolve and compassion, zeal and mercy: these were assumed to be the ideal combinations of attitudes that the missionary was to hold and exhibit. There is an inherent tension in these ideal qualities for the missionary. Zeal for the work of a holy God could easily overwhelm compassion for “the very chief of sinners”; pity for the poor of the land could gradually displace anger at their unrighteousness. Indeed, it took effort to hold on to both of these qualities, not so much because they were opposites, but because they demanded two very different approaches from the missionary toward Indians. Missionary men and women articulated their zeal and compassion differently. Because women tended to write more than men about their relationships with others, it is tempting to see the women as more compassionate and the men as more zealous.62 A close reading of the evidence, however, does not support such assumptions. From the moment they decided to join the foreign missionary force, American women wrote and spoke of the determination needed to embark and continue on such an endeavor. In explaining to her brother the reason for her choice of the missionary vocation, Louisa Wilson argued that making known “to the heathen the way of salvation” was a duty given by Scripture. “But this cannot be accomplished without making some sacrifices. Friends must be left behind. And why should not I . . . be willing to make these sacrifices?”63 Like almost all women in the missionary force, Wilson’s determination to sacrifice her life was undergirded by her sense of the plight of “heathen women,” who composed a fitting object of her compassion: The heathen wife is not much respected; the widow still less. Her means of support are gone; friends prove unkind, and often her only alternative is to submit to voluntary degradation, in order to gain a pittance to satisfy the cravings of hunger. . . . Slaves to the most abject vices, hateful themselves and hating one another, they long for, and yet fear death. . . . Their systems of religion cannot comfort the afflicted soul. They have nothing to raise Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 21; emphasis added. See, for example, Mrs. E. J. Humphrey, Gems of India; or Sketches of Distinguished Hindoo and Mahomedan Women (New York: Nelson & Philips, 1875). 63 Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie, 97–­98. Lowrie’s maiden name was Wilson. 61 62

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them above the troubles of this life; and what is still worse, they have no light to guide them to heaven.64

In such conceptions of the focus of missionary life, compassion and zeal came together in women’s callings. The Missionary as Critic The first generation of British and American Protestant missionaries to India assumed a close relationship between religion and society.65 They were firmly convinced that religious traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity fostered certain beliefs, values, and behaviors, which in turn resulted in certain kinds of societies. Their writings are full of references to “pagan society,” “Mohammaden society,” and “Christian society”—­which was then divided into Roman Catholic and Protestant society—­assuming that these religious traditions entailed certain ways of thinking about and ordering the world.66 This does not mean that missionaries were blind to the great variety within what could be a “pagan” or “Christian” or “Mohammaden” nation. Quite the contrary: they noted and commented on the marked differences between various classes and groups of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Sikhs in the Punjab could be commended for their rejection of idolatry and of caste, whereas Roman Catholic nations could be viewed in as negative a light as “heathen” ones.67 Yet running throughout the numerous missionary comments on religions and societies is the fundamental assumption that Lowrie, Memoir of Mrs. Louisa A. Lowrie, 93–­94; emphasis in original. For British missionary constructions of Hinduism, see Oddie, Imagined Hinduism. For the ways in which Indians engaged in the construction of Hinduism, see Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). American missionaries got their views from British evangelicals such as Charles Grant. See Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–­1958 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 36. 66 One can say that sociologist Max Weber was also thinking along these lines. One example of such thinking among missionaries: “What a world this could be made, and will be made, if Christianity gets control of it! Surely paradise can be restored. . . . The [Mohammedan] civilization is not worthy to live. It is doomed to die, and Christianity alone deserves to be exalted in the earth.” William Butler, From Boston to Bareilly and Back (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1885), 103–­4. 67 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 4; Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 11. See Copley, Religions in Conflict, 12–­13, for Protestant views of Catholicism. 64 65

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religious traditions—­and atheism as well—­function as ideological foundations: they produce certain kinds of recognizable cultures and communities, which need judgment, evaluation, and intervention by those who wish to set the world aright. Following is a missionary analysis of the economic problems of Indian society: [T]he main cause of Hindu poverty and suffering, in my judgment, is the intolerable burden of their religious system, with its countless hosts of unprofitable priests and faquirs; its multitude of beggars, earning religious merit, not urged by necessity to seek for alms; its numerous long, expensive, and painful pilgrimages to holy shrines and places, involving thousands of families every year in utter ruin; its incessant draining of the hard-­earned gains of every laboring man and woman to satisfy the exactions of the Brahmans for priestly services, in ways and for occasions as numerous as the hours in every man’s life, and with a rigor of superstition incredible to those who have not themselves been not merely witnesses but students of its enormity; and, perhaps, more than all, the apathetic, death-­like influence of caste, withering and destroying all enterprise, improvement, and hope of bettering their condition.68

Likewise, the political problems of India tended to be blamed on its religion: The Hindu in his present environments, is incapable of self-­government. He has had a trial of three thousand years, but has failed. The reason of failure is not to be looked for in any physical or mental incapacity, but in the disastrous religious system which has overshadowed the nation. The caste-­system strikes at the root of national cohesion and unity, while priestly craft and arrogance in seeking to aggrandize themselves, deprive patriotism of its loftiest and purest inspiration.69

The missionaries’ ideal of the good society was a “Christian nation” such as Great Britain or the United States—­where “Christian” actually meant Protestant. Again, they were well aware that their own countries did not live up to the Protestant ideals they espoused. American missionaries were deeply pained by the lack of religious commitment and the loose morals of the British in India and by the institution of slavery

Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 33–­34. Dennis Osborne, India and Its Millions (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Rodgers Printing, 1888), 27. 68 69

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in the United States.70 However, they believed that people in a Christian nation could be reformed, could be persuaded to adopt the highest ideals of their professed religion. Evangelicalism, after all, had begun as a movement that strove to create “true” Christianity in “nominal” Christian nations.71 On the other hand, missionaries believed that no matter how much one tried to change the behaviors of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or atheists, they could never fully live a godly and righteous life, because their religious convictions (or lack of them) would keep them in perpetual bondage to false ideas and unethical standards.72 These persons needed to be converted to (true) Christianity, and only through such conversions would whole societies be properly regenerated.73 Because India was considered to be a “Hindoo” nation, the preponderance of nineteenth-­century American missionary religious interest (and invective) was focused on Hinduism rather than Islam or bhakti sects. Many missionaries also saw Indian Islam as thoroughly permeated by Hinduism. The Indian Muslims’ faith, wrote John Lowrie, “is like that of their sect everywhere, and their practice differs but little from that of their heathen countrymen. They are hardly less superstitious, nor at all less addicted to immoral practices.”74 Moreover, if India was to be converted to Christ, it was Hinduism that had to be destroyed and replaced. For missionaries, then, the foundational Indian religion to investigate and critique was Hinduism. American missionaries had at their disposal a number of sources for their understandings of Hinduism. The writings of early German Pietist missionaries in India and their supporters, which contained descriptions of Indian religious beliefs and practices, had been known in America

See Robert Stewart Fullerton, Memoir of Robert Stewart Fullerton, ed. J. J. Lucas (Allahabad: Christian Literature Society, 1928), 25, for his views on slavery; see also “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 18 February 1861 entry. 71 Andrew F. Walls, “The Eighteenth-­Century Protestant Missionary Awakening in Its European Context,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 40–­41. 72 James R. Campbell makes this argument in Missions in Hindustan (Philadelphia: Board of Missions of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, 1853), 49. 73 Stanley, “Christian Missions and the Enlightenment,” in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 13. Stanley draws on the work of Peter van der Veer and Peter van Rooden in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996). 74 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 37. 70

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since the early eighteenth century.75 Books describing various religious traditions of the world were available to the reading public; in 1784 New England author Hannah Adams published An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared in the World from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day, which aimed to give an impartial account of various Christian traditions and world religions and included a section on the religion of the “Gentoos.”76 Eighteenth-­ century British Orientalists’ work on Hinduism was also known in America.77 In the early nineteenth century, American and British Unitarians were championing the religious ideas of Indian reformer Rajah Ram Mohun Roy, and Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were praising the insights derived from sacred texts such as the Gita.78 Additionally, British evangelicals provided volumes of material on Indian religions. With all the various sources of knowledge about Indian religions came a variety of perspectives and judgments on them. At one end of the spectrum, American Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson held highly positive views of Indian religions. At the other end of the spectrum were British evangelicals, who could find few if any redeeming qualities in the religious beliefs and practices of Indians. The eighteenth-­ and early nineteenth-­century British Orientalists who studied Hinduism tended to present it in a far more sympathetic, even positive light than the missionaries who followed them.79 Nineteenth-­century British missionaries saw their Orientalist predecessors as far too sympathetic to Indian religion and civilization.80 Well aware that British sources on India were not univocal in their assessment of the country and its people, the early American missionaries to Hindi North India tended to rely on British evangelical and

75 Michael J. Altman, Imagining Hindus: India and Religion in Nineteenth Century America (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2013), 19. 76 Altman, Imagining Hindus, 24. 77 Preface to Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India. 78 Altman, Imagining Hindus, 100. 79 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), divides the fundamental British attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “Indomania” followed by “Indophobia,” the former epitomized by scholars such as Sir William Jones and H. T. Colebrook, the latter by missionaries such as William Ward and Alexander Duff. 80 Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? 101–­3.

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missionary constructions of what had come to be called “Hinduism.”81 This happened as a matter of course. Even before they arrived in India, the Americans read books by British evangelicals at home and on their sea voyage. Landing in Calcutta, they were warmly welcomed and graciously hosted by British missionaries living there. As the Americans spent time in the city recovering from their difficult sea journey and getting acclimated to the new country, they naturally sought out information about India from their hosts. So John Lowrie consulted British Baptists W. H. Pearce and Joshua Marshman and Scottish evangelical Alexander Duff about conditions and work in India.82 Twenty years later Methodist James Thoburn wrote that he “had the pleasure of meeting a number of missionaries” while in Calcutta “and found them cheerful, energetic, and liberal men.”83 Thoburn also recounted a visit to a European dentist in the city who tried to dissuade him from taking up missionary service. “Let me assure you,” advised the dentist, “that these people [i.e., Indians] never can be made Christians. It is physically impossible. You might as well try to make a Christian out of that brick pillar. They must pass through another stage of development before they will be prepared for a religion so advanced as Christianity.”84 Thoburn knew that there were European “opponents of mission . . . in all parts of India,” but he argued that “they know little or nothing whereof they speak.”85 The most influential missionary portrayal of Hinduism was that of British Baptist William Ward, who first published his Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos in 1811. Due to its great popularity, the work went through several revisions, editions, and printings, with a reprinting of the third edition occurring in Delhi as late as 1990.86 Ward’s purpose in writing these descriptions was not to present a balanced view of the religion but to counteract what he saw was the 81 The term was coined in the late eighteenth century probably by Charles Grant, an enthusiastic British supporter of missions; Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 71. 82 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 19. 83 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 38–­39. Thoburn was particularly touched by his encounter with Alexander Duff. 84 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 40. In response to this, Thoburn comments, “At that time there were Bengalee Christians in the city [of Calcutta] who were [the dentist’s] equals in sincerity, and his superiors in intelligence, and who were developed quite up to any level which such objectors ever reach, but their existence was wholly ignored.” My Missionary Apprenticeship, 40–­41. 85 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 41. 86 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 159–­60.

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naïve and romantic views of European authors who viewed the “Hindu system” with favor. In other words, Ward’s was a work of propaganda, not of scholarship, although it was so effective that it was taken to be the latter.87 He demonized Hinduism, presenting it as a coherent religious system that was immoral, superstitious, and evil and that desperately needed to be displaced by the truth and goodness of evangelical Christianity. As he wrote in his diary in 1801, “Brahmans and the Devil” were colluding in the task of “destroying the souls of men.”88 Borrowing from their British fellow evangelicals, American missionaries could hold and propagate negative views of Hinduism in the nineteenth century, as the following comment from Methodist T. J. Scott illustrates: To any one not acquainted with the darkness of an idolatrous heathen mind it is difficult to convey an impression of how dark it appears on looking into that mind. It is when the native’s language is so well mastered as to become a complete avenue to his thoughts and feelings that one feels “how great is that darkness.”89

Not all missionaries were so vituperative in their denunciations. Presbyterian Robert Stewart Fullerton could occasionally criticize the “caste and superstition” found in Indian religion, but on the whole he refrained from broadsides against Indians and their beliefs and customs, a testament to his irenic personality.90 Through all the varying comments of American missionaries on Indian, especially Hindu, society, certain criticisms emerge constantly and consistently. One of the most condemned aspects of Indian society was the institution of caste. While “caste” is notoriously difficult to define, and its history in precolonial and colonial India contested, American and British missionaries conceived of it as an immutable religious, economic, and social hierarchy of the different groups of Indian people.91 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 165. Quoted in Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 178. 89 Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages of India, 17. Scott was one of the Hindi experts in the Protestant missionary force. For American missionary views of Hinduism, see also Sushil Madhava Pathak, American Missionaries and Hinduism (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967), 77–­84. 90 Fullerton, Memoir, 94. Fullerton served in India from 1850 to 1865. 91 For historical developments of caste, see Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Susan Bayly, Caste, 87 88

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There were two fundamental missionary criticisms of caste. One was that it held individuals socially captive by not allowing them to break out of their social grouping and so improve themselves. Another was that it inhibited conversion to Christianity, because to become Christian meant to leave one’s caste, which was socially almost impossible.92 A second constellation of criticisms concerned the religious beliefs of the Indian people, which missionaries assumed to be dictated by Hinduism. Following biblical precept and example, missionaries severely censured idolatry, polytheism, and superstition, assuming they led to the cruelty and licentiousness that missionaries either heard about or witnessed themselves. Finally, another set of denunciations focused on the place, status, and treatment of women in Indian society. Missionaries assumed Indian women to be greatly oppressed and denigrated, and considered the institution of zenana, or women’s quarters in a household, to symbolize the mental, social, and spiritual prison of the female portion of the population.93 While in general American missionaries adopted the perspectives of their British counterparts, the adoption was not whole cloth. Americans made adjustments to those assessments. At times they incorporated Orientalist perspectives into their writings.94 At other times they added their own observations of Indian ways and customs, both religious and social, in their understandings and descriptions of Hinduism.95 Naturally, received notions of the religion shaped these observations, but firsthand observations could also question and unsettle preconceived ideas. In addition, the opinions of Indians played a role in American views of Indian society. For example, Ishwari Dass of the Presbyterian mission wrote a small book for Europeans entitled Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos. “I know of no work,” wrote one Presbyterian missionary, “which gives in so brief space such accurate and Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 92 See Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-­Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon Press, 1980). 93 Pruitt, Looking-­Glass for Ladies, 43. On sequestered women in Indian society, see Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 94 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 34. 95 Missionary newspapers printed diaries and journals of missionaries, which provided their observations and impressions. For example, see James Wilson, “Journal of Rev. James Wilson,” Foreign Missionary Chronicle, August 1836, 117–­24.

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extensive information on this subject.”96 While Dass regularly echoed missionary criticisms of Indian society, he also criticized European perceptions of India and heaped praises on Indian civilization and people.97 One of the striking differences between British and American views of Hinduism concerns Brahmins. British evangelicals had portrayed Hinduism as “Brahminism” and “Brahminism” as Hinduism.98 (They were at the same time drawing parallels between Hinduism and Roman Catholicism, purportedly a tradition in which the laity is controlled by a wicked priesthood.)99 Brahmins, according to this British view, were malevolent manipulators who oppressed and profited from every other caste of Hindus. According to one commentator, “No one among the contrivers and leaders of false religions was ever able to devise so well-­ framed a system of imposture as the brahmins have done, in order to preserve unimpaired their religious control over the other castes, and to keep the latter in that state of stupidity and ignorance in which they are immersed.”100 The constant caustic critique of Brahmins evident in British evangelical literature found only muffled echoes in American missionary accounts of Hinduism.101 The Americans’ divergence from British analysis was due to several factors. First, American evangelicals at this time were not as consumed as their British counterparts in struggles against Roman Catholicism. Issues such as slavery and temperance were much more important to them, and British evangelical attacks on Brahminism were at least partly caused by anxieties regarding Catholicism. Second, in their personal encounters with Indians, at least some American 96 William Rankin, Memorials of Foreign Missionaries of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-­ School Work, 1895), 92. 97 Ishwari Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of Northern India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1860). See chap. 4 for a discussion of Dass’ work in contrast to Ward’s. 98 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 72. 99 Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 100 James Hough, The History of Christianity in India, 5 vols. (London: Seeley & Burnside, 1839), 2:226. 101 For example, on p. 109 above, while the “exactions of the Brahmans for priestly services” is one of the criticisms leveled by John Lowrie at Hinduism, the Brahmins are not the only perceived problem, nor are they seen as the root cause of Hinduism’s baleful influence.

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missionaries noticed that Brahmins actually did not play an important role in ordinary village religion—­and that popular Hinduism flourished (and resisted the Christian message) without Brahmin intervention.102 In fact a century earlier, German missionaries in South India had come to a similar conclusion: non-­Brahmins were more important than Brahmins in religious leadership among the Tamils.103 Here personal experiences of missionaries modified the conceptual framework they brought with them. Finally, a number of Brahmins joined the Presbyterian Church.104 In extant autobiographies such converts profess a love and respect for their parents, even when they forsake the parents’ religious traditions. Presbyterian catechist Kasbu Ram related that his parents “were Brahmins—­my father an officiating priest. Both took much pains to make me acquainted with the tenets of Hinduism. . . . I was taught by my father to feel that I was not only to be saved by Hinduism, but that I was to live by it; and hence I diligently studied such books as he placed in my hands, thinking that my usefulness here and happiness thereafter would be enhanced by it.”105 While Kasbu Ram went on to write at length about his dissatisfaction with Hinduism, he never criticized his parents for their perseverance in teaching him that way of life, which they sincerely believed would lead to his present and future “happiness.”106 So while American Protestant missionaries relied heavily on British evangelicals for their understandings and critiques of Hinduism, they modified the received tradition with other views and their own experiences. While there is a heavy bias in the missionary literature of the nineteenth century to discount other religions as simply false—­that is, based 102 For example, in Scott’s Missionary Life among the Villages of India, Brahmins do not make an appearance as religious leaders, although significant space is devoted to village religion. 103 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 60–­62. 104 John C. B. Webster, The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1976), 48–­51. 105 Fullerton, Memoir, 231–­33. 106 Similarly Zahur-­al-­Haqq, the first Indian Presiding Elder of the Methodist Church, writes respectfully of his “honored” father, the master of a school, under whose tutelage he studied “Persian, Arabic to some extent, and Hindee, and was also instructed in astronomy, astrology, and a kind of sorcery.” Zahur-­al-­Haqq, Autobiography of Rev. Zahur-­al-­Haqq, First Convert of the Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church in India, trans. Mrs. E. J. Humphrey (New York: Missionary Society, 1885), 7.

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on ignorance and superstition—­a few missionaries could venture that there was something compelling about certain Indian religious beliefs and practices. For example, a close-­up view of the majestic Himalayas elicited from more than one European evangelical a hypothesis about why Indians would see them as the abode of the gods. “What wonder that the imagination of the natives makes it the home of a goddess, and peoples it with divinities? The terrestrial seemed here blended with the celestial world. Earth, in vast snowy stalagmites, was piled into heaven,” gushed the Rev. T. J. Scott.107 In other circumstances as well, missionaries found it difficult to dismiss the religious traditions of the people around them summarily. One of these was when missionaries experienced compassion from Indians who were not Christians. Many evangelicals firmly believed that ethics were directly related to religion, that true religion was the source of true morality. And they knew that this belief was under attack from many quarters. “Probably no device of the adversary was ever more successful in darkening and destroying men’s souls,” opined a report from the Presbyterian Mission in 1871, “than his suggestion, that religion is wholly distinct from morality. Everywhere in Christendom, as well as in Heathendom, have men drunk in this poisonous belief.”108 The assumption that true morality required true religion had been under attack since the eighteenth century, with various Protestant intellectuals providing rebuttals.109 Yet in the nineteenth century that assumption was being called into question not only by those beyond evangelical circles but by evangelical missionary experience as well. In a letter to her sister after four years of service, Emma Bayles McAuley confessed, “I have been treated with so much kindness by strangers in this country that I am often reminded of the difference in some of my own relations. It seems to me now I could not bear so much coldness with the same calmness as I did just before leaving [the United States].”110 Occasionally a comment appears in a missionary publication that Indians who are not Christians behave in ways that are very “Christian”: “[H]ad I been among Christians instead of heathen friends, I could not have been Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages in India, 330–­31. “Report of the Lodiana Mission, 1871,” Lodiana, India, 1871, MT 80 PSZ LA, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, 14. 109 I am grateful to Brooks Holifield for providing clarity on this issue. 110 Letter of Emma Bayles McAuley to her sister, Furrukhabad, 18 March 1845, RG 24, box 1, folder 3, Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society Archives. 107 108

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more tenderly cared for,” one Indian Christian woman was quoted as saying.111 Dr. Clara Swain observed that a Rajasthani king and queen hosting her were “so kind and considerate that we can hardly realize that they are not Christians.”112 Over time, missionaries found that they could be sympathetic to some of the religious ideas, ideals, and values of Indians who identified with various religious traditions. One of the segments of Indian society that most fascinated missionaries—­as well as other Europeans—­was Indian holy men, usually termed fakirs if Muslim and yogis if Hindu. The wealth of description given about them points to one of the contradictory features of these persons: they were easily recognized but almost impossible to define. They had chosen to withdraw from caste society to pursue a life of religious devotion. In that sense they were ascetics. However, the path of asceticism was anything but unambiguous. Fakirs and yogis could be mendicants or businessmen, world renouncing or armed militants, sexually abstinent or married with families. They could live alone or belong to a group of thousands, reside for years in one spot or travel great distances across the subcontinent. The common denominator is that they had withdrawn from “worldly” concerns to pursue a life of holiness, even if they afterward reengaged the world quite vigorously.113 The British who ruled India had long viewed the holy person as “mysterious, unpredictable, and dangerous.”114 The missionaries who followed the British civil servants added to this negative image. The fakir (a general term that often included sadhus and yogis) was lazy, lived off the hard work of others, and was theologically misguided at best, seeking salvation through works of righteousness. In this the fakir or yogi was a religious counterpart to the Roman Catholic monk. However, missionaries found three traits of the holy man compelling. One was his desire to deprive himself of the pleasures of worldly society for the sake of reaching the divine.115 A second was many a fakir’s and yogi’s renun-

Fullerton, Memoir, 201. Swain, Glimpse of India, 165. 113 See William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1–­2. 114 Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India, 4. 115 See Calvin’s extended discussion of self-­denial as necessary for a godly life. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1836), book 3, chaps. 7–­8, pp. 618–­38. 111 112

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ciation of reliance on images for worship. A third was the acceptance by some holy men of the missionary as a fellow religious expert or seeker. Missionaries provided a variety of portraits of fakirs and yogis. Methodist William Butler gave a highly critical account of fakirs in The Land of the Veda. He began his description with a characteristic flourish: “Of all the curses under which India and her daughters groan, it may safely be said that this profession of the Fakirs is one of the heaviest and most debasing.” They are “ignorant, beastly-­looking men” who “swarm India, infesting its highways, crowding its ghats and temples, creeping into its homes, and leading captive its poor, silly women.” This last point yielded a comparison with the Catholic Church: Indian women “are as absolutely in their power as the female penitents of the Romish Church are in that of their priesthood, and even more so.”116 The description continued for ten pages of his book to which were added over two pages of pictorial illustrations of the fakirs. The text ranges from straightforward explanation (the origin of the word fakir) to pity (Butler’s desire that they be saved from “the power of evil spirits”) to admiration (there are sincere fakirs who “devote themselves to a course of religious contemplation and asceticism”) to denunciation (“the great majority” are “imposters and hypocrites”).117 The denunciation gets most of the space and results in contradictions. Butler describes the fakirs as ignorant and misguided but also wily and crafty. They are supposed to be insincere and vainglorious, but he paints their extreme depravations and painful self-­mortifications in vivid detail. They are said to be honored by all classes of society, who spend huge sums of money to support them, but self-­debasement and seclusion are among the hallmarks of their life. So with Butler’s sharp criticisms of fakirs come admissions of the authenticity of their endeavors. If Butler generally disdained yogis and fakirs, Andrew Gordon of the United Presbyterian Mission of North America provided a relatively dispassionate account of a prolonged encounter with a fakir in Kashmir. The solitary “gray-­headed” Muslim fakir, “tall, lank, and all but stark naked” provided several days of lodging at his forest hut for a Christian

116 William Butler, The Land of the Veda (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1871), 191–­92. The fact that Butler is Irish probably plays a role in his criticism of Roman Catholicism. 117 Butler, Land of the Veda, 192, 195.

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convert and his Muslim companion.118 This occurred despite the fact that the fakir had previously been a sepoy fighting Christians during the 1857 Uprising and had seen many of his companions blown from cannons or shipped off to the Andaman Islands by the victorious and vengeful British.119 The interaction between the fakir and the two men from the Presbyterian mission went on for several days. The relationship between the two sides ranged from cordial to friendly. The fakir was allegedly curious about Christianity; the visitors were curious about the fakir’s local renown as a healer, even though they disapproved of his methods.120 The two sides exchanged religious ideas and opinions, and while Gordon claimed that the convert convinced the fakir of the rightness of the Christian cause—­a standard trope in missionary writing—­the fakir did not convert to Christianity. The author noted that the fakir went out of his way to help his guests, at times providing them protection from locals who were either suspicious of or hostile toward them.121 In these ways Gordon provided a sympathetic image of a fakir and avoided the stylistic convention of roundly denouncing the holy man. Methodist James Thoburn published a contradictory account of his visit with a “Hindoo Devotee,” or “Jogi.” He introduced this class of men in expected ways: by pronouncing that their “pretended austerities” are “feigned,” and their “reputation for virtue” highly “questionable.” However, Thoburn spent most of the article describing his conversation with one “poor wretch” who was “manifestly no imposter”: a yogi who had observed austerities that resulted in one of his hands being permanently lifted above his head. The conversation opens with the holy man providing a brief autobiography. Thoburn gives a vivid physical description of the ascetic and then vouches for his goodness in contradistinction to other ascetics. The evidence adduced for this is his sociability and kindness to all, his practice of invoking a “blessing on all the children,” and his lack of pride.122

118 Andrew Gordon, Our India Mission (Philadelphia: Andrew Gordon, 1886), 314. 119 Perhaps the fact that the Christian convert’s companion was a Muslim had something to do with the fakir’s openness to these strangers. 120 Gordon, Our India Mission, 316–­17. 121 Gordon, Our India Mission, 326. 122 Thoburn writes that the yogi’s Hindu blessing is a sign of benevolence.

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Thoburn first introduces the yogi’s theology by calling it “stupid” or “thoughtless,” but then provides a clear and cogent explanation of the yogi’s religious views on topics such as merit and dharma. The missionary asks the yogi whether he agrees with each of the Ten Commandments, and the yogi comes across as a highly ethical human being. Finally, Thoburn says that he sits down on the floor next to the yogi and tries to convince him of the truth of fundamental Protestant beliefs: that all human beings are sinful, that asceticism cannot gain us merit for salvation, and that a day is coming when God will judge all human beings no matter what their race or status in life, “and none but the pure of heart will see his face.” These assertions, we are told, are too much for the kind yogi, who asks to leave. The missionary gives him some money and dismisses him “kindly.” Thoburn concludes his article as follows: “One of the best and most successful of our native preachers was once a wandering devotee, and [God] who converted Saul of Tarsus, can turn this poor wretch from his folly, and make him a burning and shining light in this land of darkness. For which let every Christian reader pray.”123 Thoburn is probably referring to Andrias, the Kabirpanthi guru who became a Methodist preacher.124 The missionary draws a complex, contradictory, and paradoxical portrait of a yogi. He indulges his audience in its prejudices but then offers some alternative and positive understandings of the man. In this way he purposely draws his readers into the portrait to disabuse them of some of their most cherished ideas. The three missionary descriptions, taken together, manifest deep ambivalence toward Indian ascetics. On the one hand, the missionaries professed repugnance at them, and impugned them with the basest motives of seeking fame and power in Indian society. Such negative evaluations were part of the conventions of describing non-­Christians to American church audiences.125 Yet the authors also told their supporters at home that there were praiseworthy yogis and fakirs who were true seekers of the divine and therefore in some sense spiritually related to the missionaries. There was in fact some sense of affinity between the religiously committed and disciplined missionary, and the religiously committed and disciplined Hindu or Muslim ascetic. James M. Thoburn, “A Visit from a Hindoo Devotee,” Western Christian Advocate, June 13, 1866, 1. 124 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 124–­25. 125 See Timothy Stephen Dobe, “Flaunting the Secret: Lineage Tales of Christian Sannyasis and Missionaries,” History of Religions 49, no. 3 (2010): 254–­99. 123

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James Thoburn ended his article with a rather startling claim: that the future of the church lay in India’s “wandering devotees.”126 Little did he realize that it was the missionaries who had wandered into the religious space carved out by fakirs. At times this was literally true. As Bayard Taylor, an American tourist in India in the middle of the nineteenth century (and no sympathizer of Christian missions), wandered through a festival on the banks of the sacred rivers in Allahabad, he noticed a Presbyterian missionary in the crowds: “Mr. Owen preached for half an hour in the mission tent among the fakeers. A number of natives flocked around, listening attentively, and made no disturbance, though two or three of them were Jogees of the most fanatical kind. They were apparently interested, but not touched.”127 Missionaries and the Promise of New Community The British Empire significantly affected the propagation and reception of missionary ideas regarding Christian community. American evangelicals introduced into India new ideas about the ordering of society. They promoted ideas of democracy, equality, and Anglo-­American evangelical morality, and tried to establish their churches on these principles. While the realities of Indian social arrangements, British imperial rule, and some of their own deeply held prejudices against Indians kept confounding missionary attempts to form ideal religious communities, the missionaries persisted. Moreover, Indian converts were just as interested as the missionaries in the new forms of religious community, and often pointed out to the foreign leaders their own shortcomings in living up to and instituting their ideals. As both Indian and foreign evangelical Protestants participated in the establishment of new religious communities, they found that the British presence in India provided both assistance and difficulties to their social experiments. American missionaries expressed some ambivalence about the British Empire, even if on the whole they supported it strongly. On the one hand, they were critical of British imperialism, given their own national history. On the other hand, they were deeply appreciative of Protestant Christian rule over India. This was not simply because they expected special favors from the government (although they often got them), but See similar claims from Osborne, India and Its Millions, 209–­10. Bayard Taylor, A Visit to India, China, and Japan, in the Year 1853 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1855), 237. 126 127

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because of their belief that different political regimes were founded on different religious foundations, and that the regimes that did the most public good were Protestant, especially of the Anglo-­Saxon variety. In this era, missionaries tended to tie Anglo-­Saxon superiority to geography, culture, and religion rather than race, though racialism increased over the course of the nineteenth century. In fact missionaries periodically commented on how in the past Anglo-­Saxons had been living as savage brutes while Indian civilization was flowering. “Three centuries before Julius Caesar invaded the howling wilderness of Great Britain to fight our half clothed, idolatrous ancestors, Alexander the Great found a people in the Panjab who ranked with the foremost in the world in point of civilization,” Andrew Gordon reminded his readers.128 John C. Lowrie criticized the British Empire’s economic policies: “The revenues of the East India Company and the income of their servants, are not all spent in India; nor does commerce restore to the Hindus what they lose by their constant drain of their pecuniary means.”129 He goes on to argue that perhaps the “exactions” of the previous rulers were “ruinous” to individuals; “yet they did not diminish the amount of money in circulation among the people at large.”130 And while the British have “greatly improved the condition of the common people . . . they may not have sufficiently changed the general system of their predecessors, so as to allow the cultivators of the soil a larger subsistence from their labors.”131 Lowrie also criticized the politics of empire: the way in which government in India was administered was “too purely foreign and English” and at the same time not responsible to the British people, who were now the de facto rulers of India.132 Robert Stewart Fullerton went further: “The rule of the English is a pure despotism,” he opined.133 Andrew Gordon criticized the East India Company’s agrarian policy: “The farmers are reminded that their lands belong not to themselves, but to the British Government; they are only renters, and must pay one or two rupees per acre of land rent.”134 So Lowrie, Fullerton, and Gordon raised two criticisms of empire from their American Gordon, Our India Mission, 75. Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 31. 130 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 31. 131 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 31. 132 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 32. 133 Fullerton, Memoir, 55. 134 Gordon, Our India Mission, 80. 128 129

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perspective: one was that the economy was extractive rather than capitalist, and the other was that the political system was autocratic rather than democratic. There were other American criticisms of British rule. One common complaint was that the European population in India, with all its vices and faults, was the greatest hindrance to the spread of the Christian message. The British, wrote Andrew Gordon, “opened an extensive trade between England and India, flooded the country with beer, wine, and spirits, and placed over it an administration which the poor people regard as very burdensome.”135 So for some American missionaries the Europeans could be just as much an object of the missionaries’ work as the “heathen” Indians. James Thoburn was convinced that “the English people in India must be made an important agency in this great work [of Christian mission]. It would appear . . . that they are a great hindrance. If so, we must direct our labors toward them until a change is effected.”136 The British in India also maintained standards of living that the Americans could find extravagant and discomfiting. Writing to her sister when an American missionary couple joined them, Emma Bayles McAuley remarked, “We are quite pleased with the Janvieres, it is quite cheering to see a new American face, I can assure you. . . . [The military officers] furnish their houses elegantly. I never saw anything so stylish in America. We live in an old Kote [large house] built by a rich native. . . . It has an appearance of an old castle.” Mrs. McAuley then brought up one of the more common criticisms of American missionaries by their constituency at home, that they were living in the lap of luxury.137 “If you were here you would not say so,” she explains. “The customs and the hot climate oblige us to have many expenses we would not have in America. . . . We are obliged to follow English customs a great deal here, Gordon, Our India Mission, 71. “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 2 July 1859 entry; emphasis in original; quoted in Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 42. The reaction was to reading a book by Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana, or Six Years in India, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1854). In a later work Thoburn lamented the production and use of opium, the imbibing of liquor by British officials, and the “deplorable immorality” of British soldiers. James Thoburn, The Christian Conquest of India (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1906), 50. 137 For example, see Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages in India, 59; Fullerton, Memoir, 58. 135 136

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as they are the most numerous and have trained the servants to their customs, but we hold fast to some of our American customs where we can, although they laugh at us for it.”138 The British sometimes gave the American missionaries the cold shoulder, which left them feeling even more lonely and isolated in a foreign land, as well as grateful for the companionship of other American missionaries, regardless of denomination.139 And from time to time, other irritations could arise with British rule: for example, the perception that Muslims were being treated better than Christians by the government.140 However, on the whole, the American missionaries were far more appreciative of European rule than critical of it. They clearly saw the hand of God at work in Britain’s conquest of India; this was part of God’s plan to convert the heathen.141 The missionaries were generally grateful that they could operate in a context where they understood and could avail themselves of the rule of the land. The British ruled with what the missionaries could recognize as “law” rather than despotism. John C. Lowrie, who had criticized British economic policy in India, on the whole greatly approved of British rule; he claimed that Indians were currently “incapable of governing themselves.”142 Missionaries sometimes used their European heritage to get their own way in conflicts with Indians.143 T. J. Scott told of a time when he went into a village and a group from the local populace shouted insults at him when he tried to preach to them. As he turned to walk away from the hostile crowd, the people “set up an uproarious hooting and clapping of hands,” sending him unceremoniously on his way. “I simply turned,” wrote Scott, “and, addressing two or three of those in advance of the crowd, told them that if I would bring such an attempt at insult and mob violence to the ears of

138 Letter of Emma Bayles McAuley to her sister Margaret Ann, 1 June 1842, RG 24, box 1, folder 3, Philadelphia, Presbyterian Church Archives. 139 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 24 March 1860, 8 August 1860, and 11 April 1863 entries; Warren, Glance Backward, 42. 140 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 26 June 1868 entry. 141 Norman Etherington, Missions and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6; Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 49–­52. 142 Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India, 32. 143 See “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 19 March 1868 entry. Also see Thoburn’s use of the court system in a case brought against him—­26 June 1868, 29 July 1868, 6 August 1868 entries.

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the English rulers they would get very severely punished.” The warning, at least according to Scott, had its effect.144 Besides providing law and order that facilitated missionary activity, the British Empire was being administered by a growing number of civil servants who were evangelicals and thus sympathetic to the missionary cause, providing significant material and moral support for this work.145 Almost every Methodist and Presbyterian mission station in Hindi North India was established at the invitation of British civil servants. They often provided the mission with free or extremely cheap land, and liberally donated money for the construction of buildings and the undertaking of projects such as schools. The mutual support of American missions and the British Empire appeared so strong that local people frequently saw the missions as part and parcel of the Empire. In fact, missionaries explicitly connected Western civilization with Christian religion. T. J. Scott recounted how when passing through a village, he and his party stopped for a while at a sugar factory. The technology employed was local: pressing out juice and boiling it down to a solid mass of sugar. Scott told the workmen about the industrial technology employed to manufacture sugar in the United States, which purportedly amazed the Indians. “I then insisted that when they become Christians and cast off their thoughts and works of darkness, they too will make sugar and other things on such a scale. Some smiled at such a result of accepting the new faith.”146 By linking faith to civilization and technology, missionaries unwittingly opened wide the door to what they most deprecated in motivations for conversion—­material benefit. If Christian faith was inexorably linked to Western technology and power, why should people not ask for the goods of Western civilization in exchange for converting to Christianity? So when Scott, a few days after the sugar mill encounter, preached to a group of villagers, “an honest, rustic-­looking old fellow, in all apparent sincerity, proposed becoming a Christian if [Scott] would give him a village!” While Scott “smiled at his naïveté, and urged that he must accept the kingdom of heaven from higher motives,” Scott’s own

Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages of India, 31–­32. Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1707–­1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 177. 146 Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages of India, 30. 144 145

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preaching actually suggested that Christian faith and Western power were a package deal.147 This association plagued American missionaries throughout the first decades of activity in Hindi North India. James Thoburn was disheartened that some villagers were more interested in his medical supplies than his preaching, although he tried to impress upon the villagers that while the two were linked, the latter was more important than the former.148 In the criticisms and laments of Scott and Thoburn, we see one of the constant struggles in the American missionary efforts, which was to untie the knot binding together Western culture and Christianity that missionaries themselves had tied. In reality the missionary association with the British was one of the things that was attractive about Christianity to some Indians at the bottom of the social hierarchy. For them, Christianity held the promise of a new kind of community—­one in which some of their greatest desires, including the desire not only for material comfort but for equality, respect, and dignity, could be fulfilled. In 1867, James Thoburn opened a school in Pauri, Garhwal, and was pleased that two girls had come as boarders and were attending. “Their parents are low caste and bring them to me with the wish that I ‘make them Angrez [English].’ They have much to unlearn and nearly everything to learn in the way of religion. They wear a profusion of jewelry and have good clothing. May God lead them to Jesus.”149 Thoburn’s diary entry reveals something about these Indians seeking schooling for their children. For the parents, “Angrez,” or English, was not a racial category, but rather a social one.150 One could be Indian, from a low-­caste background in fact, and still become “Angrez,” with the accompanying social stature. Missionary Evangelicalism had driven a wedge between the European race and its religion and culture by insisting that Indians could convert to Christianity, the purported religion of Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages of India, 43. “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 9 April 1863 entry. 149 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 2 April 1867 entry. 150 Many years ago, William Henry Scott called attention to the importance of throwaway remarks made by Spanish chroniclers in the Philippines for the historian who is trying to reconstruct Filipino society and perspectives during the Spanish era. William Henry Scott, “Cracks in the Parchment Curtain,” in Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1982), 1–­17. 147 148

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the Europeans. The girls’ parents also assumed that the culture of Christianity could be deployed to raise one’s social status in Indian society. The fact that the daughters of low-­caste parents wore a profusion of jewelry suggests that the family’s economic standing was higher than its location in the Indian caste hierarchy. For these parents, Christian culture was a means of improving social status to make it more commensurate with economic status. Like members of low-­caste bhakti-­inspired communities, they were seeking personal and social equality with their neighbors.151 For other poor Indians, Christianity’s association with the British Empire meant that the religion was offering them distinctive material, social, ideological, and religious goods. These goods promised multifaceted personal and social improvement; they held the promise for the elusive goal of commensurability, if not equality, in society.152 In fact, there were heated debates in missionary conferences about the propriety of Indian Christian converts adopting the trappings of Western civilization—­with Indians arguing for Westernization, and foreign missionaries arguing against it. Westernization for Indian Christians meant that they could gain some measure of respectability and dignity in their social order. In short, evangelical Christianity was proposing a particular kind of community within their society, a community of self-­respect and self-­improvement. Conclusion Despite their foreign provenance, and because of their foreign provenance, American evangelical missionaries in Hindi North India in the middle of the nineteenth century were able to attract the attention of a number of local people to their activities. A few of these persons converted to Christianity; the vast majority did not. Some simply listened for a while with interest. Some were sympathetic to and even supported various aspects of the mission’s work, whereas others were critical of and hostile to the missionary undertaking. That the missionaries were able to garner any notice at all is due to the fact that they understood 151 See the discussion on Sanskritization and the Christian community in Chad Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 187–­88. 152 This is borne out by later evidence from the experience of Dalits who joined the Christian community. John C. B. Webster, A History of the Dalit Christians in India (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 61–­62.

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and represented themselves as religious specialists, rendering a certain perspective—­much but not all of it critical—­on Indian religion and proposing a new kind of religious and social community in local society. For centuries before the missionaries arrived, low-­caste and Untouchable poet bhakti saints had offered critiques of the religions and society around them, and pointed to new religious communities that would embody social and religious alternatives to the status quo. While the poet-saints had not revolutionized society at large, they had succeeded in creating communities wherein followers could pursue with varying degrees of success the saints’ ideals and could keep alive the spirit—­and at least some of the poetry—­of those inspired saints. The connections to Indian religions were significantly different in North Indian bhakti and Evangelicalism, as even a cursory reading of Kabir and William Ward reveal, and so were the kinds of community that the two movements had created in nineteenth-­century Hindi North India. The religious and social dynamics operating in a math and a mission compound were in many ways starkly dissimilar. However, there were similarities as well: both promoted worship of a divine savior, both criticized the hierarchy of Indian society, and both promised equality to adherents of their sects. Moreover, what bhakti originating in low-­caste and Untouchable gurus had done in Hindi North India was to cultivate social and religious spaces where new experiments in Indian religious community construction could be pursued. And American Evangelicalism’s early successes—­if they can be called that—­came in precisely such spaces, as the following chapters demonstrate.

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—4— Indian Workers and Leaders Negotiating Boundaries

T

he indigenous workers and leaders in the Presbyterian and Methodist missions, for all their many differences, possessed two common traits. First of all, they were successful at moving back and forth between the European missionaries and the local populace, whether Christian or of other religious traditions, and functioning as linguistic, cultural, theological, and communal translators and brokers. Secondly, they lived and worked in a tension that had been created by the power of missionaries, who on the one hand desired to control and direct the formation and growth of the Christian community in India, and on the other hand preached that—­in contrast to Hinduism, Islam, and Roman Catholicism—­evangelical Christianity was a religion of equality, where all the faithful were brothers and sisters in Christ. So Indian workers were pulled by the opposing forces of loyalty to missionaries and freedom from their control. The practice of contending with religious and social boundaries and authority in Hindi North India was not unprecedented, however. The biographies of several regional bhakti saints are peppered with examples of boundary crossings as well as negotiations of authority. Although the experiences of these saints and Indian mission workers were very different, the rhetoric and stories of bhakti poets had created religious spaces where leaders (and their followers) traversed religious and social boundaries and dealt with claims of brahminical authority. This chapter provides biographies of four ordained Presbyterian and Methodist Indian ministers, descriptions of women leaders, and then concluding reflections on Indian evangelical leadership and bhakti. 131

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The Fighter for Racial Equality: Gopi Nath Nundy (1807–­1861) One of the pioneers of the Presbyterian Mission in Hindi North India, Gopi Nath Nundy originally hailed from Calcutta.1 He was born in 1807 into a family of the Kayasth jati, which itself occupied a liminal space on the boundaries of upper and lower castes and of Hindu and caste status. In Muslim communities.2 Nundy himself claimed high-­ Calcutta he enrolled in 1830 in Alexander Duff’s school, and while a student was converted to Christianity and baptized by Duff in December 1832. The following year the Scotsman sent Nundy to Fatehpur in the North-­Western Provinces, in response to requests of Christians there who were looking for a teacher to take charge of a school they had opened.3 During 1837–­1838 a terrible famine hit North India. “For miles the road on both sides was lined by famishing people, who had crawled from their homes to beg of the passing traveler a mouthful of bread. Their emaciated forms and death-­struck appearance presented a tale of suffering which rendered language and supplication unnecessary.” Nundy “visited the villages and roads for the purpose of relieving the sufferings of the people, and collecting the children either abandoned by their parents or left orphans.”4 Dr. Charles Madden, a British evangelical civil surgeon in the employ of the East India Company and one of the foremost leaders among the Fatehpur Christians, opened up an orphanage for the children that he and Nundy had collected, and employed the latter to take charge of the institution. Upon the death of his wife, Madden transferred the orphanage with fifty of its wards and material and money worth Rs. 1000 to the Presbyterians, who had been persuaded to set up a mission station in Fatehgarh in 1838. Gopi Nath Nundy moved with the orphans from Fatehpur to Fatehgarh, where the Presbyterians employed him as a teacher and evangelist at the rather 1 For Nundy’s life, see John C. B. Webster, The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1976), 51–­ 52; James P. Alter and John Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand: North Indian Christianity, 1815–­1915 (Delhi: I.S.P.C.K., 1986), 102–­4; Rajaiah D. Paul, They Kept the Faith (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1968), 1–­48. 2 Ishuree Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of Northern India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1860), 32. 3 Paul, They Kept the Faith, 8. 4 J. Johnston Walsh, A Memorial of the Futtehgurh Mission and Her Martyred Missionaries (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1858), 38–­39.

