Although missionaries were not the primary agents of religious conversion, they did provide the primary vehicles of literacy and learning. Ziegenbalg’s charity school (dharmappallikkadam) in Tranquebar spread rapidly as a model for increasing literacy between 1728 and 1731. After Rajanayakam, the captain (servaikaran) of the royal guard in Thanjavur, arranged to bring a school into the kingdom under a royal land-grant (inam), a fully ordained Tamil pastor-teacher named Aaron arrived, and the process of introducing model schools, presses, and libraries underwent amazing expansion. This continued and spread to all of India. By 1835, for example, 261 village congregations in Tirunelvali district had enrolled 2,882 children, 159 of them girls, in a hundred schools, two secondary schools, and a seminary for pastor- teacher training. By the end of the century missionary school systems stretched from Kanya Kumari to Karachi and Kohima. At each mission station, or compound, a boarding school received pupils from feeder schools in surrounding villages. After 1854 these school systems, already funded by voluntary missionary societies in American and Europe, received supplemental grants-in-aid from local governments. The language of instruction was vernacular, with English introduced at higher levels. Local Christians, initially under European supervision, did most of the teaching. Many missionaries, in effect, became colonial administrators, with staff and teachers depending on foreigners for pay or pensions.
At the apex of missionary efforts were institutions of higher learning. In virtually every city they attracted non-Christians. Antedating government- run institutions, the impact of these on Hindu (bhadralok) and Muslim (ashraf) elites was often greater than among Christians. These schools included such important institutions as William Carey’s Serampore College (1818), Alexander Duff’s College (1830), Bishops College (1824) in Calcutta, John Wilson’s College (1835) in Bombay, John Anderson’s Christian College (1838) in Madras, and Forman Christian College (1865) in Lahore. Later came institutions for women: Sarah Tucker College (Palayamkottai), Lady Doak College (Madurai), the Women’s Christian College (Madras), Kinnaird College (Lahore), and Isabella Thoburn College (Allahabad). These became elite institutions and, as such, catered heavily to the highest classes, training suitable brides for aspiring and upwardly mobile Indian gentlemen.
The language of instruction in colleges was English, not because of Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education, but because successive echelons of ‘Hindu’ notables, civil servants, and professionals demanded it. On the other hand, almost all missionaries, especially those who wanted to break down caste barriers and untouchability, opposed the use of English, clashing unsuccessfully with high-caste Hindus in the coastal cities of Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay. By the late nineteenth century theologically liberal missionaries were beginning to replace or equate ‘conversion’ with ‘civilization’ as their primary goal. Many extolled ‘Hindu’ civilization, searching it for ‘Christian’ elements derived by ‘natural revelation’. For upper-class, intellectually eclectic educators, such as William Miller of Madras Christian College, the Christian task was to permeate Indian society with Christian principles, thereby influencing the elites who had taken to Western education in such droves. The task for missionaries was to increase dialogue and mutual understanding. This kind of thinking, called ‘fulfilment theory’, gained wider acceptance, especially among upper-class missionaries in the colleges. (See pp. 16 and 267.)
The last frontier of missions in the Indian Empire was Punjab, where communal feelings between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were raw. Few Christians had been there prior to the 1840s. British and American missionaries moving there and establishing institutions in collaboration with Indians found many preconceived notions breaking down. By then, two- thirds of missionaries were women. Universal claims clashed with local dilemmas of gender, race, and imperial privilege. When multiracial institutions and principles of equality challenged social hierarchies, missionaries had to compromise and negotiate—with Indian Christians, officials, critics, patients, students, and staffs at their institutions. Upper-class, university- educated missionaries wanting to influence Hindu and Muslim gentry found themselves, ironically, striving for the oppressed, poor, and stigmatized.
Rising nationalist sentiments and communalism exposed inner conflicts. Dilemmas faced those who saw that missions might not outlive imperial rule, and for those who sympathized with nationalist aspirations, such dilemmas were never fully resolved.
Among converts to Christianity, as with earlier Christian elites in the south, what was notable was the tenacity with which they preserved traditional culture and avoided, or even spurned, ways of the West. Maulvi ‘Imad ud-din strove to communicate with his own (ashraf) people. Pandita Ramabai insisted that she was a ‘Hindu Christian’. Narayan Vaman Tilak, in his life pilgrimage (parampara), strove to reconcile his Sanskritic heritage with emancipation of the oppressed and marginalized, ending his years as a bhakta sannyasi (wandering ascetic). Sadhu Sundar Singh, declaring that ‘Indians need the Water of Life, but not the European cup,’ became a wandering bhakti mendicant and avoided missionary churches. What many Christians of India, elite and non-elite alike, most abhorred was any colonial or ‘compound’ mentality of dependency and subservience, most of all as manifest in educational and ecclesiastical institutions.