The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830-1960 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series This informative series covers the broad span of modern imperial h...

Author: Nandini Chatterjee

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Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

This informative series covers the broad span of modern imperial history while also exploring the recent developments in former colonial states where residues of empire can still be found. The books provide in-depth examinations of empires as competing and complementary power structures encouraging the readers to reconsider their understanding of international and world history during recent centuries. Titles include: Sunil S. Amrith DECOLONIZING INTERNATIONAL HEALTH India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 Tony Ballantyne ORIENTALISM AND RACE Aryanism in the British Empire Robert J. Blyth THE EMPIRE OF THE RAJ Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947 Roy Bridges (editor) IMPERIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND AFRICA Studies Presented to John Hargreaves L. J. Butler COPPER EMPIRE Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c.1930–64 Hilary M. Carey (editor) EMPIRES OF RELIGION Nandini Chatterjee THE MAKING OF INDIAN SECULARISM Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 T. J. Cribb (editor) IMAGINED COMMONWEALTH Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English Michael S. Dodson ORIENTALISM, EMPIRE AND NATIONAL CULTURE India, 1770–1880 Ulrike Hillemann ASIAN EMPIRE AND BRITISH KNOWLEDGE China and the Networks of British Imperial Expansion B. D. Hopkins THE MAKING OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN

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General Editors: Megan Vaughan, Kings’ College, Cambridge and Richard Drayton, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Ronald Hyam BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL CENTURY, 1815–1914: A STUDY OF EMPIRE AND EXPANSION Third Edition Iftekhar Iqbal THE BENGAL DELTA Ecology, State and Social Change, 1843–1943

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Brian Ireland THE US MILITARY IN HAWAI’I Colonialism, Memory and Resistance

Gerold Krozewski MONEY AND THE END OF EMPIRE British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–58 Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (editors) PSYCHIATRY AND EMPIRE Javed Majeed AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAVEL AND POST-NATIONAL IDENTITY Francine McKenzie REDEFINING THE BONDS OF COMMONWEALTH, 1939–1948 The Politics of Preference Gabriel Paquette ENLIGHTENMENT, GOVERNANCE AND REFORM IN SPAIN AND ITS EMPIRE 1759–1808 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre IRISH AND INDIAN The Cosmopolitan Politics of Alfred Webb Ricardo Roque HEADHUNTING AND COLONIALISM Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 Michael Silvestri IRELAND AND INDIA Nationalism, Empire and Memory John Singleton and Paul Robertson ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALASIA 1945–1970 Aparna Vaidik IMPERIAL ANDAMANS Colonial Encounter and Island History Kim A. Wagner (editor) THUGGEE Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India Jon E. Wilson THE DOMINATION OF STRANGERS Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–91908–8 (Hardback) 978–0–333–91909–5 (Paperback) (outside North America only)


Robin Jeffrey POLITICS, WOMEN AND WELL-BEING How Kerala became a ‘Model’

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Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 Nandini Chatterjee Lecturer in History, University of Plymouth, UK


The Making of Indian Secularism

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© Nandini Chatterjee 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–22005–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chatterjee, Nandini 1976– The making of Indian secularism : empire, law and Christianity, 1830–1960 / Nandini Chatterjee. p. cm.—(Cambridge imperial and post-colonial studies series) Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–22005–8 (hardback) 1. Education, Higher – India. 2. Religious education – India. 3. Religion and state – India. 4. Christians – India. 5. Minorities – India – Political aspects. 6. Minorities – Legal status, laws, etc. – India. I. Title. LA1153.C455 2011 3229.10954—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

2010050722


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. Matthew 22: 21, Bible, King James Version

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Contents ix

List of Abbreviations

x

Preface and Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

Part I Law 1 2 3

Religion and Public Education: The Politics of Secularizing Knowledge

23

Regulating Trust: Law and Policy of Religious Endowments in India

51

Universality in Difference: The Emergence of Christian Personal Law in Colonial India