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high rate of Rs. 80 per month because, as the Rev. Wilson explained, he had a growing family and lived in European style.5 The following year, at the urging of the American missionaries, he was appointed an assistant missionary paid by the Presbyterian mission board, while his wife, Jesse, worked with Mrs. Wilson in the girls’ school that the latter had started.6 In 1841 the first Presbyterian congregation in Fatehgarh, consisting of four Indians and six Europeans, was organized, and Gopi Nath Nundy was elected its first elder, which is an official leader in the congregation. The next year he was taken under the care of the newly formed Farrukhabad Presbytery as a candidate for ministry, and in December 1844 he was ordained a Presbyterian minister, “the first instance, it is believed, in modern times, in the entire East when a native of the country received Presbyterian ordination.”7 The ordination, however, proved to be a thorn in the side of the mission. In 1848 relationships between Nundy and newly arrived missionaries started to deteriorate, and Nundy demanded equal status with the American missionaries. In order to understand this controversy, it is necessary to know something about the governing structures of the Presbyterians in India. In effect, there were two bodies with significant overlapping membership that controlled work in India. On the one hand, there was the Mission, whose membership consisted solely of foreign missionaries. The mission was the representative of the Board of Foreign Missions in New York, which in turn was an agency of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.8 The mission was accountable to the Board of Foreign Missions “on all matters of policy, personnel, property and finance” in its sphere of work.9 On the other hand, there was the Indian church, consisting of local congregations that belonged to a 5 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 103; Helen H. Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions, Historical Sketches of the India Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Allahabad: Allahabad Mission Press, 1884), 110. The orphans from Fatehpur were joined by twenty orphans from Captain Wheeler in Fatehgarh. Additions to the orphanage brought the number of orphans to 109 in 1839. 6 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 103. 7 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 114. 8 Technically, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. 9 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 83.

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presbytery (Farrukhabad and Allahabad Presbyteries in the North-­ Western Provinces); the presbyteries belonged to the Synod of India, one of the synods of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.10 The presbyteries and synod in India had both Indian and foreign clergy as well as lay delegates, and each person had one vote regardless of national origin. The presbyteries and synod were mostly concerned “with such ecclesiastical matters as the ordination of clergymen and setting standards of admission into church membership.”11 While mission and presbytery were in theory complementary, many of the most important decisions regarding church work were made in the mission. Further exacerbating the lack of parity between mission and presbytery was the fact that it was the mission that employed the great majority of Indian workers. Because the missionaries at any given station hired or fired, transferred or promoted the Indian workers, the former wielded a disproportionate amount of power over the latter. Thus although in theory Indians and Americans had equal votes in the presbytery, in fact Indians were compelled to vote according to the wishes of their missionary sponsors. Following is one Indian pastor’s account of his vote in presbytery when the issue at stake pitted two missionaries against each other: [F]or my part I never had nor have any intention of preferring charges against the said Rev. J. S. Woodside. However, you may naturally be induced to ask, why then did I give my voice against him. To which I would reply, we [the Indian members of presbytery] did that because we were compelled to do so, for if we had not given our voices against him it would have gone against us—­because we were positively intimidated by Mr. Herron, by saying that before voting every one must look to his interest, and that if we did not vote with him that our children would soon become beggars. This last sentence, I think means nothing less than our discharge from the Mission Service.12

The way in which Gopi Nath Nundy sought to challenge the missionary hegemony was to demand membership in the mission as well as the presbytery. Like the missionaries, he was appointed and employed by the Board of Foreign Missions, and in fact was listed as a missionary in 10 This arrangement lasted until 1904, when the Presbyterian Church of India was formed, and the synods in India then belonged to it. 11 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 85. 12 Quoted in Webster, Christian Community and Change, 85–­86.

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the Board’s annual reports. Like them, he was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Nundy at first laid his claim before the missionaries in India, and when they rebuffed him, he appealed to the Board of Missions in New York. His conclusion was simple and to the point: “I am like one of them [the foreign missionaries] except in this (and I am grieved to find those at Futtehgur place so much stress upon it) that I am a native of Hindustan and they are of America and have actually come from that quarter.”13 Nundy’s case created a long-­standing controversy, carried out mostly by correspondence between Fatehgarh and New York. While the American missionaries did not question Nundy’s credentials and good work, they argued that other ordained Indians would follow Nundy into the mission, eventually outnumber the Americans, and gain control over the mission funds. And they had no confidence in Indians running their own church: “The native mind has not yet attained that standard of strength, independence and integrity when it would be safe to entrust it with the powers that G[opi] demands.”14 In the end the Executive Committee of the Board of Foreign Missions, while leaving open the possibility of having Indian members in the mission, decided not to accede to Nundy’s demands. Racial prejudice and the prevailing spirit of Western imperialism had combined with the desire for economic and political control to deprive Gopi Nath Nundy of his rightful place in the Presbyterian Mission. After this decision Nundy temporarily withdrew from Presbyterian mission work, and contemplated leaving the mission and taking a number of Indian Christians with him. However, for reasons that are not clear, he eventually accepted the role of assistant missionary without membership in the mission. In 1852 he was assigned to Fatehpur, where he worked independently without any missionary colleague until his death in 1861.15 In 1855 another case arose that caused the North India Mission to revise its proscription against Indian membership. Adam Anthony, a young Eurasian working in the government, wanted to become a missionary, and the Rev. J. L. Scott was eager to employ him in the new school in Agra. While Anthony had no personal objection to being a member of the presbytery but not the mission, he wanted to know if it was Presbyterian policy to exclude non-­Europeans from the mission—­a policy that Webster, Christian Community and Change, 210. Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 111. 15 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 212. 13 14

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would make missionary service unacceptable to him. The missionaries in Agra then circulated among their American colleagues a resolution to admit Anthony to missionary service with pay equal to Europeans, and to decide membership in the mission on a case-­by-­case basis, rather than as a matter of policy. Of the fifteen European missionaries in the mission, five objected to the resolution: three disagreed with the equal salary provision, two with allowing Indians or Eurasians into the mission. The Executive Committee in New York strongly felt that Indians could and should be admitted to the mission, but they would not grant Anthony equal pay with the American missionaries. With this decision, Anthony decided not join the Presbyterians, but he did force the board and mission to advocate membership in the mission on a nonracial basis.16 The struggle for racial equality, at least within the church, is a struggle to be true to the origins of the Christian faith. The earliest Christian communities were groups in which people of various ethnicities and religious and social backgrounds ideally were welcomed on an equal basis.17 Thus in promoting the equality of Indians and Americans within the Presbyterian Church, Gopi Nath Nundy was in a very real sense being a true evangelical, calling Christians to live according to the principles of pristine Christianity. Yet there were Indian sources for Gopi Nath Nundy’s convictions as well. For centuries Indian bhakti saints had sung poems and songs that asserted the equality of all worshipers in the eyes of their divine savior. This partly explains why Nundy, who after all came from a profoundly hierarchical religion, fought so long and hard for his rightful place alongside his American missionary colleagues. Gopi Nath Nundy was drawing on deep religious impulses from within both bhakti and evangelical traditions.18 While today Gopi Nath Nundy is remembered among historians of North Indian Christianity for his struggle for equality with North Americans, in late nineteenth-­century Presbyterian mission circles he

Webster, Christian Community and Change, 212–­14. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul promoted the unity of believers in his letter to the church in Galatia: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28 NRSV). 18 Both of those traditions, however, also recognized the authority of religious leaders—­apostles in the case of early Christianity, Brahmins in the case of bhakti—­ which created the tension in which Nundy operated. 16 17

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was revered as a Christian hero during the 1857 Uprising.19 Nundy was stationed in Fatehpur, the sole Presbyterian missionary there, when the Indian sepoys mutinied. On May 24, 1857, he left for refuge in Allahabad with his family and the wives of Indian converts, but upon arrival there three days later, he found that the city was no safer than Fatehpur. The group took shelter first in the fort and then in the mission compound, but after a few days the women from Fatehpur returned home while Nundy and his family, consisting of his wife, six-­year-­old twin boys, and a one-­year-­old infant, stayed in Allahabad. When the troops in Allahabad mutinied on June 6, the Nundy family escaped toward Mirzapur, traveling by foot and by cart. They spent two nights in a village along the way at the home of a Brahmin who feigned friendship, but who they suspected wanted their goods and lives. Finally, they were able to escape on the third day, after being robbed of all their belongings by their host and other villagers. The refugees turned back to Allahabad, perhaps unnerved by the violence they had experienced and witnessed—­ they had watched in horror as an Untouchable Chamar couple was stripped and robbed, and their baby killed in front of them. Sustained by the hospitality and kindness of various people along the way—­including a marriage procession and a gang of robbers—­Gopi Nath and his family finally reached Allahabad again. Here they were given protection for a day by a Hindu goldsmith. The next day, however, they faced an angry Muslim mob and decided to throw themselves at the mercy of Maulavi Liakatali, the leader of the Uprising in the city. The maulvi (a Muslim leader who is well versed in the law) interrogated them and then threw them in prison, where both Gopi Nath and his wife were badly abused. After six days the family was freed by Sikh and European troops under British command. Fighter for equal rights for Indians, resolute Christian in the face of persecution, Gopi Nath Nundy was also a very effective evangelist, pastor, and mission superintendent.20 During his tenure in Fatehpur from 1853 to 1857, Nundy established a boys’ and a girls’ English school for local children, as well as three vernacular schools in three villages 19 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 192–­93; much of the following account is from Gopi Nath Nundy’s own narrative reproduced in Matthew Atmore Sherring, The Indian Church During the Great Rebellion (London: James Nisbet, 1859), 184–­200. 20 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 48; Nundy in Sherring, Indian Church During the Great Rebellion, 184–­86.

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eight to ten miles outside the city. He ran a prison ministry thanks to the support of the local sympathetic British magistrate: a Christian teacher visited prisoners every day, and someone from the mission conducted weekly Sunday services. Nundy and other Indian preachers engaged in the customary preaching in bazaars and neighboring villages, and Nundy carried on the European missionary tradition of village itineration in the countryside during the winter months. As in other parts of Hindi North India, Nundy got a much more favorable reception in the villages than in the cities, and among Hindus than among Muslims. In Fatehpur, Nundy had a small chapel built for Christian worship, where “the few European residents, though they were of different denominations, together with the native Christians, met every Sabbath for divine worship.” Judge Robert Tucker, the magistrate, and “other gentlemen,” presumably all European, provided monetary and moral support to the multiracial Christian community.21 The Christian community was enlarged by conversions. Nundy writes of six converts being baptized at one time, causing much consternation in the Muslim community.22 There were also six converts who, at the suggestion of a British official, rented some land from a zamindar (land owner) and commenced farming, with reported success. Gopi Nath Nundy died in 1861, and an American Presbyterian missionary, William Johnson, assumed his work. Johnson’s report of the native Christians in his letter to the mission board paints a decidedly negative portrait of the Christian community that Nundy left behind. To begin, Johnson reported that most of the Christians that had been baptized just before Nundy died “disappeared almost immediately.” It seems that Nundy had paid money on a monthly basis and given housing to those inquiring into the faith. When the money stopped with the arrival of the new missionary, the inquirers either “returned to heathenism” or were expelled from the church for “leading scandalous lives.” About ten of those who left became fakirs. Finally, the work ethic of most Indian Christians was questionable. Johnson wrote that “the

Nundy in Sherring, Indian Church During the Great Rebellion, 185. This does not necessarily mean the converts were from Islam. It could be that Nundy at least perceived that some Muslim leaders were concerned that the Christian population was growing. 21 22

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reputation of native Christians is so bad here that . . . I cannot get places [of employment] for them.”23 On the one hand, Johnson’s report provides necessary balance to Nundy’s glowing accounts of his own work. On the other hand, it is important to note that the Johnsons had very recently arrived in India, and still did not have command of the local languages, let alone customs and manners. Yet Johnson’s reports make it obvious that people became Christians not simply for religious reasons, if the religious excludes material factors. In fact, in India religious commitment has often taken account of material factors. Gods and goddesses were appealed to in order to deal with everyday problems and difficulties in this life, more so than in the next. Missionaries provided housing, education, and work (and therefore money) for converts who had to forsake their social ties to accept baptism.24 Perhaps Nundy, with his understanding of various motives for “conversion,” believed that material benefits were legitimate inducements to attract people to Christianity. Johnson himself wrote that Nundy acted as he did “either from some error of judgment or from over zeal to increase the numbers of his church.”25 There are certainly conflicting views and assessments of Nundy’s work. Yet like the other Indian Christian leaders in the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, he had the ability to understand both Indian society and the missionary mentality well, and operating in this in-­between space, he helped to produce and nurture the fledgling Presbyterian church in India. In his fight to be included in the Presbyterian Mission, he demonstrated his desire to be free from some of the missionary authority that demanded his loyalty and subordination. The Interreligious Interpreter: Zahur-­al-­Haqq (1833–­1896) After preaching to a group of villagers in October 1868, James Thoburn baptized a number of inquirers who had received prior instruction in the Christian faith. Much to his surprise, another group of eleven men stepped forward to be baptized. “They seemed serious and resolute,” 23 William F. Johnson, Letter to J. C. Lowrie, August 29, 1861. Presbyterian Mission Archives, Philadelphia. 24 See the Rev. K. C. Chatterjee, “The Relations of Missionaries to Converts in Secular Matters,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 1872–­73 (London: Seeley, Jackson, & Halliday, 1873), 337. 25 Johnson, Letter to Lowrie, August 29, 1861.

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Zahur-­al-­Haqq. Book caption: “Zhur Ul Haqq, Our First Baptized Convert and First Native Presiding Elder”

writes Thoburn, “but I shrank from the idea of admitting so many uninstructed men to the holy rite of baptism.” Thoburn at first rebuffed the men, who were clearly disappointed, but his companion Zahur-­al-­ Haqq tactfully intervened. Haqq began a hymn and, as the people were singing, told Thoburn that he had made a mistake and would lose the confidence of the people: Thoburn should baptize those who asked for the sacrament, and appoint a pastor to teach them afterward. The missionary, in this case, heeded the advice of his Indian coworker.26 Zahur-­ al-­ Haqq exemplifies how Indian Christian leaders could understand the perspectives of persons from a variety of religious 26 James M. Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1887), 207–­8.

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backgrounds and help missionaries navigate these perspectives. Haqq also was adept at presenting evangelical Christianity in terms that outsiders understood. Not only his personality but also his life experience as a member of different religious communities aided him in such interreligious activity. Finally, Haqq is one of the Indian leaders who actually came from a bhakti sect. Besides Methodist mission records and a few secondary sources that mention Haqq’s life and work, there is a brief autobiography that was translated into English by Mrs. Humphrey, an American missionary.27 The author was fifty years old when he wrote his work in Hindustani in 1884; he had been a Christian for twenty-­five years, and two years previously had become the first Indian presiding elder—­a supervisory position second only to that of bishop—­of the Methodist Mission in India. His rise to prominence was taken as a sign of the growing strength of the Indian church and, consequently, of the success of missionary work in India.28 The spiritual autobiography was a well-­ known and often-­ used genre of Methodist writing.29 Generally speaking, a nineteenth-­century American Methodist spiritual autobiography proceeded in five phases. It began by recounting the pre-­conversion life of the author, who included a description of a conviction of sin and spiritual struggles. Then followed the narrator’s conversion, typically a single dramatic event marked by a sensation of the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Following the conversion there were more struggles that the soul encountered, and then usually an experience of “entire sanctification,” or a sense of complete cleansing from all sin, capped by a call to preach if the author was a 27 Zahur-­al-­Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­ al-­ Haqq, First Convert of the Methodist Episcopal Church in India, trans. Mrs. E. J. Humphrey (New York: Missionary Society, 1885). 28 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 5–­6. 29 Here I am indebted to the work of Ted A. Campbell, “Spiritual Biography and Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Methodism, ed. Jason E. Vickers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 243–­60. See also David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 60–­68; Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Isabel Rivers, “ ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’: Sources and Patterns of Methodist Narrative,” in Augustan Worlds: Essays in Honour of A. R. Humphreys, ed. J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), 189–­203.

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preacher.30 While Haqq’s biography contains some of these elements, others are noticeably missing. What emerges, then, is an account that received its initial template from American missionaries, but then was adapted to Haqq’s experience and the Indian context. Haqq relates that he was born a Sunni Muslim in 1834 in a village in the district of Shahjahanpur, and that when he turned twelve, he began his education under the direction of his father, a schoolmaster, learning languages, his religious tradition, astronomy, astrology, “and a kind of sorcery,” eventually excelling to the point that he was regarded as a “faithful and zealous” Muslim.31 Unlike American evangelicals who routinely bemoaned their pre-­conversion life of sin, Haqq expresses no misgivings about his social or religious life as a Muslim, except to say that he “knew nothing whatever of a change of heart, or of spiritual comfort.”32 This phrase, which is played up in subsequent missionary literature, signals not so much a critique of Islam but the particular benefits of the Methodist brand of Christianity, to which he later converted. At the age of twenty, however, Haqq became religiously restless, desiring to “ascertain the one true religion” among the many options available to him in his context, and eventually joined the “Parnami” or Pranami sect, “a bhakti reformist movement . . . close to other sant groups such as the Kabirpanthis,” founded in the beginning of the seventeenth century by a Gujarati named Mahamati Prannath.33

Campbell, “Spiritual Biography and Autobiography,” 249. Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 7. 32 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 8. 33 Gérard Toffin, “The Power of Boundaries: Transnational Links among Krishna Pranamis of India and Nepal,” in Public Hinduisms, ed. John Zavos et al. (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), 234. For Pranamis, see Dominique-­Sila Khan, The Pranami Faith, Beyond “Hindu” and “Muslim” (Bangalore: Yoginder Sikand, 2002), 8–­9. Haqq’s autobiography uses “Parnami,” whereas current scholarship uses “Pranami.” See also P. S. Mukharya, “Sant Prannath and the Pranami Sect,” in Medieval Bhakti Movements in India, ed. Narendra Nath Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1989), 113–­26; Bhagwan Das Gupta, “Pranami Sampradaya of Bundelkhand,” in Bhattacharya, Medieval Bhakti Movements in India, 127–­35; Hafiz Md. Tahir Ali, “Influence of Islam and Sufism on Prannath’s Religious Movement,” in Bhattacharya, Medieval Bhakti Movements in India, 136–­48; G. A. Grierson, “Prannathis,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908–­1927), 10:150–­51; Horace Hayman Wilson, A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1846), 226–­27. 30 31

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Although Haqq calls the Pranamis Hindus, the founder Mahamati Prannath, who was born and brought up a Hindu, had fused together Islamic and Hindu teachings in his theology, and is said to have visited various Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Oman.34 According to early nineteenth-­century British Orientalist Horace Hayman Wilson, Pranamis (he terms them Pran Nathis) had to assent to the belief that the essence of Islam and Hinduism were one and the same, and the group members shared together in communal meals. At that time, Hindu and Muslim members of the Pranami sect continued to live with and even identify with their religious community of origin, which would explain why Haqq could claim that he continued to practice Islam while still a Pranami.35 Haqq says that he found “some satisfaction” in the worship of the group, yet still could not find the “rest of the soul” that he greatly desired.36 This last phrase recalls St. Augustine’s famous line in his Confessions: “You [God] move us to delight in praising you; for you have formed us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in you.”37 So Haqq writes of his spiritual journey in ways that borrow from, and make sense in, a Western Christian framework. However, the theme of the person who is restless or yearning for God is not uncommon among a number of prominent Indian converts to Christianity, and has roots in Indian religion as well, including the bhakti tradition in which a number of poets write and sing of their deep longing for union with the divine.38 The mad devotion of Mirabai to her “husband” Krishna is one extreme example of a “soul” that is restless because it is searching for union with its God.39 As with Gopi Nath Nundy’s fight for equality with 34 Khan, Pranami Faith, 10, 12. He also supposedly incorporated Christian and Jewish elements into his religion; for example, at one point in his life, he is said to have selected twelve disciples for a crucial mission to the emperor Aurangzeb. Mukharya, “Sant Prannath and the Pranami Sect,” 116–­17. 35 Wilson, Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, 226–­27; Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 9. 36 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 9. 37 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), I.1. 38 Pandita Ramabai is one prominent example of such a Christian convert. 39 The deep aching of the bhakta for union or communion with the divine is known as viraha, and there is a whole genre of bhakti that is termed viraha bhakti. See Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-­Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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missionaries, Indian Christians could draw on different religious sources for their thought and action. As a young adult, Zahur-­al-­Haqq sought to move beyond the Sunni Orthodoxy of his upbringing by joining, or converting to, a syncretic religious movement. Yet Haqq’s movement did not require him to cease practicing his Islam. Haqq illustrates how religious change or “conversion” could be quite different in the Indian religious and social context from what it was in the Western evangelical tradition, where conversion typically meant renouncing one’s previous religious convictions and attachments for new ones.40 In fact one of the problems of conversion to Christianity in the North Indian context was that missionaries and Indians could have quite different understandings of what such conversion or movement to Christianity entailed. For some Indians at least, conversion could mean repositioning oneself in a familiar, inherited religious world.41 For missionaries, conversion entailed abandoning one religious world for another. Those Indian converts who eventually ended up leaving their natal community and joining the Christian one had to affirm, at least in public, the missionaries’ stance. It was through the public preaching of American missionary J. L. Humphrey and Eurasian evangelist Joseph Fieldbrave, in the city of Bareilly, that Haqq was brought into contact with Methodism in 1859; the evangelists’ message, as he remembers it, was that Jesus is the savior of the world. Haqq writes that he was led to take seriously the preachers’ claims about Jesus by examining what the Qur’an said about him. He wished to learn about Christianity for the same reason that he joined 40 Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 12–­18, lays out three different taxonomies of conversion, some of which may be helpful in locating Haqq’s turn to the Pranamis in a larger framework. Young and Jeyaraj dismiss Rambo as too European in his approach, although I believe Rambo’s work can be profitably employed in the Indian context. See Richard Fox Young and Daniel Jeyaraj, “Singer of the ‘Sovereign Lord’: Hindu Pietism and Christian Bhakti in the Conversions of Kanapatti Vattiyar, a Tamil ‘Poet,’ ” in Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India, ed. Andreas Gross, Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, and Heiki Liebau (Halle: Frankesche Siftungen, 2006), 2:951–­72. For an interesting discussion of bhakti and Christianity, see John B. Carman, “Is Christian Faith a Form of Bhakti?” Visva-­Bharati Journal of Philosophy 3–­4 (1968): 24–­37. 41 See Kerry San Chirico, “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, Hindus, and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012).

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the Pranamis: his desire for truth. Yet Haqq claims in his autobiography that two factors not related to theological truth were pivotal in his conversion to Christianity in its Methodist form. The first was the kindness he witnessed and experienced from the preachers. He saw them being harangued as they preached in the bazaar, and even having a brick hurled at them, but they responded with “words of kindness and love” to the haranguing and ignored the brick that grazed Fieldbrave’s legs. As they walked home, Haqq began conversing with the preachers, and asked for a Persian or Urdu translation of the Gospels, which he received.42 Fieldbrave invited the inquisitive young man to his home, introduced him to his family, and after a long conversation asked him to stay the night. Because the Pranamis were vegetarian, Fieldbrave had to order special food from the market for his guest, who was then provided a bed in the house. “But I could not sleep much,” writes Haqq, “it seemed so strange to me that these people should show so much love to me, a stranger, and have so much confidence in me. The kind of treatment I then received greatly increased my desire to understand the doctrines of the Christian religion.”43 In contrast to American and British evangelical conversion narratives, it was not some existential crisis of sin and guilt, but rather the positive loving embrace of Christian community, coupled with a desire for religious truth, that impelled Haqq toward Christianity. The second pivotal experience, according to Haqq, in his journey to evangelical Christianity was a Methodist worship service. In fact Haqq juxtaposes the two events in his memoir: “Soon after this [i.e., the night at the Fieldbrave home] the thought came into my heart it would be 42 In Humphrey’s account of this encounter between Haqq and the evangelist, it was the missionary who approached Haqq after the preaching, and not Haqq who approached the evangelists. The two men portray themselves as taking the initiative in their respective accounts. See J. L. Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1905), 110–­12. Fieldbrave was a lay preacher at the time—­he was received into Conference in 1867; “Memoir of Rev. Joseph Fieldbrave,” in Fourth Annual Report of the Mission Stations of the Methodist Episcopal Church, U.S.A., in India, for the Year 1868 (Lucknow: American Methodist Mission Press, 1869), 60. That he is Eurasian is reported by J. E. Scott, History of Fifty Years (Madras: Methodist Episcopal Press, 1906), 48. 43 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 15. Antony Copley has noted how kindness and love shown by missionaries, especially to young men who are for some reason separated from their families, seem to play a critical role in their conversions. See Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact, and Conversion in Late-­Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 191–­ 92, 197–­99.

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well for me to see the manner of Christian worship.”44 Christian community led him to Christian worship. He notes that at the first Sunday worship service he sat on a bench—­not customary in either the Muslim or Pranami traditions—­and that Mrs. Humphrey was concerned that a Muslim, who could have come to disrupt the service, was in the congregation, because the 1857 Uprising had just been quelled the previous year. Despite this sense of unease, Haqq returned during the week for religious instruction and then on Sunday again for worship. He attended Sunday school afterward, and then immediately asked for baptism, which Humphrey administered some time later. What caused Haqq to overcome his initial apprehensions in Methodist worship so quickly? It may very well be that Methodist worship manifested some resemblance to Pranami worship, which Haqq earlier says he had found satisfying. The following is a contemporary description of worship in a Pranami shrine: Although it may look from outside like an “ordinary” Hindu temple, one is struck at once by the particular atmosphere of the place: the absence of image worship and elaborate ritual, with male and female devotees sitting separately on the floor, on each side of the large assembly hall, listening to the recitation of fragments of their holy scripture and singing devotional songs to the accompaniment of harmonium, drums (tabla and dholak) and small brass cymbals (manjiras). . . . The only object of worship in the shrine is the sacred book, the Qulzam Swarup, and even the usual partaking of consecrated water (amiras), together with food offering or Prasad, is not considered an essential part of ritual worship in the tradition. Emphasis, instead, is on the inner, spiritual essence behind the forms of religion.45

Of course, it cannot be assumed that the ritual life of Pranamis has not changed in a century and a half. However, a Muslim in 1764 described the worship space inside a Pranami temple as follows: there was a small bed with a turban on it, called Prannath’s seat, with a stool on each side of the bed, one holding a copy of the Qur‘an, the other a copy of the Puranas. Then around 1900 Grierson reported that the Qulzam Swarup, the Pranamis’ sacred book, occupied a central place in the Pranami worship area, along with the bed and turban.46

Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 16. Khan, Pranami Faith, 3. 46 Grierson, “Prannathis,” 150–­51. 44 45

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Throughout these various descriptions of Pranami worship spanning two and a half centuries, the elements of aniconic devotion and a focus on scripture are constants. Assuming that singing, which pervades the bhakti tradition, also constituted an element in Pranami ritual in the mid-­nineteenth century, Haqq would have found these three elements to be important in nineteenth-­century Indian Methodism as well.47 The transition, then, from Pranami to Methodist worship was marked by important continuities as well as difference. In his autobiography he relates an incident when he took a cousin (who had come to try to convince him to return to the family faith) to a Methodist worship service: Humphrey Mem Sahib was playing on the melodeon and leading the singing of Hindustani hymns. This cousin of mine, hearing the music and singing, became very thoughtful, and after close of service, and we had gone out, he stopped suddenly and said to me: “You have committed no fault in becoming a Christian, for this worship is so excellent that from witnessing it my heart is exceedingly joyful, and the music of that instrument, with the melody of the Christians’ voices, has stirred me deeply.”48

Whatever the cousin’s actual reaction to a Methodist worship service, this incident probably reveals more about Haqq’s reasons for joining the Methodists. For him, the worship—­especially the music—­was “excellent.” The similarities between Pranami and Methodist devotion or worship are in line with Haqq’s previous assertion that he found confirmation for the Christian claims about Jesus in the Qur‘an. Haqq writes that when he heard the message about Jesus as the savior of the world, he “hastened to compare it with statements in the Koran regarding the prophet Isa.” He continues, “In the inquiry I now made I received much light from the teaching of the Koran; that is to say, the account of the visit of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, and the birth of the holy child without an earthly father, his power, etc., was very helpful to me.”49 In this 1884 narrative about his conversion to Christianity, Zahur-­al-­ Haqq does not dwell on theological and religious ruptures with his

It is telling that in the incident recounted by James Thoburn about baptizing eleven neophytes on pp. 139 and 140 above, Zahur-­al-­Haqq starts to defuse the tension by starting a song. Singing was a part of Haqq’s religious repertoire. 48 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 20–­21. 49 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 9–­10. 47

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previous faith and religious practice: he simply assumes the ruptures.50 Rather, he elaborates continuities: the understanding of Jesus in Christianity and Islam, and Methodist worship that was pleasing to him, a Pranami. Even the theological motifs that Haqq records resonate with his previous religious condition. The key biblical teaching that Haqq says convinced him to join the Methodists was the Rev. Humphrey’s exposition of Mark 8:36 during Sunday school: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Haqq remembered the missionary dealing with the issue of losing and gaining one’s life: an issue that would have spoken to him, a seeker after religious truth. Similarly, the initial preaching about Jesus as savior of the world had intrigued this young seeker. Finally, it was human kindness and love and moving worship services, rather than some deep conflict with his own religion, that drew Haqq to the Methodist community. The search for salvation, the presence of a divine savior, communal worship, and communal living: all these elements tied together the bhakti and evangelical Christian movements that Haqq experienced in the Pranami and Methodist sects. Hence he could use bhakti motifs to speak about his new Christian faith. The rupture with his previous life, so prominent in American conversion narratives, came after conversion, not before, and Haqq focused on the sociological rather than theological ruptures. Once Haqq had been baptized, some of his friends shunned him, and he had to give up his teaching job, which led to his employment as a teacher by the Methodist mission. His family and community made several efforts to bring him back to the fold. This was a common experience of Indian converts to Christianity. All these overtures were to no avail; Haqq remained a Methodist. However, he never indicates that his family persecuted or threatened him; in fact Haqq claims that his father faced disapproval from the community for his compassionate treatment of his wayward son.51 Haqq had to leave his wife and son Fazl (the latter joined him 50 See Richard Fox Young, “Enabling Encounters: The Case of Nilakanth-­ Nehemiah Goreh, Brahmin Convert,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 29, no. 1 (2005): 14–­20, on how converts view their conversion differently at different points in their Christian life. 51 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 19. In a different document, however, Zahur-­al-­Haqq wrote that his family locked him up in a room in their house, and it was only because of his (Muslim) wife that he was able to escape. Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 174–­75.

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later in the Methodist mission), but he remarried—­a Christian woman, Susannah—­and became a skilled preacher and able administrator in the Methodist mission in India.52 Haqq’s immersion into and dedication to the Methodist system in India slowly shaped and formed his religiosity, so that he reported his work and life in ways that were easily recognizable to his missionary colleagues and superiors.53 About a decade after his conversion to Christianity, Haqq was deemed ready to be ordained a Methodist minister. On his way to Bareilly to be ordained, he stopped at Moradabad, where he was urged by his missionary mentors to experience a “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” As he recalls it, “efforts were put forth in order that any who had not experienced this inward work might become aware of the fact and seek and obtain a full knowledge of the blessings promised in the Gospel to those who seek in faith.”54 The idea that Christians should seek a distinguishable baptism of the Holy Spirit in which they would completely dedicate their life to holiness had emerged in American evangelical circles in the 1850s, and after that gained more and more popularity.55 Missionary James Thoburn was instrumental in promoting the idea and practice of a spiritual baptism among the Methodists in India beginning in the late 1860s.56 The consternation that this teaching could cause in India (not to mention the United States) is reflected in Haqq’s reaction to this new teaching: “I became much disturbed in my mind, and began to say in my heart: ‘What strange words are these? What, am I not even now fully a Christian? I received baptism a long time ago. I have been preaching the Gospel for years, and have kept the ordinances

52 C. Stanley Thoburn, North India Conference: A Brief History (Lucknow: Centenary Celebration Committee, North India Conference, 1963), 8; J. H. Messmore, The Life of Edwin Wallace Parker, D.D.: Missionary Bishop of Southern Asia, Forty-­One Years a Missionary in India (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1903), 189. 53 Zahur-­ul-­Haqq, “Report of the Amroha and Babukhera Station,” in Fourth Annual Report of the Mission Stations, 38; Zahur-­ul-­Haqq, “Report of the Amroha and Babukhera Station,” in Fifth Annual Report of the Mission Stations of the Methodist Episcopal Church, U.S.A., in India, for the Year 1869 (Lucknow: American Methodist Mission Press, 1870), 37–­38. 54 Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 27. 55 Donald W. Dayton, “From ‘Christian Perfection’ to the ‘Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” in Perspectives on American Methodism, ed. Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1993), 289–­97. 56 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 195–­96, 211.

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of the Church. What lack I yet that is needful for me to obtain?’ ”57 So a rupture occurred even after conversion to Christianity. Nonetheless, and perhaps not surprisingly given that he was seeking ordination as a Methodist minister, Haqq went through the process of receiving this second baptism. He “put away all worldly thoughts” and began to consider his spiritual state. He “fled for refuge to God”—­an interesting choice of words—­with the knowledge that if he did not receive this second baptism, his profession of Christianity was worthless. He realized his weakness and sin, “wept much” at his condition, but then was comforted by God and experienced a great change within himself. “My sorrow and distress were removed, and perfect joy came into my heart instead! At first I wept for sorrow, now I wept for happiness!” The changed heart resulted in a changed person: he acquired a new motive for his work, and his “disposition and temper were all made new.” The experience of that day resulted in a permanent change within him, he wrote.58 Haqq’s account follows a standard Methodist script for baptism of the Holy Spirit. This was a religious experience that was quite thoroughly and uniquely Methodist. Yet embedded in this typically Methodist account is an allusion that is also very common in bhakti imagery: God is the One to whom the devotee flees for refuge, and upon finding refuge experiences great joy.59 After another decade of success in pastoral work, administration, and evangelism, Haqq was appointed presiding elder in 1882, the first Indian elevated to that position. This occurred during the heyday of British imperialism in India, a sign that American Christian missions were not necessarily taking all their cues from British imperial rule. In some ways, Haqq’s autobiography adopts the template of the Western evangelical conversion narrative. Just as that narrative had five distinguishable religious phases, Haqq passed through five religious phases in his life: Sunni Muslim, Pranami, Methodist convert, baptized by the Holy Spirit, and Methodist preacher. Yet his five-­phase narrative also differs in critical ways from the American narrative. As noted above, Haqq experienced no crisis of guilt for a previous life of sin that was then resolved by a decisive moment of conversion entailing trust Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 27. Haqq, Autobiography of Zahur-­al-­Haqq, 28–­29. 59 See Francis X. Clooney, Beyond Compare: St. Francis of Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 1–­6. 57 58

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and assurance in Jesus.60 Rather, for Haqq there was general dissatisfaction with received tradition that led him to seek truth in various religious communities. And he was attracted to Christian doctrine because of his experience of Christian community and Christian worship. Haqq’s conversion is narrated as a gradual movement from Sunni Islam to the Pranami sect to the Methodist sect. Conversion for him was a process rather than a singular event.61 Finally, along with obvious differences, Haqq underscored continuities between Christianity and his previous religious experiences. The Qur’an, for him, affirmed Christian claims about Jesus. He found the worship in both Pranami and Methodist sects to be pleasing. In fact, it was the continuities between different religious traditions that allowed him to embrace the differences. With his status as a presiding elder in the Methodist Church, Haqq was using his autobiography as an opportunity to narrate to his audiences—­fellow Methodists and other Protestants, as well as Indians outside the Christian fold—­some of the complexities of Christian conversion in the Indian context.62 As such he was asserting some independence from American Methodist praxis and theology within an overall context of loyalty to American Methodist ecclesiastical structures. In this way he negotiated the competing desires for independence from and loyalty to the Methodist missionary movement. The Loyal Mission Worker: Joel Janvier (1830?–­1900) Sometime in the late 1830s, a Rajput boy of seven or eight, originally from Banda in Bundelkhand, a region southeast of Delhi, ended up in the American Presbyterian Missions’ orphanage in Allahabad.63 The Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 229. Andrew Walls, “The Translation Principle in Christian History,” in his The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996), 28; Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 1. 62 It may very well be that the American missionaries who translated and disseminated Haqq’s work would have been educating their American Methodist constituency about differences in the Indian experience. 63 There are several missionary sources for Joel Janvier’s life: William Butler, The Land of the Veda (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1871), 214–­19, 250–­57; William Butler, “The First Native Minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church in India,” Ladies’ Repository, March 1871, 199–­209; J. L. Humphrey, “Rev. Joel T. Janvier,” Gospel in All Lands, December 1900, 550; Minutes of the Thirty-­Seventh Session of the North India Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held 60 61

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Joel Janvier. Book caption: “Joel Janvier, a Native Minister Given to Dr. Butler by the Presbyterian Mission in Allahabad, Blind and in His Old Age.”

missionaries provided him with a home and education, which included the study of English and some Greek and Hebrew, and in time he became a teacher in the Presbyterians’ school. It was the custom in those days for Presbyterian missionaries to baptize the orphan children in their at Bareilly, January 9–­14, 1901 (Lucknow: Methodist Publishing House, 1901), 41–­43; John N. Hollister, The Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1956), xxx–­xxxi; Scott, History of Fifty Years, 9. Hollister gives his birth date as 1830, but Butler says Janvier was twenty-two years old when they met in 1856, which would have made his year of birth 1834.

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care, and when he was baptized, he was given the name of a pioneer among Presbyterian missionaries in India, Joel Janvier, who had been murdered.64 In his early twenties, Joel married a Christian woman four years his junior known simply by the name of Emma. In 1856 Joel and Emma Janvier and their infant child lived in Allahabad with Emma’s mother, Peggy; William Butler called them a “Christianized Hindoo household.”65 However, he noted that Emma was quite fair, probably an indication that her father was European.66 A photograph of Emma’s mother, Peggy, shows her to be of rather dark complexion, wearing traditional regional clothing.67 Unlike Peggy and Emma, the father is never mentioned in any accounts of the Janvier family, which most likely indicates that there was some irregularity, at least in the eyes of the missionary society, in Emma’s parents’ relationship. When William Butler was going to Bareilly to commence the Methodist mission in 1856, he stopped at the Presbyterian Mission in Allahabad along the way. He asked the missionaries there for an assistant who could speak some English so as to communicate with him, as well as work in Hindi and Urdu among Indians. Joel Janvier was the choice of the Presbyterians, and after serious discussions with the prospective recruit, his wife, and her mother Peggy, Butler took the couple and their infant child with him to Bareilly. Peggy followed the family two years later, to become the matron of the Methodist girls’ orphanage in Bareilly.68 Butler was acutely aware that Joel Janvier had been schooled in the Calvinist system of theology, which both British and American Methodists eyed with some suspicion.69 The missionary therefore quickly set to impart to the Presby64 “Allahabad Mission and Furrukhabad Mission,” Foreign Missionary Chronicle, April 1841, 98–­99; J. D. Brown, “Sketches of Native Helpers in India,” Missionary Advocate 26, no. 12 (1871): 59. 65 Butler, “First Native Minister,” 200. Butler never gives Peggy’s last name, although in a letter she writes, she signs her name “Peggy Pybah.” Butler, “First Native Minister,” 207. 66 Also, during the 1857 Uprising, a sepoy picked out Emma among a group of washerwomen as a Christian, when she was trying to disguise herself among them. Joel writes that “her bright, intelligent face might well betray her”—­a sign that she looked significantly different from low-­caste and darker-­skinned Indian women (Butler, Land of the Veda, 253). 67 Butler, “First Native Minister,” 203. 68 Butler, “First Native Minister,” 207. 69 Butler, Land of the Veda, 219; Edward Thomson, Our Oriental Missions (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1870), 1:98.

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terian Indian the fundamentals of Methodism.70 Among other things, the Methodists expected a particular spiritual experience not required by the Presbyterians. Janvier reported that he sought and had such an experience when the “Spirit witnessed with his spirit that he was a child of God.”71 Joel Janvier, it seems, adapted well to the requirements of the particular school of Evangelicalism into which he was adopted. Janvier began work with Butler as soon as the party settled down in Bareilly. The former conducted the Sunday and midweek Hindustani services, while Butler conducted the English ones; Janvier interpreted for Butler as the need arose.72 Three months after the Methodists’ arrival in Bareilly, the 1857 Uprising erupted in Meerut on May 10, rapidly spreading to other cities in Hindi North India, and news of it reached the British in Bareilly in a few days. Upon the urging of the British commanding officer in Bareilly, the Butlers fled to the safety of Naini Tal on May 18, leaving the mission house and its contents, along with the supervision of the small band of Methodists, in the hands of Joel Janvier. When the Uprising reached Bareilly on May 31, 1857, the British of course were attacked, and those that were not killed fled toward Naini Tal. Half of the small English Methodist congregation was killed in this attack, and the Methodist mission house was burned to the ground.73 Janvier had led worship service that morning.74 Detecting that they were in grave danger, the six Indian Christians associated with the Methodist mission immediately began to hide. They were given prompt protection among the lowest classes in society. The watchman, or chowkidar, first helped to hide the Indian Christian women. Two of the Christian men disguised themselves as gardeners, although they were recognized by an acquaintance who attacked them. Joel escaped death by climbing a tree.75 Emma Janvier was running to a house where some Europeans were hiding, when the Butlers’ washerwoman, or dhobin, grabbed the fleeing woman, telling her not to enter it. The dhobin proceeded to disguise the young preacher’s wife among the washerwomen to protect her from harm. In fact a passing sepoy noticed Emma among the Butler, Land of the Veda, 219. Butler, “First Native Minister,” 202. 72 Butler, Land of the Veda, 223. 73 Butler, Land of the Veda, 248. 74 Joel Janvier’s account of what happened to him and the Methodist congregation in Bareilly is given in Butler, Land of the Veda, 252–­57. 75 Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India, 31. 70 71

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washerwomen and remarked that she looked like a Christian; the dhobin insisted that Emma was one of them.76 The house to which Emma was fleeing was later burned to the ground with all its occupants inside. As Maria, a Eurasian with a German father and a member of the first class of Methodists in Bareilly, was fleeing the danger, a sepoy decapitated her. The dhobin buried her body. When it was dark, Joel, Emma, their son, and the chowkidar left Bareilly on foot and headed in the direction of Allahabad, which was where Joel had grown up in the Presbyterian mission. Emma was physically frail, so the company had to move slowly. Moreover, because of the threat to their lives, they avoided the main roads, traveling on pathways from village to village. Their plan was rather straightforward—­it was to get to a British stronghold in which they would be safe. However, all the British centers they came upon had been overrun, so the company kept wandering in search of safety. Along the way various Hindu families gave them relief and aid in the form of food and local intelligence. Near Fatehpur the party finally met the British army, which they accompanied to Allahabad. There Joel found work on the railroads—­an industry that employed many Indian Christians—­in order to make a living for his family until he could be rehired by the Mission. All in all, the Janviers probably wandered about three hundred miles fleeing from their enemies and searching for refuge.77 When the belligerence was over, Joel rejoined the Methodists and was ordained as a minister by Bishop Thomson in 1864. The ordination, however, was not without controversy, due to Joel’s race. The minutes of the Annual Conference at which he was ordained note that on December 9, 1864, “Joel Thomas Janvier was recommended by the Bareilly Quarterly Conference as a suitable person to receive Deacon’s orders. After some consideration, the case was postponed for the present.”78 The next day, however, he was elected Deacon, along with another Indian, Henry Martyn Daniel, and missionary James A. Cawdell. The question that was debated was how a native clergy could be best developed: “Given a common aim in the development of a native Church, what is the surest way of securing the object? Some Such easy recognition of the disguised Emma as a Christian is another reason to believe she was Eurasian. 77 Butler, Land of the Veda, 256. 78 Minutes of the First Session of the India Mission Annual Conference, Held at Lucknow, Dec. 8, 1864 (Bareilly: American Methodist Mission Press, 1865), 26. 76

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maintained that this would be done by admitting native preachers into the conference, others affirmed that mixed ecclesiastical organizations had never yet developed independent native ones.”79 The American missionaries discussing this issue were well aware that they came from a racially divided society and a nation that was currently in the throes of a civil war over slavery. The visiting American bishop presiding at the conference discussed the American Civil War and slavery in his address, portraying both as a blemish on America’s Christian civilization and a stumbling block in the Methodists’ efforts to evangelize the Indians.80 At the end of the day, a majority decided “to experiment with the mixed organization” of Indians and Europeans in one annual conference, and Joel T. Janvier, along with other Indian candidates, was elected into the conference and ordained a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church.81 The Methodists thus avoided the contentiousness created by the Presbyterians’ form of organization where missionaries belonged to a body that excluded Indians.82 Emma and Joel had four children before Emma’s death in 1870, fourteen years after she joined the Methodist mission.83 Joel continued to work at various churches as an able Methodist minister until his eyesight failed him in 1884, at which point he settled down in Bareilly and preached regularly for the congregation there. He retired in 1888, but continued to preach until 1898, when he was paralyzed by a stroke. He slowly lost strength in his voice and limbs, and died on September 7, 1900. According to some sources, Joel T. Janvier had a great gift for preaching, speaking with “verve and inspiration.”84 79 “East India M. E. Conference,” Christian Advocate and Journal 40, no. 7 (1865): 52; emphasis in original. One wonders to what extent the Presbyterian missionary experience weighed on their minds. 80 Minutes of the First Session of the India Mission Annual Conference, 4–­6. 81 The American Methodists practiced a two-­step ordination, following Anglican and Roman Catholic precedent, where the minister was first ordained deacon and then after some time ordained elder. 82 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 171. 83 Butler, “First Native Minister,” 207; Thomson, Our Oriental Missions, 1:98; Brenton T. Badley, Visions and Victories in Hindustan: A Story of the Mission Stations of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Southern Asia, 2 vols. (Madras: Methodist Publishing House, 1931), 1:22. 84 Minutes of the Thirty-­Seventh Session of the North India Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held at Bareilly, January 9–­14, 1901 (Lucknow: Methodist Publishing House, 1901): 41–­42.

