Captain Cook’s Voyages inspired an apprentice cobbler in Northampton, William Carey, to seek a missionary career in Tahiti. Initially rebuffed as a ‘miserable enthusiast’, Carey co-founded the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) in 1792 and went to India the following year. He settled at Serampore, under Danish protection, because the British East India Company barred him from their territory, believing that missionaries would subvert order. In fact the Company disciplined the Governor of Madras for using the word ‘heathen’ in his correspondence and posted offerings at major Hindu shrines. India, although denied parity with the West, was not viewed as lacking in structure or civilization as were Africans and Pacific peoples. Carey, William Ward, and Joshua Marshman were known as the Serampore Trio. (See p. 108.) Their families created a super-domestic unit, sharing their finances and possessions. Carey’s involvement with indigo plantings at Mudnabati served both economic necessity and the principle of selfsufficiency. The constraints and prejudices of caste reminded him of the class snobbery he knew in England. The Trio handed out pamphlets and accosted upper-caste Brahmans in ‘debates’ that were soon found to be intolerable.
Unlike the Pacific or Africa, in India there was a profound literate tradition in Nagari and a prior history of language work. The first European Christians had arrived in 1498 to find an existing population of Thomas Christians. In 1706 Danish Protestant missionaries reached Tranquebar in the south. The Jesuits wrote an influential ‘Q. & A.’ dialogue in vernacular Bengali in 1599, and a Portuguese Bengali grammar appeared in 1743. After Clive’s conquest of Bengal, the work accelerated. The Revd William Jones wrote a Persian and Sanskrit grammar in 1771 and 1786. Warren Hastings hired pandits to compile ‘Hindu law’ from all the shastric literatures, their output supervised by Nathaniel B. Halhed, which produced the Code of Gentoo Laws in 1768; Halhed also wrote a Bengali grammar in 1778, Father Paulinus, Sancto Bartholomeo one in 1790, and H. P. Foster a dictionary in 1802.
Carey appears to have worked on his many Bible translations with but little reference to these predecessors. His first was Bengali, in 1802. With it he embarrassed the cosmopolitan pretensions of the BMS’s fund-raising by baldly translating ‘baptize’ as ‘immerse’ in Bengali. He argued that the word ‘baptiso’, John the Baptist’s act, meant ‘immerse’ in Greek, and so constrained him in his choices. Carey’s diary shows him obsessed with language, disciplined, and scholastic. From dawn to starlight he typically prayed, translated, studied an Indian language with a pandit, studied Greek and Hebrew on his own, practised his Sunday homiletics, and then prayed again. New missionaries in Calcutta did not like being directed by the Trio, which separated from the BMS in 1827. Even after forty years in Bengal, detractors noted, Serampore had only forty-three converts in good standing.
Carey employed teams of pandits of diverse backgrounds, most of them non-Christian and English-speaking. They knew about God, Jesus, and Muhammad from their own contacts. Once it became clear that many of Bengal’s languages were related to one another and to Sanskrit, it remained to translate the Bible into Sanskrit. This was done in 1810 and became an ur-text for Serampore, paralleling the Greek Septuagint’s relationship to the Standard Bible. None of the translations remained in use for as long as the Sanskrit, their interpretative linchpin; and it fell into desuetude after only thirty years. Carey’s system produced Oriya, Hindi, Assamese, Hindustani (Urdu), Marathi, Pashto, and Punjabi translations of the New Testament in the decades that followed. Among Carey’s dictionaries, the Marathi is really a smallish lexicon, ordered in Nagari according to roots which could be located in Sanskrit; the definitions are English. Several of the Bibles were criticized as structurally erratic, their sentences formed according to English grammar. Carey, however, also wrote Indian-language grammars, beginning with Bengali (1805), and he revised his Bibles in subsequent printings.
In 1811 Serampore’s press published William Ward’s long book An Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos, a work revealing of the Trio’s perspective. Instead of seeing Hinduism from within, riven as it was by competing movements of reform, Ward viewed it from the outside, a totality he divided into unequal compartments: literature, philosophy, architecture, prayers, medicine, cults, sacrifices, law, astronomy, etc. Ward argued theologically against Hindu ideas, and also highlighted their ‘impurity and cruelty’. Hinduism’s idolatry was ‘disgusting’, especially in condoning sexual outrages and featuring ecstatic pain. Ward called sati, or widow- burning, an offence against humanity, and decried the withholding of education from women. It cannot be denied that compared to the alufa and the imam, Christian missionaries were more apt to welcome girls into their classrooms. Most of all, Ward discerned in Hindu myths that the eternal and omnipotent God is given by many names, with none of them adequate. Some parts of him are represented as Brumhu (‘both the clay and the potter’, ‘invisible’, ‘perfect’), others are not. Ward used ‘Brumhu’ (or ‘Brahma’, ‘Brahmo’) as a name for God, but specific narratives were rejected, for instance that Brumhu ‘lusted’ after his own daughter. In other respects Vishnu, who came before Brumhu, or Krishna or Shiva were like God.
The Account derived from the Trio’s conversations with Serampore’s translators. One ‘educated Brahman’ told Carey, ‘God was a great light, and as no one could see him, he became incarnate under the three-fold character of Brumha, Beesho, and Seeb.’ Such were ‘errant beliefs’ about God associated with ‘their own deities’. In other words the Trio was fashioning a single godhead from scraps of Hindu lore, literature, and law. For example, Carey’s Marathi dictionary defines a single word as ‘the staff or beam of a plough’ and ‘The Lord, God’. Secondarily, God (defined as ‘he who fixes the situation of all’) is nested among derivations of the root signifying pedestal, temple, heaven, sacred, idol, providential, revelation, and fate. The result of all such work was to translate prior mythology and customs as a set of mistakes, or lies, behind which one might glimpse a vestige of higher truth without a single sufficient appellation.
Serampore is recognized as the fountain of Indian vernacular publishing largely through the efforts of Brahman translators about whom little is known. They worked on Joshua Marshman’s Dig-Darshan (‘Signpost’), the precursor of the Samachan Darpan (‘News Mirror’), from 1818, a pioneering Indian newspaper. Vidyalankar and Ram Basu were two of the translators; Ram Mohun Roy was briefly another. Vidyalankar became a leading exponent of anti-reformist Hindu orthodoxy, and Ram Mohun Roy became the father of modern Hindu reformism. In a process reminiscent of Yoruba, Kikuyu, and Maori situations, Roy drafted the translated God into a prior Hindu tradition, ‘returning’ to the ‘great light’ behind specific Hindu incarnations (the very corruptions Ward denounced). Roy adhered to Unitarianism aside from denying the expiatory nature of Christ’s death, and he launched his organization Brahmo Sahba (‘council’ or ‘congress’) by filing a deed to build a church. Renovation had long been a dimension of Hindu intellectual life, and for a while one could be a Hindu Christian; complementarily, the idea arose that Hindus ‘had their own distinctive... religious system, or dharma. In 1843 Debendranath Tagore changed Roy’s organization to the well-known progressive Brahmo Samaj (Transcendent Deity Society). The Ramanandis, a sect devoted to Rama (Vishnu), rejected caste and proselytized among the poor; they spread the Hindi version of the Ramayana, which Carey and Marshman had translated into English, in the newly cost- effective medium of movable type. Other reformers made Krishna into a masculine, righteous deity, projecting the triumphal colonial strength of Christianity back into the Hindu past, ‘updating’ Roy. And there remained Serampore’s Brumhu, his light now clear of Vedic particularities.