75

Part II 4 5

Institutions

Creating a Public Presence: The Missionary College of St Stephen’s, Delhi

109

Education for ‘Uplift’: Christian Agricultural Colleges in India

134

Part III

Community

6 Race, Authority and Conflict in the Indian Church

167

7 Rethinking Christianity: Formulating Their Faith

191

8

Representing Christians: Community Interests vs. Christian Citizenship

216

Conclusion: The ‘Crime’ of Conversion and Other Historical Curiosities

240

Appendix

248

Notes

249


List of Illustrations

vii

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viii

Contents

306

Glossary

329

Index

333


Bibliography

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Illustrations

1

Map of India under British rule, showing administrative divisions 2 St Stephen’s College, Delhi, 1911 3 Hindu students at St Stephen’s College 4 Christian students at St Stephen’s College 5 Muslim students at St Stephen’s College 6 Principal Sushil Rudra 7 YMCA symbol 8 Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Andrews 9 Leonard Elmhirst with Tagore at Santiniketan 10 Krishna Mohan Banerjea 11 K.T. Paul 12 K.T. Paul with his family

xiv 131 132 132 133 133 152 162 163 176 224 225

Tables 1 2

Relative salaries of European missionaries and Indian mission employees of the CMS, c. 1866–7 Appendix: Christians per 10,000 of population in India, 1881–1941

179 248


Figures

ix

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AICIC AIR APAC CMD CMS CNI CSI GCPI HRCE

All India Conference of Indian Christians All India Reporter Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (British Library) Cambridge Mission to Delhi Church Missionary Society Church of North India Church of South India General Committee of Public Instruction Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (Board/ Commission) Indian Law Reports London Missionary Society Moore’s India Appeals National Christian Council/National Missionary Council National Missionary Society Punjab Native Church Council Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons) Religious Education Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Society for the Propagation of the Gospel United Theological College Young Men’s Christian Association

ILR LMS MIA NCC/NMC NMS PNCC PPHC RE SPCK SPG UTC YMCA


Abbreviations

x

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Along with tens of thousands of others in India, I grew up in a Hindu family and studied at a school run by Catholic nuns. Although I was a bright but troublesome student, during all those years when I must have given my teachers endless grief, it never occurred to me that the school was not my own, or that the gods (plural in my uninformed understanding) I regularly prayed to were not my own. I learnt in the year 1999 that this was not how all Indians felt, that there were some capable of desecrating churches, raping nuns and murdering children because they were Christian. While I have undoubtedly been naïve, my experience was also a real one. In many ways this book reflects my quest to understand my own heritage, and that heritage includes the outstanding role played by Christians in shaping modern India’s culture, laws and political attitudes. In telling that story, I want to thank my teachers. I have been particularly blessed with my teachers. This book is a restatement of my Ph.D. thesis, which I completed at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, under the guidance of Christopher Bayly. I cannot imagine a better supervisor; his scholarship and teaching will remain an inspiration to me in my academic career. The Gates Cambridge Trust and the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme together funded my Ph.D. studies. The Smuts Memorial Fund and the Bishop Lightfoot Fund provided support for travel and research. St Catharine’s College made me a special grant from its hardship funds to enable me to complete my thesis as a student parent. I was able to revise the thesis into a manuscript during two consecutive postdoctoral fellowships, that of the Department of History, King’s College London, and subsequently the British Academy’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, also held at King’s College, from which I resigned after one year to take up a teaching position at the University of Plymouth. The School of Humanities and Performing Arts, University of Plymouth, generously funded my final trips to the British Library. The staff of the British Library, especially the Asian and African Studies reading room, the Special Collections department at the University of Birmingham Library, the Bodelian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford, Vidya Jyoti college, Delhi, United Theological College Library, Bangalore, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at Delhi, and Dartington Hall Trust Archive, have provided invaluable support. The Delhi Brotherhood Society (earlier Cambridge Mission to Delhi) and Father Monodeep Daniel have taught me more about Christianity in India than anyone else.