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Perhaps the most notable feature of Joel Janvier’s life and career is how untouched it seems to have been with any form of controversy or dissent. Of all the Indian Christian leaders discussed in this chapter, he is the one whose identity and service, from what we know, hews most closely to missionary desires and expectations.85 Yet Janvier was not unique in this respect, for any number of Indian leaders worked in the mission with dedicated loyalty to the missionaries’ visions of Christian community. Janvier’s upbringing in a Christian orphanage may have had much to do with his commitment to the mission and its American leaders; Ishwari Dass, whose life is recounted below, also grew up in a Presbyterian orphanage and was very loyal to the mission. Thus among the earliest pillars of Indian Christian communities were those who wholeheartedly gave themselves to the work of the church as it was envisaged and articulated by its missionary leaders. The Indian Christian Intellectual: Ishwari Dass (1827–­1867) According to his own testimony, Ishwari Dass was born somewhere in the “Upper Provinces,” what is today Uttar Pradesh, into a family that “belonged to the original agricultural class; it is said original, because in the present age [1851] people of all trades and castes have taken that employment into hand, which, in days of yore, was exclusively followed by a certain portion of the community.”86 In a later work, Dass noted that people from the upper “Brahmin, warrior and writer” castes could also be landholders and farmers, but hereditary yeomen of the Shudra caste were the “original farmers.” Not that these farmers were necessarily poor—­a well-­off farmer could “live comfortably, according to the Hindoo idea of comfort.”87 Dass acknowledged his relatively low caste but landed origins without any embarrassment or defensiveness.88 85 Of course, it can never be known what Joel Janvier himself thought of his life as a Presbyterian and then Methodist Christian; such information is simply not available in extant records. 86 Ishuree Dass, A Brief Account of a Voyage to England and America (Allahabad: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1851; repr. Kessinger Publishing, n.d.), 3. 87 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 38. 88 See Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–­1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), for a perspective on the fluidity of caste hierarchy in North India until the middle of the nineteenth century.

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Dass was born around the year 1827.89 When he was about seven years old, a famine took the life of his parents, and he eventually ended up in the orphanage in Fatehpur of Dr. Charles Madden, the surgeon who had employed Gopi Nath Nundy. After about five years under Madden’s care, in 1838 he transferred (with Nundy) to the Presbyterian orphanage in Rakha that the Rev. Henry R. Wilson and his wife ran as part of the American Presbyterian Mission. The Presbyterians had founded Rakha as a Christian village outside Fatehgarh to provide residence, employment, and Christian community for orphans and for recent converts who had been ostracized from their families and communities upon baptism. So Dass was brought up in a social setting created by the exigencies of the mission context. Early on at Rakha, Dass showed great intellectual promise, being particularly fond of books. He made exceptional progress in the study of English language and literature. “He could speak that language as few Hindoos can,” one missionary testified, “with no perceptible accent, and with great grammatical and idiomatical purity.”90 Dass enjoyed a close relationship with his American guardians. As he put it, they “paid the most faithful attention to my mental, moral and spiritual education and improvement, and I shall always be under the greatest obligation to them for their kindness.”91 The Presbyterian records are silent about when exactly Dass was baptized and officially joined the church by profession of faith, although it was “most probably done in early life, for he was one of the first three orphans admitted to Communion.”92 In 1846, when he was about twenty years old, the Wilsons took Dass with them to the United States of America via England, with the intention of putting him in school at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He spent almost two years away from home—­a little less than eleven months at sea, two months in England, and close to a year in the United States. His time in the United States was much briefer than

89 The biographical information is from Walter L. Allison, One Hundred Years of Christian Work of the North India Mission of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Mysore City, India: Wesley Press, 1941?), 26–­28; and from “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission, N. India—­Rev. Ishuree Dass,” The Foreign Missionary, September 1867, 93–­96. 90 “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission,” 93. 91 Quoted in Allison, One Hundred Years, 26. 92 “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission,” 93.

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originally anticipated, due to the weakness of his eyes, which allowed him to complete only one semester at Lafayette.93 Three years after he returned from this journey, Dass published a memoir of it, although the work itself seems to have been completed soon after his arrival home.94 A Brief Account of a Voyage to England and America reveals a skilled writer who comes across as both frank and generous in his assessment of his surroundings. The author willingly shared his impressions of the constant novelty around him, and he was someone who apparently found genuine pleasure in the new places and people he encountered. While there are a few exceptions to this characterization, on the whole Ishwari Dass portrayed himself as someone who possessed what may be called a cosmopolitan disposition.95 In his travels to unknown places and sojourns with unknown people, Dass’ basic stance was openness and engagement with the situation that was confronting him.96 This stance allowed him to negotiate different cultures easily. Upon his return to India, Dass married and worked as a teacher and headmaster at various Presbyterian schools. He also worked as a translator for the American Tract Society. During the 1857 Uprising, like many of his coreligionists, Dass had to flee from his work at a mission institution with his family, moving from village to village. The accounts of these wanderings reveal that it was not easy to decide a priori who was friend or foe of the Indian Christians. For example, we are told that Dass first escaped with some other denizens of Rakha village to the “former home of one of the Rakha Christians”97 and hid there until the zamindar of that place decided it was too risky for him to harbor Christians on his lands. The hiding place is somewhat surprising, given the hostility that converts usually faced from their kinfolk upon baptism. The same group was later given shelter by “the Rajah of Binsua’s people” for several months in one of his villages, even though the villagers Dass, Brief Account, 8. It is difficult to tell whether the keen recollections in Dass’ Brief Account are from memory or from travel journals and notes. 95 I am using here the understanding of cosmopolitanism developed by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 96 For a fuller description of Dass as portrayed in this travelogue, see Arun W. Jones, “Christian Mission and Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Ishwari Dass,” in Construction of the Other, Identification of the Self, ed. Martin Tamcke and Gladson Jathanna (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), 139–­58. 97 “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission,” 93. 93 94

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themselves were hostile to the refugees. After many months of living as fugitives, the Indian Presbyterians were about to surrender themselves to the Nawab of Furrukhabad, one of the prominent leaders of the Uprising, when they heard that the British had retaken Kanpur. The group headed toward Kanpur, where they were “kindly received and succored by Rev. Mr. Gregson, an English Baptist missionary.”98 They were then able to return to Rakha and rebuild their village. After the Uprising Dass became the headmaster of the Presbyterian school in Farrukhabad, and then of the school in Rakha. He also assisted in ministerial work, leading one of the Sunday services every week. In 1865 Dass was chosen to continue the work of Presbyterian missionary Edward Sayre in Fatehpur, and consequently on January 12, 1866, he was ordained in the Rakha church to the Presbyterian ministry. However, soon after this his health began to fail, and at the end of that year, he was sent back to Fatehgarh with the hope that he would recover physically—­a hope that was not realized. He died in May 1867, around the age of forty, after months of severe pain from dyspepsia. Besides being a teacher, pastor, and translator, Dass was a rather prolific writer. He authored an English–­Urdu manual with reading exercises and a concise grammar and vocabulary, “to enable persons of little leisure to obtain a better acquaintance with the Urdu language.”99 This book was aimed at an audience that was literate in English—­presumably Europeans living in India—­who would be interested in learning Urdu. He also completed works that were aimed at the literate Indian population, such as translations and compilations of Western works of science and literature. Dass produced several textbooks in Urdu for the Presbyterian schools, an essay on female education that won him a prize of Rs. 300, and three books in the English language that have survived: A Brief Account of a Voyage to England and America (1851), Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of North India (1860), and Lectures on Theology, Adapted to the Natives of India (1860), which won him a prize of Rs. 500. This last work was also published in Urdu.100 Ishwari Dass was undoubtedly one of the keen minds in the first generation of North Indian Protestantism, and probably would not have developed his

“Communications: Furrukhabad Mission,” 94. “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission,” 94. 100 “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission,” 95. 98 99

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considerable academic skills had he not been adopted as an orphan in the most academically inclined Christian mission in Hindi North India. Ishwari Dass played several roles as a first-­generation Indian Christian intellectual—­teacher, preacher, school administrator, author—­but the persona that he self-­consciously creates over and over again in his surviving texts is that of cultural broker. His special gift, as he saw it, was interpreting Christianity, and Europeans, to Indian society, a task he undertook in his Lectures in Theology, which will be examined in chapter 5. He also saw himself as an interpreter of Indian society to Europeans. His Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of Northern India is a case in point. Almost all Europeans who moved in Protestant Indian mission circles in the nineteenth century would have known of William Ward’s massive and authoritative work A View of the History, Literature and Mythology of the Hindoos, Including a Minute Description of Their Manners and Customs, which was first published in four volumes in 1811, with a second edition appearing in two volumes in 1815 (vol. 2) and 1818 (vol. 1).101 As noted in chapter 3, several subsequent editions and printings were issued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a testimony to its power in representing Indian society to the European world. The echo of Ward’s title in Dass’ own work signals that the latter is writing about the same theme. His treatment of it, however, is quite different. Ward’s work, as previously noted, provided extremely negative propaganda on Indian thought and society in the guise of impartial scholarship. His approach, which combines occasional mild praise with vituperative condemnation, is immediately discernible in the first paragraph of the introduction to the 1818 volume of the 2nd edition:

101 William Ward, Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners, of the Hindoos (Serampore: Mission Press, 1811). This work was then published as an abridged second edition in 2 vols., with the second volume appearing first and with a difference in title between the 2 vols.: A View of the History, Literature and Religion, of the Hindoos, Including a Minute Description of Their Manners and Customs, and Translations from Their Principal Works. In Two Volumes. The Second Edition, Carefully Abridged, and Greatly Improved. Volume II (Serampore: Mission Press, 1815); and A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology, of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of Their Manners and Customs, and Translations from Their Principle Works. In Two Volumes. The Second Edition. Carefully Abridged, and Greatly Improved. Volume I (Serampore: Mission Press, 1818).

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However difficult it may be, if not impossible, to trace the origin of the Hindoo nation, and however absurd its own chronology, the Hindoos must be allowed a high claim to antiquity: their most early writings, their unchanging manners, and a variety of facts connected with their records, which are noticed in this and other works, establish this fact beyond all contradiction. But how humbling is the consideration, that whole ages of the earliest history of so large and interesting a portion of mankind should be buried in an oblivion perfectly impenetrable. How many astonishing events, how many precious monuments of the powers of the human mind, must have been thus lost to all posterity! And yet this is a great degree the case, respecting all the nations of antiquity during the revolution of all the ages prior to that of Herodotus.—­In this culpable neglect of recording real facts, and in the invention of fictitious ones, claiming their descent from the gods, and filling millions of years with the wonderful actions of their forefathers, how poor, how contemptible does the race appear!102

In marked contrast to Ward, Dass begins his Domestic Manners and Customs not with history but with a general characterization of the country. To counter Ward’s stentorian European missionary voice, Dass also provides a European missionary perspective on India, albeit a strikingly different one—­that of Dr. David Ewart, missionary in Calcutta of the Free Church of Scotland. “Hindustan or India” says a European writer in the country “is one of the most interesting and most important countries on the surface of our globe. It has excited the ambition of Conquerors from other lands since the time of Semiramis till the present day; and has called forth the enterprise of the merchant since the earliest periods of commercial exertion down to the present era of enlightened and extensive national intercourse. The Historian, the Poet, the Antiquarian, the Philologist, the Philosopher, the Naturalist, and the Politician have, each in their several spheres, found matter to exercise their thoughts and summon forth their energies in contemplating this wonderful and interesting section of Asia.”103

Barely uttering a word of his own, Dass signals to the readership that it is going to receive a view of India that contrasts with the dominant missionary one—­and the intended readership is definitely European, as Dass makes clear in his preface.104 With his native blood and Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Mythology, of the Hindoos, i. Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 1. 104 In the preface to the Indian edition of the work, the author explains that he wrote it first for Europeans (including Americans) who had never been to India. 102 103

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roots, his Western education and fluent English, his Hindu origins and Christian inheritance, Dass is claiming to be an expert on India for the ruling class of Europeans there. He sees himself as the cultural interpreter par excellence. In this role, he presents India and Indians—­and particularly the Hindus—­in a much more positive light than do Ward and other missionary critics of the subcontinent’s peoples, especially when they were being compared to Europeans. “The features of the Hindoos are as regular and handsome as those of any nation in Europe,” Dass declares. “The Hindoo mind, supposing it has opportunity for cultivation and improvement, is not in the least inferior to the European; this is evident from what it has done, and that, unassisted by foreign nations.”105 In the opening pages, he also deals with Indian history—­which had so exercised Ward—­by summarily and unproblematically dividing it into three eras: Hindu, Muslim, and British.106 In this summary he simply adopts European biases: In the first period when the Hindus were independent, they “enjoyed a good measure of peace” and “made great improvements in the arts and sciences.” Then came the Muslims, initiating a period of depredations against Indians. “The misery that a great many Mohomedan Kings caused among the Hindoos was as great as any that a conquered nation has ever experienced, the Jews excepted,” Dass opines. Finally, he characterizes the third period of Indian history, under the British government, as “the happiest that Hindoostan has ever seen.”107 Dass’ positive assessment of “the Hindoos” does not mean that he is uncritical of his own people and their civilization. There are two general criticisms that consistently emerge in his ethnography. The first set of criticisms has to do with the religious and moral life of his people. Given that Dass was a leading member of an evangelical Protestant denomination, this line of attack is not surprising. So after extolling the great Urged, however, by “some European friends,” he has made it available to the growing European population in his own land, because “the Rulers should know all they can of the Ruled, more especially when both the races are so foreign to each other as the British and the Hindoos are.” Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, v. 105 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 5. 106 Such a division was popular among missionaries and other Europeans; it has its origins in James Mill, The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1817). 107 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 2–­4.

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Indian progress in science, philosophy, and architecture (that he alleges was crushed by the Muslim invasion of India), he notes that the Hindu religious books contain numerous “gross errors” pertaining to scientific knowledge. He then goes on to assert boldly that the “moral character of the Hindoos is awful.” This thesis is, strangely, almost immediately qualified by the claim that the vast Hindu literature contains “great encomiums on virtue and morality,” and he quotes a couplet by the bhakti saint Tulsi Das, which he compares approvingly with verses from the New Testament. However, his overall assessment of Hindu morality and religion is quite negative. The gods act shamefully, and “the daily practice of all the Hindoos, in spite of the many good moral precepts in their books is revolting to a reflecting mind.”108 He goes on to list for several pages the moral shortcomings of his people, ending with an attack on their gullibility and superstition. Dass’ claim, taken unquestioningly from missionaries, is clear: Hinduism is bad for the Hindus.109 Yet going against general missionary opinion, Dass does not condemn the caste system per se; he simply notes it as a characteristic of Hindu society: “One of the most remarkable features about the Hindoo nation is its division into castes; this division has been maintained from time immemorial, and at the present age the Hindoo adheres to it with a tenacity which ends only with his life.”110 With this straightforward introduction to the topic of castes, Dass refuses to criticize the supposedly strict boundaries maintained by them and the division of labor that results from them. In stark contrast is Ward’s view of caste: “Like all other attempts to cramp the human intellect, and forcibly to restrain men within bounds which nature scorns to keep, this system, however specious in theory, has operated like the Chinese national shoe, it has rendered the whole nation cripples.”111 Dass has no criticism of

Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 7–­9. This was the argument in 1813 of Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain: Particularly with Respect to Morals, and on the Means of Improving It, Cambridge Library Collection (1792; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 110 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 14. Notice the words “at the present age,” perhaps indicating that Dass is aware that over time the boundaries between castes have been pliable and permeable. 111 Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Mythology, of the Hindoos, 49. 108 109

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the treatment of the low castes; the sweepers, for example, are seen as integral to the functioning of Indian agriculture.112 There are two particular castes, however, that come in for criticism. The first of these are the Brahmins, although his critique of Brahmins is different from that of Ward and his ilk. To begin, Dass does not view Brahmins in a uniformly negative light. His description of them is for the most part rather matter of fact, and at one point the author quite stridently criticizes a European author’s characterization of them. Dass is most interested in the way that Brahmins live, and so he goes beyond stereotypes of caste and notes, for example, that some of them eat meat while others do not, that some of them are poor while others are rich, and that Brahmins engage themselves in a variety of occupations, including business, farming, and the military.113 The standard missionary criticism of Brahmins was that with their priestly powers and authority, they invented and maintained the caste system for their own benefit. Thus Ward writes, “Every person at all acquainted with the Hindoo system, must have been forcibly struck by the idea, that it is wholly the work of brahmins; who have here placed themselves above kings in honour, and laid the whole nation prostrate at their feet.”114 Dass does not at all take up this line of argument; for him, Brahmins are simply one of the four castes, and this ordering of society is indigenous to India, as other orderings are to other countries. Dass rather criticizes Brahmins for their (lack of) education, which if it occurs at all is in Sanskrit, a currently unused and therefore useless language. They would be better served learning Hindi. Dass therefore manifests his decided preference for the use of vernacular in religious instruction and communication. Again, given his prominent role in missionary education, this criticism is not surprising. Dass does not fault the Brahmins themselves for this deficiency, but rather Hindu religious custom, which is slavishly and thoughtlessly followed. Part of the fault also lies with the eclipse of the first epoch of Indian history, the time of the Hindu kings under whom learning among the Brahmins “was perhaps prevalent.” Indirectly, Dass criticizes Muslim rule for the sorry state of Brahmin learning.115 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 36–­49. Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 14–­20. 114 Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Mythology, of the Hindoos, 50. 115 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 16–­17. 112 113

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Like missionaries, Dass criticizes Brahmins for their claim to be gods, a claim that they abuse and that ordinary people believe. Yet he immediately qualifies this statement by informing his readers that when there are disputes between Brahmins and other castes, “very often” the former are “abused and beaten, and sometimes murdered too.” Besides, hundreds of these “gods” are thrown in prison by the British government, and some are hanged—­demonstrating that under British rule the Brahmins “are on a level with the other castes.”116 In these ways, even through his critiques of them, Dass seeks to humanize the Brahmins for his readers by removing them from the pedestal of alternating divinization and demonization upon which William Ward had placed them. The Kayasths are the second group that Dass attacks.117 He places them at the top of the fourth caste, or varna, although he notes that they themselves claim that they are members of the third, merchant varna. The Kayasths are thus a liminal group in the caste system, and Dass portrays them as liminal in other ways. A great many of them are clerks, working in various locations such as courts and government offices and recording land deeds and revenues. Because they are literate, many of them earn their living by teaching boys Hindi and arithmetic. Kayasths are also lawyers, and because of this they learn Persian for the courts. “All these lawyers are like half starved greedy wolves and rob without the least mercy all those who happen to have any thing to do with them.” These lawyers are religiously punctilious but ethically depraved: “They do not seem to have got the least correct notion about virtue and vice.”118 Following is a summary of the character of lawyers worthy of William Ward, who, in contrast to Dass, has hardly anything to say, positive or negative, about Kayasths.119 Dishonesty, oppression, and all such crimes, they say, are a necessary part of their profession and means of subsistence and they could not support themselves without them. They are certainly amongst the most faithful servants of the Wicked Spirit; and these men, with those that are connected with the police and the courts in different ways are amongst the most

Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 21. Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 32–­36. 118 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 34. 119 Ward, View of the History, Literature, and Mythology, of the Hindoos, 72–­73. 116 117

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abominable beings in the world; it seems as if they were infernal spirits in human shape.120

Dass also finds the Kayasths corrupt and corrupted because they are “half Mohomedans” due to their mastery of the Persian language and customs of the Persian court. In fact, he claims, “they believe the religion of the Moslems to be true, though it refutes the one they profess.”121 He then proceeds to deride the religious customs of the Kayasths, who supposedly break all sorts of purity laws simply for the sake of convenience and gain. For example, they eat unclean meat and “are addicted” to intoxicating liquor. For all their trespassing of religious and social boundaries, Dass claims that Kayasths are extremely generous to Brahmins, who therefore absolve them of all their errors and call them “very pious” and possessing “great spiritual merit.”122 In short, Dass portrays Kayasths as a liminal group: they lie between the third and fourth varna, they lie between Hindu and Muslim, they lie between government and people, they lie between religious and irreligious. They use this liminal position to take advantage of all sorts of people, from Brahmins to ordinary citizens, who depend on them to gain access to power and money. One can only speculate on why Dass singles out the Kayasths for such trenchant criticism. It could very well be that he genuinely dislikes the way they carry on their clerical and legal professions. He may find their inclination to Islam reprehensible. Yet his own social position is in some ways like that of the Kayasths. Like him, they occupied a liminal space in Indian society; they were mediators between foreign rulers and the indigenous population; they were teachers in the vernacular languages; they were religiously experimental. Kayasths and Indian Christian intellectuals like Dass were competitors for the same social space. All in all, Dass’ Domestic Manners and Customs is another assertion of Indian Christian independence from European missionary control, made by a very loyal worker in the Presbyterian mission. It is a concise, subtle, but pointed riposte to William Ward’s massive oeuvre on Indian society, presenting a significantly different perspective on the subcontinent’s people and challenging the prevailing missionary discourse on Hinduism. And it is one example of the way in which Indian Christian Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 34–­35. Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 35. 122 Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 36. 120 121

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intellectuals attempted to participate in the ecclesiastical and public discourse about civilizations and religions in India. In the Shadows of the Purdah: Work of Indian Christian Women The word purdah has two interrelated meanings. Purdah can mean simply “curtain” or “screen.”123 It can also refer to the cloth that covers Muslim and high-­caste Hindu women from public view.124 While the Indian women workers in Christian missions were generally from neither Muslim nor high-­caste backgrounds, their work is hidden from us by various layers of European and Indian curtains and clothing. On the missionary side, there was an explicit bias against seeing women’s work as true missionary work until the latter part of the nineteenth century, because it was believed that such work consisted primarily of preaching the gospel to nonbelievers, a task restricted to men. Thus there was a reticence in detailing any kind of women’s work in mission reports written and published by the Presbyterians and Methodists, until women formed their own missionary societies and started sending out missionaries in the 1870s. These missionaries then sent home reports of their own work and the work of Indian Christian women, which were published in women’s missionary periodicals such as the Methodist The Heathen Woman’s Friend, begun in 1869. Besides the European purdah that covered women’s work from public view, Indian society itself was segregated in various ways according to gender, and society provided purdahs for women to shield themselves from public view.125 Generally speaking, the higher the social status of women, the more they were confined to the domestic sphere, secluded from public spaces, and restricted to the company of other women in large social events. So in their accounts of Hindu religious fairs, or melas, Americans noted how village women were very much a part of the throngs that participated in the various religious, social, and economic activities that flourished at such assemblies. However, when (male) missionaries were trying to reach the middle and upper classes living in cities The New Royal Dictionary, English into Hindustani and Hindustani into English (Lucknow: Methodist Publishing House, 1911), 243. 124 Eliza Kent, Converting Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 30. 125 Kent, Converting Women, 35. 123

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Book caption: “Medical Class. About the First Women Educated in Medicine.”

of Hindi North India, they found that their gender blocked them from contact with women.126 Yet when the American women associated with the missionary force were allowed into middle-­and upper-­class Indian households, they could find warm welcomes in the women’s quarters, or zenanas.127 Because middle-­and upper-­class women were restricted in various degrees from the public sphere, it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the Indian Christian community produced women workers with the educational accomplishments and social status commensurate with the first generation of Indian Christian male leaders such as those described above. Pandita Ramabai (1858–­1922), the highly educated and articulate Marathi Brahmin woman who converted to Christianity in 1885, was perhaps the first Indian Christian woman to have her voice heard and reckoned with in the public square. Otherwise, until the last decade of the nineteenth century, the only women Scott, History of Fifty Years, 255. Scott, History of Fifty Years, 255, 259. Women missionaries were not allowed access to the women’s quarters at first. It was only after 1870 that they started to be welcomed there. 126 127

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workers in the Hindi North Indian Protestant community were Eurasians, converts from low-­caste backgrounds, or those who had been raised in Christian orphanages where the focus of education was less on academic training and more on the cultivation of domestic arts so that girls could become “suitable” wives for the male leaders of the Indian church. Their work was clothed in the purdah of domesticity, stitched together by both Indian and American societies. Early Indian Christian women were not brought into the missions’ limelight as some of the better-­educated Indian men, because their race, gender, educational background, and sphere of activity were considered second class in the missions’ structure and work. Ironically, it was the gender segregation of Indian society, so criticized by Western missionaries, that provided the opening for American and then Indian women to give leadership in church work.128 Missionaries realized that if they were going to influence Indian society in any way, the mission had to be able to communicate with Indian women, due to their role in Indian society.129 Mission reports on Indian women depicted a contradictory image of their power. On the one hand, they were portrayed as helplessly confined to their zenanas. Due to this isolation from public life, they were said to be physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, and spiritually oppressed and enchained.130 On the other hand, because of their domestic role, they were said to be the most powerful force molding and maintaining Indian mores and customs, and thus preventing the possible conversion of men to Christianity.131 From the earliest days of the American missionary movement in India, missionary wives and single women engaged themselves in opening boarding houses, orphanages, and schools for Indian girls and boys. Similarly, it was the much-­criticized caste system that actually provided the means for the rapid growth of the church, as Indians from the 1880s onward entered the church not individually but as groups, almost all of them from the low castes. 129 See Joseph Warren’s arguments for having women in the mission field in A Glance Backward at Fifteen Years of Missionary Life in North India (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856), 41–­43. 130 See L. Janvier, “Missionary Work Among the Females of India,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore in December and January, 1862–­63 (Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1863), 55–­57. 131 “The Need of Woman’s Work,” The Foreign Missionary, January 1869, 209. Both of these depictions were meant to lead the American reader to one conclusion: Christian women were needed to reach Hindu and Muslim women to liberate them, along with their men and children, from the clutches of their religions. 128

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Book caption: “A Class of Christian Girls, and Rebecca, Their Teacher, Another Member of the Medical Class, and Who Was Miss Dr. Swain’s Assistant in the Woman’s Hospital in Bareilly for Many Years.”

When the McEwans started the Presbyterian work in Allahabad in 1836, they opened up a boarding school, “chiefly of orphan girls.”132 Mrs. McEwan also began a school for Indian, Eurasian, and European children.133 In the early days of the Methodist mission, Mrs. Parker and the wife of a native preacher started two schools in 1860 in Bijnor.134 The orphanages and boarding and day schools for girls required adult 132 Holcomb, “Sketch of the Furrukhabad Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 109. 133 Allison, One Hundred Years, 3. 134 Messmore, Life of Edwin Wallace Parker, D.D., 64.

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female workers, and the few Indian and Eurasian Christian women who were available and capable were quickly employed in these rudimentary institutions.135 In fact at times the hindrance to establishing girls’ institutions was the lack of suitable teachers and supervisors. For example, in the early years of Presbyterian work at Subathu, the English residents had donated Rs. 2,000 for starting schools, which did not get off the ground due to a lack of teachers.136 Another difficulty was that Indian girls were reluctant to come to school—­or at least their parents were reluctant to send them.137 In any case, a number of Indian Christian women were employed to provide various degrees of supervision and education to girls in mission schools and orphanages. Peggy, the mother-­in-­law of Joel Janvier, was just such a woman. All we know about Peggy comes from Methodist missionary William Butler, who first encountered her when he was trying to convince Joel Janvier in Allahabad to accompany him to his new station in Bareilly. Joel was willing to go if his wife would go with him, and his wife was willing to go if her widowed mother gave them permission to leave. Butler, through an interpreter, told Peggy of his desire to take her daughter, baby grandchild, and son-­in-­law with him to begin the Methodist mission in Bareilly. Peggy wrestled long and hard with the decision, ultimately giving her permission for the family to go to Bareilly.138 Here again an Indian Christian had to negotiate the poles of loyalty and independence in the mission. Peggy, however, did not remain separated long from her daughter and her family. After two years she accepted an offer from the Methodist mission to take charge as matron of their female orphanage in Bareilly, a ministry she performed for a number of years, apparently with great success.139 When William Butler was leaving India in 1869, Peggy wrote a few words in his album, which are translated as follows: “I give thanks to my God, whom I did not know before—­but now I know him—­that he is my Savior; my faith rests in him. He is the vine, I am the branch; whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. 135 See “Letter of Mrs. J. Wilson, dated April 24,” Foreign Missionary Chronicle, March 1841, 86; Warren, Glance Backward, 98. 136 Joseph Tracy, History of American Missions to the Heathen (Worcester, Mass.: Spooner & Howland, 1840), 719. 137 Janvier, “Missionary Work Among the Females of India,” 57. 138 Butler, “First Native Minister,” 202. 139 Butler, “First Native Minister,” 207.

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Peggy Pybah.”140 Peggy’s theology, which explicitly employs imagery and wording from the Gospel of John, also employs bhakti theological motifs: there is knowledge of a divine savior, in whom one has faith, to whom one is connected, who provides eternal life to the devotee. As in a number of other condensed versions of Indian evangelical thought in this era, there is an absence of any reference to the atoning death of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins—­a vital element in evangelical missionary theology. A number of other Indian Christian women like Peggy worked under and alongside American women in the missionary force. As noted above, some of them worked in mission girls’ schools and orphanages.141 Others worked as Bible women, going to the homes of other women to talk with them and share portions of Scripture.142 Indian Christian women also accompanied American women into the zenanas of higher-­ class women.143 Still others were recruited to work in the medical field. Mrs. D. W. Thomas, wife of the superintendent of the Methodist Girls’ Orphanage in Bareilly, organized a medical class from among the girls there, and was instrumental in getting the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to send Dr. Clara Swain as a medical missionary to Bareilly.144 However, it is very difficult to discern in what ways Indian women took leadership roles in this era. There is at least one exception to this generalization. In 1869 James Thoburn, becoming aware that men could not converse with and engage Indian women, took along with him Zahur-­al-­Haqq’s Christian wife, Susannah Haqq, and about six other women and girls on a tour of village congregations. He was astonished at the way in which the Christian women could reach other women in the villages with their singing, Butler, “First Native Minister,” 207. This is the first time that we are provided a second name for Peggy, and it comes from her own brief note to the departing missionary. William Butler only called her “Peggy” in all his references to her. 141 Mrs. J. M. Alexander, “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission, N. India. Mynpurie,” The Foreign Missionary, December 1869, 155. 142 “Communications: Lodiana Mission, N. India,” The Foreign Missionary, May 1869, 292. See the discussion of Bible women in Kent, Converting Women, 150–­56. 143 “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission, N. India,” The Foreign Missionary, October 1868, 121. 144 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 188; Wade Crawford Barclay, History of Methodist Missions (New York: Board of Missions of the Methodist Church, 1957), 3:507. 140

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conversing, and praying.145 Later that year Susannah Haqq accompanied her husband with fourteen school girls to a gathering (quarterly conference) of Methodists in a village called Hatain. The Heathen Woman’s Friend provides a rather extended autobiographical narrative of some evangelistic work undertaken by Susannah. After the conference was over, she and some other Christian women went visiting various villages; presumably the school girls also went along. The modus operandi for their itinerant evangelism was straightforward: the Christian visitors would come to a village, seat themselves in a public area, and start to sing. Then when a group of local women had gathered, the Christians would stop their singing and engage in conversations, explaining who they were. Because of ongoing Methodist work, Christianity was not completely unknown in the villages. The women would then read one or more passages of Scripture.146 At one point in her “Notes,” Susannah Haqq reports that in a certain village she read the fifth chapter of Matthew, which is the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.147 This passage sets forth the ethics of Jesus, as well as blessings for the poor and oppressed of the world. It was a favorite among Indian evangelists and preachers who were sharing elements of Christianity with people of other religious backgrounds because it tended to be well received.148 The women who heard Susannah read the passage “listened gladly,” she writes. Susannah’s report gives an indication of the religious background of some of the village women who were interested in their message. In Hatain, where the quarterly conference had been held and presumably where there was a solid core of Christian families, a group of about thirty women gathered around the Christian women: I read and explained a few pages to them, and then we sang for them. The women listened to us with much pleasure, and said to us, “We never heard such words before. Till this present hour we have always considered Ram as God, and Nanak as our Saviour, but now it would appear that Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 249. Susannah Haqq, “Itinerating Notes by a Native Preacher’s Wife in India,” Heathen Woman’s Friend, April 1870, 83. I assume that a missionary translated the “Notes” before they were sent to the mission periodical. 147 Susannah Haqq, “Itinerating Notes by a Native Preacher’s Wife in India (Concluded),” Heathen Woman’s Friend, May 1870, 90. 148 It was the ethics of Jesus that were attractive to Hindus as far apart as Ram Mohun Roy and Mohandas Gandhi. 145 146

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Ram was only a king, and Nanak a fakeer, and there is another Saviour. So please continue to teach us these words, and we will not hate you any more.” One of the women wept violently. It is the custom of these people to despise Christians, and not to give them a seat, but God softened these women’s hearts, so that they brought a cot for me, and spread blankets on the ground for the girls, and showed much love towards us.149

This brief and at times confusing narrative reveals that the village women were followers of Nanak, most probably Nanakpanthis, or Sikhs.150 There was hostility between them and the Christians of the village, but later some openness to the Christian message. Thus religiously speaking, there is interest (both antagonistic and welcoming) in locally articulated Christian Evangelicalism from members of a sect founded by the bhakti sant Nanak. Later in the report, Susannah discloses that local families of chamars, or leatherworkers, an Untouchable group, either have converted to Christianity or are interested in it.151 Susannah is here portrayed as being as adept as her husband, Zahur-­al-­Haqq, in the task of relating to and interpreting Christianity to people from other religious groups and traditions.152 We do not know how many of the women working in the Methodist and Presbyterian missions actually undertook the kind of leadership that Susannah Haqq did. The purdahs of European and Indian racial prejudice and chauvinism have kept all but a very few Indian women hidden from clear view, their activities discernible only in outline. Like the Indian male leaders in the American evangelical missions, those few women acted as cultural brokers between missionaries and the Indian population. And as Peggy Pybah’s case makes clear, they too operated between the poles of independence and loyalty, endeavoring to follow their perceptions and understandings of the divine savior who had been introduced to them by the Christian missionaries coming to India.153 Haqq, “Itinerating Notes,” 83. The Methodists had work among low-­caste Sikhs in the North-­Western Provinces. 151 Haqq, “Itinerating Notes (Concluded),” 90. 152 Note how Ram and Nanak are reinterpreted: the former is a king, not a devil or false god; Nanak is a fakir, not a false prophet. 153 For a thoughtful and perceptive examination of Indian Protestant women, see Mrinalini Sebastian, “Reading Archives from a Postcolonial Feminist Perspective: ‘Native’ Bible Women and the Missionary Ideal,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 19, no. 1 (2003): 5–­25. 149 150

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Conclusion Boundary Crossing

Both foreign missionaries and indigenous leaders admitted that “a great gulf” normally separated the European and Indian worlds.154 The Indian Christian leaders and workers, like the most adaptable missionaries, were able to span that gulf, thereby advancing the work of their churches. These Indians were thus negotiators—­translators, brokers, mediators, intermediaries—­in the interface between Europe and India that occurred in mission work, in which foreign missionaries insisted that their own religion was also meant for the Indian people. The Indian Christian translator and negotiator was absolutely crucial for Evangelicalism as it sought to situate itself in the religious terrain of Hindi North India. For only after missionary Evangelicalism had been rendered comprehensible in local religious thought, language, and behavior could it take root and grow among the Indian population. In an article in the Foreign Missionary, the Rev. J. F. Ullman reported an episode regarding a catechist, identified simply as “L.,” who two years prior had been visited by a “heathen relative” being carried by friends to the Ganges River to await death and subsequent cremation. The relative seemed to plead with the Christian catechist for his life. The catechist consequently took him into his home, attended to him, and, he said, “commenced to pray, and I prayed much, that the Lord in mercy would spare the sick man’s life, and He heard me, and the old man recovered, and could return to his family.”155 The catechist’s story made theological sense to American Christians, who believed that prayers to the one true God had the potential to cure the ills of a man being carried to the banks of the Ganges in futile hope of salvation. Yet it also made theological sense in the Indian religious worldview, where powerful religious leaders (of whatever tradition) are able to intercede effectively with superhuman forces and garner their favor to aid people dealing with the dangers and difficulties of life.

154 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 63; see also Goloknath, “How Can Foreign Missionaries Secure, in the Highest Degree, the Sympathy and Affectionate Confidence of Their Native Brethren?” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference, 168–­72. 155 J. F. Ullman, “The Power of the Gospel in India the Same as at Home,” The Foreign Missionary, April 1869, 269.

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In their role as social, cultural, and theological brokers, Indian leaders in the missions needed the respect of both their compatriots and the missionaries. To satisfy American leadership expectations, they tended to have more education than most of the laity. This education may have been obtained as a result of their higher social status before conversion (Gopi Nath Nundy and Zahur-­al-­Haqq) or as a result of their upbringing in mission institutions (Joel Janvier and Ishwari Dass). The key is that their Western education and training allowed them to gain the necessary qualifications to be ordained as ministers, in the case of men, or to perform other leadership roles that were assigned to them, as in the case of women. Formal education and training, however, were not enough for Indian leaders. They needed a measure of personal charisma and a commanding public persona to interact with the local populace. While this is true of any public figure, Indian Christian leaders were often put in the difficult and sometimes dangerous position of dealing with hostile crowds. The hostility could arise from public Christian preaching, whether Indian or missionary; it could arise from antipathy to the missionary movement, or to Christianity in general. Missionaries consistently reported that while Indian evangelists frequently preached in public by themselves, missionaries always took Indian workers along with them for public preaching. Missionaries therefore relied heavily on Indian church workers to run interference, as it were, between the crowds and themselves. Each Indian preacher developed his own style of dealing with hostile crowds. Some, such as Methodist Joseph Fieldbrave, knew how to calm angry men.156 Others were experts at sparring with belligerent interlocutors. Converted Kabirpanthi guru Andrias became well known in Methodist circles as a provocative public preacher.157 The first time he preached publicly alongside missionaries, he immediately impressed them with his ability to hold the crowd: “When his turn came he mounted the cart, which served as the out-­door pulpit, and began to talk, and at once the people began to press around. He spoke like a master. He parried blows from opponents with great readiness, and gave thrusts like a master of his art.”158

Fifth Annual Report of the Mission Stations, 60. Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 125; Thoburn, North India Conference, 22. 158 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 126. 156 157

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Negotiating Missionary Authority

Presbyterian and Methodist Indian leaders of this generation lived and worked in a tension that had been created by the presence of foreign missionaries. The missionaries possessed material power, because they had access to American—­and local European—­money and goods. They possessed political and cultural power, belonging to the same race and civilization as the British rulers of India. And they claimed religious authority, believing they were anointed by God for their work. Yet they proclaimed an egalitarian message not only in terms of spiritual status but also in terms of their American political philosophy. So in theory, all church members, or all church ministers, had the same rights and privileges, regardless of their racial or cultural background. Needless to say, coming from a deeply racist society, and working itself out in a deeply racist colonial context, such missionary theory was time and again put to the test of practice, when it often failed. As they navigated the Indian and European worlds, Indian church leaders were pulled by two opposing longings: one of loyalty to the missionaries, the other of independence from them. Indian leaders recognized missionary authority, and lived and operated within the orbit of missionary material and cultural power. Some of them, such as Ishwari Dass, genuinely admired the missionaries and sought to please them. Yet Indian leaders also wished to exercise their own authority and power, to make independent decisions that could conflict with those of their missionary sponsors.159 Indian Christians who lived and worked with missionaries found themselves both attracted to the message and personality of the foreigners, as well as resistant to them as they sought to appropriate Christian salvation and freedom on their own terms. After all, the missionary message was replete with talk of freedom: freedom from idolatry, from wickedness, from degrading customs, from ignorance, from social subjugation. The very persons who offered such freedoms, however, expected certain kinds of submission from their Indian wards: submission to true worship, to certain codes of righteousness, to Christian (as opposed to heathen) customs, and to Western Enlightenment. Most importantly, the missionaries expected a certain degree of submission to their will, for in

159 Timothy Stephen Dobe, “Flaunting the Secret: Lineage Tales of Christian Sannyasis and Missionaries,” History of Religions 49, no. 3 (2010): 254–­99.

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their minds they were the living exemplars of true Christianity.160 Not surprisingly, missionaries themselves argued over what this “true Christianity” actually meant; nonetheless, Indians were expected to be loyal to them. The relationship of Indian leaders to missionaries, then, could be marked by ambiguity and contradiction. The dissensions between missionaries and their loyal Indian coworkers came to the fore in certain discussions that occurred during decennial missionary conferences. For example, in the missionary conference held at Allahabad in 1872–­1873, one of the topics of contention was whether missionaries should provide material aid to Indian Christians. The missionaries generally argued that they should stay out of the business of helping their Indian coreligionists in “secular matters.” Yet Indian leaders tended to argue for such aid. The Rev. K. C. Chatterjee, serving with the American Presbyterian Mission, noted that Jesus extended “his helping hand to relieve the bodily necessities of any of his followers.” Moreover, converts to Christianity were “generally poor,” coming from the lower classes in society, and then after converting were “banished from their homes, and excluded from the society, sympathy, and support of their friends.” So, said Chatterjee, the missionary “has to seek and promote [the Indian Christians’] temporal welfare as much as their spiritual good, and be to them as a father to his children.”161 The tension-­laden combination of loyalty and independence is well evidenced in Chatterjee’s paper. Unlike some of his fellow Indian Christian leaders, he does not simply criticize the missionaries for the problems in the church. He lays some of the blame for “illfeeling and misunderstanding between converts and missionaries” at the feet of Indian converts as well as on simple miscommunication, and urges both sides to practice “kindness, consideration and mutual forbearance in their secular dealings with one another.” Yet he also goes on to make several pointed suggestions to missionaries about changing their practices and behaviors toward Indians, in order to establish harmony within the Indian church.162

160 The tradition of missionary as Christian exemplar has a long history in the Christian tradition, going back to the apostle Paul (1 Cor 4:16). 161 K. C. Chatterjee, “The Relations of Missionaries to Converts in Secular Matters,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 337–­ 49; quotations from pp. 337–­40. 162 Chatterjee, “Relations of Missionaries to Converts,” 340–­47; quotations from pp. 341, 343.

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Negotiating Boundaries and Authority in Bhakti

Bhakti saints and leaders did not cross the same boundaries or deal with the same authorities that Indian Christian leaders did. In fact it is well recognized that bhakti communities, even when they employed a rhetoric of equality in the sight of the divine, were not very successful in crossing social boundaries embedded in Indian society. There have been only a handful of bhakti sects, such as Virasaivas and the nirguna sects like the Kabir and Ravidas panths, where there has been an outright rejection of caste. Even in these cases, the opposition to caste has been more ideological than in practice.163 In this respect, at least, Indian Christian leaders were more successful than bhakti gurus and leaders in traversing social boundaries. Where bhakti did successfully cross boundaries at times was in the case of religious traditions. Certain bhakti saints, such as Kabir and Nanak, drew from both Hindu and Muslim traditions for their religious inspiration. Mahamati Prannath continued this tradition of using both Muslim and Hindu theology and practice, as did Satya Sai Baba in the twentieth century.164 The famous story of Kabir’s death reveals how he is perceived as crossing the Hindu-­Muslim divide. According to the story, when Kabir knew that his end was near, he asked to be left alone in a hut and covered himself with a white cloth while his Muslim and Hindu disciples fought over the right to dispose of his corpse according to their respective funerary traditions. However, when Kabir died and the cloth was removed from his body, nothing was found there except a spray of flowers. One half of the flowers went to the Hindu followers who had them cremated, one half to the Muslims who had them buried.165 Crossing certain religious and theological boundaries was an art that was cultivated in bhakti religious spaces. Dealing with authority was also important, and contentious, in bhakti, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the way that bhakti saints from outcaste groups dealt with Brahmins. On the one hand, bhakti, or devotion to God, has been promoted as the one way 163 David N. Lorenzen, “Introduction,” in Religious Movements in South Asia, 600–­1800, ed. David N. Lorenzen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10. 164 See Jonathan Loar, “ ‘My Bones Shall Speak from beyond the Tomb’: The Life and Legacy of Shirdi Sai Baba in History and Hagiography” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2016). 165 Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19.

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to achieve liberation or salvation, regardless of one’s gender or caste background. As such, bhakti can be seen as an egalitarian religious movement, and indeed bhakti can criticize the hierarchy of brahminic Hinduism. On the other hand, as Patton Burchett has argued, the various stories of famous Untouchable bhakti saints still in one way or another uphold the authority of Brahmins, even when criticizing them.166 An episode in the hagiography of Raidas, a fifteenth-­or sixteenth-­century bhakti saint from an Untouchable class in Benares, is instructive. A queen comes to Benares to seek initiation from Raidas, and later invites him to a feast in her home. The Brahmins in her court are enraged and refuse to eat with the Untouchable poet. Raidas therefore sits in deep meditation outside the palace, and “mentally projects the image of his body between each and every Brahmin as they begin to eat.” The Brahmins become embarrassed and confused, and fearful of retribution from such a powerful saint. So they rush outside the palace to touch Raidas’ feet. When they find him and beg for forgiveness, Raidas tells them the story of his previous birth, when he was a Brahmin yet did not know God (Hari), so he took birth as a Shudra. Raidas then rips open his chest and shows his sacred gold thread inside—­a mark of Brahminhood. He continues, “Practicing bhakti I was saved. Without god’s love the world is base. Caste and kinship confer no authority. Only he who practices devotion crosses over.”167 In this story and others like it, the classic bhakti message is explicitly proclaimed: only devotion, not caste, brings salvation and liberation. Yet another message, in tension with that proclamation, is carried in the story: the Untouchable saint is actually a Brahmin. The purity associated with being a Brahmin does, at some level, matter. What is brought to light in such stories of struggle of saints like Raidas and of Indian Christian leaders like Gopi Nath Nundy is that these religious figures gained authority in a religious system that acknowledged other figures—­either Brahmins or missionaries—­as the traditional, established authorities. Moreover, in the case of Indian Christian leaders, it was the missionaries who had bestowed religious authority and power on the Indian Christian leaders. While bhakti and 166 Patton Burchett, “Bhakti Rhetoric in the Hagiography of ‘Untouchable’ Saints: Discerning Bhakti’s Ambivalence on Caste and Brahminhood,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 2 (2009): 115–­41. 167 Burchett, “Bhakti Rhetoric,” 121.

