It takes an elephant to catch an elephant, and a quail to catch a quail.
(Vedanayakam Sastri, Christian poet of Thanjavur)
Rarely was the relationship between Christian missions and Empire so complex as in India. The political system that the East India Company constructed rested on the support of elite communities whose religious institutions could not be violated or treated as inferior lest their hundreds of thousands of adherents be alienated. When missionaries finally gained access to Company territories, their efforts brought counter-currents of religious renewal, social reform, and the eventual rise of nationalisms. By the same token, the advent of modem forms of Christianity opened possibilities for communities long oppressed and overshadowed by Brahmanical dominance. The paradoxical result was that Christian missions often attracted their greatest followings where their connection to imperial authority was least in evidence. Moreover, dissenting and non-British missions flourished while missions too closely connected to the Anglican establishment faltered. Even as Christians struck deep roots among peoples on the social and territorial margins of India—Dalit (‘Untouchable’) communities and adivasi (‘aboriginal’ or ‘tribal’) communities—their influence hastened the construction (or invention) of modern, or syndicated, Hinduism and Indian nationalism, as well as Islamic revivalisms.
Missionaries who hoped the British Raj might serve as an instrument of conversion discovered that the Raj, as official policy, opposed such connections. The Raj, after all, was officially committed, both in policy and in law, to protecting all religious institutions of India. Anomalies or contradictions existed, but these in no way invalidated such detachment and ‘neutrality’. Different ‘British empires’ had different aims. In content, culture, logic, and policy, if not style, the Indian Empire of the Company and the India Office was never the Empire of the Colonial Office.
The Indian Empire was, fundamentally if not formally, a Hindu Raj. British merchants could never have established city-states at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta without deference to local deities and rajas, as mediated through local agents and brokers (dubashis). Local merchant bankers and merchant princes had served as double agents. Company forces, with sometimes as many as 300,000 sardars and sepoys, came largely from caste families that ruled agrarian villages. Without cadres of Brahman, Kayastha, and other high-caste civil servants controlling vital flows of information and revenue, no Empire would have been possible. Without collaboration, modem Hinduism could not have come into being.
The terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’ (‘Hinduness’) are modem. Non-religious denotations for things Hindu long antedated confessional meanings. In the early days of the Company, to be Hindu meant simply to be native to Hindustan. Terms like ‘Hindu Muslim’ and ‘Hindu Christian’ were not uncommon. The Empire was thus Hindu. The emergence of modem Hinduism owed much to late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century collaboration. Both Indian (‘Hindu’) and European (‘Farangi’) contributions made it so. It was neither a British nor a missionary invention. Contributions made by high-caste, mainly Brahman, pandits played as decisive a part as anything done by scholars from the West. Long before the Company expanded from its coastal enclaves, local scholars had already conveyed deep insights to such missionaries as Roberto de Nobili (d. 1656), Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (d. 1719), and Constantius Giuseppe Beschi (d. 1747). Their studies of ‘Malabarian’ cultures and ‘Gentoo’ (or ‘Hindoo’) deities could not have been made without the scholarship of many local pandits. Without Company patronage, beginning with Warren Hastings in the 1770s, much ancient lore might not have been excavated, and might have perished. Missionaries also played a part. The three-volume work on ‘Hindooism’ published by the Serampore Baptist missionary William Ward (see pp. 202-5) merely followed the logic of codifying a single system and reifying an emerging quasi-official orthodoxy. Even as this syncretistic and tolerant ideology conveniently brought various religious systems under the imperial umbrella of Hinduism, the Company’s own governments (Madras, Bengal, Bombay, etc.), on advice from their native servants, took over management responsibility for all pukka religious endowments and temples, thereby inadvertently putting every local Hindu institution under a single, overarching structure. Tens of thousands of Hindu institutions were thereby inadvertently welded together within the imperial apparatus.
Christians had little place in this growing Empire run by a Company whose motive was profit. The first evangelical (Pietist) missionaries in Tranquebar were clapped into gaol and, but for their Royal Danish patron, would have been deported. Ever cautious and pragmatic, Company servants studiously avoided tampering with existing religious traditions. Their policies of non-interference and religious neutrality aimed to show all in India that their Raj was not Christian and did not favour missionaries. Some European servants of the Company even endowed and supported Hindu deities and temples. Although a handful of missionaries were tolerated in the eighteenth century, including Danish and German Pietists who happened to be on the ground, their efforts were not encouraged. Later, local Catholic vicars apostolic received subventions, so that their priests could serve Irish contingents within the Company’s army. But the Baptist William Carey, who stirred up waves of missionary voluntarism with his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens (1792), was barred from entry into Bengal. He could cross the Hugli from Serampore to Calcutta only after being hired as Professor of Oriental Languages at Fort William College. Claphamite pressure on parliament after 1792 also forced some missionary chaplains into India.