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I have received much support and hospitality in India and elsewhere, which is not directly reflected in this book. I thank the RJM sisters of Dublin and Agra and the fathers of the Mill Hill Mission, London for allowing me access to the archives of their religious houses, and for providing me with the most generous hospitality. The cover image, The Last Supper by Jamini Roy, is from the Collection Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Needham. I am grateful to the Museum and its wonderful staff for not only granting me permission to use the image but also supplying me with a free digital copy of the painting. I thank the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, London, for permitting me to use a photograph of Sushil Rudra, erstwhile principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, previously printed in the St. Stephen’s College Magazine (Easter, 1923), and the three group photographs of St. Stephen’s College students, previously printed in a Cambridge Mission to Delhi publication, called St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. I thank the Dartington Hall Trust for permitting me to use two photographs of Leonard Elmhirst together with Rabindranath Tagore from the Dartington Hall Trust Archives. The map on page vii has been produced by the Cartography department of the University of Plymouth, based on Map 1 in Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 17, with permission from Cambridge University Press and the map ‘Territorial and administrative changes, 1857–1904’ in Joseph E. Schwartzberg, A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Oxford University Press, 1992, accessed via the Digital South Asia Library), p. 65, with Professor Schwartzberg’s permission. The sketch of K. M. Banerjea, from India Review and Journal of Foreign Science and Arts (1843), is reproduced with permission from the British Library. Chapter 3 in this book is a modified version of my paper, ‘Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 44: 6 (2010), pp. 1147–1195 (© Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission). Any persons or institutions holding, or believing they hold the rights for the photographs of the YMCA symbol, Martandam, and of K. T. Paul and his family are requested to contact me. Hayden Bellenoit, Julie Elkner, Christopher Harding, Mitra Sharafi and Jon Wilson have read various parts of the manuscript and offered useful criticism and suggestions; many thanks to them. I thank the anonymous reader of the manuscript for his/her extremely generous and constructive comments. I thank Ruth Ireland and Michael Strang, the history editors at Palgrave, and Vidhya Jayaprakash and her editorial team for their support throughout the process of turning the manuscript into a book. My amazing cousins, Tania and Abhishek Bhattacharyya, and my dear friend, Bhanupriya Rao, undertook many difficult projects at my behest. My parents, Ashok and Gopa, and my sister Ranjana, have encouraged me


xii

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xiii

for so long and so much, that I feel almost ashamed for producing just one book for them. It is hardest to thank the person who really made this book possible, because it seems odd to claim that this book is more mine than his, just because I wrote it. To my husband Vikas, and my Armaan, I can only say that I love you. All errors and shortcomings are my own responsibility.



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Figure 1 Map of India under British rule, showing administrative divisions

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In the early hours of 23 January 1999, in a village called Manoharpur, in the eastern state of Orissa in India, Graham Staines, an Australian national who had lived and worked in India for three decades, was burnt to death along with his two little sons, Philip and Timothy. They were murdered by a mob led by a man called Ravinder Pal Singh, alias Dara Singh, who set fire to their car. The father and his children were sleeping outdoors in the car in which they had travelled to the village. After setting fire to the car, the mob kept guard to prevent their victims from escaping, and watched them burn to death. A commission of inquiry, consisting of a Supreme Court Judge, D. P. Wadhwa, concluded after six months of investigations that ‘the motive for the crime was that there were conversions of illiterate and poor Hindu tribals to Christianity on certain premises ... [although] these conversions were not necessarily inspired by Staines.1 This incident followed close on the heels of organized violence against Christians in another poverty-stricken, volatile and tribal-majority2 area of India, the Dangs district of the western state of Gujarat. Beginning from Christmas day of the previous year, numerous churches, prayer halls, schools, private houses and Christian individuals faced attacks, accompanied by virulent anti- Christian propaganda.3 In response, the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, visited the area to assure all that justice would be done but simultaneously suggested that when a situation of calm was restored there had to be a ‘national debate on conversions’,4 neatly shifting responsibility for the violence from the perpetrators to the victims. In a country such as India, where society is often polarized by religion to the extent of brutal violence, where law enforcement is slow and unpredictable, and where the highest state offices are at times held by persons whose political ideology equates a certain religious identity with the national one, what kind of history can one write about the tiny community of Indian Christians, other than that of constant victimization? Consequently, in what way can one discuss ‘secularism’ in India, except with dismissive


Introduction

1

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irony? Although it might appear counter-intuitive, this book wishes to urge that there are indeed other histories to be told, in the telling of which Christians emerge from the margins of Indian history to the centre stage of Indian modernity. This book is the history of a set of policies, practices and, above all, a political culture that goes by the name of ‘secularism’ India. The principal argument is that Christians, of various races, classes and castes, relatively small as a group in India, played a disproportionately significant role in shaping Indian secularism, under the specific conditions created by British imperial rule in India. There is a lot in the proposition above that lends itself quite readily to conclusions that are not drawn by this book, so let me explain what exactly I am talking about when connecting secularism, Christians and India.