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evangelical religious ideologies claimed that sants and native preachers respectively had as much access to God as Brahmins or missionaries, the religious systems that produced these claims were founded on Brahmin or missionary religious authority. So there was an inherent contradiction built into the authority structures of both bhakti and Evangelicalism. The result of this contradiction was a diverse assortment of struggles by some (certainly not all) bhakti poets and Indian Christian leaders to assert their authority and power in ways that honored the ideals of their own religious traditions. Raidas insisted he was a Brahmin; Gopi Nath Nundy insisted he was a missionary. And Mirabai insisted that she was married to Krishna, and not her husband. So various bhakti poets (especially those from low status and “untouchable” backgrounds) and various Indian Christian leaders chafed against the larger authorities in their religious and social world.168 There is no historical evidence that Indian Christian leaders who in various ways challenged missionary supremacy were thinking of and being influenced by the lives of rebellious bhakti poets and saints such as Kabir, Raidas, and Mirabai. Yet one cannot discount the possibility that the popular stories and hagiographies of insubordinate saints were known by Indian Christian leaders. In any case, the stories of bhakti saints like Raidas provided cultural and religious scripts that could be revised and reworked for Christian purposes and exigencies. In the biographies of Presbyterian and Methodist leaders above, individual Indian leaders lived out their vocations traversing the divide between the European and Indian worlds and worldviews, and negotiating the tensions created by the opposing pull of loyalty and independence with regard to missionaries. Yet it was in these unchartered borderlands and novel political tensions that the first generation of Indian Protestant leaders helped to pioneer the formation of new religious communities, which were built in a Thirdspace cultivated by certain low-­status bhakti communities in the religious terrain of Hindi North India.

168 Nundy was certainly not unique in his struggles against his mission. See the cases of Krishna Mohan Banerjea and Lal Behari Day in Copley, Religions in Conflict, 220–­38.

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merican missionaries who tried to spread their message to a North Indian audience were often frustrated by the ways that the local populace either deemed their ideas irrelevant or interpreted them in completely unusual and unhelpful ways. For example, in confrontations between Christian evangelists and Muslim ulama, the latter were adept at confounding the former through innovative and unexpected interpretations of Christian Scripture and tradition.1 In a very different social and religious context, the following is the report of a “typical” conversation between an American Presbyterian missionary and a peasant grass cutter in northern India around 1870. Here the missionary describes to an American church audience the difficulties he encounters when conversing about theological matters with local people: A couple of villagers coming in one day with loads of grass for sale were induced by curiosity to stop and listen to the [missionary’s] preaching. The Missionary noticed them and interrupted his discourse in order to explain to them what he had been talking about. “I am telling these people,” he said, “that in God’s sight we are all sinners, and that we all need a Saviour. Do you believe this?” “Yes indeed: I am always committing sin.” “Is it possible! Are you not then afraid of the judgment of God? Why do you sin against Him?”

1 Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-­Mutiny India (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1993).

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“What can I do? We are not rich, we must earn our daily bread, we are too poor to do anything meritorious.” “But why should your poverty make it necessary for you to commit sin? Will you tell me some of the sins of which you are guilty?” “Well, this grass that I am selling, I have destroyed life in cutting it. I cut wood also in the jungle. But unless I sell grass and wood, I cannot feed my wife and children. It is the fate of us farmers to commit sin. It is written in our destiny, we are obliged to cut our grain, and then every time we plough or reap, we are sure to kill many worms and insects.” “But are these the only sins you have committed?” asked the Missionary, wishing to reach the man’s conscience. “Can you not think of any other evil acts?” He said he could think of nothing else. “Do you love God, and seek to do His will?” “Of course I do,” was his prompt reply. “Who ever resisted his will? All men do the will of God. It is He that causes all that happens.” Without stopping to protest against this Pantheistic blasphemy, the Missionary asked, “Do you love your neighbors as yourself? This is what God requires of every man. Have you never been unkind to any one? Have you never wronged any one?” “Never,” he said. “I am an honest man; I never defrauded or injured any one.” Notwithstanding all this the preacher is frequently listened to attentively, and returns to his home greatly encouraged.2

Given the difficulty that missionaries experienced when appropriately transmitting the Christian message in their context, what is surprising is that any Indians at all responded positively to that message. In fact the success, such as it was, of the Presbyterian and Methodist missions was due in large part to the missionaries’ Indian coworkers, who received varying degrees of acknowledgment from the Europeans for the missions’ effectiveness. The Indian agents of the American missions, as one would expect, were neither uniformly good nor bad. Yet they did all possess one advantage over the foreigners: they knew the local populace as only natives could. Thus if they were dedicated and adept at their work, they could connect to their compatriots in ways that were not possible for the foreign missionaries. Unfortunately, it is a challenge to find writings of Indian pastors, evangelists, and teachers and thus to hear in their own words how they 2 “Report of the Lodiana Mission, 1872,” Lodiana, India, 1872, MT 80 PSZ LA, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Penn., 3–­4.

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presented the Christian message to their compatriots. There is, however, the exceptional case of the Presbyterian church worker Ishwari Dass, who was able to publish a number of works that have been preserved to this day. One of these is a book on theology, for which he received a prize of Rs. 500 for the best popular lectures on theology adapted to India, from the Calcutta Tract Society in 1859. The work is entitled, rather straightforwardly, Lectures on Theology, Adapted to the Natives of India. A close examination of this work discloses how one well-­ trained Indian Christian intellectual attempted to present his Presbyterian theological heritage of Calvinism credibly to Hindi North Indian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dass is not discussed here as some sort of typical first-­generation evangelical from Hindi North India; indeed, in many ways he was quite atypical among his coreligionists. Rather, he represents one effort, and an erudite one at that, to render a dominant strand of North American evangelical Christianity in a North Indian mode. The Lectures The theological work consists of twenty-­six lectures that span a little over four hundred pages.3 According to the preface, the lectures pay particular attention to “doctrines which the Hindus are peculiarly prone to misapprehend.”4 The Lectures themselves are divided into three large sections, with a coda on eschatology at the end. The first section provides a description of God, with a strong emphasis on God’s power, transcendence, and moral government. Dass expounds on God’s greatness and power as seen through creation and divine providence, which is understood as God’s ruling over all creation. The following is an exposition on God’s creative power: We see that of all the great works which man has accomplished in this world, there are not many of each kind. Thus we do not see many Taj Mahals in this country like the Agra Taj Mahal; nor many mosques like the Delhi Jama Musjid; nor many forts like Fort William in Calcutta; nor many bridges over great rivers like the Jaunpore bridge over the Goomtee; and so forth. This shews that man is weak; if he were more powerful, he

3 Ishwari Dass, Lectures on Theology, Adapted to the Natives of India (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1860). 4 John Murdoch, “Preface,” in Ishwari Dass, Lectures on Theology, Adapted to the Natives of India (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1860), iii.

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could accomplish hundreds of great works in a life-­time; every country would be full of them. But God is not straitened in his power; his power is infinite; and therefore his creation is, we may say, boundless. It has cost him no labour to create the worlds; he had only to give the word, and they immediately came into existence.5

In the second section, Dass deals with the human condition and God’s intervention in it. He begins with humanity’s creation and its duty to render “sincere, constant, and supreme love, honour, and obedience” to God.6 He then moves to humanity’s sinfulness arising from the refusal “to perform that for which we were created,”7 then to the need for pardon from God without which humans “will be miserable for ever in hell,”8 and the necessity “that the love of sin should be killed in our hearts.”9 However, humanity cannot save itself from either the consequence or the ongoing reality of sin: humanity “stands in need of divine aid.”10 This divine aid comes in the form of Jesus Christ, “the Saviour of sinners.”11 Dass then provides arguments as to why Jesus alone can be, and is, the savior of humanity. The third section of the Lectures consists of a long sermonic admonition on our duties as Christians: our duties to God (repentance, faith, prayer, love, reading the Bible, “godly fear,” observing the Sabbath, holiness), our duties to ourselves (humility, meekness, temperance, chastity, diligence, contentment, cheerfulness, self-­denial, edification), and our duties to our fellow human beings (to our spouses, to our children, to our masters and servants, to our rulers and those subject to us, and to all in general). Dass’ theology ends with a chapter on eschatology, “The Future Perfect Happiness of the True Worshippers of God; and the Dreadful Punishment of the Wicked.”12

Dass, Lectures, 20. His examples of human “great works” are both Indian and British. 6 Dass, Lectures, 127. 7 Dass, Lectures, 137. 8 Dass, Lectures, 204. 9 Dass, Lectures, 210. 10 Dass, Lectures, 213. 11 Dass, Lectures, 215. 12 Dass, Lectures, v–­vi. 5

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The Western Theological Sources Before delving into the Lectures themselves, it is necessary to understand Dass’ theological heritage, because so much of his work relies on it. Because he was a member of the Presbyterian mission in India, and had spent his formative years with Presbyterian missionaries, many of the key ideas and intellectual themes in Dass’ Lectures were taken from the mid-­nineteenth-century Princeton Theology in which his mentors were steeped.13 The Princeton Theology was so named because its chief proponents all taught at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey: Archibald Alexander (taught 1811–­ 1851); Alexander’s student, who became his colleague and successor, Charles Hodge (taught 1822–­1878); and Charles Hodge’s son Archibald Alexander Hodge, who taught first at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh (1864–­1877) and then at Princeton (1878–­1886). All three of these men were supporters of foreign missions, and A. A. Hodge worked as a missionary in Allahabad from 1847 to 1850, until his wife’s poor health forced them to return to the United States. There are four salient characteristics of the Princeton Theology: a firm belief in the authority of the Bible, a commitment to the principal historical documents of the Reformed theological tradition, a deep confidence in Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, and a “vibrant style of religious experience.”14 The truth and veracity of the Bible had been under increasing attack since the Enlightenment, and developments in historical biblical criticism emanating from Europe in the nineteenth century contributed to a crisis of belief among many Christians within the orbit of European civilization. Princeton Theology responded to this crisis by vigorously affirming a doctrine of biblical inerrancy that “extended to every book and every word, not merely to the conceptual substance.”15 Princeton Theology adamantly insisted that the Christian 13 John C. B. Webster, The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1976), 30–­40. 14 Mark A. Noll, “Introduction,” in Charles Hodge, The Way of Life, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 20. See a critique of Noll’s narrow reading of the sources of Charles Hodge’s theology by Annette G. Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-­Century American Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15 E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 379. That being said, there are important differences between the nineteenth-­century

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Scriptures are the “very Word of God,” as Charles Hodge put it in his Sunday School pamphlet The Way of Life, which by 1850 had been translated into Urdu for use in North India.16 Along with an inerrant view of the Bible, the Princeton men subscribed to the historic understandings and statements of the Reformed tradition, which traces its foundations to the works of sixteenth-­century French theologian John Calvin. He expounded his highly influential ideas most forcefully and cogently in The Institutes of the Christian Religion. While Dass does not explicitly quote Calvin, his Lectures so echo and adapt ideas from the Institutes that it seems highly likely that Dass had read at least parts of it in English. The translation most widely available and read in America during Dass’ day was that of Englishman John century Presbyterians, however, Allen (1771–­1839).17 The nineteenth-­ were not as wedded to Calvin as later generations would be. Instead, the Princeton theologians especially favored seventeenth-­century Swiss theologian Francis Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology both Alexander and Hodge used as the text for their theology classes. The Princeton divines also hewed closely to the Westminster Confession, which for them contained the essential doctrines of the Calvinistic theological system.18 Third, the Princeton Theology had a supreme confidence that reason, as understood by Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, would vindicate their understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith. For them, there was no clash between reason and revelation.19 Archibald Alexander opened his well-­known Evidences of the Authenticity, Inspiration Princeton theologians and twentieth-­century fundamentalists in their views of biblical inerrancy. 16 “No one can fail to remark that the Bible demands immediate and implicit faith from all who read it. . . . [I]f this demand of faith goes with the word wherever it goes, it must rest upon evidence contained in the word itself. . . . To make the testimony of others to the truth of Christianity, the ground of faith, is inadmissible.” Hodge, Way of Life, 54. 17 The information regarding Allen’s translation is from the “Introduction” in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), xlv–­xlvi. Unless otherwise noted, the 1836 printing of Allen’s translation is the one that will be cited in this chapter: see full publication details below. 18 Holifield, Theology in America, 381. 19 They “admired William Paley, affirmed natural theology, and believed that arguments from design and causation proved the existence of God.” Holifield, Theo­ logy in America, 379–­80.

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and Canonical Authority of the Holy Scriptures, which came to be known simply as his Christian Evidences, with an affirmation of reason: That it is the right and duty of all men to exercise their reason in inquiries concerning religion, is a truth so manifest, that it may be presumed there are none who will be disposed to call it in question. Without reason there can be no religion; for in every step which we take, in examining the evidences of revelation, in interpreting its meaning, or in assenting to its doctrines, the exercise of this faculty is indispensable.20

Finally, given the intense intellectual confrontations and prolific academic output of the Princeton theologians, especially Charles Hodge, it is easy to forget that these were men of deep and genuine piety. To them, genuine religion consisted of two essential elements. One was the truth of the Bible, as they understood it. The other was the subjective experience of faith in lived religion. For them, these elements were two sides of the same coin.21 The lived experience of Christianity is one reason that Princeton Seminary supported foreign missions, and that graduates of that seminary predominated in the Presbyterian Church’s North India mission field, deeply influencing people like Ishwari Dass. In the case of Dass, this influence was greatly strengthened by two visits to Prince­ ton Seminary, one lasting six weeks, during his American sojourn in the 1840s.22 Ishwari Dass clearly takes over much of the intellectual framework and contents of Princeton Theology. In fact, a quick read of his theology can leave one with the impression that he simply adopts his mentors’ theology without any significant changes.23 In his work we easily recognize the four hallmarks of the Princeton Theology discussed above. He uses the Bible liberally, although his approach to the Bible is different from that of standard American Reformed theology, a matter to be discussed below. For example, he recounts the creation of the world as it is told in Genesis, he uses the story of Noah to illustrate human sin, and he quotes from a psalm to explain the affliction of the righteous.24 20 Archibald Alexander, The Evidences of the Christian Religion, 6th ed., enlarged (New York: Jonathan Leavitt, 1832), 5. 21 Noll, “Introduction,” in Hodge, Way of Life, 32. 22 Ishuree Dass, A Brief Account of a Voyage to England and America (Allah­ abad: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1851), 60–­65. 23 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 82. 24 Dass, Lectures, 1–­5, 322–­23.

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Dass also adopts the fundamental tenets and structure of historic Reformed theological works. Dass echoes the first question and answer of the Westminster Catechism, “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever,” in the opening sentence of his work: “Blessed be God who, with making our souls immortal, has also given us reason, that we may know and worship him, and secure our future happiness.”25 In the first section of the Lectures, which deals with God’s infinite power, transcendence, and moral government, Dass is elaborating, as did Charles Hodge in his Systematic Theology, on the Westminster Standards, which describe God as “a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”26 In the second section of the Lectures, on human sin and God’s salvation, Dass closely follows the form and many of the arguments of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, whereas the third section is an exposition of the Great Commandment, in which Jesus says that the greatest law is to love God with all one’s being, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.27 Similarly, the final chapter in Charles Hodge’s The Way of Life is an explanation of “Holy Living.”28 25 The Shorter Catechism, in Book of Confessions, Study Edition (Louisville, Ky.: Geneva Press, 1999), 229; Dass, Lectures, 1. It is interesting that throughout his work, Dass correlates human reason with glorifying God, and the immortality of the soul with enjoying God forever. He argues that a proper use of reason will inevitably lead to a proper knowledge and worship of God, and a proper understanding of how we get into heaven (i.e., by doing good deeds) will ineluctably lead to enjoying God forever. Thus on p. 365 Dass states that humans “are beings possessed of reason and immortal souls, that they are made for the glory of God and deriving enjoyment from him, and that they are sent into this world to prepare themselves for the next.” 26 Dass, Lectures, v; Shorter Catechism, 229; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, repr. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 1:369–­441. 27 While the final section has no real equivalent in the Westminster Standards, the enumeration of duties to God, self, and neighbor was very common in American evangelical circles of the day. See E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978), 146–­49. The Westminster Shorter Catechism does go through the Ten Commandments, and Reformed theology views the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor as a summation of the Ten Commandments. Shorter Catechism, 233–­37; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1836), II.viii.11. 28 Hodge, Way of Life, 4, 206–­33. The final chapter on eschatology reflects Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 3, trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 1992), 561–­637.

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Following the Princeton Theology, Dass emphasizes that reason is no foe of Christianity; on the contrary, it supports the claims of the faith. Throughout his treatise, he avers that reason will lead humanity to know and worship God rightly: “[M]an has been favoured with reason, and when he sees every thing around him, and what power has been manifested in the creation, he ought to think of that great Being who is possessed of this immense power.”29 Those who confuse creation with God the Great Creator are not simply misled; they are unreasonable.30 “Some people are so foolish as to worship trees;—­as the peepul, the tulsi, and others. This plainly shews that they do not exercise their reason even a little; because if they did, they would know that they ought not to worship a senseless tree, but that Being who has created it.”31 Finally, Dass strongly encourages a piety steeped in the Reformed tradition. He enumerates the elements of this piety in his discussion of our duties to God: “Repentance for our sins, Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation and for all other things, Prayer, Love, Reading God’s holy Word, Godly fear, Observance of the Sabbath, and Holiness.”32 Princeton Theology for Nineteenth-­Century North India While Dass borrows liberally from the rhetoric, structure, and substance of Princeton Theology, he adapts it to his own religious and social environment in a number of different ways. To begin, he stresses two common foundations of Christian, Muslim, and certain Hindu theologies. These are first an assumption that God is great and omnipotent, a theme that especially resonates with Islamic thought and with popular Hindu theistic traditions.33 A second common foundation is reason, on which he relies for theological discourse and argumentation. So Dass does not find a need to abandon the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy that was

Dass, Lectures, 7. Dass, Lectures, 6–­7. Dass borrows Calvin’s understanding of the human creature. Calvin, Institutes, I.xv.2. Calvin also asserts that it is reason that separates humanity from the rest of the animal world. Calvin, Institutes, II.ii.12. 31 Dass, Lectures, 8. 32 Dass, Lectures, 249. 33 Johannes Bronkhorst, Karma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 6. The greatness of God is also a theme in nirguna bhakti traditions, perhaps reflecting the influence of Islam in them. 29 30

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part of his intellectual heritage; he considers it useful in advancing his arguments. Dass also demonstrates how his Christian theology is part of a karmic moral economy. He reshapes Christian theology so that it deals with the problem of human suffering, rather than human guilt, and he proclaims a divine savior who operates in a karmic moral economy, saving humanity through suffering. Another adaptation of the Lectures is that they treat the Bible with the recognition that it is one sacred book among many in a religiously pluralistic world. Finally, Dass’ theological work also includes a manual for proper Indian Christian living, by which these Christians can shape a new community in their religious and social context, and acquire a respectable status—­especially important for those who are mostly poor and indeed illiterate.34 Emphasizing Common Foundations: The Greatness and Power of God

Dass adopts Princeton Theology’s very strong emphasis on God’s transcendent power for his apologetic purposes. In fact, while the Westminster Confession of Faith begins with a discussion of the nature and status of the Scriptures, Dass completely omits this topic and instead launches immediately into eight long lectures on the nature of God.35 God’s creation, says Dass, is evidence of his infinite power: “God is possessed of infinite power. . . . It is by his infinite power that he has made this glorious universe which we see on all sides.”36 From expounding on God’s creation, Dass moves to discussing God’s providence, which he defines as God’s “preserving and governing all his creatures and overruling all their actions.”37 All plants and animals are preserved, supported, and ruled by God.38 The governance of God extends, naturally, to human affairs, and all political rulers, whether 34 This feature of Dass’ theology has persisted to the present. See Rakesh Peter Dass, “Language and Religion in Modern India: The Vernacular Language of Hindi Christians” (Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 2016). 35 Westminster Confession of Faith, 173–­76. Charles Hodge, Way of Life, 52–­ 76, also opens with a discussion of the Scriptures. Francis Turretin begins with a discussion of the word “Theology,” and then moves to a discussion of “The Holy Scriptures.” Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, I.vii–­viii; Dass, Lectures, 1. See Calvin, Institutes, I.v.1–­10. 36 Dass, Lectures, 2–­3; emphasis in original. 37 Dass, Lectures, 20. In this he echoes Calvin, Institutes, I.xvi. 38 Dass, Lectures, 21, 85.

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nawabs, rajas, the Moghul emperor, or the British, are appointed by God, as God raises up the lowly to high places and deposes the mighty from their thrones.39 Such a view of divine providence allows no room for luck: all this is people’s foolishness and “nonsense,” an offense to human reason.40 The lectures on God’s power manifest in creation and providence are followed by lectures on God’s wisdom, and then God’s goodness, which can be plainly seen by observing the creation around us. Dass lists God’s attributes: “wisdom, power, goodness, justice, truth, omniscience, omnipresence, and holiness. He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in all of these attributes.”41 These attributes, as in the Princeton Theology, are an expression of God’s spiritual nature.42 Dass gives special attention to the justice of God, compared to the injustice of human rulers. He launches a jeremiad against the unjust, warning those who are “more or less powerful by riches, birth, or rank, be not intoxicated with the little advantage that you have over other men; and practise no injustice towards them.” In particular, he castigates zamindars (landowners) “who oppress their poor tenants and make them suffer much,” and native officers and police who “in a thousand instances pervert justice.”43 Similarly, he contrasts the truth of God to the lies that people tell.44 Two lectures explain God’s moral governance, which is extended only to human beings, because unlike other creatures people were created with reason. The government which [God] exercises over brutes and inanimate objects is directly by his power . . . [b]ut the government that he exercises over rational creatures is through their reason; that is, he does not treat them as pieces of stone or lumps of clay, but addresses his commands to their understanding; and tells them that they are right and proper and fit to be obeyed; and then, by every persuasion, desires them to obey these commandments.45

Dass, Lectures, 28–­30. Dass, Lectures, 31; Calvin, Institutes, I.xvi.2. 41 Dass, Lectures, 71–­72. 42 Dass, Lectures, 71. 43 Dass, Lectures, 76–­77. 44 Dass, Lectures, 80. 45 Dass, Lectures, 96–­97. 39 40

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God gave the human being a law: “that he should constantly, sincerely and supremely love, fear, and worship his Creator;—­and that he should love every creature like himself;—­that is, he must not hate even his enemies, but do them all the good in his power.”46 Dass spends about 30 percent of his Lectures on Theology on the creating, transcendent, and governing power of God.47 The documents that form the core of the Princeton Theology, such as the Westminster Confession, the Shorter Catechism, and Calvin’s Institutes, do not grant nearly as much space to these topics.48 Charles Hodge does not even touch upon the attributes of God in The Way of Life, although he does so in his Systematic Theology.49 In his theology, then, Dass not only adopts but highlights the Reformed tradition’s emphasis on the greatness of God, especially in relation to creation and its governing. In doing so, Dass is deliberately building his theology on what he considers to be common foundations of Calvinistic, Islamic, and certain Hindu thought. In fact at times he can use certain Islamic and Christian theological traditions about the transcendence of God to criticize Hindu notions of the divine-human relationship: The Hindoo notion of salvation is not right. They believe that when a person is saved and becomes perfectly holy, he is united to God and becomes one with him, just as brooks become one with rivers by falling into them or the rivers unite with the ocean by falling into it. . . . But this is not the Dass, Lectures, 97–­98. This exposition lays the groundwork for his claims about the sinfulness of humanity, which contravenes God’s good and just rule; why humanity needs a savior; and why Jesus Christ is the only savior who can redeem humanity. 48 The Westminster Confession expounds on God’s nature, creation, and providence in four of its thirty-­five chapters, the pages occupying about 10 percent of the Confession; the Westminster Shorter Catechism devotes ten short questions out of 110 to the nature of God, and John Calvin expends less than 5 percent of the Institutes of the Christian Religion explicitly describing God’s nature and providence. Calvin, Institutes, I.i.1–­I.v.3, I.xvi.1–­I.xviii.4. One can justly argue, however, that God’s sovereignty and power are a leitmotif running throughout Calvin’s Institutes, which again shows how “Reformed” Dass was. 49 Charles Hodge devoted one chapter of seventy-­seven pages in the first volume (648 pages) of his three-­volume Systematic Theology to “the nature and attributes of God”; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:366–­441. Although the Systematic Theology was published between 1871 and 1872, Hodge’s ideas were well formed before then: he was convinced by the seminary trustees that if he published the work any earlier, “students would not come to Princeton if they had access to his theology elsewhere.” Holifield, Theology in America, 379. 46 47

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case with God and the righteous. God is the Creator, and the righteous are creatures. The difference between them is infinite, and it is not possible for them ever to unite.50

However, the greatness of God is also a feature of certain Hindu traditions, and these were highlighted by eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Orientalists and evangelicals. To illustrate Hinduism’s understanding of God to a Christian audience, Monier Monier-­Williams quoted a hymn from the Isa Upanisad: Whate’er exists within this universe Is all to be regarded as enveloped By the great Lord, as if wrapped in a vesture. There is only one Being who exists Unmoved, yet moving swifter than the mind; Who far outstrips the senses, though as gods They strive to reach him; who himself at rest Transcends the fleetest flight of other beings; Who, like the air, supports all vital action. He moves, yet moves not; he is far, yet near; He is within this universe. Whoe’er beholds All living creatures as in him and him—­ The universal Spirit—­as in all, Henceforth regards no creature with contempt.51

In all the various streams of the bhakti tradition, there is a marked tendency to extol the greatness of the divine whom the bhakta worships. There is a difference, however, between the Reformed and many bhakti traditions in the nature of the greatness that is praised. It is God’s creative, transcendent, and governing power that Dass praises. In the bhakti tradition, however, it is the deity’s love of and power over the life and salvation of the bhakta that predominate in the songs of the poets. Yet at times this divine power over the person comes to be seen as one dimension of the deity’s universal power, as in the sections (chaps. 10 and 11) of the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna reveals his universal glory to Arjuna. Still, due to the intimacy of the relationship between the divine and the devotee in the bhakti tradition, the power of the deity over the whole world is not always emphasized. Despite these differences between the bhakti and Reformed traditions, Dass wants to underline Dass, Lectures, 401. Monier Monier-­Williams, Hinduism (London: SPCK, 1882), 45.

50 51

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the common theological assumptions about the divine in the Christian, Muslim, and Hindu traditions: that the divine is omnipotent as well as the transcendent creator and ruler of the universe. Emphasizing Common Foundations: The Importance of Reason

The proponents of Princeton Theology were confident that good Christian theology was completely reasonable, and that reason was in fact required to understand the nature of God and God’s workings in the world. However, they were also very aware that the use of reason alone could lead people far from the path of orthodoxy. In consonance with much Christian tradition, they insisted that while reason (properly used) would not contradict Christian revelation, reason by itself was a poor guide for correctly apprehending God and God’s work. For this, people needed Christian revelation.52 Archibald Alexander argued in Christian Evidences that even if a few select philosophers could eventually “discover all truths,” the great mass of humanity had “neither the leisure nor ability for such tedious and difficult researches.” Moreover, experience and history prove that even the wisest persons on earth have not been able to get at the truth: “They reasoned much, and speculated as far as human intellect could go; but instead of clearly ascertained truth, they rested at last, in mere conjecture; or deviated into gross error.”53 Therefore inherent in Reformed theology is a question about the reliability of reason for discerning true knowledge about God. The Lectures of Ishwari Dass are full of affirmations not only of the necessity of reason but of its reliability in theological investigation. Here Dass leans to one side of Reformed theology for his Indian context. Throughout the Lectures he manifests no doubt about the efficacy of reason in confirming the authenticity of the Christian message. He assumes that any reasonable person reading his work will be convinced of the truth and cogency of its arguments and assertions. This assumption is manifest in the very first paragraph of his work: “It is admitted by all that the soul of man never dies, but, after leaving this body, lives in a state either of happiness or misery. It is also generally acknowledged that our future condition depends altogether upon the course of conduct

Calvin, Institutes, I.v–­vi. Alexander, Evidences of the Christian Religion, 38.

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that we lead in this life.”54 Later when he appeals to Hindu and Muslim readers, he asks them to observe their spiritual teachers carefully: “Almost all of them profess to be religious and holy. But what kind of holiness is theirs when they commit such heinous crimes! Exercise your reason a little and think if this can be true holiness, and whether this can take them to God.”55 Confident in the powers of human reason, in contrast to his American mentors, Dass downplays the role of the Bible in revealing religious truth; he relies significantly less than they do on the Bible to make his case for Protestant Christianity—­a topic to be discussed below.56 While in Dass’ theology, as in all Reformed theology, reason and the Bible work together as one seamless whole, he pushes the limits of Princeton Theology by emphasizing the reliability of reason in grasping theological verities. Rather than using his sacred Scriptures as the starting point of divine knowledge, he begins the Lectures by engaging in rational argumentation to establish the credibility of his own tradition, as well as his own sacred Scriptures, and to show how that tradition and those Scriptures are supported not only by reason but even the (reasonable) wisdom from other religious sources and authorities, as will become clear below. So early in the Lectures, Dass declares, “God by his Holy Spirit and 54 Dass, Lectures, 1; emphasis added. The truth of the matter is that standard Princeton Theology did not admit that “our future condition depends altogether upon the course of conduct that we lead in this life,” because it was only by God’s grace that any one of sinful humanity could be saved. “That by the deeds of the law no flesh shall be justified before God, is taught so clearly and so frequently in the New Testament, it is so often asserted, so formally proved, so variously assumed, that no one can doubt that such is indeed the doctrine of the word of God.” “[T]he resurrection of Christ secures both the spiritual life and future resurrection of all his people.” Hodge, Way of Life, 127, 138. 55 Dass, Lectures, 317; emphasis added. Notice how Dass echoes Kant’s admonishment to be enlightened, quoted in chap. 4: “Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of thy own understanding! is therefore the dictum of enlightening.” It is impossible to tell if Dass is consciously recalling Kant, or is simply picking up on ideas that were embedded in the thinking of the Presbyterian missionaries. 56 In Lectures, 295–­97, Dass does enumerate all those things that the Bible teaches, and that cannot be learned from other sources. Interestingly, Dass here lists teachings of the Bible that he in fact has discussed earlier in his work, without recourse to the Bible as divine authority. Charles Hodge, in contrast, starts his discussion of the Protestant Rule of Faith with the declaration, “All Protestants agree in teaching that ‘the word of God, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only infallible rule of faith and practice.’ ” Hodge, Systematic Theology, 151.

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Holy Word and wonderful works teaches about himself through reason. Reason shews the great power of God, and should always lead us to praise him.”57 Incidentally, such a heavy reliance on reason goes against the grain of bhakti, where the divine reveals itself (in ways that often confound reason) to the sant and the bhakta. Dass relies heavily on reason for explaining Christian thought because he wants to work with what is common among all human beings, rather than with what is exceptional in Christianity. Reason, Dass believes, is a human faculty shared by people of all faith traditions, and he is convinced that the use of reason will lead all (reasonable) people to the realization of the truth of Christianity. In this way he emphasizes a common foundation of reasoned thought and argument among all religious traditions. Re-­forming Reformed Theology: The Karmic Moral Economy

One significant way in which Dass reshapes American Calvinism is to bring it into what can be called a karmic moral economy, as this was understood by nineteenth-­century evangelicals.58 A karmic moral economy is one where an individual’s actions in the present determine the disposition or quality of his or her future lives. The word karma at its most rudimentary level means act, action, rite, or motion.59 In its more developed and popular understanding, the so-­called law of karma assumes that each action, whether ritual, social, or moral, has consequences: good and right actions are meritorious, or punya, whereas wrong actions are unmeritorious, or papa (or apunya). The term papa is used to translate the English word “sin” in Hindi Christian literature. The accumulation of merit (also punya) and demerit (also papa) in past lives determines, respectively, one’s enjoyment or suffering in the present life: either in heaven and hell, or in this world where one has been Dass, Lectures, 11. See Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 52–­55, for the ways in which American Evangelicalism tried to deal with charges of irrationality leveled against Christianity, and how it also argued for a synthesis of reason and the biblical witness. 58 One of the hallmarks of churches in the Reformed tradition is captured in the phrase “Reformed, always reforming!” which is an English translation of the Latin, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.” 59 Bronkhorst, Karma, xix; W. J. Johnson, Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169. 57

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reborn.60 “Good deeds will give rise to agreeable forms of rebirth, bad deeds to disagreeable ones.”61 An early twentieth-­century Western encyclopedia provides the following description: All acts [not free from passion] . . . are . . . distinguished as good or bad, merit or demerit. The principle of distinction seems to be retribution: the act with pleasant retribution is good; that with unpleasant retribution is bad. It may also be said that acts performed with a view to happiness in this world are bad; acts performed with a view to happiness in the world beyond are good. We sometimes meet with the noteworthy statement that good and bad actions (sucharita and duścharita) are characterized by their intention for the good or harm of others.62

The laws of religion and society and ethics that humans are supposed to uphold, in other words our duty in life, are referred to as dharma. The term is often the way that the English word “religion” is translated. The purpose of religion, then, is to teach and guide people to right action, which will result in future happiness. (Dass sees the Bible as the guide to help us live rightly: the Bible is the source of Christian dharma.) The theory of karmic retribution and of rebirth applies rather strictly to individuals, not groups of people. So what one has done in previous lives plays itself out in one’s present life. Only if this is true does it make sense to look for escape from rebirth and karmic retribution through particular actions, such as practicing asceticism or discovering the true nature of one’s self.63 However, well before the beginning of the Common Era, merit (and demerit) had come to be seen as transferable: “the store of karmic residue that someone has accumulated may affect someone else.”64 This meant that karma was no longer seen as operating strictly at an individualistic level; an individual could “willingly or accidentally” give to others “credit for a religious achievement . . . often in exchange for a negative quality given by the recipient.”65 The idea of merit transfer Johnson, Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 169–­71. Bronkhorst, Karma, 4. 62 James Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908–­1927), 7:675. 63 Bronkhorst, Karma, 91. 64 Bronkhorst, Karma, 92. See also Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, “Karma and Rebirth in the Vedas and Puranas,” in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 10–­13. 65 O’Flaherty, “Karma and Rebirth,” 3. 60 61

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thereafter remained popular in all Indic religious traditions, including Buddhism and Jainism; Dass adopted it in his soteriology.66 The author situates his theology within the karmic moral economy by shaping the Princeton Theology in three broad ways. First, he insists that our actions have inevitable consequences for our future life and, very specifically, for our salvation. This he announces quite boldly and surprisingly in the first paragraph of his work: [O]ur future condition depends altogether upon the course of conduct that we lead in this life. Obedience to God in this life will make us happy in the next: disobedience to him here will make us miserable hereafter. It is therefore very necessary and a point of great wisdom, to know God and his commandments while we have opportunity, and to obey him, that we may endeavour to secure our future and everlasting happiness.67

This declaration—­especially that we should try “to secure our future and everlasting happiness”—­is surprising because such an understanding of salvation runs contrary to a major tenet of Protestant theology, especially Reformed theology, that there is nothing that humans can do to save ourselves, and therefore we must rely solely upon God’s grace for salvation.68 Dass, however, insists that good deeds help humans get to heaven and that bad deeds bring upon us the condemnation of hell. Certainly God helps human beings perform good deeds, and we need to trust God to do them. However, for Dass ultimately it is the deeds themselves that get us into heaven or hell. It is for this reason that he ends his Lectures with a chapter titled “The Future Perfect Happiness of the True Worshippers of God; and the Dreadful Punishment of the Wicked.”69 Dass’ understanding of good and evil deeds would also cohere with Islamic understandings of good and evil: God rewards good deeds in the afterlife, but punishes evil deeds. Moreover, Islamic thought in

66 It should be noted that these common notions involving karma, such as rebirth, karmic retribution, and merit transfer, are not to be found in the most ancient Hindu texts, but in the earliest literature of Jainism and Buddhism. Yet in this literature karmic retribution is not presented as a new concept, but as an old one, indeed one that had become oppressive. So in speaking of “Hindu” ideas of karma, the religious traditions of Jainism and Buddhism are to be included. Bronkhorst, Karma, 3. 67 Dass, Lectures, 1. 68 Hodge, Way of Life, 129–­32. 69 Dass, Lectures, 394.

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Hindi North India, at least by the nineteenth century, also entertained ideas of meritorious deeds that can help people get into heaven.70 This is not to say that Dass denies that we are saved by God’s grace.71 Yet God’s mercy saves us in much the same way that a bhakta’s deity saves her, by rescuing us from the effects of our wrongdoing.72 And just as importantly, we must continue to do good works for salvation: [People] must not come to [God] trusting in their good works for salvation. They have no good works. . . . They have, on the contrary, the immense burden of a whole life of sin to answer for. . . . If they are ever saved, [God’s] mercy alone must save them, and not any supposed good works of theirs. But at the same time, good works, such as God has commanded, must be done constantly.73

While Dass can forcefully reiterate “the doctrine of salvation entirely by the free mercy of God,” he never relinquishes the conviction that “[p]eople in this world are in a state of trial, and are to receive according to their works in the next world.”74 This is readily understood in a karmic moral economy, where a person’s karmic actions are punya or papa but also where a deity can save a bhakta from the consequences of papa by rescuing the devotee from the world and bringing her into (comm)union with the deity.75 Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–­1900, in India’s Muslims: An Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 58. See Dass’ quotation of Emperor Aurangzeb’s letters, where he states exactly this. Dass, Lectures, 159. 71 Dass, Lectures, 239, 245. 72 On how Christ the divine savior rescues humanity, see the below section “Re-­forming Reformed Theology: The Nature of the Divine Savior.” 73 Dass, Lectures, 194. This does not go against Calvin’s understanding of good works. However, Calvin insists that good works do not get us into heaven. Rather, those that are destined for heaven freely and gladly perform good works. 74 Dass, Lectures, 403–­4. See also p. 254, which reads, “To remember our utter helplessness constantly, and to exercise an entire trust upon the Saviour for pardon and everlasting happiness, is absolutely necessary”; and p. 245, where Dass combines God’s mercy with the necessity of works for salvation. 75 Liberation or “salvation” in bhakti is somewhat different than in other traditions of Hinduism. While many schools of Hindu thought posit moksha, or liberation from the endless cycle of death and life, as the goal of the religious life, bhakti is far more interested in the devotee’s relationship with the divine: “As for the (ultimate) goal of Bhakti it is theoretically liberation (moksa) . . . but, in actual fact, liberation is, in the more emotional Bhakti, a remote matter for most worshipers. The devotee seeks the protection and grace (Sanskrit prasada, Tamil arul) of the Lord. He 70

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Reformed theology does indeed have a place for good works in a Christian’s relationship with God. In fact, there is much discussion of righteous living in Reformed doctrine, as in other Protestant doctrine. Yet there is a very strong emphasis on the necessity of God’s grace for salvation within Reformed theology, and this emphasis creates a tension between God’s grace and human action in the economy of salvation. Again, what Dass does in his Indian context is to lean toward one side of a tension within his inherited Reformed theology; he admits the necessity of God’s grace, but emphasizes the need for good works for salvation. Consonant with his karmic assumptions about the efficacy of good works, Dass argues that divine justice and retribution are meted out according to our works not only in the next world but also in our present lives. So good people are rewarded in this life, and evil people are punished. The consequence of virtue is happiness—­true, spiritual happiness. And the consequence of vice is misery; this misery makes the vicious suffer both in body and soul. As surely as a man, who works for a just master, gets his wages, so surely he who practises virtue, or obeys the law of God, derives happiness from it; and as surely as fire burns up things, so surely vice brings misery with it.76

Dass clarifies that the happiness derived from virtue is “peace of mind; and that is really the greatest thing that man can have in this world.”77 Conversely, those who are immoral have no peace of mind, and “[a]ll their lifetime their condition is full of disquietude and terror.”78 However, God often rewards virtue “even in a temporal point of view. God very often rewards people for it even with the good things of this world.”79 Dass needs to face the reality that the virtuous do suffer in this life, while the “vicious” at times prosper. He does so by arguing, as Calvin does, that the suffering of the virtuous is ultimately to their benefit: God sends afflictions on the righteous person so that “his heart may not be set upon this world, but that it may be weaned from the love of sin and surrenders to his Lord, satisfied to adore him. In that sense, Bhakti is the means and the end.” Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid, eds., The Archaeology of Bhakti I (Pondicherry, India: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2014), 8–­9. 76 Dass, Lectures, 98. 77 Dass, Lectures, 105; emphasis in original. This somewhat resembles the goal of bhakti, which is joyous communion with the Lord. 78 Dass, Lectures, 113. 79 Dass, Lectures, 107–­8. Calvin also argues this in Institutes, II.viii.4.

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the things of this world.”80 Moreover, “the peace of mind which the man enjoys from the practice of virtue far outweighs all the sufferings which he has to bear in his body; and then we must remember that the especial time for his reward will be hereafter.”81 Similarly, although the immoral may have wealth and power, this does not benefit them, because vice is “like poison to the soul; its effect is spiritual death or misery to the soul. . . . Men who commit vice are unhappy in every way.” And like the virtuous, the immoral will receive their final just recompense in the life to come.82 Continuing to draw on American Reformed theology, Dass extends his arguments beyond individuals to whole societies: “When rulers and subjects are both virtuous, the moral Governor of the world rewards that nation for its virtue; he prospers and exalts it, and it is a happy nation.”83 Again, the converse is true of unrighteous nations. India, says Dass, used to be a virtuous nation, and Nepal is one country that is virtuous in the present: while the “former kingdom of Oude is a very fruitful country and can produce a great deal of wealth, yet in point of virtue how greatly inferior it was to Nepaul, and consequently how miserable!”84 A second broad way in which Dass shapes the Princeton Theology to fit the karmic moral economy is in his understanding of the key doctrine of original sin. According to this doctrine, humanity’s sin is attributable not simply to each person’s wrongdoing but to a genetic moral flaw passed on to each human being from Adam, the human progenitor, who was the first person to sin. In this view of sin, human beings are sinful from birth, and sin is a flaw in the character of human beings. Dass does mention in the Lectures that a human being is sinful from birth; however, he emphasizes that sin is in the doing: A man is sinful from his very birth; but at present, take his case from the time that he begins to know right from wrong. If you could see the motives of his heart, you would find that all that he does every day is only

Dass, Lectures, 105. See Calvin, Institutes, I.xvii.1. Dass, Lectures, 107. 82 Dass, Lectures, 112–­ 13. For sin as “spiritual death,” see Calvin, Institutes, II.i.5. 83 Dass, Lectures, 108. 84 Dass, Lectures, 110–­11. It is not clear why Dass singles out Nepal for praise. 80 81

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for himself; and nothing for the praise and worship of God for which he was created.85

Throughout the rest of his theological treatise, Dass emphasizes that each person is responsible for his or her wrong actions: “We have not performed that for which we were created. We have not loved, feared, and served God; and thus we have become utterly sinful.”86 Wrongdoing is attributable to the individual, not a mythical progenitor. As noted above, the word used by Christians to translate “sin” into Hindi is papa, which is literally an action that is not meritorious; papa are “ethical and/or ritual deficiencies.”87 In the karmic moral economy, all “sin” is accumulated by one’s wrong actions, and eventually one has somehow to suffer for those sins. Dass keeps this view of sin in mind as he writes for his Indian audience.88 “All men are sinners, and [God’s anger] has come upon all; and this is the reason that all suffer here more or less,” Dass avers. The solution to this problem is for human beings to follow the ways appointed by God—­in other words, to do one’s duty, or dharma: God does not wish to see his creatures suffering; he has told them the right way, and said, if they walk in it, they will be rewarded; if not, they will be punished. So it is left to his creatures themselves to choose the right way and be happy, or to go on in the wrong way and be miserable.89

In keeping with his view of the direct consequences of action, Dass approvingly cites two letters from the dying Muslim emperor Aurangzeb to his grandson, where the old man is in anguish about the “fruit” of 85 Dass, Lectures, 139. For his discussion of Christ’s sinlessness (or his holiness, which is the same thing for Dass), see Dass, Lectures, 222–­24. Here Dass does say that a child receives certain sin from the father—­which is why Jesus was sinless, because he did not have a human father. 86 Dass, Lectures, 137. Interestingly, besides aligning his notion of sin to Indian understandings of the effects of wrong action, Dass was also either consciously or unknowingly echoing developments in American Calvinism that, in contradistinction to the Princeton Theology, saw the doctrine of original sin in its classic form as too harsh and unjust. See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 403–­14. 87 Johnson, Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 232. 88 For Dass’ views on punya and papa, see Ishuree Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of Northern India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1860), 107, 110ff., 256f. 89 Dass, Lectures, 93.