Not until 1813 was the Company’s ban broken through an alliance of voluntary (missionary) agencies with free-trade opponents of monopoly. Evangelicals among the Court of Directors (led by Charles Grant) and in Parliament conducted a pamphlet war similar to the onslaught on the slave trade, which led to reinsertion of the ‘Pious Clause’ of 1792 into the Charter Renewal Act of 1813. Thereafter, any missionary or merchant denied entry into British India could appeal directly to the Board of Control, whose Chairman could revoke actions taken by Company directors. Even so, Company authorities stood ready to summarily expel any missionary, and to punish any overly zealous officer whose tactless actions provoked social unrest. Anyone disparaging Hindu and Muslim practices as ‘devilish’ or ‘heathen’ could be admonished or even deported. Sir Thomas Munro, while Governor of Madras (1820-7), removed an officer who abused his official position by indulging in personal evangelism. When Lord Bentinck’s decree of 1827 abolishing female infanticide and widow-burning (sati) aroused a storm, over 30,000 gentry (bhadralog) of Calcutta co-signed a ‘Sacred Petition’ complaining against the violation of their religious freedoms. Leadenhall Street and Whitehall felt duly warned.
Meanwhile, pleas by Tamil Christians for protection from persecution (1799-1806) went unheeded. How, they asked, could high officers who represented a Christian nation not offer protection to its own Christian subjects? Only after many local Christian leaders had died and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in London again petitioned for Company protection of ‘Hindu Christians’ did the Company remind local authorities that religious intolerance in countries subject to its authority had never been countenanced. Since ‘all sects had been permitted to follow their separate persuasions without molestation, so there could be no question that all who profess the Christian faith, whether of European, Armenian, or Indian race, should enjoy the like privilege and protection’. This failed to halt sporadic outbreaks of violence. Over 500 ‘native Christian householders’ signed a petition, presented in March 1833, describing ‘deeds . . . being done in support of heathenism and injustice to the poor, by the Honourable Company’, which, ‘like kings of old, was exempting temples from taxation, funding daily sacrifices, seasonal festivals, and reinstating devil worship’. New converts were being threatened, beaten, and robbed of means of tapping palmyra trees for livelihood:
If it were under the government of heathen kings that this injustice were shown to Christians, it would be a wonder; but that under the government of Christians and their servants, Christians should suffer injustice, and that by their means the increase of Christianity is prevented, is to us a matter of astonishment.
‘Native Inhabitants’ of ‘Blacktown’ (Georgetown, Madras), on the other hand, addressed an appeal to the Governor-in-Council, pleading for protection from aggressive Christian threats against their ancient religious customs. Pleased that missionaries had been prevented from building a church and school in the vicinity of their ancient temples, the petitioners ended with an expression of gratitude:
Therefore, we most humbly render our hearty thanks to your honour in Council, praying to God for your Welfare and also for the Honourable Company who are ever Benevolent... in distributing justice impartially. May the Goddess of Victory dwell on the edge of the Sword of their Warriors and let their Flag continue as long as the Sun and Moon shall endure.
On 11 October 1836 the Bishop of Madras formally protested against the Government’s involvement in such ‘idolatrous practices’ as managing properties and functions (for thousands of Hindu temples; protecting pilgrimage sites; requiring Christian soldiers to attend Hindu festivals (in violation of their consciences); forcing ‘thousands of poor, defenceless peoples to leave their homes and, at the risk and even the cost of their lives’ to drag great ‘Temple Idol’ Cars’ (Rath Yatras) in processions; and turning a blind eye to hundreds of thousands of ‘dancing girls’ (devadasis) being consigned to perpetual temple prostitution. ‘Disclaiming the desire, in any degree, to violate the liberty of conscience so fully and justly accorded to the Mahomedan and Heathen elements of the Company’s empire’, the Government’s response was swift and ruthless. Such issues were too potentially dangerous: ‘great Political and State questions’ could not be made liable to ‘private feelings of individuals’ or ‘misled by excessive zeal’. Bishop Daniel Corrie was publicly rebuked and General Peregrine Maitland, the Commander-in-Chief, returned to London (where he launched the Anti-Idolatry Connexion League).
In the 1840s the Governor of Madras, Lord Tweeddale, was censured and recalled for using the term ‘heathen’ in official communications, and for giving public support to missionaries and their schools. The Madras gentry had organized a large public meeting and sent a strongly worded memorial to the Court of Directors. A riotous tumult—so dangerous that mounted police and military were dispatched to preserve order—gathered at ‘the rooms of Patcheapah’s Institution, on Wednesday the 7th October 1846’. Over 12,000 notables (mahajans) of the Hindu Community of Madras affixed signatures (chevralu) to documents addressed to Parliament. ‘Civil and Religious rights and privileges’, they charged, were being violated by missionaries, abetted by pro-missionary European officials.
In the aftermath of the ‘Great Mutiny’ (Rebellion) of 1857, authorities both in Britain and in India blamed the ‘proselytizing zeal’ of missionaries. Even after the Company was abolished, in 1858, local governments, with rare exceptions, were careful not to show much public sympathy for missionaries. Particularly suspect were missionaries who sided with nationalists, Anglican prelates trying to expand ecclesiastical domains, or anyone disturbing religious institutions.