‘Indian secularism’ ‘Indian secularism’ always needs a long footnote – whether that consists of a revelation of India’s failure to live up to true secular ideals, a prescription for achieving them, a questioning of the ideals themselves or, as in recent academic literature, an attempt to historicize its meaning. Soon after India’s emergence as a republic, the incongruity between India’s deeply religious society and formally secular constitution struck various observers forcefully – sometimes to produce cautiously optimistic predictions of (future) success, but in all cases to draw attention to the many lapses.5 At least from the 1960s, there also arose the criticism that India was being evaluated against a reified model of law and social organization which was not even universal to the countries of the West. It was pointed out that a country could be secular in a variety of valid ways.6 On the other hand, mass violence inspired by religion, which did not end in India with the genocide occasioned by Partition, is hard to validate even within the most malleable of secular frameworks. Add to this the disillusionment with the autocratic modernism of the Indian nation-state, typified by the Emergency of 1975–7, which simultaneously saw the suspension of the Constitution and the addition of the word ‘secular’ in its preamble, and one can see why in the 1980s academic opinion veered towards a robust scepticism about the universal validity of secularism as a principle of governance as well as social organization.7 Around the same time, a vigorous ‘history from below’ highlighted the variety and validity of numerous ‘little selves’ and ‘fragments’, which could only be misapprehended and violated by the narratives and practices of the modernizing nation-state.8 Secularism, like big dams, fell into disrepute. In the 1990s, two new analytical trends entered the debate. The first returned attention to the elephant in the room – the theory of secularization – which was present in these debates within the allusions to the


2


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pervasive nature of Indian religiosity but not explicitly tackled by examining why and how social religiosity mattered. Weber had referred to the old meaning of ‘secular’ as ‘of pertaining to the world’ when he suggested that with Protestantism human activities in the world came to be seen as the exclusively legitimate means of pleasing God. Preoccupation with the world led to a disavowal of supernatural or extra-worldly explanations for events in the world.9 At one level then, secularization theory proposed to explain a pattern of cognitive change: how human beings understood the world. Some suggested that this meant an explosion of meanings, an unprecedented multiplicity of valid ways of explaining the world,10 while others suggested more one-sidedly that in European societies religious or supernatural explanations simply did not convince anybody any longer.11 At another level, secularization theory proposed to explain the changing place of religion in social life, and here divergences began to appear. An early divide showed up between those studying America, with its undiminishing religiosity and those studying Europe. While Weber himself and the important Weberian Talcott Parsons interested themselves in the religious motives underlying modern economic activity,12 scholars studying Europe or influenced by European history insisted that religion simply ceased to play any significant part in modern industrial societies. The third and apparently the least controversial aspect of secularization theory is that of the separation of the church and the state.13 There was less agreement about what the third proposition meant for the second; Talcott Parsons suggested that the vitality of American religion derived from the separation of the church from the state,14 whereas others suggested that once exit became an option religious subscription became patchy.15 In the 1990s, doubts surfaced about the factual premises of secularization theory: even if one were to leave aside its predictive potential as a blueprint for modernity, did it really happen anywhere at all? Parallel to the emergence of very large bodies of scholarship discussing the revival of religious belief and practice in nineteenth-century Europe,16 the enmeshing of religion in national self-imagery,17 the persistence of formal church–state connections in Prussia,18 and even more surprisingly perhaps, France,19 sociologists began to wonder about the accuracy of secularization theory, some arguing that it was less of a theory and more of a normative programme, never quite achieved.20 There was also little agreement about what ‘secularization’ was supposed to comprise, scholars according primacy to different strands of the theory. Ironically, a sociologist whose work is on dynamic and highly political religious traditions in Spain, Poland, Brazil and the United States, has made the most valiant effort to salvage the workable parts of the theory by parsing it into its three constitutive arguments: with modernity religion decreased, what remained was privatized, and all of it was institutionally separated from other aspects of social life. Casanova suggested that secularization