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his sins: “I brought forth nothing into this world; but carry with me the fruit of my sins. I do not know with what misery I shall be tormented. Though I hope in the mercy of God, yet when I think upon my actions, I cannot but fear.”90 Dass is also well aware of the prevalence of sin. He spends page after page describing and detailing it.91 In so doing, he reflects the Reformed doctrine that all humankind is utterly lost in sin. As a Christian theologian who does not believe in Indian religious notions of rebirth, he never intimates that our present condition is due to wrong actions in previous lives. Yet neither does he resort to the classic Christian doctrine of original sin to explain the current sinful state of affairs in the world. Rather he provides Indian explanations for it. He cites a poem of “a Hindoo poet” who writes about the ubiquity of covetousness and how “man worships money as his god.”92 And at one point when Dass could naturally have invoked the doctrine of original sin, he instead provides an Indian understanding of the pervasiveness of sin: We are sinful from the very moment that we are born. And sin begins to act and manifest itself in us from the very time that we are able to move about and think and act. . . . Natives of this country know this very well, and ascribe it to the Kali jug, or sinful age.93

The third broad way that Ishwari Dass locates his theology in a karmic moral economy is by utilizing the concept of transfer of merit. He explains Jesus Christ’s ability to save people from hell and send them to heaven by claiming that Christ’s merits are transferred to his followers. This argument is examined below, in the context of Dass’ understanding of humanity’s plight. Re-­forming Reformed Theology: Dealing with the Problem of Suffering

One other adjustment that Dass makes to the Presbyterian theology of his missionary mentors and overseers concerns the consequences of sin. John Calvin succinctly describes the consequences of sin as “death” or “death of [the] soul”: Dass, Lectures, 159. Dass, Lectures, 137–­85. 92 Dass, Lectures, 167. 93 Dass, Lectures, 148. 90 91

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As the spiritual life of Adam consisted in a union to his Maker, so alienation from him was the death of his soul. . . . Therefore, when the Divine image in him was obliterated, and he was punished with the loss of wisdom, strength, sanctity, truth, and righteousness, with which he had been adorned, but which were succeeded by the dreadful pests of ignorance, impotence, impurity, vanity, and iniquity, he suffered not alone, but involved all his posterity with him, and plunged them into the same miseries.94

The consequences of Adam’s sin are death, depravity, and suffering, and those consequences are transmitted to all humankind. Similarly, in The Way of Life Charles Hodge writes that the “term commonly employed to designate [the] punishment [for sin] is death; death not merely of the body, but of the soul; not merely temporal but eternal.”95 In contrast to this Western Christian theology, Dass stresses that the effect of sin is not so much depravity or death but suffering: “The consequence of sin is suffering. All mankind suffer. Therefore all mankind are sinners.”96 Rather than death being the ultimate punishment for sin, Dass sees death as “a part of the suffering that sin has brought upon us.”97 So while Calvin lists human failings—­“ignorance, impotence, impurity, vanity, and iniquity”—­as the consequences of sin, Dass claims that human suffering, “cares and anxieties, pain, sickness, sorrow and death, are all the consequences of sin.”98 Throughout his theology, Dass never swerves from his understanding that human suffering is the result of sin. Dass has shifted the fundamental problem of humanity, to which religion responds, from guilt to suffering.99 In the Western Christian Calvin, Institutes, II.1.v. Hodge, Way of Life, 82. 96 Notice, however, that Calvin also speaks of suffering as the consequence of sin. 97 Dass, Lectures, 138, and see also pp. 92, 230. It is important to remember that the three forms of suffering that Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, witnessed were aging, sickness, and death. 98 Dass, Lectures, 138. Another list is compiled in Dass, Lectures, 92: “All raging fevers, and cholera, and painful affections of the head, the stomach, the liver, and the eyes, and all the pain that people endure from sores; —­the sickness of children and dear relations and their death, and the pangs of the heart that are produced by their loss, and the death of the sufferer himself, with all the troubles, cares, and anxieties that he has to bear in this life.” 99 See S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Mary­ knoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995), 129–­57. See also Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: 94 95

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tradition, the overarching problem that religion and theology address is human guilt that arises from a life characterized by culpable sin. If human beings are not convinced of their sin and thereby not possessed by feelings of guilt, it is the aim of the religion to arouse within people a sense of their sin and thus create in them a sense of guilt.100 And so in the conversation between the missionary and the grass cutter at the beginning of this chapter, the missionary wished “to reach the man’s conscience.” Without a sense of guilt arising from sin, the whole structure of Western Christian theology is rendered irrelevant. The problem of the Hindu religious worldview that is to be addressed, on the other hand, is the suffering of humanity. This problem is most sharply posed in the Buddhist tradition, in which suffering is named as dukkha, and the whole purpose of that tradition is directed to escaping finally and permanently from dukkha. The Buddhist tradition simply emphasizes a pervasive issue in Indian religion at large, which is that life is marked by suffering and the goal of “salvation” is finally to be liberated from this suffering. In the Hindu tradition, suffering is most commonly identified with samsara, “the potentially endless cycle of suffering and rebirth to which the embodied individual is subject, unless they can achieve moksha [liberation or release].” Samsara, by extension, also means the world as it is experienced.101 Life is not simply difficult and hard; life is endlessly difficult and hard, and the goal of various paths or ways of salvation—­including the path of putting one’s trust in a divine savior—­is to escape the suffering that inheres in the world permanently. Whereas in Hinduism samsara also possesses aspects of pleasure and goodness, in Buddhism dukkha is simply suffering. Dass relies heavily on a Buddhist view of life, even though Buddhists were a tiny minority of the population of Hindi North India in the nineteenth century.102 In fact many British Christians who studied the religions of India at that time considered the Buddha to be a highly ethical person—­in contrast to the millions of Hindu gods and goddesses—­and praised him for this. So in a lecture on the “Creeds of India” delivered in Scotland in 1879, Edward Colebrook claimed, “I have said that [the Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 100 See Hodge, Way of Life, 104–­13. See also Robbins, Becoming Sinners. 101 Johnson, Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 286. 102 Henry Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India, 1871–­72 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1875), 16.

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Buddha’s] moral teaching was of the highest order. All who have risen from the study vie with each other in enthusiastic praise.”103 Moreover, Western Christian scholars viewed the Buddha’s teachings as a reaction against the immoral and ineffectual Hinduism of his day. Given this positive assessment of Buddhism by Western evangelicals, Dass borrows from Buddhist thought for his rendering of Christian doctrine. By emphasizing that the consequence of sin is suffering, and avoiding language that speaks of human depravity, Dass makes human suffering the problem to which his adapted Christian theology responds. Certainly Calvin, in the quotation above, speaks of human suffering due to sin. However, it is a deserved suffering, meant to evoke a sense of guilt, not simply “cares and anxieties, pain, sickness, sorrow and death” of which Dass writes. For him, the suffering that results from sin evokes pain and despair, so the “soul of a true worshiper of God” will feel “perfectly happy” when “it escapes this world of sin and suffering and enters heaven.”104 In this world, people, as they live, grow older and older, and feebler and feebler, and if they escape death by sickness, or violence, or accident, mere old age carries them off after a number of years. But there is neither old age nor its infirmities in heaven. The righteous . . . will live in the perfect enjoyment of the happiness of heaven for ever.105

Re-­forming Reformed Theology: The Nature of the Divine Savior

Given that Dass’ Calvinism addresses the problem of human suffering rather than human guilt, and given that it operates in a karmic moral economy, how does Dass see Jesus Christ functioning as the savior of the world? The foundation of Reformed (and other Protestant) understandings of salvation is the doctrine of justification by faith. This doctrine teaches that human beings are justified in the eyes of God not by their good deeds or their obedience to God’s law, as they cannot fulfill the law because of their sinfulness; rather, human beings are justified by the “vicarious obedience and suffering” of Jesus Christ, who Edward Colebrooke, The Creeds of India (Glasgow: W. G. Blackie, 1880), 45. 104 Dass, Lectures, 396. 105 Dass, Lectures, 400. Dass also does not want to equate earthly life with hell, which he reserves as a place for eternal punishment for the unrighteous (404). 103

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by paying the penalty for sin by dying on the cross released humanity from the demands of God’s law and justified them in God’s sight. In the nineteenth-­century Princeton Theology, this justification of human beings becomes operative only if humans accept its truth by faith; those who do not accept this doctrine are condemned to hell.106 Dass picks up on the classic Reformed assertion that Christ’s suffering and death atone for humanity’s sins, but he stresses that it is Christ’s suffering—­rather than primarily his death—­that removes the sins of humanity.107 In Dass’ religious milieu, suffering is believed to be redemptive, because suffering can destroy papa, or the karmic effects of wrong deeds. Ascetic practices, by which a person suffers, are one way to destroy the effects of karma.108 So Dass again stresses one aspect of his inherited theology to adjust it for his context. Dass does make the classic Christian claim that Christ’s death was the payment for sinners’ wrongs, a payment that granted salvation to humanity. “The Son of God . . . saw the miserable state of sinners, and felt so great a pity for their wretched condition, that he offered to die in their place, and save them from the dreadful wrath and curse of his Father and from the pains of hell.”109 However, as Dass continues to elaborate on this idea for several pages, it becomes clear that for him the atoning sacrifice of Christ was not merely his death but his whole life of suffering, of which death was a part. He argues that a savior “should bear the punishment of sinners. To save them from the effects of sin, he must suffer in their place. All suffering in this world is the consequence of sin. Christ suffered every misery when he was in the world.”110 These sufferings “commenced from the very time that he was born,” when “he chose to be born in the house of very poor people”; continued through his life of hardship, persecution, and deprivation; and culminated in his Hodge, Way of Life, 119–­66; quotation from p. 131. Dass, Lectures, 239. 108 For example, suffering is linked to salvation in historic Jainism, although the suffering and the liberation of Jain ascetics is very different from the suffering and salvation of Jesus described by Dass: “Remaining in a standing position for days on end, preferably in the heat of the sun, abstaining from food and drink, not protecting one’s body from stinging insects and other vermin that will prey upon the ascetic—­ all this creates great suffering. The Jainas looked upon this suffering not as an inevitable product of the chosen method, but as an essential part of it. This suffering, they claimed, destroys the traces of earlier deeds [karma].” Bronkhorst, Karma, 12. 109 Dass, Lectures, 219. 110 Dass, Lectures, 230. 106 107

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death, which is seen as an integral part of his suffering, not a sacrificial act that stands on its own.111 In an acknowledgment that many great religious people—­one thinks of the Buddha, for example—­have suffered acutely in their bodies, Dass stresses that Christ’s suffering in his mind and soul were the greatest suffering of all; it was these that “principally atoned for the sins of mankind.”112 Dass’ views can be contrasted to orthodox Reformed theology, which sees Christ’s death as the atonement for humanity’s sins.113 In The Way of Life, Charles Hodge carefully shows why Christ’s death was necessary for the redemption of humanity, based on the Jewish system of sacrifice: “The iniquities of us all were laid on him; he was treated as a sinner in our place, in order that we might be treated as righteous in him.”114 Hodge continues, “Jesus Christ delivers us from the punishment of our sins, by offering himself as a sacrifice in our behalf; . . . the punishment of sin is removed by the substitution and death of the Son of God.”115 Resisting the heavy weight of Western Christian tradition and selectively stressing certain aspects of it, Dass attributes the redemption of humanity to Christ’s suffering, which begins at his birth, continues through his life, and culminates in his death. Perhaps Dass’ most innovative shaping of classic Calvinist soteriology is his view of the operation of Christ’s good deeds. While Dass does argue repeatedly that we must completely trust Christ for our salvation, knowing that he died for our sins, it is the merit that Christ accumulates due to his obedience to God’s law and his sacrifice on the cross that he uses to save those who trust him from hell, and to usher them 111 Dass, Lectures, 230–­34. See Calvin, Institutes, II.xiv.3. Dass claims that the redemptive suffering of Christ began in the Garden of Gethsemane, where “the wrath of God for sinners began to be poured on him,” and continued to his crucifixion. Dass, Lectures, 235. 112 Dass, Lectures, 238–­39. 113 Calvin, Institutes, II.xvi.5. It should be added that in this same section Calvin does state that Christ’s whole life was a propitiation for our sins; however, his death was particularly salvific: “[F]rom the time of his assuming the character of a servant, he began to pay the price of our deliverance in order to redeem us. Yet more precisely to define the means of salvation, the Scripture ascribes this in a peculiar manner to the death of Christ.” What Dass does is to shift the weight of the atoning work of Christ from his death to his suffering. 114 Hodge, Way of Life, 133–­36; quotation from p. 133. Dass also mentions animal sacrifices in Judaism, as well as sacrifices in all Indian religions. Dass, Lectures, 221–­22. 115 Hodge, Way of Life, 137.

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into heaven.116 Dass argues that Christ accumulates so much merit by perfectly keeping the law of God during his life on earth that this merit is what actually gets his followers into heaven. In other words, Christ transfers his merit to his followers for their salvation. Dass presents Christ as the only person who could save humanity from the consequences of its own sin. Dass lays down four “qualifications” or “requisites” for the savior of sinners: “1. That he should be holy. 2. That he should be almighty. 3. That he should suffer all the punishment that sinners deserve. And, 4. That he should, in the place of sinners, keep all the commandments of God that they have broken; thus to merit heaven for them.”117 The first three of these “requisites” are to be found in standard Reformed theology. The fourth, while taken from Calvinist theology, Dass interprets rather uniquely by emphasizing that it is Christ’s obedience to the law of God while he was living on earth that gains the merit necessary for his followers to enter heaven: The fourth thing necessary in a Saviour is, that he should keep all the commandments of God that sinners have broken, and thus acquire merit by which he may lay claim to heaven for those whom he will save from the pains of hell. . . . To take us to heaven, he must in our place fulfil all that God had commanded us. He must fulfil his law in every point, and thus merit heaven for us.118

Dass picks up on a line of thought regarding Christ’s “merit” that is found in both Calvin and Hodge, and advances a soteriology in which Christ’s fulfillment of God’s law earns the merit necessary for humanity to enter into heaven.119 Dass, Lectures, 240, 241, 245, 254. Dass, Lectures, 215. 118 Dass, Lectures, 217–­18. 119 See Calvin: “Now, that Christ by his obedience has really procured and merited grace from the Father for us, is certainly and justly concluded from various passages of Scripture. For I assume this as granted: if Christ has satisfied for our sins; if he has sustained the punishment due to us; if he has appeased God by his obedience; in a word, if he has suffered, the just for the unjust,—­then salvation has been obtained for us by his righteousness, which is the same as being merited” (Institutes, II.xvii.3 [p. 478]). See also Hodge: “According to this doctrine the work of Christ is a real satisfaction, of infinite inherent merit, to the vindicatory justice of God; so that He saves his people by doing for them, and in their stead, what they were unable to do for themselves, satisfying the demands of the law in their behalf, and bearing its penalty in their stead; whereby they are reconciled to God, receive the Holy Ghost, 116 117

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[Christ] has loved God with all his heart and strength, and he has loved mankind as himself. By this perfect obedience that he has rendered to God in the place of man, he possesses great merit, because he has done what God required of man; and by this great merit he can take all those to heaven who trust in him for salvation, and do as he bids them.120

In fact, “a Saviour’s merely bearing the punishment of our sins will save us from hell, but not take us to heaven. . . . To take us to heaven, he must in our place fulfil all that God had commanded us. He must fulfil his law in every point, and thus merit heaven for us.”121 In other words, Christ’s salvific work is not simply accomplished by his death on a cross, but also by his keeping all the commandments of God all through his life and thus earning merit on behalf of all humanity that is saved. In light of the importance of the ideas of punya, or merit, Dass vigorously asserts that Christ’s merit is salvific. Dass divides Christ’s salvific work into two parts: his suffering and his good works. His suffering keeps his followers from entering hell, but his obedience to God during his earthly life brings his followers into heaven. Christ is also part of the karmic moral economy: his good deeds accumulate merit that is then transferred to his followers to get them into heaven. The logical problem for Dass then is determining whether it is Christ’s merit that saves people from hell and gets them into heaven, or whether it is their righteous actions that get them into heaven. Dass makes both claims in his work. At times he holds the two together by arguing that if we trust in Christ and his merit for us, Christ gives us the Holy Spirit that enables us to do the righteous work that gets us into heaven. In fact, this line of reasoning is not different from standard Reformed thought. Ultimately, for Dass, it is some combination of the actions of God and of humanity that attain salvation for the latter. On the one hand, God has provided for human salvation through the good works and suffering of Jesus Christ, and “we are to be saved only by trusting in him, and must not depend in the least degree upon ourselves.”122 On the other and are made partakers of the life of Christ to their present satisfaction and eternal salvation.” Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:563–­64. 120 Dass, Lectures, 241. 121 Dass, Lectures, 218. This idea is also put forward by Johannes Wolleb, an early seventeenth-­century Swiss Reformed theologian who was popular in America. See Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), 462. 122 Dass, Lectures, 245.

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hand, “our future condition depends altogether upon the course of conduct that we lead in this life. Obedience to God in this life will make us happy in the next; disobedience to him here will make us miserable hereafter.”123 How the actions of God and the actions of humanity actually work together in the economy of salvation is not always resolved in Dass. One may make the same observation about Western Protestant theology, which insists on both the complete efficacy of God’s grace and the necessity of humanity’s good works. At the same time, it is also true that in the Hindu worldview, ideas about salvation through God’s kindness or graciousness (prasada)—­especially prominent in the bhakti tradition—­circulate alongside ideas about karma wherein salvation is totally dependent upon our actions. So while Dass may not be completely consistent in his theological framework, he is drawing both on reasoning and assumptions common in the Indian religious world and on certain strands of orthodox Reformed theology. Re-­forming Reformed Theology: The Authority of the Bible in a Religiously Pluralistic World

One of the conspicuous absences in Dass’ theology is any sort of defense of the veracity of the Scriptures. Such defenses were standard in the American Reformed theology of his day and usually occurred toward the beginning of any theological work. The opening chapter of Charles Hodge’s The Way of Life is entitled “The Scriptures are the Word of God,” and the four sections of the chapter are devoted to arguing for the divine origins of the Bible.124 Hodge was particularly concerned about the status of the Christian Scriptures, because he was constantly waging an ideological battle against real and imaginary foes who were questioning biblical truth. His primary opponents were Deists in America, and scholars of Higher Criticism in Germany, both of whom were undermining traditional Protestant views of the Bible. Other Reformed theologians, however, also dealt with the nature and truth of the Scriptures in their works.125 In his Institutes, John Calvin deals with the Bible in chapters 6 through 14 of book I, after first dealing with epistemological Dass, Lectures, 1. Hodge, Way of Life, 51; see also p. 145. 125 Francis Turretin begins his Institutes of Elenctic Theology with a discussion of the nature of the theological enterprise, and then proceeds to an exposition on “The Holy Scriptures, The Word of God.” (I.vii–­viii). 123 124

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issues.126 Thus the concern with the status of Scripture, while becoming acute for American Reformed theologians in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, was certainly a historic concern of the tradition. Dass omits any discussion of the status of the Bible. Moreover, he eschews quoting Scriptures as an authority for his theological claims. He rarely argues that a particular claim must be true because the Bible says so; rather, he seems to assume that the force of his argument will persuade his readers. In fact many times in his work he quotes from Scripture without mentioning his source. In writing about confessional prayer, he quotes Psalm 51 (a favorite of Calvinists) without attribution: “We must humble ourselves, and confess our sins, acknowledging with sincere sorrow that we have committed them against so merciful a God. A pious man used thus to confess his sins before God in prayer:—­ ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me . . .’ ”127 The one biblical author that Dass quotes by name is Solomon, probably because he is well known and respected by Muslims as a religious authority.128 Even when Dass uses the Bible as an authority, he does not defend it or prove its veracity. Describing the humanity of Jesus Christ, he writes, “In the holy Book in which he teaches us about himself and the salvation that he has procured for us, he calls himself also the Son of man; because he took to himself a body like we have.”129 When he does quote Scripture, it is usually to illustrate or provide evidence for an argument that he is making. The Bible, in other words, functions as one authority among several in the Lectures, and does not receive the attention that reason does as a grounding for Dass’ many claims. Dass also quotes Indian sayings and writings to illustrate his points. For example, he undergirds his argument about God being infinitely true by citing an Indian proverb.130 While he does not give reasons for his refusal to argue for the divine authority—­let alone the inerrancy—­of the Bible, his reticence can be explained by his social and religious milieu. Dass’ intellectual context is Calvin, Institutes, I.vi–­xiv. Dass, Lectures, 276. See also Dass, Lectures, 270, 300, 303, 339. 128 Dass, Lectures, 363, 303. 129 Dass, Lectures, 221. 130 “Sat borábor pun nahin, aur jhúth borábar páp nahin; that is, there is no merit like truth, and no sin equal to falsehood.” Dass, Lectures, 79. See also pp. 167 and 273. In Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs, 8–­9, he favorably compares a quotation from Tulsi Das, a bhakti saint, to verses from the book of Galatians. 126 127

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quite different from that of his American mentors. He is not engaging the Western critics of the Bible who so vexed American Presbyterian theologians. Rather, in the religiously pluralistic context of India, a number of traditions have their own sacred Scriptures and claim their own divine authority. Besides the Vedas and the Qur‘an, there are various collections of sacred writings recognized by sectarian groups.131 Dass knows that in a religious context where there are numerous Scriptures that claim divine origin and authority, to say that the Christian Bible is the only writing from God would not really persuade anyone who does not already believe so. In other words, while for the Christian community it is not necessary to argue the case for the divine authority of the Bible, for other religious communities it is futile to do so. For Dass, the case for Christianity must be made by reasoning based on generally shared Indian assumptions about religion and the Christian lifestyle. It is these factors that persuade. The Bible is used to add force to these arguments, not to ground them. In nineteenth-­century Hindi North India, it was the logic and experience of Christianity that led people to the truth of the Bible, and not the other way around, as in American Reformed theology. It would be a mistake to think that Dass himself does not believe in the divine origins of the Bible. He states quite plainly that the Bible has been given by God for the benefit of humanity. His doctrine of Scripture comes in the last part of his theology, when he is enumerating humanity’s duties to God: God has given to mankind a holy Book; this book he caused to be written by his prophets and apostles, who were religious teachers, and whom he made good and holy. In writing this holy Book, these prophets and apostles were guided by the Holy Spirit of God, so that all which they have written in this valuable book is directly from God; and every part of it is perfectly true. God has given this Book to mankind to be a guide for their belief and conduct. All mankind are the servants of God, and God is their Master. This Book tells these servants what they must do.132

While he states the Bible is “perfectly true”—­in agreement with Princeton Theology—­Dass sees the Bible’s function primarily as a guide to humankind for its belief and actions. Elsewhere he writes that God’s 131 For example, the Sikhs view the Guru Granth Sahib as inspired Scripture, Kabirpanthis hold various collections of Kabir’s sayings to be religiously authoritative, and the Pranamis hold sacred the Qulzam Swarup. 132 Dass, Lectures, 294.

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“holy book is exceedingly necessary to man. Without it he would be in utter darkness about every thing. . . . The book of God is both a light and a guide to lead us through the dark wilderness of this sinful world. It was for this very purpose that God gave it to mankind.”133 The Bible is not a compendium of “facts” that can be arranged to discern God’s plan of salvation, as Charles Hodge taught. Yet it is, as Hodge also taught, a guide for right living.134 Again Dass emphasizes one aspect of his inherited Reformed theology in order to fashion it for his context. Christianity is dharma, a duty with its own rules and regulations. For Dass, the Bible provides the content of Christian dharma; it is a guide to help humanity live rightly. And it is the embodiment of this living that convinces the world of the truth of the faith. The Formation of Christian Community

Ishwari Dass also devotes a significant amount of space to the third section of the Lectures where he expounds upon humanity’s duties to God, to ourselves, and to our fellow human beings.135 What is evident in this long parenetic section of the Lectures is that Dass is very interested in how Christians, and indeed all people, ought to behave. Our duties to God include repentance, faith, prayer, love, reading God’s word, godly fear, observance of the Sabbath, and holiness—­which Dass interprets as ethical living.136 These duties to God cultivate a certain Reformed piety. Duties to ourselves include humility, meekness, temperance, chastity, diligence, contentment, cheerfulness, self-­denial, and edification. The duties to ourselves encourage the development of what may be termed a certain kind of evangelical disposition in society. Then there are duties to fellow human beings: as husbands, wives, parents, children, servants, masters, subjects, rulers, and other people.137 There are two notable characteristics of Dass’ admonitions regarding duties to fellow human beings. First of all, he lays great stress on the equality of women and men, a standard trope in missionary rhetoric. He criticizes his male compatriots for their treatment of women, writing that “God considers [women] in the same way that he does men, and Dass, Lectures, 294–­95. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:1–­2, 15–­17. 135 He devotes 157 pages or about 40 percent of the Lectures to this section. 136 See Dass, Lectures, 309–­24, for holiness as ethics. 137 Dass, Lectures, 249–­394. See Hodge, Way of Life, 145, for a summary of right relationships in society. 133 134

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will treat them in the day of judgment as rational beings; and men ought to treat them here as they do their own sex.”138 This general principle is tested in Dass’ instructions on family relationships, because he upholds the patriarchal order and argues that it is the “duty of a husband” to “govern” his wife and children. Well aware of the conflicting instructions he is giving, he repeatedly admonishes men to love their wives; he severely criticizes wife beating; he argues that “the government of the husband over the wife is only for this world, and it does not prove any spiritual and abiding inferiority of the wife to the husband.” Most important, when he does instruct wives to obey their husbands, he adds the caveat that “if the husband order her to do any thing that is not right, she must not do it, because God has forbidden her to do that which is wrong; and his command is infinitely superior to that of the husband.”139 The wife, then, holds a trump card in her dealings with her husband—­the will of God.140 Dass’ concern for girls and women is also evident in his exhortation to parents to treat their daughters as well as they do their sons. He criticizes parents for not educating their daughters,141 and for believing that girls are “made only for marriage, and this belief is instilled in them at as early an age as possible.” Instead, he writes, parents “should know and remember” that “[i]n the sight of God boys and girls are alike; both have got immortal souls, and both stand in need of real happiness.”142 Dass upholds the equality of the sexes by referring to their equal status before God, even as he concedes that women and men are bound to live in a patriarchal order where men are to govern women in the family. A second notable emphasis in the instructions to the Christian community is the importance of education, another trope in missionary rhetoric. Dass lays great stress on reading the Bible and other Christian literature, which assumes not only literacy but education.143 He directs those who cannot read to learn how to do so.144 He requires “edifi Dass, Lectures, 349. Dass, Lectures, 347–­54; quotations from pp. 348, 350, and 354. 140 See Calvin, Institutes, II.viii.38, for a similar restriction on obedience to parents. 141 Dass, Lectures, 350, 369–­72. 142 Dass, Lectures, 365, 368. See also Dass, Lectures, 368–­72, for his criticisms of unequal treatment of women. 143 Dass, Lectures, 294–­302. 144 Dass, Lectures, 345. 138 139

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cation,” which means “that we always endeavour to increase in true wisdom.” And edification is not only for oneself, but “[l]ike every other duty, the edification of others is binding upon every human creature.”145 He lectures parents about educating their children: “Ignorance is the mother of many vices, but knowledge when respected and valued will keep a person from many of them.”146 All in all, Dass wants to impart to the Christian community North American middle-­class evangelical values. He urges Christians to be pious, virtuous, ethical, forbearing, self-­ controlled, temperate, hard-­ working, cheerful, and educated, treating each other and their fellow human beings with compassion. Dass is apparently urging foreign values and modes of living upon Indian Christians. Yet the categories of “foreign” and “indigenous” need to be understood properly in the nineteenth-­century Indian community. What matters is not so much the source of the ideals being urged, but the appropriation of those ideals. class American evangelical values on Indian Dass urges middle-­ Christians because many of them have origins in India’s low castes, and the kind of life that Dass commends is one that is useful to them for improving their status. The adoption of Victorian values assisted Indian Christians from low caste and class backgrounds to raise their status in the indigenous social and religious hierarchy. Sociologist M. N. Srinivas termed the process by which this happens “Sanskritization.” In this process, lower-­caste groups lay claim to higher-­caste status by abandoning activities and behaviors that are identified as characteristically low caste, and over the course of generations adopting behaviors and activities that are viewed as pertaining to higher castes. Victorian norms of femininity, cleanliness, education, literacy, temperance, and hard work were adopted by lower-­caste converts to Christianity so that they could claim higher status in society.147 Other norms, such as the equality of women and men, identified the Indian Christian community with the ruling British, and in this way also assisted in the process of social elevation. Dass, like other Indian Christians who selectively adopted Western culture, wants his fellow Christians to acquire some measure of dignity

Dass, Lectures, 344–­46; quotations from pp. 344, 346. Dass, Lectures, 366–­72; quotation from p. 368. 147 Chad Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–­ 1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 53–­57, 187–­88. 145 146

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and respectability in society. They are, in his words, “to pass through this world respectably and honestly.”148 The Audience for the Lectures The title of Dass’ oeuvre states that his theology is adapted to the natives of India, and the first page claims an even more specific audience: these are “Lectures on Theology for the Illiterate.”149 However, the title and first paragraph of Lecture I, “On God’s Greatness and Power, as Manifested in the Creation of the World and of Man, and in His Providence,” signal that the lectures are not meant simply for the illiterate, and in fact raise the question whether they are even primarily for the illiterate.150 Ishwari Dass is well aware that he is writing for at least two audiences: the European missionary community that would judge his work, and literate Indians who would for some reason be curious about or interested in his brand of Christian theology. Because of his personal qualities and acumen, his upbringing in a Presbyterian orphanage, and his close associations with Western evangelicals, Dass was a man with what W. E. B. Du Bois in a quite different context called a “double consciousness.”151 As a youth, Dass had learned the art of moving back and forth easily from one culture to another and of living in two cultures simultaneously. Moreover, he knew that while his lectures were supposed to be geared to the fledgling North Indian Protestant community, the prize of Rs. 500 would be given not by illiterate Indian Christians but by a group of well-­educated British and American Christians who were steeped in transatlantic evangelical thought and practice. Thus, ironically, the work needed to convince them, not the natives of India, that its theology was appropriate for Indian Christians. And the gap between the two parties was a problem generally acknowledged by church leaders of whatever

Dass, Lectures, 335. Dass, Lectures, 1. 150 Dass, Lectures, 1. 151 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 5th ed. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1904), 3. For an expanded use of the concept of “double consciousness,” see Bruce M. Knauft, Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 1996), 57–­58. 148 149

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background.152 Ishwari Dass, who by all accounts had excellent relations with missionaries, was the exception that proved the rule.153 So Ishwari Dass addresses at least two different groups of evangelical Christians in his Lectures. However, the fissures in the Christian community in India did not end there: a close reading of the text reveals that Dass is aware that this community is socially segmented beyond European and Indian. The first page’s claim that the lectures are for the illiterate acknowledges the social status of the majority of Protestant Indian Christians. The text would therefore need to be read and interpreted to them by literate members of the Christian community. And so the Lectures are also meant for the literate, as Dass reveals in certain passages. For example, he exhorts his audience to read the Bible while acknowledging that there are those who cannot read: [W]e ought to read [God’s] holy word. If we are not yet able to read we ought to learn soon; for a man to learn to read his mother-­tongue is not a very difficult thing. The word of God is translated into every language by his servants, so nobody can bring the excuse that it is not to be had in his own tongue.154

He goes on to point out that besides the Bible there are “thousands of good books” that are published annually for people’s general edification, and “it is their duty to read these books and derive wisdom from them.”155 Literacy is not the only social marker that divides Dass’ Christian audience. In his work the author assumes that his readers come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. In a section in which he urges all parents to “save something” out of their income to pay for their 152 See D. Herron, “Sympathy and Confidence: How Can Foreign Missionaries Secure, in the Highest Degree, the Sympathy and Affectionate Confidence of their Native Brethren?” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore in December and January, 1862–­63 (Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1863), 159; the Rev. Goloknath, “Sympathy and Confidence: How Can Foreign Missionaries Secure, in the Highest Degree, the Sympathy and Affectionate Confidence of Their Native Brethren?” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference, 166. 153 See his obituary in The Foreign Missionary, September 1867, 93–­96. This does not mean, however, that his thought is not “Indian,” or “Indian enough.” Rather it means that he was one of the mediating figures in the early life of the Presbyterian Church in North India. 154 Dass, Lectures, 345. 155 Dass, Lectures, 345.

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children’s education, he notes that higher education is not financially within the reach of all: “We do not say that all classes should endeavour to make their children learned; but all should endeavour to give their children some education by which they may know God and their duties, and pass through this world respectably and honestly.”156 Such passages, including Dass’ explication of servants’ duties to masters and masters’ duties to servants, indicate that his envisioned readership comprises Christians from a wide spectrum of classes and social strata—­from illiterate servants to Western-­educated masters—­even though the majority of Christians are from the humbler classes.157 Dass is also aware that Christian literature is read not only by Christians,but by persons from other religious communities. The author also intends for his work to be an apologetic piece aimed at Hindus and Muslims. This becomes explicit when he is discussing the difference between real and nominal Christians, a standard evangelical trope: Real Christians alone have a correct idea of holiness; and Mussalmans and Hindoos and nominal Christians may, in some measure, at least learn from their daily conduct what it is. Real Christians are very rare in this country. We must repeat again for Hindoo and Mahomedan readers, all that are called Christians are not Christians.158

The Lectures, then, are not simply an exposition of Reformed evangelical Christianity for a variety of Christians in India; they are also an apology for Christianity in a society where Hindus and Muslims comprise the great majority of the population. Conclusion: A Thirdspace Theology for the Socially Marginal Dass’ work is connected to the theology of bhakti very tenuously. In fact, the form and content of his theology is very unlike that of the songs and poems of regional bhakti saints. To give just one example, the deep intimacy between the bhakta and the divine is almost completely missing in Dass’ theology. Dass’ work is based on theology emanating from 156 Dass, Lectures, 335. The emphasis on honesty and respectability may signal that he is thinking of Christian mission schools. 157 Dass, Lectures, 380. See also pp. 300, 355. 158 Dass, Lectures, 314; emphasis added. See also Dass, Lectures, 247, where he addresses non-­Christians: “You say you must persevere in the faith in which you are, because your forefathers have held it; but this is a very foolish argument.”

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Princeton, not Prayag. Yet there are two ways in which Dass builds on bhakti traditions. First, by titling his work as a theology for the illiterate, he is allegedly addressing the segment of society that was particularly attracted to bhakti sects. Secondly, Dass follows the bhakti tradition of both critiquing and appropriating the theologies in his milieu, as he reshapes and rethinks his Christian tradition to create a compelling vision of the human-­divine relationship. In these ways he constructs his own work in social and theological spaces that had been cultivated by the bhakti tradition. Ishwari Dass worked imaginatively with theological material he inherited to produce a theology that would provide Christian responses to religious questions and desires arising from the Indian context. He recognized that the Calvinism he learned from his missionary mentors, like all religious traditions, is laden with internal tensions. Dass chose to emphasize certain sides within those tensions, certain strands of belief and practice, of the Princeton Theology of his missionary teachers.159 What Dass was attempting to do was to stake out some common theological foundations that evangelical Christianity could share with other religious traditions of Hindi North India to construct a new religious community on those foundations. Thus, on the one hand, Dass argued for a form of Christianity that would be comprehensible to people who were already well attuned to Muslim, Hindu, and sectarian religious assumptions and ways of thinking. On the other hand, Dass also argued for a new religious tradition that could in important ways distinguish itself from other religious traditions in its context. Much of its uniqueness, it is clear, had been introduced by missionary agency. However, for Dass (and for the missionary community that sponsored the essay competition) this did not mean that Christianity needed to remain inherently foreign. Rather, the missionary work needed to be adapted to the Indian religious intellectual and practical landscape, so that a new, unique, but still Indian religious tradition could emerge. For Dass, Christianity is a strictly monotheistic religion, which posits an omnipotent, righteous, and transcendent God, and proclaims a savior who is both human and divine and who offers to save people from their suffering by leading them to heaven. This religion calls people into a community governed by a particular ethic and piety. That ethic stresses, among other things, equality of women and men, an emphasis I am grateful to E. Brooks Holifield for raising this point.

159

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on education and learning, compassion for fellow human beings, honesty in speech and action, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, sexual self-­control and monogamous marriages, and thrift in the use of money.160 This is a community with a faith and a set of practices available to all people, yet especially applicable to the lowest castes and classes of society. This chapter opened with the report of a conversation between a missionary and a peasant who cut grass and wood for sale. The conversation was recounted in a missionary report that aimed to show how frustrating it was trying to reach ordinary Indians with the message of the Christian gospel. Paradoxically, Ishwari Dass’ rather erudite Lectures on Theology actually addresses the concerns and worldview of the peasant, as he was portrayed in the dialogue. The peasant was very interested in a divine savior, which is not unusual in the North Indian context. However, the peasant was not interested in the kind of savior that the missionary was proclaiming, a savior who rescues people from guilt. The missionary tried to induce in the peasant a sense of guilt by asking him to reflect on how he had not loved God or his neighbor completely. The peasant, however, was completely confident that he had done the will of God—­indeed, God is so powerful, how can one not do God’s will?—­and that he had perfectly loved his neighbor. The peasant’s problem was not guilt but suffering. First of all, he “sinned” by causing suffering in other beings—­by killing plants and animals in the course of his livelihood. By causing others to suffer, he accumulated papa, or “sin,” and he would thereby suffer punishment in hell or in his rebirth. Moreover, as a peasant he was consigned to a life of suffering—­he did not have the economic means to engage in ritual actions such as going on pilgrimages, spending long hours in religious devotion, or providing money to temples, which would earn him merit, or punya. For such a peasant, a savior would be someone who could provide him the merit to avoid suffering and enter into heaven to enjoy its goodness. This savior would also help him enjoy the goodness of life here on earth. It is this kind of savior that Ishwari Dass’ Calvinistic theology was aiming to portray and proclaim. Perhaps his Lectures in Theology were, indeed, meant for the illiterate, as the title page stated.

160 It is interesting how many of these overlap with what missionaries thought of as Buddhist morality. See Colebrook, Creeds of India, 45–­48.

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—6— Community in a New Context

L

ike all enduring social movements—­ whether religious or not—­ nineteenth-­century evangelical and bhakti sectarian groups stressed the formation of communities where their particular beliefs, practices, and affections could be instilled and cultivated. This chapter describes the kinds of people that joined the evangelical communities of the American missions, and some of the ways they innovatively structured their common lives, in part by appropriating models of social formation that were available to them. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British increasingly distinguished the population of India by race. There were European, Eurasian, and “native” members of the American missions, all who played crucial roles in the establishment and development of Evangelicalism in Hindi North India. The place of the three groups, the contributions they made, and the ways they organized their lives in the mission churches varied somewhat. At the same time, there was significant overlap and interaction between the various segments of the mission churches. Together, they created a novel religious and social community in Hindi North India. American Evangelicalism and the Formation of Christian Community The first generation of evangelicals in India comprised an amalgamation of people with social, religious, and biological origins in Indian and European societies: namely, native Indians, Europeans (who included

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Americans), and Eurasians, or “East Indians.”1 However, as noted in chapter 1, the tripartite racial grouping of Christians in India predated the arrival of American evangelical missionaries. The latter’s importance lay not in the creation of a multiracial Christianity but in bringing together preexisting Christians and new converts to form one Christian community, even though linguistic, racial, economic, and cultural differences were still evident and operative in it. In this the American mission was part of a larger European evangelical missionary movement that sought to develop Christianity that was relevant to the context of British North India. When American missionaries landed in India, the Europeans—­most of them British—­were generally involved in the military and civil service, in business, and in religious and charitable organizations. They were baptized Christians, although many of them participated minimally or not at all in Christian rites and observances. Indian Christians consisted mostly of Roman Catholics from South India, along with a few local converts such as wives of British soldiers. Eurasians mostly (though certainly not exclusively) came from the community formed by the offspring of British soldiers and Indian mothers.2 All three of these racial groups joined the Methodist and Presbyterian missions, although as the missions accrued converts from the Indian population through the years, the proportion of European and Eurasian Christians in the mission churches declined. However, the latter two groups (Europeans and Eurasians) provided critical support for the American evangelical enterprise in Hindi North India. Europeans in the American Evangelical Missions

While most of the reports and descriptions of the mission-­ initiated churches focus on missionaries and Indians, lay Europeans were a small but vital part of the new Christian community, not least due to the For the development of racial distinctions in British India, see Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 1–­9. 2 Christopher J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–­1883 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1996), 1–­20. However, there were certainly influential Eurasians, especially if one of their parents was European. See the fascinating life of Harry Inglis in Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-­East India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 1

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support they provided through human and material resources. The British community in India as a whole was divided in its opinion of Protestant missions in the first decades of the nineteenth century. A small but increasing number were sympathetic to the missionary cause, whereas others were determinedly set against it. No doubt some were indifferent.3 The East India Company during most of the eighteenth century actively supported Christianity among its Christian religious subjects in India. These included substantial numbers of Roman Catholics. However, from the middle of the eighteenth century, it increasingly opposed missionary activity among Indians of other religions for fear that this would stir up added discontent among the populace.4 The Company’s attitude to mission work reflected the spirit of the majority of the British public for the greater part of the eighteenth century; the British were not, generally speaking, too interested in missionary activity. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), formed by a handful of mission-­minded Anglicans in 1698, supported a few mission activities.5 Otherwise for most of the eighteenth century, there was one Anglican mission society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) formed in 1701, but most of its work, such as it was, took place among British settlers.6 The SPG did pursue mission work among Native Americans and African slaves in Britain’s American colonies, although that was not its primary mandate, as this was articulated in the first annual sermon of 1702: “The design is, in the first place, to settle the State of Religion as well as may be among our own people there . . .

For example, see the negative reactions of at least one British official, still recovering from the ravages of the 1857 Uprising, to the Methodist plan to bring twenty-­five workers to North India at one time, in Clementina Butler, Mrs. William Butler: Two Empires and the Kingdom (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1929), 81. 4 Penelope Carson, “An Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, no. 2 (1990): 169–­90. 5 The SPCK’s major thrust was to support Christian education in Britain, but it provided Christian literature for South India and supported German missionaries there during the eighteenth century. Kevin Ward, A History of Global Anglicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 33. 6 Ward, History of Global Anglicanism, 50–­51. 3

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and then to proceed to the best Methods [we] can towards the Conversion of the Natives.”7 The evangelical revival in Britain and North America in the eighteenth century slowly introduced changes in the British public’s views of Christian work and life. Still, its energies (like those of the aforementioned SPG) were primarily focused on revivifying British Christianity in the nation and its overseas territories. However, toward the end of the century, the growing fervor and strength of Evangelicalism resulted in the formation of numerous voluntary mission societies. Some of the most important ones were the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS; formed in 1792), the interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS; 1795), and the evangelical Anglican (as opposed to the High Church SPG) Church Missionary Society (CMS; 1799). The Scots organized the Scottish (later Edinburgh) Missionary Society and the Glasgow Missionary Society in 1796; both of these were interdenominational. In British North America, the interdenominational American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was formed in 1810. Certain British evangelicals, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, became dismayed that the East India Company was opposed to missionary activity among non-­Christians in India, prohibiting it in Company territory. The class and religious backgrounds of evangelicals from dissenting churches rendered them suspect in the Company’s eyes.8 So the first British missionaries in India—­who happened to be Baptist and evangelical—­had to establish their work in the Danish enclave of Serampore in Bengal in 1800.9 British evangelicals both consciously and unconsciously undermined the Company’s barriers to missionary work. As a conscious strategy, they strove to use their growing political influence in Britain to change Company policy.10 They triumphed in the second decade of the nineteenth century: in 1813 the Company charter was 7 Quoted in Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28 (emphasis in original charter of SPG). 8 Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–­ 1858 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 25–­27. 9 Before these missionaries, however, evangelical Anglican chaplains such as Claudius Buchanan, Henry Martyn, and Daniel Corrie had experimented with mission work among Indians. Ward, Global History of Anglicanism, 216. 10 Perhaps the politically most influential and active evangelical for this cause was Charles Grant. Carson, East India Company and Religion, 27–­31.

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amended so that missionaries could work among non-­Christians in its territories. Along with this planned strategy to change the Company’s policy toward mission work, British evangelicals also undermined that policy from within: growing numbers of evangelicals signed up to work for the Company, and once they reached India, they promoted Christian evangelistic and other missionary activity to the best of their abilities.11 The experiences of both the Presbyterians and the Methodists show that sympathetic lay Europeans provided invaluable personal and financial support to the American endeavors.12 The Presbyterian mission in the city of Allahabad provides a typical example. To begin, it was European and Eurasian Christians who first convinced the Presbyterians to commence work in that city in 1836. The first Presbyterian congregation in Allahabad consisted wholly of Europeans and Eurasians—­the first Indian convert was baptized three months later. A European gentleman provided the funds necessary to open up three schools.13 The first church building was constructed by the “English congregation” in 1840 on land donated by the East India Company: “the members subscribed liberally, and the other residents at the station helped them handsomely.”14 Even as the proportion of converts increased over the years, the European community remained active and supported the American missions generously. In return, American missionaries continued to offer church services in English, catering to the British and to English-­educated Eurasians, in the various towns and cities where the missionaries worked into the 1870s and beyond.15 European interest in the missions increased correspondingly. As Joseph Warren put it in his memoir, “The benefit of 11 See E. J. Lake and Alfred Strawbridge, “Two Essays on Lay Cooperation,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore in December and January, 1862–­63 (Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1863), 96–­106. 12 John Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions, Historical Sketches of the India Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Allahabad: Allahabad Mission Press, 1886), 82–­83. 13 Walter L. Allison, One Hundred Years of Christian Work of the North India Mission of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Mysore City, India: Wesley Press, 1941?), 3–­4. 14 Joseph Warren, A Glance Backward at Fifteen Years of Missionary Life (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856), 97; Allison, One Hundred Years, 6. 15 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 84.