Introduction 3


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should only be taken to mean the institutional separation of religion, often referred to as the separation of the church and the state.21 Minimalism itself does not guarantee agreement, although it does sometimes clarify the terms of the argument. Another eminent anthropologist of religion, Talal Asad, questioned whether institutional differentiation is a meaningful concept when religion can influence political goals and, thereby, the constitution of, among other things, economic policy and pedagogic aims. Asad suggests that the quest to isolate religion from other aspects of social life is in essence a normative project, premised on a conceptual map that imagines the objective existence of religion as an isolable entity.22 Asad, of course, does not deny that secularism exists – quite the contrary: secularism, or the ‘secular’, is the focus of his expanding oeuvre. For him, ‘secularism’ is a political ideology premised on the assumption that it is possible and desirable to isolate ‘religion’ from the ‘secular’ sphere. It is this conceptual map that he explores in writing about the ‘formations of the secular’, twinned with the production of a manageable, isolable ‘religion’ as its other. South Asianists, on the other hand, appear to have remained largely unaffected by this soul-searching by students of the ‘post- Christian West’. Just as secularization theory was shattering into irresoluble differences of definition, postcolonial scholars seized it as a normative project of the hegemonic West and sought to reveal its imperial history. And here Christianity enters the story, by the back door as it were. Drawing on an older long scholarly tradition of studying the policy effects of a particular Christian vision of civilization and empire that took shape around the mid-1830s,23 a number of scholars sought to explain what was apparently ‘secular’ British imperial policy by pointing out its legitimating function. With secularism equated with civilization and the right to govern, newly invented disciplines such as English literature taught Indian students the superior virtues of English civilization and, hence, the legitimacy of imperial rule. The compradores of this project were Christian missionaries, who were opposed to secular education as such but hoped that secular and scientific knowledge would undermine Indian irrationality and lead to Christian confession; in practice they worked as propagandists for the British Empire.24 If Indians had a role at all, it was in exposing the crypto- Christian roots of British secular policy.25 Thus far, secularism in India had no Indian history. A recent work on the other hand has proposed that secularism was indeed an Indian political ideology, one adopted under specific historical circumstances and invested with particular meanings. In Shabnum Tejani’s opinion, secularism was not just an ideology of nationalism, it was nationalism itself, whose constant Other was and remained Communalism, or the quest for Muslims to secure political recognition of their religious difference. When that frustrated quest led to a demand for partitioning of the nation, self-vindicated Indian nationalism, always another name for Hindu majoritarianism, rebranded itself secularism, hence the emergence of that term in


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Indian political vocabulary in the 1940s.26 Since the author starts her book by stating that in her view, India was anything but secular,27 it is not surprising that after all this historicizing, the ‘Indian secularism’ that emerges has little similarity with the other possible definitions of secularism, especially the kind of secularism that Euro-America is supposed to have experienced and which sociologists have been attempting to explain. One might even be tempted to see secularism as a term emptied of meaning by Indians and merely reattached to patterns of politics that are more readily associated with the Third World: sectarianism, majoritarianism and populism. In my opinion, what is still lacking is an explanation of those modern state practices and political ideas in India which are recognizably secular, as in they are similar to phenomena that secularization theorists of the West have been grappling with all through the twentieth century. Why is religious instruction excluded from the curriculum of state schools in India, unlike Britain? Why are religious foundations not just independent of the state but very superficially regulated, compared to charitable institutions in Britain? Why is there not just one set of religion-based family laws but four, and a civil law of marriage as well? It is my proposition that by tracing the local and historical routes by which the modern and apparently the universal have been shaped, we write a more accurate history than by taking modernity in the postcolonial world to be lower-grade derivatives from European modernity or culturally informed alternatives. 28 It seems to me that such an approach is logically imperative – not just because Europe’s claim to universal modernity has been provincialized but because the thesis of modernity’s spread from Europe to the rest of the world has become chronologically questionable.29 In her recent work on law and capitalism in late colonial India, Ritu Birla proposes a ‘colonial genealogy to modernity’. 30 For reasons discussed below, I think that we can do with an Indian history of secularism, which is not simply ‘Indian secularism’.