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the association of missionaries with English society is not confined to the missionaries. There have been many cases of conversion, resulting from their labours, both amongst Englishmen of all grades, and the East Indians.”16 The Methodist story is a similar one. William Butler had planned to commence work in Lucknow, the capital of the Kingdom of Oudh, but the British commissioner there had refused to countenance any ideas for mission work in the city.17 Butler moved on to Bareilly, where a Scottish judge, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, welcomed the missionaries into his home. He provided crucial material and moral support, as well as valuable local information gained from his thirty years of experience in India and knowledge of the local language.18 The circular that advertised the opening of Methodist work in Bareilly announced both English and Hindustani services; it also suggested that the European community could support the Methodist mission to the “Hindoo and Mohamedan population” by providing “a kind invitation to their servants to attend the Hindustani services, either on the week day, or on the Sabbath, as may be most convenient.”19 Two of William Butler’s first assistants were British: Josiah Parsons was from a British Methodist family and had been in India for five years before joining the American Methodist mission in 1858, and Samuel Knowles had come to India with the East India Army six years previously.20 Knowles’ connection to the army was not happenstance: European troops of the East India Company provided a constant supply of religiously interested—­or at least curious—­congregants for the Presbyterian and Methodist services, and some of these congregants became members of the mission.21 Warren, Glance Backward, 194. East Indians here refers to Eurasians. Clementia Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 41. 18 William Butler, The Land of the Veda (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1871), 221. 19 Clementia Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 47; emphasis in original. 20 John N. Hollister, The Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia (Lucknow: Lucknow Publising House, 1956), 5; James Thoburn, “Wayside Notes: An Autobiography, Chapter IX,” Western Christian Advocate, March 1, 1911, 10. Parsons left the Methodists to work for the Baptist mission in November of 1859. “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 11 November 1859 entry, Special Collections, Pelletier Library, Allegheny College. 21 Presbyterian missionaries regularly held English worship services for European troops, a ministry that provided material benefits to the Mission, because when British soldiers were part of any congregation, “a pecuniary allowance” was made 16 17

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On the whole, European members and friends of the American missions strongly supported the Empire. At times, in fact, Christian missions came under fire for their loyalty to the British government. The opening page of the January 7, 1841, issue of Friend of India, a newspaper published by the British Baptist Mission in Bengal, featured a response from the editor to the charge of “sycophancy to the Government.” The editor argued that the newspaper should not “carp” against the government because “the welfare of India is especially committed to the keeping of government.”22 Nineteenth-­century British mission newspapers in India were absorbed by the activities of the British government and military, which were reported in highly positive terms. The activities of Indian Christians were far less frequently reported. American missionaries also viewed the British government as a providential instrument for their mission.23 In fact, missionary work sometimes consciously followed the Empire. In 1839 American Presbyterian missionaries made a case for establishing Allahabad as “the principal station of the second mission” because it had become the seat of British government in the North-­Western Provinces.24 The American missions attracted more and more Indian converts over the years. Yet a contingent of British and other European soldiers, civil government employees, business persons, and other residents continued to be an integral part of the missions and their work. This side of Methodist and Presbyterian work could be problematic, as Methodist James Thoburn recognized early in his career: We had all gone out to India as missionaries to non-­Christians, and without exception had expected this to be our primary work. When, however, by the government to the Mission. Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 85. On the Methodist side, the experience of James Thoburn is instructive: when he commenced work in Naini Tal in 1858, his diary recounts how his ministry was focused on the British soldiers and other Europeans stationed there. “Preached last night to a quiet and attentive little congregation. After service baptized five soldiers and one miner, the first persons I ever baptized and the first adults ever baptized in Nynee Tal. I also received nine probationers into full connection. May God increase our infant church an hundred fold!” “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 22 September 1859 entry. 22 “Editorial,” Friend of India, January 7, 1841, 1. 23 John C. Lowrie, A Manual of the Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 3rd ed. (New York: William Rankin Jr., 1868), 86, 88. 24 Foreign Missionary Chronicle, February 1840, 55.

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it began to seem that [European] congregations, at least in some places, would ask for our services, we very naturally began to fear that we might be diverted from our original mission to India if we responded to the call of these who already bore the Christian name. Very naturally I felt an immediate and intense interest in the [European] people who came to hear me preach, but at the same time I began to fear that I should become greatly hampered in my work if I accepted my new obligations too seriously.25

One reason that evangelically inclined Europeans tended to gravitate to the American mission churches is that the East India Company chaplains worked only at major Company stations, in Company-­controlled territory. When in 1825 Bishop Heber visited Lucknow, which was home to a small European population, he found no Christian clergy there to care for the needs of the resident Christians, who besieged him with requests for a clergyman for the city. In addition to their scarcity, the chaplains had a reputation, certainly not always unjustified, for doing only the minimum duties required by the Company, and in a most perfunctory manner.26 They were allegedly there for the pay and the thrill of being in India, not really for the care of souls.27 Thus Europeans who desired to nurture their spiritual life in the Christian tradition were often eager for the missionary presence and supported it liberally with their personal involvement, encouragement, and material gifts. Eurasians in Evangelical Missions

The already Christian (as opposed to convert) constituency of the missions, however, was not restricted to Europeans. Eurasians formed another significant population of Christians in Hindi North India who were actively seeking Christian community. Like the Europeans to whom they were often unfavorably compared, the preexisting Eurasian Christian population also provided incalculable support for the American 25 James M. Thoburn, “Wayside Notes: An Autobiography, Chapter X,” Western Christian Advocate, March 8, 1911, 9–­10. 26 For a history of chaplains, see Daniel O’Connor, The Chaplains of the East India Company, 1601–­1858 (London: Continuum, 2012). 27 In Chronicles of Budgepore, a trenchant satire on British rule in North India in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the fictitious town of Budgepore the chaplain—­who is contrasted to a missionary—­boasts that he can complete the Sunday service, including the sermon, in seventeen and a half minutes. Iltudus Prichard, The Chronicles of Budgepore; Or, Sketches of Life in Upper India (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1870), 244.

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evangelical missions. The glimpses we are afforded of the Eurasian population portray them as falling into two quite different social classes: a minority that is educated and mixes rather easily with Europeans and respectable segments of Indian society, and the majority that is socially adrift and generally disdained by Indians and Europeans alike.28 The Eurasians tend to be hidden or effaced in the missionary record for at least two reasons. First, like the Europeans, they could not be counted as new converts who, of course, were the raison d’être and the great prize of missionary work. Secondly, Eurasians were generally viewed as social misfits, as Bishop Heber’s comment makes clear: “I never met with any public man connected with India, who did not lament the increase of the half-­caste population as a great source of the present mischief and future danger to the tranquility of the Colony.”29 One Methodist missionary described them as “a kind of pitiable compromise between the native and the European”; pitiable because they found themselves “with a blood legitimately or illegitimately mingled with that of the native, much to their social disqualification and discomfort.” He also believed they had “a sad blending of the native and European vices.” In other words, Eurasians were perceived as having the worst of both worlds and were fully accepted by neither.30 John C. Lowrie reported that the Baptists used “East Indians” in the majority of their smaller mission stations. They were “good men” and, with their knowledge of the local language and their ability to withstand the Indian heat, very useful to the mission. However, he wished that they could spend some time in a “Christian country” such as the United States or England to improve their usefulness, because one could not truly understand or appreciate the advantages of Christianity and civilization if one’s life were spent completely in a “heathen country, even though under the best auspices.” He immediately qualified his opinion by noting that some of the Eurasian missionaries were equal to or even better than European

28 Hawes, Poor Relations, ix. It could well be that these two classes were actually poles of a wide social spectrum that was evidenced in the Eurasian community. 29 Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828), 1:63. 30 T. J. Scott, Missionary Life among the Villages of India (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1876), 42.

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missionaries; however, “the former would be much benefited by enjoying the advantages of the latter.”31 Eurasians supported and furthered the American missions in crucial ways. They were part of the core of the initial Christian communities founded by the missions. American Presbyterians began English-­language services for “Europeans and Eurasians” in Allahabad, and the Presbyterian congregation in Agra in the 1850s was almost exclusively Eurasian, consisting of government employees.32 Moreover, missionaries could justify their work with Eurasians by pointing to the latter’s social marginality. When he commenced work in Allahabad in 1837, Mr. McEwen wrote that the “young East Indians are growing up almost as ignorant of God as Hindus. . . . On arrival I commenced laboring among this class of people. . . . Mrs. McEwen has collected a number of East Indian children as day scholars.”33 In Agra, the Presbyterian mission established a high school for East Indians.34 The second vital form of support that Eurasians provided to the fledgling American missions was Christian leadership. As noted above, the British Baptists freely used Eurasian workers for their missions. The Eurasian component in the early leadership of the Methodist mission was especially prominent.35 One of the earliest and most avid supporters of the first Methodist community in Bareilly was Maria Bolst, the daughter of a German mercenary residing permanently in Bareilly and “a bazaar woman,” ordinarily a term for a prostitute.36 The father had sent Bolst for schooling to the Baptist Mission School in Calcutta, where she “was converted and inspired with the desire to help her mother’s 31 John C. Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1850), 74–­75. 32 Allison, One Hundred Years, 10; Robert Stewart Fullerton, Memoir of Robert Stewart Fullerton, ed. J. J. Lucas (Allahabad: Christian Literature Society, 1928), 148; e-mail correspondence with John Harrison, August 27, 2012. 33 Allison, One Hundred Years, 3. 34 Matthew Atmore Sherring, The Indian Church During the Great Rebellion (London: James Nisbet, 1859), 74; Fullerton, Memoir, 49. 35 There could be a number of explanations for this. It may be that the Presbyterian mission was less attractive to Eurasians, for whatever reason. Or it may be that the Presbyterians spoke less of Eurasians in their reports. Given that work with Eurasians was heaviest in the early years of the missions, it may be that because the Methodists were relative latecomers in the period under review, we hear less of the Eurasians overall in the Presbyterian reports for the years 1835–­1872. 36 Clementia Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 44. On the term “bazaar woman,” see Hawes, Poor Relations, 13.

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people.”37 She returned to Bareilly in 1853 to her father’s home and interpreted the arrival of the Butlers three years later as an answer to her prayers for missionaries in the city.38 Bolst was instrumental in Methodist work for the first few months: she was a dedicated member of the first Methodist class in India and worked diligently with Mrs. Clementina Butler to establish a school for girls. She was killed, as was her father, on the first day of the 1857 Uprising in Bareilly.39 Once the Uprising had been crushed and the Methodists recommenced their work in Hindi North India, Eurasians were prominent in the work of the mission. This is evident in the European names of the Indian assistants appointed at various Methodist mission stations.40 Indian names of mission workers include Sundar Lal, Bakhtawr Singh, Abdullah, and Rajab Ali.41 The British and Americans, on the other hand, Clementia Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 44. Clementia Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 54. The text says that Maria’s father persuaded her not to go with the Butlers to Naini Tal at the outbreak of the Uprising: I presume therefore that she was living with him or both her parents in Bareilly. 39 Clementia Butler, Mrs. William Butler, 54. 40 So in 1866, over half the appointed “native preachers” and “exhorters” had names such as Enoch Burge, James Gowan, William Durham, and Joseph Fieldbrave; it is safe to assume that most (though not all) were Eurasian. We do know that Joseph Fieldbrave was Eurasian. J. E. Scott, History of Fifty Years (Madras: Methodist Episcopal Press, 1906), 48. 41 Report of the India Mission Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church USA and Minutes of the Second Conference Session Held at Moradabad, Feb. 1–­17, 1866 (Bareilly: American Methodist Mission Press, 1866), 17. Mission workers with one name such as Andriyas and Paul are assumed to be Indian workers. The following is the complete list: Bareilly: Enoch Burge, Native Preacher; Peggy, Orphanage Matron. Shahjahanpur: Sundar Lal, Native Preacher; Thomas Gowen, Horace J. Adams, Exhorters; Isabella, Orphanage Matron. Budaon: Joseph Angelo, Native Preacher; Paul, and Cyrus Burge, Exhorters. Naini Tal: John Barker, Native Preacher. Khairah Bajairah: James Gowan, Exhorter. Lucknow: Joseph Fieldbrave and Abdullah, Native Preachers. Sitapur and Lakhimpur: Stephen Richards and Bakhtawr Singh, Native Preachers. Gondah: Rajab Ali, Native Preacher. Nawabganj: James David, Native Preacher. Rai Bareilly: Joseph R. Downey, Native Preacher; Amos, Exhorter. Moradabad and Chandausi: William Durham, Head Master City School; Ummed Singh and Ambic Charn, Native Preachers; Andriyas, John Judd, H. A. Cutting, Exhorters. 37 38

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were usually ordained ministers; Joel Janvier was the lone ordained Indian minister in full connection in 1866.42 Like the European population, the Eurasian population was linked economically, politically, and racially to the British Empire. However, its relationship to that empire was decidedly more troubled than that of Europeans. Many Eurasians were poor, doing whatever menial jobs they could find. A number worked in government offices as clerks.43 Others worked for British firms or other commercial interests. Yet even the literate Eurasians constantly had to deal with opprobrium from the East India Company, which from 1773 to 1833 singled them out “for discrimination and discouragement” and from the 1830s preferred to hire “natives of full-­blood” rather than Eurasians in its civil service.44 Being once removed by race and class from both Indian and European society, Eurasians created a hybrid culture that borrowed heavily from both, yet they were disparaged by both. Given these attitudes and perceptions, presumably Eurasians, or “East Indians,” had a more ambivalent attitude than Europeans toward the British Empire, which had, on the one hand, produced this community and, on the other hand, did not want to accept its legitimacy.45

Amroha and Babukera: Zahur-al-Haqq and William Plumer, Native Preachers; Bulloo Singh, Gurdiyal Singh, and Ibrahim, Exhorters. Sambhal: Calvin Kingsley, Exhorter. Bijnour: Thomas Cullen, Native Preacher; Prem Das and Benjamin Luke, Exhorters. 42 To be sure, determining the racial background of persons from their names is not an exact science, and the Methodists do not distinguish between Eurasians and other native Indians. The exhorter Andriyas was an Indian convert, as was Joel Janvier, and an Indian convert could very well have adopted a name such as “James David” at baptism. The assumption is that most of the “native preachers” and “exhorters” who have both first and last European names came from Eurasian backgrounds. 43 Fullerton, Memoir, 148. 44 Hawes, Poor Relations, 55, 150–­51. 45 By far the largest numbers of Eurasians by the early nineteenth century were the result of unions of British soldiers with Indian women. Hawes, Poor Relations, 9. It is far more difficult to find writings by Eurasian Christians than by native Christians, which means that it is almost impossible to ascertain the former’s views and opinions on almost any subject.

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Indians in Evangelical Mission Communities

For a number of reasons, getting a sense of the Presbyterian and Methodist Indian Christians—­or “native Christians” as they were termed—­ from American missionary records is not a straightforward task. First of all, many mission reports were written for church members in the United States who comprised a network of supporters, and these supporters tended to be more interested in the lives of the missionaries than the Indian Christians. Moreover, the financial support of missions depended almost exclusively upon these supporters, so there was a strong incentive for missionaries to report what they thought their supporters wanted to hear, and not to report those matters that would be unwelcome news.46 Second, missionaries’ racial and class prejudices could keep them from understanding Indians’ perspectives and conditions. Third, missionaries tended to be so focused on their work that it was sometimes difficult for them to step back from their own preoccupations and engage Indians on the latter’s terms. Fourth, the living arrangements of missionaries worked against free social intercourse between foreigners and Indians. Missionaries lived in mission compounds, where they could be insulated from the Indian population.47 Finally, there were the cultural differences between missionaries and Indians, which affected their interactions to varying degrees. The observations of the Rev. S. C. Ghose, a pastor in Bengal, sum up most of these differences: Difference of nationality, difference in circumstances, inability to say the right thing at the right time arising from the difficulty of attaining a thorough mastery over a foreign tongue, the impossibility of residing in most of the places where churches have been founded, and the calls of their legitimate duties as evangelists to the heathen, have prevented most of the

46 See William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Critics of mission often complained of overly rosy assessment of mission work from missionaries: see Richard Temple, “Opinion of Sir Richard Temple on the Value of Missions,” in Laymen’s Opinions of the Value of Missions in India (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1893), 12. 47 The Rev. K. C. Chatterjee, “The Relations of Missionaries to Converts in Secular Matters,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 1872–­73 (London: Seeley, Jackson, & Halliday, 1873), 344; Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–­1940s) (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 49–­52.

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European Missionaries from exercising due pastoral supervision over the churches gathered by them.48

Certainly there were missionaries who learned to adapt well to India, yet both missionaries and Indians acknowledged that, in general, the significant social distance between missionaries and Indian Christians was problematic.49 So although the greatest information we have about the native Christian community comes from missionary accounts, the authors of those accounts were sometimes poor judges of the social and religious dynamics operating within the native community. Nevertheless, by gathering scattered information, reading between the lines, and attending to Indian voices in missionary documents, it is possible to discern the way that the native Christians of the Methodist and Presbyterian communities were constituted and organized over time. These Christians came to the missions from quite different backgrounds. Native Christians from Other Christian Communities

North Indian society was highly mobile during the transition from Mughal to British rule between 1770 and 1870. People, goods, ideas, capital, and political and military forces flowed readily from one place to another across the country in response to the rise and decline of various local and regional crises and opportunities. Religious traditions and institutions were certainly affected by this movement, as people adjusted their personal and communal lot to new political and economic circumstances.50 So it is not surprising that Christians would be caught up in this mobility of society at large. A number of native Methodist and Presbyterian Christians came from other churches. Gopi Nath Nundy came to the Presbyterians from the Free Church of Scotland Mission in Calcutta.51 While this transfer was a completely harmonious affair, often the movement of Indian Christians from one mission to another was a much more contentious matter. 48 The Rev. Surju Coomar Ghose, “The Native Church in Bengal,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 281. 49 See chap. 3. 50 Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–­1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 51 See the biography of Gopi Nath Nundy in chap. 4.

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Some Indian Christians, including disgruntled church workers, moved from one mission to another in the hopes of receiving better treatment and pay. The desire of each mission to increase its numbers as much and as fast as possible added impetus to this movement. The following is a complaint of the Rev. Ghose against a particular unnamed mission that he alleged willfully encouraged members from other missions to join it: In many places the Missionaries of a certain denomination well known in Bengal, have done considerable injury to many of the Churches of Christ. By readily receiving into their church-­fellowship men excommunicated from other Churches for gross misconduct, by offers of money to the weak and discontented Christians belonging to the latter, as well as by various other means, these Missionaries, European and Native, have not only subverted the ends of discipline and trampled under foot the law of Christian charity, but have also considerably weakened the pecuniary resources of these Churches.52

Of course, the Protestant communities did not complain at all about “sheep stealing” when their members had come from the Roman Catholic Church.53 Orphans

A significant number of first-­generation native Methodists and Presbyterians came from mission orphanages. These institutions were established during times of famine, when numerous children were left destitute because their parents and other family members had died or were otherwise unable to take care of them. Such children somehow found their way to Christian orphanages, which were able to run with donations garnered from both the Indian and foreign public. The Presbyterians ran a famous orphanage at Rakha, and the Methodists established orphanages in Bareilly and Shahjahanpur ten years after commencing their work. It is not always clear how the orphans ended up in the Christian orphanages. Some of them sought out the orphanage as a place of

52 Ghose, “Native Church in Bengal,” 285. See also C. Harding, “The Native Church,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 292. 53 The Rev. T. Spratt, “The Training of Agents in the Tinnevelly Mission,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 217.

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physical refuge and sustenance.54 Others were stray children brought in by various European and Indian Christians: Gopi Nath Nundy provides one example.55 Still others were deposited at a Christian orphanage by distraught neighbors or family members.56 Christians were not the only religious sect known for adopting orphans, or even for taking and raising children from other people’s families. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries,Vaishnavite warrior ascetics known as gosains maintained and augmented their numbers by taking children into the sect.57 During times of famine, war, and other dislocation, distraught parents or other adults would give their children to the gosains to be raised by them.58 Children in distress, especially boys, would also join the ascetic bands, and there is evidence that the gosains were trafficking in slaves: eighteenth-­century Bengali court writer Ghulam Husain Khan writes how one ascetic leader, or sannyasi, led his “slave boys” into battle.59 Moreover orphans, such as the famous gosain warrior Anupgiri Bahadur at the turn of the nineteenth century, could become prominent leaders themselves—­a phenomenon also known in Christian missions.60 Obviously, Christian and gosain orphans were brought up in starkly different environments, with decidedly dissimilar expectations placed upon them, and it is highly unlikely that Christian mission leaders saw themselves imitating the gosain communities in any way. Yet the idea that a religious group would accept, recruit, and perhaps even pursue orphans to strengthen and enlarge itself was not completely novel in North India. Joel Janvier was one such orphan. See the case of two famished orphan siblings who came to the Methodist orphanage looking for food: Mrs. E. J. Humphrey, Six Years in India: Or, Sketches of India and Its People as Seen by a Lady Missionary (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1866), 197–­99. 55 Gopi Nath Nundy (see chap. 4) collected children for the Presbyterian orphanage during the famine of 1837–­1838. Captain James Gowan brought an orphan of a sepoy slain in the 1857 Uprising to a Methodist orphanage; Humphrey, Six Years in India, 101. 56 Humphrey, Six Years in India, 101. 57 A Vaishnavite is someone who is dedicated to the worship of the deity Vishnu. 58 Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 183. 59 William Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80–­82. 60 Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, 82, 110. As discussed in chapter 4, both Joel Janvier and Ishwari Dass were ordained ministers raised in Christian orphanages. 54

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The most important orphanage of the American evangelical missions in Hindi North India was the Presbyterian one in Rakha, on the outskirts of Fatehgarh. Its origins date to the devastating famine of 1837–­ 1838, when two British officials of the East India Company, Captain S. G. Wheeler, stationed in Fatehgarh, and surgeon Dr. Charles Madden, working in Fatehpur, separately asked the Presbyterian Mission to carry on the orphan and educational work they had begun in the stations that they were leaving. The Presbyterians responded by opening up an asylum for orphans in Fatehgarh in 1838, which two years later was moved to Rakha where the Commissioner of the Agra Division granted them a large tract of land, “the former ‘Artillery parade ground, an immense plain, comprising sixty acres’ on the outskirts of Fatehgarh.”61 The aim of the missionaries who established the orphanage was to build an economically and socially self-­sufficient Christian village, “from which streams of light and knowledge may go forth to enlighten the darkness around.”62 Two mission bungalows were constructed, along with the orphanage and a church building. The first missionaries running the orphan asylum, the Rev. and Mrs. Henry R. Wilson, hired six skilled carpet weavers from Mirzapur to teach the orphans how to make carpets and tents.63 They started to school the children, and immersed them in the Christian faith by providing Christian education and baptizing them—­seventy-­four were baptized in September 1839.64 For the first thirty years of its existence, the Rakha orphanage, as it was called, fulfilled the hopes and dreams of its missionary founders. The institution was economically self-­supporting, with carpets and tents being purchased primarily by the British army. As the children grew up, their marriages were arranged (according to Indian custom), and the married couples were encouraged to settle down in I’saipur (literally, Christian Town), a village built by the missionaries for their wards (including converts) behind the orphanage. The village had “two rows of mud-­walled buildings, divided by a wide street” that was “lined in with a row of trees on each side.” At each end of the village there was 61 James P. Alter and John Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand: North Indian Christianity, 1815–­1915 (Delhi: I.S.P.C.K., 1986), 104. The commissioner was R. N. C. Hamilton. 62 The Foreign Missionary, December 1874, 212; quoted in Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 104. 63 Allison, One Hundred Years, 15. 64 Allison, One Hundred Years, 15.

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a large gate, with “a very respectably sized village hall” opposite the gate at one of the ends.65 In the decade leading up to the 1857 Uprising, the number of inhabitants of I’saipur increased fourfold, to over two hundred persons. Most of the men continued to work in the orphanage workshops; some became teachers, catechists, and evangelists. A new church was built in 1856 to accommodate the growing Christian community; it cost $6,000 and “was paid for largely by subscriptions of local Christians.”66 A village council, called a panchayat, met periodically, but the missionaries “continued to supervise the lives and affairs of the villagers, much as they had done when the latter were children in the orphanage.”67 As a result, missionaries worried that “the greatest defect of our plan exhibited itself in a want of self-­reliance and manliness on the part of our people; it kept them in a state of tutelage.”68 Once the 1857 Uprising was decided in favor of the British, I’saipur continued to grow as a Christian community. The carpet-­weaving and tent-­making industries were revived, and the tent factory was called “The Native Christian Orphanage Tent Factory Company.” It was organized as a joint stock company, the original shares being issued at Rs. 50 each, and for many years the annual dividends for the stock were about 100 percent. The British government and Indian princes were the prime customers: in 1872 the Maharajah of Gwalior, an ally of the British, bought two large durbar tents from Rakha for Rs. 10,000.69 The manager of the factory at this time was Prem Singh, one of the orphan boys who had come in 1838. From about 1870 onward, however, the profitability of the tent factory diminished. The children of the orphan generation of Presbyterian Christians at Rakha were not content to work in trades that were considered to be low caste in Indian society. They preferred teaching, preaching, and working in offices, and did not desire the agricultural or factory work that had been bequeathed to them by the older generation.70 Thus over the years Christians comprised a diminishing number of workers in the factory labor force. For this reason and others, the tent J. J. Walsh, quoted in Allison, One Hundred Years, 17. Allison, One Hundred Years, 19. 67 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 105. 68 J. J. Walsh, quoted in Allison, One Hundred Years, 18. See also Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 122–­25. 69 Lucas, quoted in Allison, One Hundred Years, 170. 70 Allison, One Hundred Years, 170. 65 66

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factory could not successfully compete with similar factories in that part of the country. About 1880 the company was forced to go into liquidation, with the shareholders receiving the original value of their shares.71 The village of I’saipur was also under stress from about 1870 onward. The mission discovered that being the landlord of Indian Christians was difficult: as early as 1872 the mission adopted a resolution “stating its intention to surrender its right to the land connected with Rakha to the Government.”72 However, action on the resolution was not taken until 1893, after a report on the village shared the following findings: that for many years only a small amount of rent due to the mission had been paid by the villagers; that a large portion of the land had been sublet to “non-­Christians,” contrary to the condition of the original leases; that the people possessed an attitude toward the mission “of at least partial defiance”; and that the “moral and spiritual state” of the people was “wholly unsatisfactory.”73 This report illumines some of the difficulties to the mission engendered by a Christian community with its origins in an orphanage. Christian missionaries in the mid-­nineteenth century placed great hopes on orphans becoming the foundation of their Christian community by producing its leaders. These hopes were not fulfilled—­or at least not fulfilled to the degree that the missionaries expected. This situation is reflected in Joseph Warren’s thoughts on the matter: “There are several catechists in the Allahabad mission, who were brought up in our orphan asylum. I do not think an orphan asylum the best possible place in which to educate men. It seems to produce a character always too much prone to dependence.”74 Missionary complaints of an excessive dependence of Indian Christians are based on their own assumptions of human social development. These assumptions are made explicit in the reigning ideology of Protestant missions, articulated by the two most influential Anglo-­American mission secretaries of the mid-­nineteenth century: Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM and Henry Venn of the CMS. Both of them saw the goal of Christian mission to be establishing self-­supporting, self-­governing,

Allison, One Hundred Years, 171. Allison, One Hundred Years, 171. 73 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 124. 74 Warren, Glance Backward, 94–­95. 71 72

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and self-­propagating indigenous churches.75 While Anderson and Venn decried the hesitation and “backwardness” of missionaries in empowering local Christians to run their own churches and communities, there was still a general assumption in the missionary community that its end goal was to establish an independent Christian community.76 This assumption, in turn, reveals how embedded the early and mid-­ nineteenth century missionary movement was in various expressions of the European Enlightenment.77 It has been rightly pointed out that American evangelicals were especially indebted to the Scottish version of the Enlightenment, known as Common Sense Philosophy.78 Yet the evangelical call for self-­standing native churches reflects Continental Enlightenment attitudes as well.79 The following is a late eighteenth-­century English translation of the first paragraph of Kant’s famous essay “What Is Enlightenment?”: Enlightening is, Man’s quitting the nonage occasioned by himself. Nonage or minority is the inability of making use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This nonage is occasioned by oneself, when the cause of it is not from want of understanding, but of resolution and courage to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of thy own understanding! is therefore the dictum of enlightening.80

For the Protestant missionary movement, independence entailed a local Christian community that had cut itself off from the alleged Wilbert R. Shenk, “Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn: A Special Relationship?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 5, no. 4 (1981): 168. 76 Shenk, “Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn,” 168; quote from Rufus Anderson, Christian Missions: Their Relations and Claims (New York: Charles Scribner, 1869), x. 77 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 74; Brian Stanley, “Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation,” in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 2–­5. 78 Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 154–­57. 79 Annette G. Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-­Century American Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 15–­35. 80 Emanuel [Immanuel] Kant, “What Is Enlightening?” in Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, and Various Philosophical Subjects by Emanuel Kant, . . . From the German by the Translator of The Principles of Critical Philosophy. In Two Volumes (London: William Richardson, 1798), 3; emphasis in original. 75

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superstitions and fatalism of Indian religions, so that Christians could think for themselves and stand on their own socially and ideologically. It was to be a community that was economically self-­sufficient, that produced its own leaders who in turn guided the community by (Western) Enlightenment values, and that extended its Enlightened religion into Indian society.81 The majority of Indian Christians of the second generation at least, especially those with roots in low-­status castes, had rather different assumptions about what independence entailed. Because these assumptions were not verbally articulated in existing documents, they need to be discerned from actions that the missionaries complained about. First of all, both missionaries and Indian Christians agreed that Christianity brought “independence” to its adherents. However, while missionaries assumed that such independence would lead to the severance of ties with non-­Christian communities and a strong (paternalistic) relationship with the foreign mission, Indian Christians interpreted independence in quite the opposite direction: they would continue to deal with the rest of Indian society, albeit with a new and much improved social standing, while gaining equality with missionaries. This is what the complaints of “at least partial defiance,” of failure to pay rent, and of subletting land to non-­Christians reveal. Secondly, for Indian Christians “independence” did not entail economic independence; in fact, many Indian Christians were quite happy being subsidized by the mission.82 They appreciated missionary material and ideological support; what they resisted was missionary control of their lives. So for Indian Christians, independence meant a release from low social status and accompanying poverty, and from religious traditions (even Christian ones) that reinforced those social and economic hierarchies. It meant reengaging Indian—­and missionary—­society on new terms, as members of a new religious community that was on par with the commensurate religious communities in the region, and that drew from the religious and social ideas and the material benefits introduced by missions. To be an Indian Christian meant to worship a savior who did not simply respond to spiritual needs, but who also offered liberation Brian Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization in English Evangelical Mission Thought, 1792–­1857,” 169–­97, in his edited volume Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. 82 Rev. David Mohun, “The Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 360–­61. 81

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from social contempt and economic deprivation. Again, on this last point, Indian Christians and missionaries agreed. Where the two disagreed, however, was the kind of life to which Christ had liberated the Indian Christians. For the missionaries, the European Enlightenment of self-­reliance provided the assumptions undergirding evangelical Christian social arrangements. For native Christians, freedom from social and economic oppression included the possibility of drawing upon missionary material and cultural resources for the fashioning of their lives, as will be discussed below. Indian Converts from Sectarian Backgrounds

After the 1857 Uprising, members of various low-­status bhakti sects became interested in the Methodist and Presbyterian missions, and some of them joined not only individually but in groups. The Methodists seem to have absorbed more sectarian converts than Presbyterians before the 1890s, although the latter had several Kabirpanthis join the mission at Dehra Dun in 1859—­and many more were interested.83 There are a number of reasons that the Methodists received more sectarian converts. First of all, the Methodists were beneficiaries of the years of preaching and teaching that the Presbyterians had undertaken before the 1857 Uprising. This is apparent in the conversion of Mazhabi Sikhs, to be discussed below, in the Moradabad District. Secondly, the Methodists, largely due to the intervention of Zahur-­al-­Haqq it seems, decided beginning in the early 1870s to baptize people soon after they expressed interest in joining the church, and then catechize them after baptism.84 The Presbyterians, in their anxiety not to have people join the church from improper motives, imposed a long discernment and teaching process for potential converts leading up to baptism, which discouraged any number of them.85 Finally, when the Methodists came to the realization that it was the poor and ritually more polluted sectors of society that were most interested in evangelical Christianity, the mission planned to 83 John C. B. Webster, The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Macmillan of India, 1976), 48, 273; “Report of the Lodiana Mission, 1859,” Lodiana, India, 1859, MT 80 PSZ LA, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, 31–­32. 84 James M. Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1887), 207–­10. 85 For example, see S. H. Kellogg, “Communications from the Missions. Furrukhabad Mission, North India,” The Foreign Missionary, June 1868, 11–­12.

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reach out specifically to them.86 This caused no small dissension among Christian missions at large. Writing in the early 1890s, James Thoburn remarked that a Calcutta paper “called attention to the fact that some of our missionaries in Northern India were, even now, bringing a reproach upon the Christian name by baptizing professional thieves and receiving them into the Christian Church.”87 The term “professional thieves” referred to Mazhabi Sikhs in Moradabad. From the evidence available, it seems that Kabirpanthis and Nanakpanthis, or Sikhs, were the most interested in joining the Methodists and Presbyterians in the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh in the twenty years after the 1857 Uprising. In chapter 4, for example, there is a description of Susannah Haqq and other Christian girls and women visiting with village women from the Nanakpanth. Powerful Methodist preacher Andrias was a Chamar and a Kabirpanthi guru before conversion.88 Following is a description by Thoburn of sectarian gurus in Hindi North India: They wear the coarse garb of devotees, and combine the characters of the tradition devotee and the religious teacher. . . . There are various classes of Gurus, but those most frequently met with are either followers of Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, or of Kabir, a Hindu reformer of an earlier age. Their followers are almost exclusively low-­caste people, and the Gurus themselves are for the most part outside the pale of strictly orthodox Hinduism.89

The Methodists also reported in 1870 that Pranamis—­the sect from which Zahur-­al-­Haqq had come—­in the town of Pilibheet were interested in the mission.90 All three sects—­the Kabirpanth, Nanakpanth, and Pranami—­were nirguna bhakti groups, meaning that they worshiped the deity without attributes. According to mission reports, in December 1858 a deputation of three men from the district of Bijnor in Rohilkhand came to the Presbyterian mission in Dehra Dun. They represented a community of about 86 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 220–­21; Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 180. 87 James M. Thoburn, India and Malaysia (Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts, 1892), 267. 88 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 124, 129. 89 Thoburn, My Missionary Apprenticeship, 125. 90 Sixth Annual Report of the India Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, U.S.A. For the Year 1870 (Lucknow: American Methodist Mission Press, 1871), 5.

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sixty families of Kabirpanthis who wished to know about “the religion of Jesus,” as well as hundreds of others who “were willing to become Christians.” The visitors claimed to pray already in the name of Jesus, and they “hoped to be saved by him.” They stayed on the mission premises, where the mission personnel held “frequent conversations and a close examination of them.”91 The Presbyterians were convinced of the sincerity and truth of the Kabirpanthis’ declarations, and so baptized the three men in January 1859. The next month a missionary went to the villages in the district where the community was living, and spent two weeks preaching and itinerating there, “and inquiring into the origin, nature, and extent, of the work going on in their midst. He found the state of things to be even more encouraging” than expected. About thirty of these Kabirpanthis, most of them family members of the three men already baptized, returned with the missionary to Dehra Dun, found employment there, and “seemed honest inquirers after the truth.” The children attended mission schools, and over the course of the summer, the Presbyterians baptized eleven more—­both children and adults—­of the group. Eventually the group left for “Major Rind’s Christian colony in the Western Doon,” where they expected “greater temporal advantages” than they could find at Dehra Dun.92 This Christian colony had been established in 1858 originally for Christians from Mirzapur, and then from other locations in northern India.93 In early 1859, low-­caste Mazhabi Sikhs contacted the Methodist mission in Moradabad, asking for baptism.94 The term “Mazhabi Sikh” refers to Sikhs from the sweeper Chuhra (Untouchable or Dalit) caste, but according to Methodist missionaries in the nineteenth century, a large number of the Mazhabi Sikhs in Moradabad were professional

91 “Report of the Lodiana Mission, 1859,” 31–­32. I am assuming that these are the Kabirpanthis that Webster refers to in Christian Community and Change, 48, 273. See also the report of this visit as presented in “Recent Intelligence,” The Home and Foreign Record of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, May 1859, 141, and August 1859, 237–­38. 92 “Report of the Lodiana Mission, 1859,” 31–­32. 93 The Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal. 1861 (London: F&J Rivington, 1862), 177–­80. 94 J. L. Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India (Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1905), 81–­85, 113–­16.

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thieves, and also—­ironically—­worked as watchmen, or chowkidars.95 They still occupied “a very low social position.”96 They had come to know about Christianity from the preaching of Presbyterians stationed in Fatehgarh before the 1857 Uprising. According to missionary sources, the guru of this particular group of Mazhabi Sikhs had heard the Presbyterians preaching at one of the great melas on the Ganges. Before the guru died at the time of the 1857 Uprising, he told the group, “Some day, before long, the missionaries will come to Moradabad, and when you hear that they have come, go to them and do what they tell you.”97 The missionary at Moradabad, J. L. Humphrey, baptized fifteen or twenty of the Sikhs later that year.98 In 1869 another group of Mazhabi Sikhs living in Sambhal conveyed interest in the Methodist mission.99 Over time, some young men among this group of Methodists received education and rudimentary theological training, and “began to prove themselves very efficient workers.” By the 1881 Census, according to Thoburn, the four to five thousand Mazhabi Sikhs in Rohilkhand had “virtually disappeared.” Not coincidentally, the number of native Christians in the district had increased by about the same number.100 Beginning in the 1880s, large numbers of low-­caste and outcaste groups joined Christian churches in what has been called “mass movements.” Among the Methodists, besides the Mazhabi Sikhs, Chamars and then Lal Begis joined the mission churches in groups.101 Chamars had themselves been attracted to bhakti-­inspired sects such as the Kabirpanthis, Raidasis, and Satnamis; the Lal Begis, however, had their own religious tradition that is said to have been a “mixture of animism, spirit 95 W. H. McLeod, Historical Dictionary of Sikhism, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 128. “They were made [chowkidar] on the principle ‘that it takes a thief to catch a thief,’ or perhaps it is a principle of honor among thieves in India, not to steal from those who are under the protection of one of their clan.” Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India, 85. 96 Thoburn, India and Malaysia, 267. 97 Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India, 81. This story line, of the bhakti guru instructing his followers to go to missionaries, also appears prominently in Satnami conversion stories: Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion, 59–­63. 98 Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India, 115. 99 Fifth Annual Report of the Mission Stations of the Methodist Episcopal Church, U.S.A., in India, for the Year 1869 (Lucknow: American Methodist Mission Press, 1870), 35. 100 Thoburn, India and Malaysia, 266–­67. 101 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 196–­201.

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worship, and teachings drawn from Islam and Hinduism, particularly from the writings of Kabir and Nanak.”102 The movement of bhakti-­ inspired low-­caste groups into American evangelical churches after the 1857 Uprising thus presaged a radical growth and change in Christianity on the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the entrance of large groups of persons from particular sects and castes into the church.103 Other Indian Converts

Christians who joined the American missions from other religious traditions came with diverse motivations.104 Despite the best efforts of American missionaries, there was a substantial number who joined the churches for what were construed as material or worldly reasons.105 As one Presbyterian report put it, “It is not pretended that all the baptized are truly converted; for though our principle is to baptize only those who give credible evidence of having been regenerated, it has often been made painfully obvious, that our judgment was not infallible.”106 The Rev. Goloknath provided an Indian perspective on why a person may convert for material gain: “Native Christians are generally poor and ignorant; and they do not pretend to conceal the fact, that when they cast in their lot with the people of God, they had some hope—­many of them at least—­of securing some of those worldly advantages, which the Gospel invariably brings to Christian nations.”107 This reality may partly explain why Gopi Nath Nundy offered material benefits to seekers and converts. It was also common practice for Christian converts to set up

Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 196–­97; John C. B. Webster, A History of the Dalit Christians in India (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 16. 103 Webster, History of the Dalit Christians in India, 31–­71. 104 See Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion, 71–­100, for a discussion on conversion among the Satnamis. 105 Humphrey, Twenty-­One Years in India, 84. 106 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 53. 107 The Rev. Goloknath, “Sympathy and Confidence,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 168. Notice how Goloknath is pointing to missionary rhetoric about the superior civilization of “Christian nations” as a reason that Indians are attracted to Christianity, a point discussed in chapter 2. 102

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their homes around the mission compound, and many of them were employed in work that was generated by the mission.108 Others, however, joined the Presbyterian and Methodist churches for what today may be termed more religious reasons. Gopi Nath Nundy and Zahur-­al-­Haqq, described in chapter 4, are examples. However, to separate the material from spiritual reasons (as missionaries generally did) is to misunderstand the way religion functioned in nineteenth-­ century Hindi North India. For there at least, one’s religious commitments were strongly connected to one’s physical and social condition and status. Deities and spirits as well as deceased and living saints were approached to intervene and provide aid for pressing difficulties in this life. Different social groups and jatis, or castes, had particular divinities to whom they were bound in devotion and loyalty, and these divinities were expected to offer this-­worldly aid and protection. The material and the spiritual were inextricably linked together. What many converts who joined the Methodists and Presbyterians were seeking was a new way of life, with spiritual, ideological, social, and material elements. And without some degree of sincere commitment, few would have borne the social ostracism and even violence from their own communities of origin, and disparagement by the larger European community, which usually accompanied baptism. With regard to the social status of converts, the majority of them came from the lower classes and castes, which is not surprising given that the great portion of the Indian population belonged to these ranks of society.109 While representatives of all the major castes and various social strata were found in the Methodist and Presbyterian churches by 1870, the preponderance of members came from the poor and humble Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 57; Temple, “Opinion of Sir Richard Temple,” in Laymen’s Opinions, 15. 109 This goes against John Webster’s judgment in Christian Community and Change, 48–­49 and 273–­74. He concludes that only 10 percent of the Presbyterian converts until 1886 were of low-­caste origin. He does so by assuming that the conversions that were reported (as opposed to unreported conversions) represent the total number of conversions. In my own reading of the primary materials, I find that missionaries tended to report (1) high-­caste and Muslim converts, and (2) converts that came in large numbers. Therefore I believe that high-­caste converts are greatly overrepresented in the Presbyterians’ reports of conversions. Webster also ignores other data that indicate the generally low-status origins of Indian converts to Christianity. 108

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segments of society.110 One indication of this is that missionary reports make a special point of announcing if a Brahmin or other high-­caste convert had joined the church. This would indicate that such high-­caste converts were not too common (although they represented the high hopes of the early evangelical missionary movement). Orphans were considered socially low ranking; they had no standing in caste society because they had no family to claim, and hence were considered to have lost caste—­in other words, lost social status.111 When noting the occupations of North Indian Christians in the Presbyterian Church in 1886, it was observed that “a few of these may be regarded as well-­to-­do in the world, though most of them are in the receipt of very small incomes.”112 At the General Missionary Conference held at Allahabad in 1872–­1873, the Rev. Wilson of the Free Church Mission in Bombay noted that converts to Christianity all over India have been drawn principally from the thoughtful classes of the community, represented by the Bráhmans; the anxious, represented by (non-­ hypocritical) Devotees and Fakirs; and the degraded and oppressed, represented by the Mountain and Forest tribes, and the Low Classes of the Towns and Villages, as the Antyaja, or those “born at the end,” according to the system of caste.113

The backgrounds of Methodists and Presbyterians generally mirrored those of other Christian converts in India described above, with the addition of converts from Islam. There is not much information about the religious and social backgrounds of converts from Islam. Probably some, like Zahur-­al-­Haqq who had belonged to the Pranami sect before joining the Methodists, had come to evangelical Christianity via sectarian bhakti groups. Most Muslims in Hindi North India in the nineteenth century were not the high-­status Ashraf or Saiyad of foreign origin or converts from high castes, but were descended from lower-­caste, or Shudra, Indian communities that had become Muslim over the course of centuries. The 1872 110 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 54. 111 Webster, Christian Community and Change, 181. 112 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 60. 113 J. Wilson, “On Preaching to the Hindus,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 22–­23.

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Census says of Muslim convert communities: “In [the North-­Western] Provinces . . . we find instances of the descendants of Mahomedan converts, who embraced the Mahomedan faith often at the edge of the sword, retaining Hindoo customs and adhering to observances and ceremonies which are purely Hindoo.”114 While the assertion regarding forced conversions is historically untenable, the observation that nineteenth-­century Muslims followed many Hindu customs is corroborated by other sources. For example, the Julaha Muslim community of weavers and cultivators, numbering over 900,000 in the United Provinces in the 1901 Census, were assigned low-caste status. They had been significantly influenced by Buddhism and sectarian Hinduism, such as that promulgated by Nath Yogis, before conversion to Islam.115 Such influence both facilitated the Julahas’ move to Islam and significantly shaped their understanding of their new religion.116 Given their social and religious marginality, it is most likely that many converts to evangelical Christianity from Islam in the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh came from such low-­caste Muslim groups. While Indian converts came from various religious communities and social strata, there was one experience that most of them faced when they were baptized, no matter their background, and that was an outcasting from their own family and kin, a social death as it were.117 The act of baptism, which signaled a move to a new social as well as religious community, also signaled a forsaking of one’s natal community, and the repercussions from that ranged from ostracism to violence. As one Indian minister from Allahabad put it: We are all aware that a Hindoo or a Mahomedan may believe what he likes, he may be a Christian in heart; but let him pass the Rubicon, let him only go through the waters of baptism, let his relatives and neighbours only know that he has been with the missionary and joined the faith of the Feringies openly, from that very moment his trials and sufferings begin;

114 W. C. Plowden, compiler, Census of the North-­Western Provinces, 1872 (Allahabad: North-­Western Provinces’ Government Press, 1873), 1:xx. 115 Herbert Risley, The People of India, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1991), 122–­23, 126–­27. 116 Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69–­78. 117 See the outcasting of a convert from the Untouchable Chamar community in Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 182.

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from that very time he is cursed, maltreated and shunned; henceforth he is considered a degraded outcast.118

There were a few exceptions to this experience. When a number of persons converted to Christianity together, they could support each other, even when they were ostracized from the rest of their jati, or group. This must have been the case for the Mazhabi Sikhs and Kabirpanthis who joined the Methodist and Presbyterian missions. A second exception is the conversion of those who had already left their home and society in order to lead a life of religious wandering and asceticism: the “Devotees and Fakirs” in missionary parlance. Such converts had, in effect, voluntarily entered a social death to pursue higher religious callings, and so their entry into the Christian faith was not as traumatic as those who were newly cut off from their existing social networks. In 1866 the Methodist mission in Budaon reported the baptism of an elderly Brahmin who had embarked on a life of religious wandering at the young age of ten, when he stole off surreptitiously to the temple of Jagannath in Puri. For nine years in his youth, he was employed as a sepoy in the East India Company military, and then he retired to spend his time in meditation on the banks of the Ganges River.119 When he was about sixty, he was told by an Indian Christian policeman “of the Savior of men and of the plan of salvation,” which led him to the Budaon Methodist mission.120 The Christian Village

Because many Indian converts were ostracized from their communities of origin, new spaces and structures—­physical, social, and ideological—­ were created for their communal life. One common, and at times contentious, space created by and for Indian Christians was the “Christian village,” an establishment that involved all the racial and social segments of the mission churches. I’saipur, described above, which had emerged

118 Mohun, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 359. 119 This was first near Fatehgarh and then in Anupshahr. 120 T. J. Scott and Joseph Angelo, “Report of the Budaon Station,” in Report of the Indian Mission Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and Minutes of the Second Conference Session held at Moradabad Feb. 1–­17, 1866 (Luck­ now: American Methodist Mission Press, 1866), 16.

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from the Rakha orphanage, was one such village. The villages could be built either in rural or in urban areas. With land and other material support from the European community, missionaries or Indian Christians could establish Christian villages either in the countryside, near the mission compound, or in some other part of the city with a Christian population.121 Foreign and Indian (both native and Eurasian) mission leaders were also crucial for running these villages.122 The village “system” was controversial among missionaries and church workers; basically, the question was whether native Christians should live together in order to support one another and be easily supported by the mission, or whether they should live as members of the general population and thereby provide a Christian influence throughout society.123 The question was rarely raised as to why missionaries did not think it their duty to live “in the midst of the heathen, so as to exert an influence there for good.”124 Missionaries almost always lived in missionary compounds, which were often located in a part of the city with other European dwellings.125 Both the Presbyterian and Methodist missions established and supported Christian villages, providing a number of justifications for them. This arrangement prevented persecution from the converts’ former kinfolk and associates, and it provided mutual support among the Indian Christians. It could provide economic activity for impoverished Christians. It also facilitated congregational and pastoral oversight of the new community, and it reinforced new habits and social norms, in particular economic independence, that were seen as part and parcel 121 “Missionaries . . . separate [Christians] from among their heathen countrymen and keep them together, either in mission compounds or in Christian villages”: Mohun, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 357. For a description of a Presbyterian Christian village and mission compound in Allahabad, see Emma Walsh, “Communications: Furrukhabad Mission, N. India. Allahabad,” The Foreign Missionary, May 1869, 292–­95. 122 H. Stern, “The Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 352. 123 See the papers and arguments in the Allahabad Missionary Conference report. The Baptists seem to have been the most opposed to the concept of Christian villages. 124 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 58. 125 Newton, “Historical Sketch of the Lodiana Mission,” in Presbyterian Church, Historical Sketches, 58.

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of being a Christian. Moreover, a number of missionaries and Indian church leaders doubted that newly converted native Christians would have the character and fortitude to be able to influence their Hindu and Muslim neighbors.126 From an Indian Christian perspective, the village was a place of safety in a society that was hostile to converts. The village provided them with a source of work and income when their compatriots refused to employ them or to purchase any goods and services from them, or when missionaries wished to raise their standards of living. It kept them from having to participate in non-­Christian religious festivals, and insulated their children from “the pestilential atmosphere of heathen vices and the jungle fever of heathen practices,” as one Indian pastor put it rather stridently. The village also provided converts with ready and regular access to Christian worship and education.127 The Christian village was organized so that the missionary was the head of it: he provided the leadership, the rule, the discipline, and the order. Very often he was the master tradesman and landlord for the villagers. Faced with a growing population of unemployed and homeless Christians, “the Missionary is driven to the expedient of the workshop, the printing press, or the cultivation of the land.”128 For many a missionary, this was a frustrating task: it was not what he had come out to do, it was not what he was trained to do, and it was not something to write home about proudly. There is no denying that not only a great part of [the missionaries’] valuable time is spent in looking after the temporal matters of their flock, in settling their petty broils and repairing their houses, but there is much inconvenience and annoyance, especially when one has to come in collision with them for non-­payment of rent, or punish them for their misbehaviour.129

Moreover, from many a missionary’s perspective, the Christian village—­like the Christian orphanage—­stunted growth in “independence Mohun, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 362. 127 Mohun, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 359–­64; quotation from p. 362; Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 183–­84. 128 Stern, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 353. 129 Mohun, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 358. 126

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and self-­reliance of character.” The Christian’s faith “may be feeble and fruitless; he may lean too much for his support upon the arm of flesh, i.e., of the Mission and Mission-­house, and expect that every thing must be, and ought to be, done for him and his family.”130 Once again, Enlightenment assumptions about true religion grounded missionary critiques of native Christians. Furthermore, the convert could be highly reluctant to change what missionaries considered undesirable behavior, and such recalcitrance could drive the latter to terrible extremes, such as public shaming and punishment. As the head of the Christian village, the missionary could wield a formidable amount of power and authority over the lives of Indian Christians. The combination of frustrations in running the village and almost boundless authority and power of the missionary could lead to horrendous results. For example, in 1847 in the Christian village set up by the CMS in Benares, a German missionary personally and publicly whipped a convert named Dorcas who was found guilty of adultery, and as an additional humiliation had her tonsured. A few years later, another CMS missionary was sentenced to life imprisonment in Tasmania for whipping his daughter so badly that over weeks of abuse she died.131 While incidents like these were exceptional, they do indicate possible abuse in the Christian village system. On the whole, however, despite the missionaries’ complaints and abuses, the village system supported a Christian population that otherwise would probably have been severely oppressed in its native society or probably would not have existed because of the pressures to reintegrate into it. As one Indian pastor put it, for the “young convert” there are “many chances of his being carried away with the stream, and thereby not only make shipwreck of his faith, but also bring a reproach on the very name of Christianity.”132 The Christian village was an innovative structure that drew on several extant foreign and Indian social arrangements. At times, Christian 130 Stern, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 351. 131 “C. B. Leupolt, Benares, journal entry, Dec., 1847,” CI1/0177, CMS Archives, Birmingham, UK; “Bengal. Law. Supreme Court, December 8,” Allen’s Indian Mail 10, no. 190 (1852): 59–­62. I am deeply indebted to Richard F. Young for these references. 132 Mohun, “Christian Village System,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 359.

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villages were established with the assumption that they could function more like New England or Ohio villages than North Indian ones. So William Butler, in 1861, secured a tract of land where Mazhabi Sikh converts could live and farm, and sent the missionary Edwin Parker and his wife to superintend the place. The residents cleared some of the jungle for farmland and established a new village, Wesleypore. Unfortunately, the location soon proved to be very unhealthy; when the rains arrived, numerous people came down with malaria. Several Christians died, and others fled; after just over a year, Wesleypore was abandoned, and it is remembered as “one of the most unfortunate enterprises of India missions.”133 Europeans living in Indian cities had also created urban districts for themselves, and separated themselves from the natives. By the early eighteenth century, the city of Madras was divided into “White Town” and “Black Town,” “the first place in world history to officially designate its two sections by color.”134 Cantonments and barracks for European and Indian soldiers also separated soldiers from civilians in British-­ruled towns and cities. In this way European rulers had developed urban areas for distinct social groups. There were three indigenous institutions that provided models for developing the Christian village. The first was the mohullah or basti, the second the village jajmani arrangement, and the third the math of various sects. The mohullah or basti was an area of a city where persons from the same religious tradition (e.g., Muslims) or from the same caste (e.g., sweepers) lived together in their various dwellings. Here they were able to arrange their social and religious lives among themselves, generally without direct interference from other groups in society. While the Christian village was not a basti or mohullah, because it was not an urban enclave integrated into a larger city, like these latter spaces, it did provide a well-­demarcated area reserved for Christian dwellings, where the residents could arrange their own lives.

133 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 183–­84. There is an extended description of the Wesleypore experiment and disaster in J. H. Messmore, The Life of Edwin Wallace Parker, D.D.: Missionary Bishop of Southern Asia, Forty-­One Years a Missionary in India (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1903), 69–­83. 134 Carl H. Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 48.

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The second institution was the jajmani system, although the word “system” has been criticized as being too strong and rigid for describing a social arrangement that could be quite loose and flexible in different parts of India.135 The so-­called system was first described and codified in the early twentieth century, but it is a traditional social arrangement in the villages of Hindi North India.136 It is a rural arrangement, not an urban one like the mohullah or basti. According to the jajmani model, every person in the village belongs to a particular caste, which in turn performs a particular service or duty such as carpentry, laundering, religious rituals, accounting, sweeping, and so on. Moreover, castes can have ritual, social, and economic duties to perform: so the barber has a particular role in weddings, and the sweeper woman in child birth. Custom dictates that the secular as well as the ritual and familial duties be performed only by the appropriate caste members. Each caste is expected to perform its particular services for other caste groups in the village, in accordance with rules of ritual purity and impurity. Thus caste members are bound not only to each other in kinship ties but to members of other castes in ties of reciprocal service, for which they are paid in various ways—­with money, food, clothing, and particular concessions such as a free residence site, free food for the family, free clothing, free food for animals, free timber, rent-­free land, credit facilities, opportunities for supplementary employment, aid in litigation, and so on. Such concessions do not apply equally to everybody, but differ according to custom.137 The castes that are lower on the religious hierarchy call the rulers that are above them their jajman, whereas the higher castes call the lower castes serving them their kam karne wale, which literally means “worker.” So the priest, teacher, genealogist, accountant, and goldsmith are the jajmans of the carpenter, barber, shepherd, and tailor.138 The relationship between members of different castes is not that of employer and employee, but is more personal, with a certain degree of social closeness and familiarity that goes beyond what one encounters in the American

135 C. J. Fuller, “Misconceiving the Grain Heap: A Critique of the Concept of the Indian Jajmani System,” in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Jonathan P. Parry and Maurice Bloch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33–­63. 136 William Henricks Wiser, The Hindu Jajmani System (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1936). 137 Wiser, Hindu Jajmani System, 10–­11. 138 Wiser, Hindu Jajmani System, 6.

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workplace.139 In fact, there is a sense of obligation placed on the higher and wealthier castes to provide the bare necessities of life for the poorer ones. Thus workers can go to their jajman if they need food, and after supplications can be “certain of receiving some grain. . . . In the subconscious mind of the good Hindu there is always the thought ‘a giver of grain (receives) Eternal bliss.’ (Manu IV: 232).”140 The reciprocity of the system, with its ability to provide for the physical, social, and religious needs of every stratum of society, is what gave the jajmani arrangement a certain stability. Needless to say, the arrangement was also wide open to abuse and oppression of the lower castes by the higher ones. While the Christian village did not run according to the jajmani model, there were aspects of the Christian experiment that echoed both the dependency and reciprocity found in the traditional North Indian village.141 The following is a rather long and detailed, but rich, description of a Christian village by an Indian Presbyterian minister, in which one can discern aspects of the jajmani model: Many converts . . . look upon the missionary merely as a paid agent of a Religious Company, sent for the purpose of converting Hindoos and Mussulmans to the faith of the Gospel; and, having collected them into colonies, to be their superintendent. His work is not only to teach that which relates to their souls’ eternal salvation, but to promote in them a spirit of industry, enterprise, and moral courage; to create for them a social and political standing; and to prepare them for an independent mode of life. In short, he has to conduct their temporal affairs, and polish their social manners, with the law of the Gospel. In this view, the missionary stands among his converts like a father amidst his children. He has to provide them with suitable employment, build houses for their accommodation, provide wives, when they feel disposed to marry, and procure subsistence for those that depend on his bounty.142

In the Christian village, it was the duty of the missionary to provide work, housing, land, and other services, and the Christian converts 139 Ann-­Belinda Steen, “The Hindu Jajmani System—­Economy or Religion?” in South Asian Religion and Society, ed. Asko Parpola and Bent Smidt Hansen (London: Curzon Press, 1986), 31. 140 Wiser, Hindu Jajmani System, 103–­4. 141 Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 146–­47. 142 Goloknath, “Sympathy and Confidence,”in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 167.

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worked in some form of agriculture or industry (furniture construction, carpet weaving) for their “payment” to the mission. In 1870 “several” villagers who had been baptized by the Methodists immediately apostatized “because they were not employed.”143 Most probably, the villagers had expected the mission to provide work, as jajmans in their village would do. The aforementioned group apostasy from the Methodists brings to light one of the regular features of church organization and work in the first generation of Methodists and Presbyterians, and that is that both Indians and foreigners could be engaging in the same activity with, however, very different assumptions regarding the work they were doing and the roles they were playing. In the Christian village, for example, from the villagers’ perspective, the missionaries could be seen as some sort of jajman, the religiously and materially powerful people who would provide for the villagers’ needs. To reciprocate, the villagers would provide labor, appropriate religious devotion, and obedience (within certain limits, as will become clear below) to the missionaries’ prescriptions for Christian living. From the missionaries’ perspective, the foreigners were simply providing material and spiritual aid to a benighted and oppressed people who, once they were truly converted, would stand on their own, working and worshiping according to standard Enlightenment and evangelical assumptions of the good and godly life. Such differing understandings of the villagers’ and missionaries’ work and roles could coexist and cooperate without much difficulty for a while, but over time friction could develop. Villagers would become upset at the missionaries if the latter refused to provide appropriate aid such as food, employment, or protection in times of need. Villagers also would become angered when missionaries tried too assiduously to interfere in aspects of family and social life. In the jajmani system, after all, while caste members interacted with each other on a regular basis, different castes structured their internal caste activities, such as marriage and family life, according to their own traditions and rules. When the overly zealous missionary would try to reform Indian Christians’ social and personal habits with too much haste and vigor, he or she could run into vehement opposition.144 Sixth Annual Report of the India Mission, 11. See the discussion at the end of this chapter on missionaries’ attempts to control the Europeanizing of Indian converts. 143 144

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For example, Methodist leaders found it almost impossible to stop the practices of child marriage and the payment of bride price among certain village Christian converts in the 1860s and 1870s.145 Such practices could also lead to great conflict within the church. In the late 1860s, a village girl from a Methodist family had been married, with the customary exchange of money, to a non-­Christian boy. Before the marriage was consummated, she went on to study in a Methodist boarding school in the city of Moradabad. Upon reaching young adulthood, she refused to accept the arrangement that had been made for her as a girl. She went on to marry a young Christian man, and she was soon joined by another young woman in her rebellion. The village Christians were divided into two factions: those who stood by the girls, opposing child marriage (and the Methodist missionary and preachers were in this camp), and those who believed the prior arrangements should be honored. Many new convert families belonged to this latter group. The Methodists were thereafter split into two groups.146 Many Christian converts expected to continue certain customs from their communities of origin even after baptism, and held quite different notions of conversion from missionaries and other church leaders. The third Indian model for religious community is the math, which was common in nineteenth-­century Hindi North India. A math was a collection of buildings where a few members of sectarian groups, such as panths and sampradayas, lived together, and where the other sect members whose dwellings were in the town or city came for worship, fellowship, and instruction. Typically, the leader, or mahant, of the group lived in the math with some of his pupils, or chelas. Furthermore, the math provided temporary shelter and food to pilgrims and other travelers in its dharmsala. The math was therefore a religious institution that organized the life of the sect in the surrounding region. Maths came in various sizes; the following is the description of a prominent math, which the author calls a convent, in Bodh Gaya in the early nineteenth century: The convent is surrounded by a high brick wall containing a very considerable space on the banks of the west branch of the Fulgo, between it and the great temple of Buddh Gaya. The wall has turrets in the corners and some Alter and Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand, 181–­82. Letter of Edwin Parker, 1876, quoted in Messmore, Life of Edwin Wallace Parker, 159–­60. 145 146

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at the sides, and has two great gates, the handsomest part of the building. Towards the river is a Dharmsaleh [guest house for pilgrims], consisting of a long cloister, but not quite finished. The principal building is a large square, with towers at the corners like a castle, and very few windows outwards. It contains several courts and many apartments totally destitute of neatness, elegance, or convenience. Within the wall is also a garden, a plantation of turmeric, and a burial ground where several Sann­yasis [Hindu holy men] are deposited in temples of Siva. The buildings have been erected at very different times, each Mahant [leader of the sect] having made various additions, so that there is no uniformity nor symmetry of parts.147

The author goes on to list the various Hindu and Buddhist images kept in the math, along with their locations. As can be seen from this description, this particular math was a rather large and imposing structure, having features that reminded the author of a European abbey. Maths, however, could be much smaller, providing living quarters for only a few people. Another nineteenth-­century European observer described them as “often little more than a collection of huts or cells ranged around a central court-­yard.”148 Generally speaking, all maths had a set of permanent huts or other dwellings for the mahant and his pupils, a temple or shrine for worship, and a dharmsala, or hostel, for travelers and mendicants. “Ingress and egress is free to all, and indeed a restraint upon personal liberty seems never to have entered into the conception of any of the religious legislators of the Hindus.”149 Christian mission compounds, where converts sometimes lived, bore some outward resemblance to maths. The former were often built with walls enclosing them and contained family dwellings along with other structures such as boarding houses, chapels, schools, and printing presses.150 The orphanage at Rakha was built in a compound with missionary homes and a chapel. Like a math, the mission compound housed religious leaders, and the laity would have access to the compound to visit them, to worship in the chapel, and to use the other buildings as needed. Francis Buchanan, Journal of Francis Buchanan Kept During the Survey of the Districts of Patna and Gaya in 1811–­1812 (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1989), 51–­52. 148 A. S. Geden, “Monasticism (Hindu),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908–­ 1927), 8:803. 149 J. Campbell Oman, The Mystics, Ascetics and Saints of India (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), 249. 150 Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands,” 49–­52. 147

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Mission Premises at Bareilly

Both missionary compounds and Christian villages, then, had some features of the math: they contained residences for religious leaders and followers, provided spaces for worship, and functioned as centers for organizing religious communal life and for educating. The point of these comparisons is not to claim that Christian domestic arrangements such as the orphanages, villages, and missionary compounds simply copied existing Indian or foreign structures. Rather it is to demonstrate how evangelical Christians, both native and foreign, were operating and improvising in a creative Thirdspace as they sought to construct new ideational, social, and physical spaces for themselves. Sometimes unknowingly and unconsciously, they borrowed from a variety of local and foreign social and even physical structures as they sought to create new religious communities in their environment. Indian Converts and the British Empire The British Empire had brought with it foreign people, ideas, and artifacts, and Indian Christians interacted with the imperial presence in their own way. They quickly adopted and adapted to ecclesiastical structures imported from North America, at times using them to claim authority

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and fight for equality.151 Moreover, they readily adopted elements of Victorian culture and social norms to forge a new communal identity, as will be discussed below. Yet this new identity meant that Indian Christians occupied a marginal social space among both ruler and ruled, and in this margin religion and empire did not neatly overlap. While they shared the official religion, or dharm, of the British, they did not enjoy the latter’s political and social benefits. Moreover, Europeans who were unsympathetic to the cause of Christian mission often looked down upon Indian Christians.152 Before 1858 the East India Company was reluctant to hire educated Indian Christians for positions of responsibility, whereas certain jobs reserved for Christians, such as drummers and servants for British in the armies, were considered low caste.153 Presbyterian missionary Robert Fullerton remarked that at least before the 1857 Uprising, “worldly-­ minded” Europeans spoke disparagingly of Indian Christians, who were viewed as having embraced the religion from “improper motives.” During the Uprising, British feeling against Indian Christians in Agra was so strong that the military officials in the fort refused to let them in even when it was clear that the enemy was just as intent on killing Indian Christians as Europeans. It was only when the sepoys were at the point of obliterating the Indian Christian community, and when the Church of England missionaries threatened to leave the fort and die with the Indian Christians, that British officials allowed them into the protection of the fort.154 After the Uprising and the passing of the government of India to the British Crown, more of the British population began to temper its views of Indian Christians. This was in part because the latter were seen as sympathetic to British rule. The Secretary of State for India, in a report 151 They could also use indigenous structures to fight for independence from the missions; see Timothy Stephen Dobe, “Lineage Tales of Christian Sannyasis and Missionaries,” History of Religions 49, no. 3 (2010): 254–­99. 152 Sherring, Indian Church During the Great Rebellion, 93–­95; Survey of Existing Missions in India (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1873), 2; Temple, “Opinion of Sir Richard Temple,” in Laymen’s Opinions, 12–­13. 153 Fullerton, Memoir, 202; Prichard, Chronicles of Budgepore, 199. 154 Fullerton, Memoir, 260–­61. See also Edward Porter, “Essay on Native Christians. How May Their Character and Social Position Be Raised?” in Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, Held at Ootacamund, April 19th–May 5th, 1858 (Madras: D.P.L.C. Connor, 1858), 242–­48.

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to Parliament in 1873, provided the following assessment of the 250,000 “rural and aboriginal” Indian converts to Christianity in British India: The principles they profess, the standard of morals at which they aim, the education and training which they receive, make them no unimportant element in the Empire which the Government of India has under its control. These populations must greatly influence the communities of which they form a part; they are thoroughly loyal to the British Crown; and the experience through which many have passed has proved that they are governed by solid principle in the conduct they pursue.155

Although British views of native Christians began to change after 1857, the latter’s connection to European society was still very often through missionaries. The missionaries, for their part, while claiming converts as Christians, also categorized them as “natives.” As such, missionaries repeatedly confessed that they themselves were known to disparage Indian Christians and to treat the latter with harshness and indifference to their material needs.156 In fact, missionaries assiduously endeavored to keep Indians from becoming Christian for material or political gain and thus participate in the material benefits of empire. Among the Presbyterians, and until the 1860s among the Methodists, Indians were regularly examined for months before they were allowed the rite of baptism, and were made to pass all kinds of tests to make sure that they were converting for spiritual rather than worldly reasons. When an unemployed Brahmin approached Methodist James Thoburn saying that he was a Christian inwardly but not outwardly, Thoburn was suspicious that he was “more hungry for rice and chipatis [bread] than for the bread of life.” Still Thoburn encouraged him in his religious quest. A few days later, the Brahmin left the missionary’s community. Thoburn had first of all made him work as a coolie “as a test of his sincerity.” Because the work “did not involve a loss of caste,” the missionary “finally required him to break his caste at once or renounce all claim to being a Christian.” This the Brahmin could not do.157 Survey of Existing Missions in India, 20–­21. For a summary of European and Indian criticisms of missionary attitudes toward Indian Christians, see Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact, and Conversion in Late-­Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19–­21. 157 “Diaries of James M. Thoburn,” 12 and 16 March 1860 entries. 155 156

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While the native Christians’ cultural and family origins were in Indian society, those who converted to Christianity were often rejected by that society.158 So it was often up to missionaries either to find or to create jobs for Indian Christians.159 Because Indian Christians did not belong fully either to European or to Indian society, both sides viewed them with suspicion. Their religion disqualified them from much of Indian society, their race from European society. In view of the outright animosity of any number of British in the imperial regime to Indian Christians, one wonders what the latter thought of that regime. The scattered evidence suggests that despite the rejection they may have sometimes experienced, Indian Christians generally looked favorably upon the British Empire, especially the way of life Europeans had imported. Evidence for Indian Christian support of the British government comes from the Presbyterian minister Ishwari Dass. In his Lectures on Theology, Dass is not only explicit but effusive in his praise of British rule: The state of this country, before the British came here, was most deplorable; disorder and tyranny prevailed everywhere, and the state of the people of the whole country was like that of sheep without a shepherd, exposed to the fierce attack of wolves. The whole country was under a number of Nawabs and Rajahs, who were tyrannizing over the people and oppressing them as much as they could. . . . When the people of the country had suffered enough, [God] sent another nation to govern them, which loves justice and truth, and is desirous of doing them good; and under its government the country is prospering.160

Care is needed in handling this evidence. Ishwari Dass was known as a Christian leader who was highly sympathetic to the missionary cause.161 Many Indian Christian leaders, unlike him, could be far more critical of the foreign missionary presence. In fact at least some missionaries believed that most of the educated Indian Christians had feelings See the case of native Christians being forbidden to use village wells; Messmore, Life of Edwin Wallace Parker, 163–­65. 159 E. J. Lake, “Lay Cooperation,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 99. 160 Ishwari Dass, Lectures on Theology, Adapted to the Natives of India (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1860), 123. See also pp. 110–­11 regarding the virtue of the British people and government. 161 However, see Dass’ critique of standard missionary views of Indian society in chapter 3. 158

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of “bitterness, suspicion and even dislike” for missionaries.162 Moreover, even Dass does not praise the British Empire without qualification.163 Dass’ biography, however, provides a clue as to why Indian Christians would have given at least qualified support for the Empire. Christian evangelical missions were inextricably linked with the Empire, both in the minds of the general Indian populace and in actual fact. Missionaries supported the Empire and were supported by evangelically minded British civil servants who at times engaged in mission work themselves. The orphanages started by Captain Wheeler and Charles Madden are good examples. So inasmuch as the economic and political support of evangelically inclined Europeans benefited native Christians, the latter appreciated the British presence. Yet more attractive to native Christians than European people and their material resources was European culture. Evidence for this comes, ironically, from missionary complaints that Indian Christians adopted Western manners and did not want to live like Indians. At the Allahabad Missionary Conference in 1872–­1873, one missionary spoke at length about the “evil of Europeanizing” that afflicted Indian church workers.164 However, the Indian speakers at the Conference were far less disturbed at the prospect of Europeanized Indian Christians, and in fact at times openly advocated for at least limited “Europeanization” of their fellow believers. So one Indian member of the CMS mission in Bombay pleaded for good European-­style education for “Native Christian children.” He noted that Europeans and Americans sent their children back home for schooling, proving that Indian mission schools did not provide a good “Christian” grounding for Christian pupils: “If [missionaries] do not wish that their children should associate with heathen children, what good Native Christian parent wishes that his child, by going to missionary schools, should pick up the vices of heathen children?” His concern was not with the academic standards of Indian mission schools, but with the Indian cultural and religious influences prevalent in them.

162 The Rev. J. Vaughan, “The Native Church,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 270. 163 Dass, Lectures, 124. Of course, British evangelicals themselves had been making this argument since the eighteenth century. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 47–­48. 164 The Rev. Dr. Tracy, “The Training of Mission Native Agents,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 211.

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One missionary argued that becoming a Christian meant adopting “Christian civilization,” which involved much expense—­ a clean lifestyle, education, clothing, reading materials, lamps for reading and prayers, windows in houses, a separate kitchen, and so on. He went on to contend, “It is very difficult in India as well as elsewhere to define the limits between necessity and luxury, and I am well aware that there is a great tendency of the converts to overstep it; but a certain allowance must be made to them.”165 He also noted that it was the missionary force that had introduced European material culture to Indian Christians. An Indian clergyman then argued that it was the missionary’s duty to “seek and promote the temporal welfare” of Indian Christians.166 However, missionaries should not interfere with the converts’ “mode of living—­ the manner and matter of their dress and their household management,” which was often “English.”167 There were several reasons, then, why Indian converts to Christianity supported the Empire, despite its reluctance at times to support them. By establishing a political regime that allowed Protestant missions to operate safely, the Empire de facto supported the missions, which in turn provided for the livelihood of many native Christians. In addition, various individual members of the imperial regime explicitly and generously supported the Indian Christian community. The British Empire also provided models for a lifestyle that was appealing to Indian Christians because these models assisted them in their quest for dignity, respectability, and social acceptability. As they adopted Victorian standards of cleanliness and domesticity, they claimed higher status in the Indian social hierarchy. And finally, British culture was attractive because it was the mode of life of the rulers of India, with whom Indian Christians shared a common religion. As the Rev. Goloknath of the American Presbyterian Mission put it: Native Christians, in common with their Hindoo friends, try to imitate the manners and customs of their rulers. They did so in the time of the Mussulman,—­ and they will do so now. If you go among the Sirdars [Sikhs], or visit a respectable Hindoo or Mussulman in the town, you will 165 A. Wenger, “Interference with Secular Matters,” in Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 320; emphasis added. 166 Chatterjee, “Relations of Missionaries to Converts in Secular Matters,” Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 1872–­73, 337. 167 Chatterjee, “Relations of Missionaries to Converts in Secular Matters,” Report of the General Missionary Conference Held at Allahabad, 1872–­73, 338.

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find chairs, tables, drawers, and couches. In almost every place they prefer English things to those of country manufacture.168

Thus for all the discrimination that Indian Christians may have experienced from their British rulers, the former still found the culture and civilization of the latter to be an attractive component of the Christian religion. Bhakti, ThirdSpace, and Christian Community What emerged, then, over the middle of the nineteenth century was the formation of a new religious and social body in Hindi North India. Here evangelical Christians centered their religious devotion and worship on a deity who had become incarnate in the savior Jesus. Principally on Sundays, but on other days of the week as well, they gathered to sing songs, offer prayers, and listen to sacred scriptures being read and explained. They came together from different racial and social backgrounds experimentally to create a community founded on the principle of equality among members, even though that principle was in practice subject to inconsistent and capricious application. This was a community where the spiritual, material, and social needs of the members were met to varying degrees of satisfaction. It was a community that aimed for respectability, dignity, and social advancement for its members that came from the lowest castes and classes. And it was a community that was self-­consciously different from the other religious communities in Hindi North India, even though it had to borrow language and ideas from them in order to translate itself into a new context. The connections between evangelical communities and low-­status bhakti-­inspired sects in Hindi North India were varied. Members of certain sects, such as Mazhabi Sikhs, Nanakpanthis, and Kabirpanthis, converted in groups to evangelical Christianity and added significant numbers to this fledgling religious movement. Moreover, the theologies and ideologies of such bhakti sects found certain resonances with North American evangelical Christianity, and the latter used some of the former’s idioms and motifs to express itself. Just as importantly, such bhakti communities had created for North American Evangelicalism a particular kind of religious space, with certain significant ideas and 168 Goloknath, “Remarks on Sympathy and Confidence,” in Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore, 184.

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practices about the rationale and functioning of religious communities in the religious landscape of Hindi North India. status bhakti-­ inspired groups had for centuries First of all, low-­ insisted that the sole criterion for membership in their religious community was devotion to a particular understanding or manifestation of the divine. This apprehension of the divine was articulated by a particular saint or guru who gathered a group of followers around him or her and thus gave birth to the bhakti community that nourished itself, in part, on the words and memories of its founder. Joining the religious community did not in principle depend upon birth, but upon religious devotion to the divine. It was precisely such an understanding of the basis for religious community that allowed American evangelicals to pull Indians from diverse backgrounds, but especially from the lowest strata of society, into their religious community. While Europeans and Eurasians had their own theological and ideological reasons for joining this multiracial and socially variegated religious community, Indians influenced by low-­ caste bhakti sects knew that ideas of equality across social and religious strata based on religious devotion to a particular deity had been promulgated for centuries by certain bhakti saints and gurus.169 The corollary to the ideal of equality promoted by these bhakti saints and their communities was a criticism, at times strident, of the hierarchies and other inequalities present in Indian societies and religious traditions. Bhakti saints such as Kabir attacked caste and gender hierarchy, as well as different aspects of Hindu and Islamic traditions. Thus bhakti in Hindi North India had created a space for critique of religion and hierarchy, as well as for the pursuit of equality and respectability. In this space a transplanted Evangelicalism was able to adapt, survive, and grow, with its own critiques not only of other Indian religions but then of missionary ideas and practices, and with its own multiple and sometimes conflicting strategies and goals for equality and respectability. Bhakti sects in Hindi North India had also promulgated a code of ethics that stood in contradistinction to mainstream ideas of righteous conduct. Nineteenth-­century Indian society was grounded in an implicit 169 Islam is the other North Indian religion that embraced followers from different nations and strata of society. By the nineteenth century, however, Islam in North India had also functionally divided itself into many different social groups, so ethnographers claimed that the caste system was almost as prevalent in North Indian Islam as in Hinduism. See Henry Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India, 1871–­72 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1875), 27.

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yet nonetheless powerful notion of dharma: a set of duties termed varnashramadharma that vary according to one’s social status or caste, one’s gender, and one’s stage in life (child, householder, retired person, forest dweller). However, the ethic promulgated by bhakti saints such as Kabir, Surdas, and Mirabai challenged varnashramadharma. While this dharma emphasizes duties and obligations, bhakti dharma is “an ethics of character that focuses on love.”170 The bhakti dharma operated both in tension and in cooperation with the traditional varnashramadharma. As North American evangelical communities took their place in the North Indian religious landscape, they were also grounded in an ethic of mutual love among members of their Christian fellowship. To be sure, this ethic was selectively enforced. Yet it established ideals by which both foreign and local members of evangelical communities judged each other and the world. Out of this ethic, North Indian Evangelicalism developed social and ethical norms and practices of its own, borrowing from and amalgamating both local and foreign ideas of the good life and ultimately producing a recognizable middle-­class ethic in Hindi North India. The social marginality of low-­status sectarian groups did not prevent them from entering into the life of Indian society. They participated in the economic and political life of the land. Their religious ideas were cherished, if not always followed. Their saints were respected and even revered. They were allowed to maintain their own social structures, even when they were consigned to the lowest strata of Indian society. In this way these bhakti groups created a Thirdspace that provided some separation from, yet also deep involvement in, Hindi North Indian society. Evangelical Christianity, different though it was in significant ways from such bhakti-­inspired sects, constructed its communities in precisely this marginal Thirdspace—­a space where it could be socially, religiously, ideologically, and ethically different, yet begin to construe itself as a member of society at large.

170 John Stratton Hawley, “Morality beyond Morality,” in Hawley’s Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Times and Ours (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49.

Conclusion

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he foregoing study has been about the founding and formation of (yet) another religious tradition in Hindi North India, this time in the nineteenth century under British rule. What was new was not the religion, Christianity, which had put down roots in the Indian subcontinent during the first centuries of the Common Era. Rather what was novel was the particular tradition of Christianity that established itself, namely Evangelicalism (which itself was barely a century old in Britain and the United States, its countries of origin). It was Evangelicalism that successfully established viable Christian communities across the expanse of North India, including Bengal and Punjab. This study has focused on Christian communities connected to American, rather than British, evangelical missions in the North-­Western Provinces and Oudh. Evangelicalism arrived in Hindi North India as a foreign religion—­or, more precisely, as the religion of foreigners. These foreigners were a subset of British and American Protestants who considered their expression of the faith as far superior and purer than other forms of Christianity. They also considered the other North Indian religious traditions in their field of labor—­Hinduism, Islam, various sectarian groups, and Indian Christianity—­as false at best, and at worst as sure roads to ruin in this life and to eternal damnation in the life to come. The Anglo-­American evangelicals had come to this conclusion not because they were fundamentally malevolent but because they had been steeped in a religious culture in their home countries that assiduously cultivated certain understandings of and perspectives on the workings of a benevolent God, and 273

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on the purpose of a rich and meaningful human life. Ironically, it was as much their religious as their political identity that granted them the little authority they could garner in the Indian context to censure other religious traditions. The foreign evangelicals in India, however, were not content to criticize what they perceived as the sin and evil around them. Rather, they were bent on leading others to the good life as they understood it—on converting others to the evangelical version of Christianity so that ultimately everyone could experience the goodness of God and salvation in the here and now, as well as eternally. Despite the foreign evangelical missionaries’ racial, cultural, and religious biases and prejudices, they were convinced that no human being should a priori be disqualified from hearing about, and being given a chance to respond to, the grace and goodness being offered by God. So with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm, they strove to convince people of every race and station in life to join evangelical Christian communities, which the foreign missionaries ardently hoped and even believed would over time blossom and flourish, eventually dominating the world’s religious landscape. Filled with determination and optimism, American evangelical missionaries arrived in Hindi North India expecting to fulfill their religious dreams of establishing a new world order—­both spiritual and social—­ rather promptly. In this they were deeply disappointed: the vast majority of Indians (and even most Europeans) preferred to keep to their religious proclivities rather than embrace the missionaries’ message. In fact, the strangeness of evangelical Christianity often exposed its promoters to scorn and ridicule, which would have been far more public and intense had the missionaries not enjoyed the political backing of sympathetic British government officials. Yet slowly evangelical communities started to be formed in Hindi North India. They were characterized by an eclecticism unusual for religious communities in the country. First of all, they were racially diverse, with Indian, Eurasian, and European members. It is true that these different constituencies within North Indian Evangelicalism did not usually associate with each other with any degree of intimacy or familiarity. However, they did recognize each other as members of the same Christian group and therefore worthy to some degree of mutual recognition and support. Secondly, people joined evangelical communities for quite varied reasons. Christian Europeans and Eurasians became convinced of the truth of the evangelical perspective on their own religion. In

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addition, Eurasians found Evangelicalism helpful in resituating themselves religiously and socially in a society that was rather hostile to them. What about those Indians who became evangelicals? How did they make sense of the religion of foreigners? To begin, most Indians were introduced to evangelical life and thought not by foreign missionaries but by missionary-­trained Indian church leaders who translated Evangelicalism into idioms comprehensible by the local populace. Indian mission workers also translated Indian understandings of Evangelicalism to foreign missionaries. The mediating role of Indian church workers and agents was crucial in the establishment and growth of Indian Evangelicalism. These native workers did not conform to any one particular mold. They came from a diversity of backgrounds and could interpret evangelical Christianity in quite different ways. Their loyalty to particular Christian traditions and denominations varied quite widely. However, the successful Indian mission workers—­those who made the Methodist and Presbyterian mission churches and communities grow—­were skilled at negotiating the cultural, theological, ideological, and social boundaries of nineteenth-­century Hindi North India. They also were skilled at dealing with the ambiguities of missionary power and authority. Moeover, even though evangelical Christianity found itself on decidedly hostile or at least indifferent religious terrain in Hindi North India, there was one bit of religious and social space where its claims could be taken with some seriousness. This space had been created and cultivated by indigenous bhakti movements, which had been propagated in the region since the fifteenth century. For four centuries before Evangelicalism ever arrived in Hindi North India, certain important strands of bhakti had proclaimed and dared to realize new visions of the divine-­ human relationship, and of the relationship between all members of society, by both contradicting and selectively appropriating the dominant religious traditions of the region. Evangelical Christianity, quite coincidentally, bore some similarities to bhakti of low-­status religious groups such as Kabirpanthis and Nanakpanthis, so the former could build on ground staked out by the latter. Both traditions were heart religion, focusing on the affective experience of the divine. They also focused their devotion on a particular manifestation of the divine, proclaiming this divinity’s power and efficacy to all people, regardless of their place in the religious and social hierarchies of society. The two movements had a penchant for vernacular religion, singing out their message in common languages, promising

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salvation and liberation to members of their communities in terms that were accessible and easily understood. They both criticized existing religious and social practices and hierarchies; they believed that heartfelt religion should be available to all people. Yet both also freely borrowed and amalgamated religious ideas from the dominant religions in their milieu, using what was helpful for their own purposes. They both in theory, if not always in practice, welcomed all people into their communities. And so it was North American Evangelicalism that was drawn to religious spaces, the spaces of low-­status bhakti sects, by forces beyond its control, and in those spaces it reached those whose ears were especially tuned and whose eyes were especially focused by the poetry, songs, and visions of this bhakti. In fact, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, bhakti had created what Edward Soja has termed social and ideological Thirdspaces in Hindi North India, places where reigning orthodoxies and orthopraxis could be subjected to rigorous critique, and new ideas for human community could be imagined and developed, discussed and debated, and put into practice. These Thirdspaces influenced dominant social and ideological structures, providing new ideas for human self-­understanding, ideas that could and did lead to changes and adjustments in those dominant structures. Pulled by its imperfect resemblance to certain bhakti movements, Evangelicalism became a denizen of the religious Thirdspace cultivated by them in Hindi North Indian society. Here, evangelicals proclaimed new religious and social ideas and established new communities and institutions for those who cared to join them. However, Evangelicalism could not reside in a Thirdspace in Hindi North India without being reshaped and reformed itself. In fact, such reformation and reshaping of the movement was built into its very constitution, because Evangelicalism was created as a type of Christianity that could be appropriated and expressed by all strata of society, especially the lowest—­first in Britain and the United States, and then around the world. So as Indians joined the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, they brought their own ideas and assumptions regarding religion and society, shaping both the form and the content of Evangelicalism in their context. Institutions such as the Christian village sprang into being, dependent on missionary and Western support. Christianity was quickly expressed in local idioms such as bhajans, which were indigenous religious songs. Many Indians had a proclivity for viewing Evangelicalism through the theological lens of bhakti, seeing in Jesus Christ

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a divine savior who would respond to their worldly as well as spiritual needs, and lovingly commune with them no matter their lot in life. They especially resonated to the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”1 And in the process of such religious community building on such religious terrain, a new form of Christian Evangelicalism was born: one that had vital links to Western Protestantism, yet one that was being firmly rooted in the soil of India. Among Indians, it appealed especially to people of the lower classes who desired, among other things, to improve their social and economic lot. This evangelical Christianity was in no way to be confused or identified with contemporaneous local bhakti communities. What emerged in nineteenth-­century Hindi North India was not another variant within the bhakti network but a new religious tradition that built its edifice in Thirdspaces created by bhakti. In short time, evangelical Protestantism would join with other Protestant traditions in India to form a theologically and socially broader and more inclusive church. More than 150 years separate contemporary Protestants of Hindi North India from the generation of their founding mothers and fathers, and much has changed in the character of their religious tradition since the nineteenth century. Speaking very generally, historic Protestantism has become part of the establishment—­as has Roman Catholicism—­in the public and religious life of the land. So it has succeeded quite well in its project of inculcating what may be deemed a middle-­class life into the fabric of its own society. Denominations such as the Church of North India and the Methodist Church in India run numerous educational and medical institutions, some of them quite prominent locally and even nationally. Moreover, such well-­ established denominations have the ability to participate as recognized players in local and regional politics. Yet the passing of time has not completely eroded the importance of bhakti and other religious Thirdspaces for Protestants in Hindi North India. There are three reasons for this. 1 I was surprised in my visit to Methodist and former Presbyterian churches in Hindi North India how frequently this verse from Matthew 11:28 appears somewhere in church buildings. See also Kerry San Chirico, “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region,” in Constructing Indian Christianities: Culture, Conversion, and Caste, ed. Chad Bauman and Richard Fox Young (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 23–­24.

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First, the life of bhakti has been incorporated into Protestantism—­ indeed into other traditions of Christianity—­ in various ways.2 The bhajans sung before, during, and after the inherited and adapted Protestant liturgies are one example of how bhakti has been appropriated by North Indian Christians. The appropriation is not simply musical; it is just as much theological and attitudinal. Fundamental to Christian self-­understanding is the belief that God offers quotidian and eternal salvation to every worshiper of the divine savior Yeshu Masih, no matter what may be his or her background. And the piety—­the affective dimension of religious life—­that undergirds Protestant theology and worship has been influenced and inflected since its earliest days as much by bhakti as by Anglo-­American Evangelicalism. Second, since the first generation of new converts to evangelical Christianity in the middle of the nineteenth century, there have continued to be other Indian converts to Christianity, creating in effect continual waves of first-­generation Christians who inevitably draw from their Hindu religious backgrounds as they adopt Christianity for themselves. And bhakti can be the Thirdspace that gives them the ground on which to experiment with and build their understanding of Christianity. Maharashtran Christian poet and Brahmin convert the Rev. Narayan Vaman Tilak aptly described such selective use of bhakti in the second decade of the twentieth century; he famously asserted that “it was over the bridge of Tukaram’s verse that I came to Christ.”3 Tukaram was a sixteenth-­to seventeenth-­century Maharashtran sant who had become well known by the nineteenth century for his bhakti poetry.4 The image of bhakti as a bridge between orthodox Hinduism and orthodox Christianity is another helpful one in understanding the relationship between the two religious traditions in the nineteenth century. The image prevents us from collapsing the two traditions into some sort of common religion: 2 In fact Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement, which are arguably the most vigorous forms of Christianity in India today, draw much more explicitly on bhakti for their self-­understanding. San Chirico, “Between Christian and Hindu.” 3 Philip Constable, “Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth-­and Early Twentieth-­Century India,” Scottish Historical Review 86, no. 222, part 2 (2007): 310. 4 Constable argues that Tukaram was not necessarily, or simply, a bhakti poet, but had been so interpreted by missionaries and other Christians working in Maharashtra. My own interest is not in the precise nature of Tukaram’s poetry but on how he was received in the Indian Christian community, namely as a bhakti poet.

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there is indeed a gulf separating Hinduism and Christianity. While maintaining their distinctions, the image nevertheless points to a connection between the two traditions, a connection that was perceived and used by Indians (and even some foreign missionaries) who traveled back and forth between Hinduism and Christianity.5 The Thirdspace created by bhakti and used by Evangelicalism provides crucial ground on which the newly arrived religion can be understood in terms that make sense in the existing religious culture. Finally, Indian Protestants who have become frustrated with denominational Christianity have continued to create for themselves new Thirdspaces for their own experiments of faith. These Thirdspaces are on the margins not of Hinduism or of Islam but of late twentieth-­and early twenty-­first century establishment Christianity itself. The foreign missionary era of Indian Protestantism came to an end in the 1960s. Since the first decades of the twentieth century, momentum had been building in Protestant missions, which had their fair share of imperious missionaries shaped by their imperial era, for Indians to exert greater control and take up greater responsibility in the churches.6 Once India gained its independence in 1947, the devolution of power to Indians proceeded at an even more rapid pace. Moreover, the new Indian government started to deny visas for the great majority of foreign church workers, generally allowing only those involved in purely humanitarian work such as education and medicine to enter the country. Thus for both internal and external reasons, Indian churches became administratively independent of their foreign sponsors after the formation of the new nation-­ state. The American Presbyterian Mission in North India, which had formerly joined with other Presbyterian and Congregational churches to form the United Church of Northern India in 1924, became one of the many streams of Protestantism to found the Church of North India in 1970. The Methodists in India who had come out of See H. L. Richard, Following Jesus in the Hindu Context (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1988). 6 Kenneth Lawrence Parker, “The Development of the United Church of Northern India,” Journal of the Department of History (The Presbyterian Historical Society) of the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. 17, nos. 3/4 (1936): 182; V. S. Azariah, “The Problem of Co-­operation between Foreign and Native Workers,” in The History and Records of the Conference Together with Addresses Delivered at the Evening Meetings, authored by the World Missionary Conference (1910, Edinburgh), 9 vols. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910), 9:306–­15. 5

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the American mission did not join this union, but they eventually formed the Methodist Church in India in 1981. The exuberance and energy of the first decades of independence, however, have given way in more recent years to a deep malaise within the historic Protestant churches of North India.7 Conversations with informed laity and clergy about the state of their church quickly turn to the subject of corruption and other forms of self-­aggrandizement rampant among church leaders. In particular, the massive amounts of real estate left behind by the Protestant missions of the British Raj have proved to be a tempting source of illicit gain for church officials. The feelings of any number of conscientious North Indian Protestants are summed up in the following assessment: “There has been a tremendous amount of unfaithfulness within both independent and mainline churches in India; many of the leaders, bishops, priests, and pastors—­the ‘shepherds’—­ abuse their power. Selfishness, nepotism, corruption, sexual perversion, immorality, greed, and sloth have infiltrated the church.”8 Calls for reform within the historic Protestant churches have so far been sympathetically acknowledged but generally ignored in practice, because those who are in a position to institute change have the least incentive to do so (there are notable exceptions). Thus members of these denominations who wish to mobilize the church for deeper involvement in society often work beyond the confines of their own ecclesiastical structures to live out their understanding of the faith. In doing so, they create new Thirdspaces, full of exciting possibilities and unforeseen pitfalls, where religious entrepreneurs can carry out experiments in faithfulness. A few examples convey some of the breadth of religious innovation occurring among Protestants of established traditions. Sam and Usha (not their real names) live in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, where over the years they have labored to bring the Christian message to people of other religious traditions throughout North India. Sam grew up in the Methodist Church in India and was educated in a Methodist 7 The condition of the Roman Catholic Church in North India is very different, at least from all outward appearances. The reasons for this are numerous and complex. Protestant leaders, however, quickly point to the fact that Roman Catholics do not have elections for their church leaders, so they bypass the influence-peddling characteristic of many democratic systems of government. 8 Paul Swarup, “Zechariah,” in Global Bible Commentary, ed. Daniel Patte (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 318. Such a state of affairs is not, of course, unique in the history of Christianity; in fact, it surfaces with some regularity.

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college. His father was a Methodist preacher who held prayer meetings and Bible studies in his home. These eventually led to a plan to bring the word of God—­as understood by these evangelical Christians—­to every household in the city. In 1988 Sam was part of a group of Protestants, mostly from Church of North India and Methodist backgrounds, who formed an organization dedicated to spreading Christianity in the regions around them. He and Usha, who composes religious songs, were married in 1990, and since then both have been active in this work. The organization is an indigenous, interdenominational ministry, largely independent of foreign monetary support. The Indian missionaries sponsored by the organization are trained at various Bible colleges and institutes in the country, usually for about two years, and are then sent out to North Indian and Nepalese villages where they are expected to hold secular jobs while spreading the faith. Once congregations are formed, they are turned over to more established Protestant institutions, usually Pentecostal churches or parachurch organizations, that have a comparable zest for bringing people into the Christian fold. However one may evaluate such Christian work, it is clearly part of a long legacy of Protestant activity in Hindi North India begun by foreign missionaries and their Indian coworkers. Also clear is the fact that the churches established by the missionaries and Indian leaders in the nineteenth century, such as the Church of North India or the Methodist Church in India, either cannot or will not undertake such work. So contemporary Christian activists, like Usha and Sam, create their own Thirdspaces on the margins of established Protestant Christianity, simultaneously borrowing from and critiquing it while joining in alliances with religiously marginal people from other like-­minded groups like Pentecostal and parachurch organizations in order to create and recreate Christianity in North India. The city of Allahabad has been a center of Presbyterian work since the 1830s. A number of venerable ecclesiastical and educational Christian institutions have been founded there. On the north side of the Yamuna River sits Ewing Christian College, established by the Presbyterians in 1902 and now run by the Church of North India as a well-­ respected educational establishment. Even though the college was not in session when I visited it in the summer of 2008, the president and few faculty I met with were very kind and hospitable and generous with their time. My guide was Isaac, a student at the college who was a member of the Church of North India. He was very active in Ewing’s chapter

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of the Student Christian Movement (SCM), which is firmly committed to dealing with issues of social justice and other societal problems. Yet Isaac, like other members of the SCM at Ewing, worshiped at a Pentecostal church in the city. Moreover, throughout his elementary and high school years, he went to a Roman Catholic school, which required all Christian students to attend Mass. I doubt that Isaac was aware that his religious profile in important ways reflected that of evangelical missionaries of the nineteenth century, who combined a commitment to order and discipline, a hunger for righteousness, and a penchant for emotional enthusiasm. Isaac’s religious profile also reflected that of a Roman Catholic nun I met in Allahabad. Originally from Kerala in South India, the sister was a member of the Ursulines of Mary Immaculate, and she had come to North India to work as an accountant in a school run by her order in Lucknow. While there she felt called to do some other work, and inspired by attendance at a charismatic Catholic revival, she finally prevailed upon her mother superior to let her take night classes at a local law school. She eventually finished there, passed the bar exam, and was working as an attorney in a diocesan social organization when I met her. One of her main tasks was fighting in court for indigent women and children trying to get their fair share of government-­issued food. All the while she had remained deeply committed to the Catholic charismatic movement, crediting it for her vocational inspiration, energy, and dedication. On the south side of the Yamuna in Allahabad sits the Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology & Sciences, which was started by Presbyterian missionaries (chief among them Sam Higginbottom) in 1910 as an agriculture training extension of Ewing Christian College, then known as Allahabad Christian College. In 1947 the agricultural division severed formal ties with the Presbyterian establishment and gained its own board of directors from seven different mission boards and agencies, becoming the Allahabad Agricultural Institute.9 The name was changed again in 2009 to honor its main founding figure. While Higginbottom (1874–­1958) had spearheaded the formation of what became a highly successful agricultural assistance ministry, he For information see E. D. Immanuel Ebenezer, “Allahabad Agricultural Institute/University,” in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of South Asian Christianity, ed. Roger Hedlund, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1:13; Gary R. Hess, Sam Higginbottom of Allahabad (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1967). 9

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was a somewhat controversial figure, especially among missionaries, in his day. His idea of agricultural assistance to poor farmers as Christian mission was novel and contested, and he had both firm friends and bitter enemies within the missionary body. He was an autocratic administrator, a charismatic speaker, and a very effective fund-­raiser. Today the Institute is run by Bishop Rev. Fr. Prof. Dr. Rajendra B. Lal, its first vice-­chancellor and a controversial man among the Christians of Allahabad.10 Under his leadership, the Institute has thrived in its educational programs and outreach. Yet he is reputedly hungry for power, authority, and fame, and his financial and political dealings are said to be highly irregular. Lal is not only the head of the Institute, but was installed and consecrated in 2012 by an ecumenical gathering of Christian leaders (the Church of North India was not represented) as “bishop” of Yeshu Darbar, or the Royal Court of Jesus. This program reaches out to villagers of the area with the message that Jesus is Savior.11 The Yeshu Darbar began as “Gospel and Plough” with prayer meetings at the home of then P ­ rof. R. B. Lal in 1994. Today it has grown into a large movement among village people, with spectacular worship and healing services, including exorcisms, held on grounds that abut the Sam Higginbottom Institute. Videos of these services proliferate on the Internet. I did not spend nearly enough time with any of the persons I have briefly introduced above to come to any definite conclusions about the value and worthiness of their ministries, or to what extent their reports about themselves and each other were true. What did become evident to me, however, is that any number of North Indian Protestants today who want to live out their faith have created and are operating in their own religious Thirdspaces. (The fact that the Ursuline sister is working in a Roman Catholic diocesan organization within the bounds of the institutional church is also telling.) These Thirdspaces are not at the margins of Hinduism and Islam, as was true for the activists’ spiritual forebears in the nineteenth century. Rather today the Protestant Thirdspaces are on the margins of their own established Christianity, 10 Much of my information has been gleaned from conversations with various Protestant leaders in Allahabad. I also had the opportunity to meet and converse briefly with Bishop R. B. Lal. 11 Information can be found on the Institute’s website, http://www.shuats .edu.in, and for the Yeshu Darbar on http://shuats.edu.in/yeshu_darbar.asp (accessed May 9, 2017).

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namely historic Protestantism. In these marginal Thirdspaces, religiously active Protestants are borrowing from, criticizing, refining, and reshaping the Christian tradition with which they grew up, as well as combining it with other Christian traditions available to them—­mostly Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism, but at times Syrian Orthodoxy brought by South Indians working in the North. Yet even in this markedly Christian Thirdspace, the religious terrain cultivated by bhakti and used by early Evangelicalism is palpable and discernible. It can be witnessed in the focus on Jesus as divine savior, in the critique of inherited religious structures, in the importance accorded to the emotional and devotional life, and in the willingness to appropriate themes, styles, and theologies from a variety of Christian traditions and sources. It can also be heard in the Christian bhajans that continue to be composed and sung today.

Teri Aradhana Karun (I Shall Adore You) Chorus: I shall adore you, I shall adore you. Forgiving (my) sins, grant (me) life, I shall plead for mercy. I shall adore you. 1. You are great, all powerful, You are the music of my life; The strings of my heart cause music, Your worship is sweet song. May you be honored through my life: That is the one thing I desire. Forgiving (my) sins, grant (me) life, I shall plead for mercy. I shall adore you. 2. In every particle of creation, The mysteries of your greatness are hidden; Even the birds give praise to your glory; Every second they sing melodies of joy. May my devotions (bhakti) also be acceptable to you: I pray this from my heart. Forgiving (my) sins, grant (me) life, I shall plead for mercy. I shall adore you.

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3. Light a lamp in my fallen life; In you lies my hope. Remove all my sins from my body, May my desire be completely fulfilled. The difficult, sorrowful times of life— May I face them with determination. Forgiving (my) sins, grant (me) life, I shall plead for mercy. I shall adore you. (translated from Hindi by Satish Gyan and others)

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Index of Places

Bundelkhand, 151 Burma, 72

Afghanistan, 42, 48 Agra, 24, 45–­46, 59, 73, 81, 135–­36, 185, 234, 241, 265 Allahabad, 13, 19, 28, 59, 62, 74–­79, 81–­82, 85, 87, 122, 134, 137, 151–­ 53, 155, 171–­72, 179, 187, 229, 231, 234, 243, 252–­54, 268, 281–­83 Amroha, 83, 236n41 Awadh, 18, 24, 39, 46–­48, 51, 56–­58, 82, 84, 87, 230, 247, 253, 273 Ayodhya, 24, 27–­28

Calcutta, 13, 52, 54n145, 56, 59, 66–­ 67, 69, 71–­74, 82, 98, 112, 132, 162, 185, 234, 238, 247 Chunar, 55–­57, 61n175

Bahraith, 83 Barabanki, 83 Bareilly, 59, 62n176, 82–­83, 86, 104–­ 5, 144, 149, 153–­56, 171–­73, 230, 234–­35, 239, 264, 280 Benares, 16n50, 24, 28, 35, 40n88, 56, 181, 257 Bengal, 1, 13, 26, 27, 29n37, 31n46, 35, 38n81, 39, 45, 48, 51, 61, 67, 72–­73, 84, 112n84, 228, 231, 237, 239–­40, 273 Bihar, 39, 45, 48 Bijnor, 83, 171, 236n41, 247 Bodh Gaya, 262 Bombay, 54n145, 72, 252, 268 Britain, 11–­12, 63–­64, 66, 71, 109, 123, 125, 227–­28, 273, 276 Budaon, 83, 235n41, 254

Deccan Plateau, 45 Dehra Dun, 38, 81, 246–­48 Delhi, 24, 42, 45, 48, 51, 66, 73, 84–­ 85, 112, 151, 185 Doab, 85 Etawah, 81, 87 Farrukhabad, 81, 133–­34, 160 Fatehgarh, 81, 86, 132–­33, 135, 158, 160, 241, 249, 254n119 Fatehpur, 81, 86, 132, 133n5, 135, 137–­38, 155, 158, 160, 241 Fatehpur Sikri, 46 Gangetic Plain, 24, 42 Goa, 61, 63 Gonda, 83, 235n41 Gorakhpur, 78 Gujarat, 13, 142 Gwalior, 242

311

312 — Index of Places

Hadhramaut, 41 Hardoi, 83 Hardwar, 28, 101–­2 Hatain, 174 Hyderabad, 48 I’saipur, 241–­43, 245 Iran: see Persia Iraq, 143 Ireland, 61, 68, 81–­82 Kanpur, 73, 83, 85, 160 Kapurthala, 77 Kashi: see Benares Kashmir, 45, 119 Khera-­Bajhera, 83, 235n41 Lakhimpur, 83, 235n41 London, 67 Lucknow, 13, 24, 49, 51, 53, 56–­59, 82–­83, 230, 232, 235n41, 282 Ludhiana, 62, 73–­74, 77 Maghar, 40 Mainpuri, 81, 86 Meerut, 51, 55, 84, 154 Mirzapur, 137, 241, 248 Moradabad, 38, 83, 106, 149, 235n41, 246–­49, 262 Morgantown, 97–­98 Naini Tal, 83, 86, 154, 231n21, 235n41 Nawabganj, 83, 235n41 New Jersey, 70, 187 New York, 70, 133, 135–­36 North America, 11, 63, 66, 70n25, 71, 119, 228, 264 North-­Western Provinces, 18, 27, 51, 58, 72, 74, 76, 81, 86–­87, 132, 134, 175n150, 231, 247, 253, 273 Ohio, 99, 258 Oman, 143 Oudh: see Awadh Pauri, 83, 127

Punjab, 12n39, 16, 41, 46, 51, 73–­74, 77, 87, 108, 273 Puri, 26, 254 Pennsylvania, 70, 72, 96, 104n51, 158 Persia, 42, 45, 47–­48, 55n147 Pilibheet, 83, 247 Pittsburgh, 72, 187 Rae Bareli, 83, 235n41 Rajasthan, 23, 95n23, 118 Rakha, 158–­60, 239, 241–­43, 255, 263 Rampur, 47, 104–­5 Rangoon, 72 Rohilkhand, 48, 50, 82, 247, 249 Roorkie, 81 Saharanpur, 22, 74, 81 Sambhal, 83, 236n41, 249 Sardhana, 51–­52, 63 Serampore, 29n37, 67, 72, 228 Shahjahanpur, 83, 142, 235n41, 239 Sind, 41, 51 Sitapur, 83, 235n41 South Asia, 39n84, 41–­49 South India, 18n60, 35, 45, 53n139, 54–­55, 63, 67n15, 116, 226, 227n5, 282, 284 Sri Lanka, 41 Subathu, 74, 77, 172 United States of America, 10–­11, 13, 34, 63, 65n7, 66, 71–­72, 81, 83, 100–­101, 106, 109–­11, 117, 124, 126, 135, 149, 156, 158–­59, 187–­88, 213, 228–­29, 233, 237, 264, 273, 276; see also North America Uttar Pradesh, 18, 51, 157, 280 Uttarakhand, 18 Varanasi: see Benares Virginia, 97 Vrindavan, 24 Wesleypore, 258 Yemen, 41

Index of Subjects and Names

Adams, Hannah, 111 African Americans, 96–­97 Africans, 69–­70, 70n25, 227 Ahmad, Sayyid, 50 Akbar the Great, 45–­47 Alexander the Great, 123 Alexander, Archibald, 187–­89, 196 Allegheny Seminary, 72 Allen, John, 188 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 69–­72, 228, 243 Anderson, Rufus, 243–­4 4 Andover Seminary, 69, 71 Andrias, 121, 177, 247 Anglicans, 11, 52–­53, 55–­59, 64–­ 65, 156n81, 227–­28, 232; see also Church of England Anthony, Adam, 135–­36 Anupgiri Bahadur, 240 Arabi, Ibn al-­, 43 Arabs, 41–­42 Arjuna, 33, 195 Aryan, 31 asceticism, 30, 34, 41, 118–­19, 121, 199, 209, 254 ascetics, 28, 30, 34, 36, 41, 118, 120–­ 21, 209n108, 240 ashrama, 32

atonement, 15, 64–­65, 209–­10 Augustine, 143 Aurangzeb, 46, 48, 66, 143n34, 201n70, 204 autobiography, 2, 93, 116, 120, 141, 145, 147, 150–­51, 174 avatar, 23–­24 Babur, 45 baptism, 12, 53n139, 54n145, 56, 75, 77, 92, 132, 138–­40, 146–­50, 152–­53, 158–­60, 226, 229, 231n21, 236n42, 241, 246–­51, 253–­54, 261–­ 62, 266 Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), 228 Baptists, 11–­13, 29n37, 65n7, 66, 71–­ 72, 77, 112, 160, 228, 230n20, 231, 233–­34, 255n123 Bebbington, David, 63n1, 64, 65n5 Begum of Sardhana, 51–­52 Bhagavad Gita, 33, 111, 195 bhakti, 3, 6, 32–­41, 142–­43, 191n33, 201n75, 213, 271–­72; and asceticism, 41; and evangelicalism, 6–­18, 20, 89, 128–­29, 131, 136, 147–­50, 173–­75, 180–­82, 195–­96, 201, 221–­22, 225, 246–­50, 275–­79, 284; nirguna, 6, 8, 35n65, 37, 39n84, 180, 191n33, 247; saguna, 8, 37 313

314 — Index of Subjects and Names

Bible, 13, 15, 50n127, 64, 114, 148, 173, 186–­89, 192, 197–­99, 213–­17, 220, 281 Bible Society, 78 biblical criticism: see higher criticism biblical inerrancy, 187–­88, 213–­14 Bijak of Kabir, 13 Bolst, Maria, 155, 234–­35 Bowley, William, 55–­57, 61 boys, 76–­77, 137, 151, 166, 170, 217, 240, 242, 262 Brahma, 23–­24 Brahmins, 1–­2 , 29, 31–­32, 137, 169, 254, 266; and bhakti, 33–­34, 36–­37, 131, 180–­82; and Indian Christians, 157, 165–­66, 169, 254, 278; missionary views of, 1–­2 , 109, 113, 115–­16, 165, 252, 266 Brahmo Samaj, 22, 24 Brainerd, David, 65n7, 70–­71 British, 11, 46, 53–­56, 58–­62, 64, 73, 77–­78, 109, 111, 118, 125, 207, 219, 225, 226–­32, 264–­71, 280; evangelicals, 11, 65–­67, 69, 71, 73–­ 74, 82, 108, 111–­16, 132, 138, 153, 228–­31, 234–­35, 241, 273; see also British Empire; British government; Orientalist British Empire, 45–­46, 48, 67–­68, 71, 85, 90, 105, 122–­23, 126–­28, 150, 163, 178, 193, 218, 231, 236, 238, 264–­70, 273, 280 British government, 2, 18, 20, 21n1, 26, 48, 50–­51, 58, 65–­66, 68–­69, 74, 82, 84–­87, 93, 118, 120, 123–­25, 138, 154–­55, 160, 163, 166, 225, 230–­31, 241, 242, 258, 265, 274 Brown, Peter, 91 Buchanan, Claudius, 71, 228n9 Buddha, 206–­8, 210 Buddhism, 110, 200, 207–­8, 223n160, 253, 263 Butler, Clementina, 81–­83, 154, 235 Butler, William, 81–­83, 103n48, 119, 152–­54, 172, 230, 235, 258 Caldwell, James, 101

Calvin, John, 118n115, 188, 191n30, 194, 201n73, 202, 205–­6, 208, 211, 213 Calvinism, 153, 185, 188, 194, 198, 204n86, 208, 210–­11, 214, 222–­23 Carey, William, 29n37, 66–­67, 71 caste, 10–­13, 21, 25–­26, 29–­34, 36–­39, 58–­61, 68, 86, 91, 108–­9, 113–­15, 118, 127–­29, 132, 153, 157, 164–­66, 168, 170, 175n150, 180–­81, 218, 223, 233, 242, 245, 247–­53, 258–­61, 265–­66, 270–­72, 277 celibacy, 30 Certeau, Michel de, 4n10, 16 Chamars, 60, 94, 137, 175, 247, 249, 253n117 Chand, Prem, 13 chaplains, 52–­53, 57, 60, 64–­65, 228, 232 Chatterjee, K. C., 179 Chishti, Shaykh Salim, 46 chowkidar, 154–­55, 249 Christian village, 158, 241–­43, 254–­ 64, 276 Christianity, 11, 13–­17, 19, 22–­27, 51–­52, 63–­66, 78, 108, 112–­14, 120, 126–­28, 136, 139, 143–­4 4, 148–­51, 161, 169, 174–­75, 177, 179, 191, 198, 215–­16, 218, 222, 226–­28, 233, 245, 249, 252–­54, 257, 266–­67, 269–­70, 273, 278–­79, 281 Christians, American, 13, 16–­21, 29, 54, 61–­63, 69–­88, 89–­129, 133–­36, 141–­42, 144–­45, 148–­60, 168–­70, 176–­79, 183–­85, 187–­91, 213–­15, 225–­26, 237–­38, 241, 243–­4 4, 273–­74 Christians, Eurasian/East Indian, 54–­ 62, 64, 75, 79–­80, 86–­87, 93n15, 135–­36, 144–­45, 153, 155, 169–­72, 225–­26, 229–­30, 232–­36, 255, 271, 274–­75 Christians, European, 1–­3, 20, 22–­23, 29, 31, 50–­61, 67n15, 73–­76, 85–­87, 104, 110–­16, 160–­62, 219–­20, 225–­ 34, 255, 258, 265, 268, 274; see also British evangelicals

Index of Subjects and Names — 315

Christians, Indian/Native, 13, 16–­19, 51–­62, 74–­80, 86–­87, 94–­95, 114–­ 16, 127–­28, 131–­82, 216–­20, 225–­ 26, 231, 237–­72, 275, 278–­84 Chuhras, 248 Church Missionary Society (CMS), 55–­ 56, 228, 243, 257, 268 Church of England, 11, 57–­58, 265; see also Anglican Church of North India (CNI), 62, 277, 279, 281, 283 Church of Scotland, 1 Civil Service, 2, 53, 57, 66, 68, 118, 126, 226, 236, 268 class (social), 13, 31–­32, 54, 59–­61, 93, 104, 108, 119, 154, 157, 163, 168–­ 71, 173, 179, 181, 218, 221, 223, 228, 233–­34, 236–­37, 247, 251–­52, 270, 272, 277 Colebrook, Edward, 111n79, 207 conversion, 3n5, 12–­13, 15, 17–­19, 29, 38–­39, 44–­46, 52–­53, 57, 60–­61, 64, 69, 72, 75–­76, 80, 84–­85, 96–­ 100, 110, 114, 120–­21, 125–­28, 132, 138–­39, 141–­51, 169–­70, 175, 177, 179, 218, 228–­34, 246–­58, 260–­70, 274, 278 conversion narrative, 145, 147–­48, 150, 249n97 Corrie, Daniel, 53, 57, 65, 228n9 Dalit, 6n17, 128n152, 248 Daniel, Henry Martyn, 155 Dara Shikoh, 48 darshan, 25 Dass, Ishwari/Ishuree, 27, 114–­15, 157–­68, 177–­78, 185–­23, 240n60, 267–­68 Devi, 24 devotion/devotee, 3, 7, 8–­16, 25–­26, 28, 32–­37, 39, 41, 43, 49, 58, 118–­ 22, 143, 146–­47, 150, 173, 180–­81, 195, 201, 223, 247, 251–­52, 254, 261, 270–­71, 275, 284 dharma, 32, 121, 199, 204, 216, 265, 272 Dharmashastras, 32 Dharmasutras, 32

Divali, 27 Du Bois, W.E.B., 219 Duff, Alexander, 1–­3, 20, 104n49, 106, 111n79, 112, 132 dukkha, 207 Durga, 23 Dwight, Timothy, 71 East India Company, 2, 28, 48, 52–­54, 56, 58, 65–­68, 71–­73, 76, 84–­85, 123, 132, 227–­30, 232, 236, 241, 254, 265; and Christian missions, 2, 28, 52, 65, 67, 71–­72, 76, 123, 228–­30, 232 East Indians: see Christians, Eurasian; Eurasians education, 1, 18–­19, 56, 75–­76, 80, 84, 93, 139, 151n62, 160, 163, 165, 170, 172, 177, 217–­18, 221, 223, 227n5, 241, 243, 249, 256, 263–­64, 266, 268–­69, 277, 279, 281, 283; see also schools Edwards, Jonathan, 70–­71, 100 Eliot, John, 70 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 111 Enlightenment, 91, 162, 178, 187, 197n55, 241, 244–­46, 257, 261 Eurasians, 54–­55, 58–­61, 64, 75, 79–­80, 86–­87, 93n15, 135–­36, 144, 145n42, 155, 170–­72, 225–­26, 229–­ 30, 232–­36, 255, 271, 274–­75 Europeans, 2, 13, 26n23, 52–­61, 68–­ 69, 73, 75–­76, 84–­87, 104, 112–­ 15, 117–­18, 124–­25, 127–­28, 133, 135–­38, 153–­54, 156, 160–­63, 165, 168, 171, 175–­76, 178, 182, 219–­20, 225–­26, 229–­36, 239–­40, 251, 255, 258, 263, 265, 267–­68, 271, 274 evangelism, 1, 2n2, 55, 72n40, 75–­76, 78, 80, 94, 150, 174, 229 evangelist, 28, 60, 79, 83, 87, 102, 132, 137, 144, 145n42, 174, 177, 183–­84, 237–­38, 242 Ewart, David, 162 fakir, 102, 109, 118–­22, 138, 175n152, 252, 254; see also yogi famine, 94, 132, 158, 239–­41

316 — Index of Subjects and Names

Farangi Mahal, 49 fasting, 30 festival, 25–­28, 30, 68, 79, 122, 256 Fieldbrave, Joseph, 144–­45, 145n42, 177, 235n41 Free Church of Scotland, 162, 230, 238 Fullerton, Robert Stewart, 113, 123, 265 Gandhi, 12, 39, 174n148 Ganges River, 48, 73–­74, 79, 176, 249, 254 gender, 10–­11, 32, 92, 168–­75, 181, 271–­72; see also women Ghorid Empire, 42 Ghose, Surju Coomar, 237, 239 girls, 76–­77, 93, 104, 127–­28, 133, 137, 153, 170–­75, 217, 235, 247, 262 Gita: see Bhagavad Gita Glasgow Missionary Society, 228 Goanese, 54, 60–­61 Goloknath, 90, 250, 269 Gordon, Andrew, 119–­20, 123–­24 Gosains, 101, 240 Greenwood, William, 56 Grierson, George, 13, 146 guilt, 145, 150, 184, 192, 206–­8, 223, 257 guru, 11, 14, 17, 34, 39, 41, 121, 129, 177, 180, 215n131, 247, 249, 271 Guru Nanak: see Nanak, Guru Haqq, Susannah, 149, 173–­75, 247 Haqq, Zahur-al-­, 116n106, 139–­51, 173, 175, 177, 236n41, 246–­47, 251–­52 Hawley, John Stratton, 33n54, 34, 36 heart religion, 9, 34, 275 Heber, Reginald, 52–­61, 232–­33 hell, 15, 90, 92, 106, 186, 198, 200, 205, 208–­12, 223 henotheism, 14 Herron, David, 89, 134 higher criticism, 187, 213 Hinduism, 3, 6–­10, 12, 14–­17, 20–­ 44, 46–­47, 55, 108–­16, 131–­32, 143, 146, 164–­65, 167–­68, 180–­81, 191, 194–­96, 200n66, 201n75, 205,

207–­8, 213, 222, 247, 250, 253, 263, 271, 273, 278–­79, 283; missionary views of, 22–­24, 25–­26, 29–­31, 79–­ 80, 108–­22, 161–­67, 170n128, 247, 253, 273 Hindus, 9–­10, 43–­4 4, 46–­48, 57, 61, 76, 80, 84–­85, 105, 108, 110, 118, 121, 123, 137–­38, 143, 155, 163–­65, 168, 170n131, 174n148, 180, 185, 197, 221, 234, 247, 256, 260, 263 Hodge, Archibald Alexander, 187 Hodge, Charles, 187–­90, 194, 197n56, 206, 210–­11, 213, 216 Holi, 27 hooks, bell, 5 Humayun, 45 Humphrey, J. L., 144–­45n42, 148, 249 Humphrey, Emily J., 93n14, 141, 146–­47 Ibn Arabi: see Arabi, Ibn al-­ immorality: see morality and immorality imperialism, 67, 70n25, 122, 135, 150 Islam, 3,14, 17, 20, 39, 41–­51, 55, 108, 110, 131, 142–­4 4, 148, 151, 167, 191, 194, 200, 250, 252–­53, 271, 273, 279, 283 Jagannath, 26–­27, 254 Jahangir, 45, 47 jajmani system, 258–­61 Jamuna River, 76 Janvier, Emma, 124, 153–­56 Janvier, Joel, 82, 124, 151–­57, 172, 177, 236, 240n60 Jat, 48 jati, 29, 31, 37, 132, 251, 254 Jefferson College, 96 Jesus Christ, 1–­2 , 8, 15, 54n146, 64, 65n5, 90, 96, 98–­100, 102, 110, 127, 131, 144, 147–­48, 151, 173–­74, 179, 186, 190–­91, 194n47, 197n54, 201n74, 204n85, 205, 208–­14, 239, 246, 248, 270, 276–­78, 283–­84 Jews, 136n17, 163 Johnson, William, 103n46, 138–­39 Jones, William, 29, 111n79

Index of Subjects and Names — 317

Judaism, 14, 24–­25, 143n34, 210 Judson, Adoniram, 69, 72 Judson, Ann, 69, 72 Julaha, 39, 253 Julius Caesar, 123 Kabir, 6–­10, 13–­14, 36–­37, 39–­40, 129, 180, 182, 247, 250, 271–­72 Kabirpanth, 6, 13, 35n65, 38–­41, 142, 215n131, 270, 275 Kabirpanthis, 38–­41, 121, 177, 246–­ 49, 254 Kalb Ali Khan Bahadur, 104 karma, 7, 192, 198–­209, 212–­13 Kayasth, 132, 166–­67 Khan, Ghulam Husain, 240 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, 50, 85 Knowles, Samuel, 230 Krishna, 7–­8, 24, 26–­27, 33, 37, 41, 143, 182, 195 Kshatriya, 31 Lafayette College, 158–­59 Lakshmi, 23–­24, 27 language, 1–­2 , 9, 11, 15–­16, 19, 29, 36, 42, 47, 55–­56, 68, 71, 76, 78, 93, 113, 132, 139, 142, 158, 160, 165, 167, 176, 208, 220, 230, 233–­34, 270, 275 Lefebvre, Henri, 3–­4 leprosy, 77 Liakatali, Maulavi, 137 liberation: see salvation literacy, 39, 79, 160, 164, 166, 192, 217–­23, 236 London Missionary Society (LMS), 228 Lowrie, John C., 72–­74, 98, 103n47, 110, 112, 115n101, 123, 125, 233 Lowrie, Louisa A., 73, 97–­98, 103n45, 104n49, 107–­8 Lowrie, Walter M., 96–­99 Lucknow Residency, 58 Lutherans, 55 Madden, Charles, 132, 158, 241, 268 Magh Mela, 28, 79 Mahabharata, 29, 36 mahant, 262–­63

Major Rind’s Christian Colony, 248 Marathas, 46, 48, 67 marginality, 3, 5–­6, 38, 221–­23, 234, 253, 265, 272, 281, 284 Marshman, Joshua, 112 Martyn, Henry, 65, 155, 228n9 math, 40, 129, 258, 262–­64 matrkas, 24 Mazhabi Sikhs, 38, 246–­49, 254, 258, 270 McAuley, Emma Bayles, 117, 124 McEwen, Rev. and Mrs., 74–­75, 234 medical work, 19, 77, 104–­5, 127, 169, 171, 173, 277, 279 mela, 28, 79–­80, 101, 168, 249 mendicants, 59, 101, 109, 118, 132, 134, 263; see also sannyasi merit (religious), 98, 105, 109, 121, 167, 184, 198–­201, 204–­5, 210–­12, 223; see also punya Methodist Church in India (MCI), 277, 280–­81 Middleton, Thomas, 55 Mirabai, 7–­9, 14, 36, 41, 143, 182, 272 mission compound, 129, 137, 237, 251, 255, 263–­64 missionaries: see Christians, American missionary itineration, 56n155, 94, 138, 248 missionary work: see education; evangelism; orphanages; preaching; publishing; schools missionary work, women’s: see women, missionary mohullah, 258–­59 moksha, 14, 26, 201n75, 207 Monier-­Williams, Monier, 195 monotheism, 14, 24, 222 morality and immorality, 22, 26, 40, 49, 54, 60, 109–­110, 113, 117, 121–­ 22, 124n136, 158, 163–­64, 166, 174, 185, 190, 192–­93, 198–­208, 212, 216, 218, 222, 223n162, 243, 260, 266, 271–­72, 280 Mughal, 42, 45–­49, 66–­68, 84 Muslims, 6, 9, 21, 24–­25, 39, 40–­51, 56–­57, 60–­61, 76, 79–­80, 84–­85,

318 — Index of Subjects and Names

103n45, 105, 108, 110, 118–­21, 125, 132, 137–­38, 142–­43, 146, 150, 163–­65, 167–­68, 180, 183, 197, 204–­5, 214, 221–­22, 230, 252–­53, 256, 258, 260, 269 Nanak, Guru, 8n24, 17, 36–­37, 39, 174–­75, 180, 247, 250 Nanakpanth, 8n24, 35n65, 270, 275 Nanakpanthi, 175, 247, 270 Native Americans, 16, 65n7, 70–­72, 227 Native Christians: see Christians, Indian/Native nawab, 46, 48, 56, 104–­5, 160, 193, 267 Nawab of Rampur, 104–­5 Newell, Harriet, 69, 72 Newell, Samuel, 69, 72 Newton, John, Jr., 77 night watchman: see chowkidar nirguna bhakti: see bhakti, nirguna Noll, Mark, 63n63, 65 Nundy, Gopi Nath, 132–­39, 143, 158, 177, 181–­82, 238, 240, 250–­51 ordination, 55–­56, 72, 83, 131, 133–­ 35, 149–­50, 155–­56, 160, 177, 236, 240n60 Orientalist, 29, 40n86, 68, 111, 114, 143, 195 orphanages, 75–­77, 80, 83, 93–­94, 132–­33, 151, 153, 157–­58, 170–­73, 219, 235n41, 239–­43, 255–­56, 263–­ 64, 268 orphans, 75–­77, 80, 132–­33, 152–­53, 158, 161, 171, 239–­46, 252 panth, 11, 37–­40, 180, 262 papa, 198, 201, 204, 209, 223; see also sin Parker, Edwin, 81, 258 Parker, Lois, 81, 94, 171 Parsons, Josiah, 230 Parvati, 23 Pearce, W. H., 112 Peggy (mother-­in-­law of Joel Janvier), 153, 172–­73, 175, 235n41

Persian, 35, 42, 45, 68, 78, 116n106, 145, 166–­67 Pietism, 63n1, 110, 189, 191, 216, 222, 278 pilgrim, 28, 262–­63 pilgrimage, 25, 28, 109, 223 pir, 48–­50 polytheism, 14, 22–­23, 114 Portuguese, 30, 58 Pranami, 142–­48, 150–­51, 215n131, 247, 252 Prannath, Mahamati, 142–­43, 146, 180 Prasad, Sukhdev, 13 prasada, 14, 146, 201n75, 213 preaching, 28, 51, 57, 74–­75, 78–­80, 83, 87, 90, 92–­95, 97, 99, 101, 121–­ 22, 125–­27, 138–­39, 141–­42, 144–­ 45, 148–­50, 156, 168, 177, 183–­84, 232, 242, 246, 248–­49; bazaar, 79, 90, 94, 138, 145, 177 presiding elder, 116n106, 140–­41, 150–­51 Princeton Theological Seminary, 97, 187–­89, 194n49 Princeton Theology, 66n12, 187–­89, 191–­219, 222 prison, 114, 137–­38, 166, 257 publishing, 75, 77–­78, 87, 94–­95, 117, 168, 185, 220, 231 puja, 24 punya, 198, 201, 204n88, 212, 223; see also merit Purana, 29, 36, 146 purdah, 168, 170, 175 qadi, 44 qasbah, 43–­4 4 Qur‘an, 40, 43, 50, 144, 146–­47, 151, 215 race, 31–­32, 55, 59–­61, 69, 87, 121, 123, 127, 135–­36, 138, 155–­56, 162, 163n104, 170, 175, 178, 225–­26, 236–­37, 254, 267, 270–­71, 274 Raidas: see Ravidas Rajah of Binsua, 159 Rajput, 7, 46–­47, 151

Index of Subjects and Names — 319

Sanskritization, 218 sant, 6n19, 11, 37, 39, 142, 175, 182, 198, 278 sannyasi, 30, 32, 240, 263 Saraswati, 23 savior, 8, 106, 129, 136, 144, 147–­ 48, 172–­73, 175, 186, 192, 194n47, 201n74, 207–­13, 222–­23, 245, 254, 270, 277–­78, 283–­84 Sayre, Edward, 160 schools, 3n5, 55–­56, 74–­79, 83, 86, 93, 95, 98, 105, 126–­27, 132–­33, 135, 137, 146, 148, 152, 158–­61, 170–­ 74, 229, 234–­35, 241, 248, 262–­63, 268, 282; Islamic, 49, 116n106, 142; see also education Scott, J. L., 135 Scott, T. J., 113, 116n102, 117, 125–­27 Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, 187–­88, 191, 244 sect, 8, 11–­12, 16, 20–­22, 29, 32–­41, 58, 89, 101, 110, 129, 141–­4 4, 146–­ 48, 151, 174–­75, 180, 215, 222, 225, 240, 246–­50, 252–­53, 258, 262–­63, 270–­73, 276; see also Kabirpanth; Nanakpanth Semiramis, 162 sepoy, 61, 68, 84, 120, 137, 153–­55, 240n55, 254, 265; see also soldier sermon, 56n155, 57, 95, 97, 100, 186, 227, 232n27 sacrifice, 15, 25, 64, 107, 209–­10 Sermon on the Mount, 174 sadhu, 30, 118 Shahjahan, 45, 47–­48 saguna bhakti: see bhakti, saguna Shah, Ahmed, 13 saint, 6, 8n24, 9, 12–­13, 17, 21, 34, 36–­37, 40n86, 44–­46, 129, 131, 136, shaikh, 43 Shakti, 24, 35 164, 180–­82, 214n130, 221, 251, Sher Shah, 45 271–­72; see also sant salvation, 9, 14–­15, 26, 30, 32, 34, 96, Shi‘ite, 47 Shitala, 24 98, 107, 118, 121, 148, 176, 178, Shiva, 12, 23–­24, 35 181, 190–­91, 194–­95, 200–­202, Shudra, 31, 157, 181, 252 207–­14, 216, 254, 260, 274, 276, Sikhs, 8n24, 12n39, 16–­17, 35n65, 46, 278; as liberation, 14, 26, 30, 41, 48, 85, 108, 137, 175, 215n131, 247–­ 181, 201n75, 207, 209n108, 245–­46, 48, 269 276; see also moksha Sikhs, Mazhabi: see Mazhabi Sikhs samsara, 207 sin, 15, 27, 64–­65, 97–­98, 100–­101, Sanskrit, 6n19, 9, 11, 15, 29, 33–­34, 106, 121, 141–­42, 145, 150, 173, 36–­37, 39, 68, 165, 201n75 Ram, Kasbu, 116 Ram, 6–­9, 24, 27n28, 37, 174–­75 Ramabai, Pandita, 143n38, 169 Ramayana, 29, 36 Ratha-­yatra, 26–­27 Ravidas, 36, 180–­82, 249 reason, 188–­91, 193, 196–­98, 213–­15 rebirth: see reincarnation Reed, William, 72–­73 reform, 3n4, 6, 9–­11, 15, 23–­24, 36, 43, 45, 49–­50, 64n5, 68, 110–­11, 142, 198n58, 247, 261, 276, 280 Reformed theology, 187–­91, 194–­216, 221 reincarnation, 14, 34, 41, 199, 200n66, 205, 207, 223 revelation, 22, 188–­89, 196–­98 Ricketts, Mordaunt, 58 ritual, 9–­10, 16, 22–­23, 25–­26, 28, 30–­31, 33–­35, 40, 79, 146–­47, 198, 204, 223, 246, 259 Robbins, Joel, 17 Rohillas, 48 Roman Catholicism, 10, 16n50, 18n60, 58, 115, 119, 131, 156n81, 239, 277, 283–­84 Roman Catholics, 16, 51–­54, 57, 61, 63, 91n9, 108, 118, 226–­27, 280n7, 282 Roy, Rajah Ram Mohan, 111, 174n148

320 — Index of Subjects and Names

183–­84, 186, 189–­91, 197n 54, 198, 201–­12, 214, 216, 223, 274, 284–­85; see also papa Singh, Prem, 242 Sita, 24 Sitala: see Shitala Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 227 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 227–­28 Soja, Edward, 3–­6, 276 soldier, 52–­61, 65, 68, 84, 124n136, 226, 230–­31, 236n45, 258; see also sepoy Srinivas, M. N., 218 suffering, 77, 85, 109, 132, 192–­93, 198, 202–­12, 222–­23, 253, 267 sufi, 39, 43–­4 4, 46–­50 Sultanate of Delhi, 42 Sunni, 47, 142, 144, 150–­51 Surdas, 36, 272 Swain, Clara, 95n23, 104–­5, 118, 171, 173 Tagore, Rabindranath, 39 Taylor, Bayard, 122 theology, 6–­10, 14–­15, 19, 22–­25, 32–­37, 39, 43, 61, 66, 92, 118, 121, 131, 143, 145, 147–­48, 151, 153–­54, 172–­77, 180, 183–­223, 249, 270–­71, 275–­78, 284 Thirdspace, 3–­6, 20, 33, 38, 182, 221–­ 23, 264, 270–­72, 276–­84 Thoburn, James, 81–­82, 94, 98–­99, 105–­7, 112, 120–­22, 124, 127, 139–­ 40, 147n47, 149, 173, 231–­32, 247, 249, 266 Thomas, Mrs. D. W., 173 Thomson, Edward, 83, 155 Thoreau, Henry David, 111 translation, 8, 13, 15–­16, 29, 29n37, 34, 36–­37, 44, 56, 78, 81, 93n14, 131, 141, 145, 159–­60, 172, 176, 188, 198, 199, 204, 220, 270, 275 Tucker, Robert, 138 Tulsi Das, 164 Turretin, Francis, 188, 213n125

ulama, 43–­4 4, 48–­50, 183 Ullman, Rev., 176 United Nations, 91 Untouchables, 11–­12, 94, 129, 137, 175, 181–­82, 248, 253n117 Upanishad, 28, 195 Uprising of 1857, 50, 55, 81, 83–­87, 105, 120, 137, 146, 154–­55, 159–­60, 227n3, 235, 240n55, 242, 246–­50, 265 Vaishnava, 35n65, 37, 46, 101, 240 Vaishya, 31 varna, 31–­32, 166–­67 varnashramadharma, 32, 272 Veda, 22, 28–­29, 37, 215 Venn, Henry, 243–­4 4 vernacular, 9, 11, 15, 29, 36, 75–­76, 87, 93, 137–­38, 165, 167, 275–­76 Victorian, 85, 218, 265, 269 village, 21, 23–­25, 44, 79, 86, 94, 116, 125–­27, 132, 137–­40, 142, 155, 158–­60, 168, 173–­75, 183–­84, 241–­ 43, 247–­48, 252, 281, 283; see also Christian village Vishnu, 23–­24, 27, 35, 37, 240n57 Wade, C. M., 74 Walji Bhai, 13 Walls, Andrew, 19n65, 64–­65 War of 1812, 71 Ward, William, 111n79, 112–­13, 115n97, 129, 161–­68 Warren, Joseph, 54, 59–­60, 77, 229–­ 30, 243 Watts, Isaac, 7–­9 Wesley, Charles, 7–­9 Wesley, John, 11, 65n7, 71 Westcott, George Herbert, 13, 40n86 Western Foreign Missionary Society, 72 Western Theological Seminary, 187 Westminster Catechism, 190, 194n48 Westminster Confession of Faith, 188, 192, 194 Wheeler, S. G., 133n5, 241, 268 Williams, Roger, 70 Wilson, Henry R., and Mrs., 133, 158, 241

Index of Subjects and Names — 321

Wilson, Horace Hayman, 35, 39–­40, 143 Wilson, James, and Mrs., 76, 78–­80 Wilson, John, 31–­32, 252 Wilson, Louisa: see Lowrie, Louisa A. Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS), 81, 104, 173 women, 10, 33–­34, 36, 40, 47, 54, 60–­61, 93n15, 94, 96, 104–­5, 109, 114, 119, 154, 168–­71, 173–­75, 216–­ 18, 222, 234, 247, 259, 282; Indian Christian, 57, 76, 86, 118, 137, 149, 153–­54, 168–­75, 177, 234–­35, 247, 262, 282; missionary, 19, 80–­83, 92–­98, 102, 104–­8, 168–­71, 173

World Vision, 91 worship, 6–­8, 12–­15, 23–­26, 33, 35–­ 40, 43, 58, 74–­76, 85, 102, 119, 129, 136–­38, 143, 145–­48, 151, 154, 178, 190–­91, 194–­95, 201n75, 204–­5, 208, 230n21, 245, 247, 249–­50, 256, 261–­64, 270, 278, 282–­85 Yale University, 71 yogi, 41, 44, 118–­22, 253; see also fakir Zahur-­al-­Haqq: see Haqq, Zahur-al-­