Secularism in India It is not simply in the realm of legal niceties that India’s experience of secularism is distinctive. Secularism is also a political language, and not just one that is cynically deployed by the majority- controlled postcolonial state with autocratic tendencies. During the traumatic episodes that this chapter started with, and all through the period of my extended research work in India, I was deeply impressed by the deep commitment of Christian leaders across the board to a political concept they called ‘secularism’, which they often explicitly related to the specific Indian constitutional provisions establishing freedom of religion.31 ‘Secularism’ therefore has a positive connotation not only for majoritarian Hindus, as a stick with which to beat the Muslims, but it is also a constitutional, political and social ideal for minority


Introduction 5


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groups, especially Christians, including people who are active members and office-holders of the churches they belong to. On the other hand, while right-wing political leaders and intellectuals in India regularly rant against the ‘secularists’,32 and while the BJP, the principal right-wing Hindu nationalist party, promotes Hindutva or ‘Hinduness’ as a species of ‘civil religion’,33 it does not officially call for a Hindu theocratic state. In fact, one of its common complaints is that true secularism is not being pursued by state agencies, presumably peopled by the ‘pseudosecularists’ that they condemn. What then, does ‘secularism’ mean in India, such that deeply religious members of persecuted minorities aspire to it, while majoritarian parties can accommodate it within their official agenda? Why does this term occupy so much space in the language of contemporary Indian politics, when it is noticeably absent from those of nations whose secularity is rarely questioned, such as the UK or the USA?34 From a more sociological angle, Christianity as a ‘minority’ religion has a superficially anomalous location in Indian society. Nobody acquainted with India can fail to notice the immense prominence and popularity of certain kinds of Christian organizations and activities, across the social and religious spectrum. Lal Krishna Advani, one of the most senior leaders of the BJP and widely perceived as the iron fist to Vajpayee’s velvet glove, had himself been to a Roman Catholic school as a child.35 Newspaper matrimonial advertisements, a quirky but no doubt revelatory indication of middle- to upper- class domestic aspirations in India, show a marked preference for the convent- educated, or, to save paying for too many words, the ‘convented’ bride. Stories of almost miraculous cures are often narrated with relation to clinical experiences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore. If a large number of Indians do equate Hindu religious identity with the national one, what were they doing letting their children and the mothers of their children be educated by Christians and exposing themselves at their most vulnerable to Christian medical ministrations? It is possible, of course, that Indian Christians, when arguing for ‘secularism’, were recommending legal protection against religious discrimination. Private belief in a set of doctrines does not contradict the claim to such legal protection but forms the basis for it. On the other hand, the non- Christian ‘majority’ possibly treats Christian educational and medical institutions functionally, without reference to any Christian doctrine that might inspire the management of such bodies. Such explanations would of course imply that India is an ideal type of Casanova’s model of secularization, where people are able to separate institutions, ideas and social spheres at the drop of a hat. Things are complicated even further when one examines the actual demands made by different agents in the Indian political spectrum: one of the key issues in debates about Indian secularism is the legitimacy of multiple ‘personal laws’, which are laws of domestic relations, inherited property


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and religious institutions, applicable according to the religious identity of the persons involved. Although the personal laws are often represented in political debate as ‘religious laws’, or codes directly premised on religious doctrine, institutionally such laws are defined by statute and applied by a single unified judiciary. The consequent constant intervention of the state in matters defined as ‘religious’ has caused legal scholars evaluating India’s constitutional experiment with secularism to pronounce it as flawed.36 It is an irony few appear to have remarked upon, that the BJP’s programme says exactly the same and that Muslim and Christian groups urge against the projected ‘Uniform Civil Code’ as a forced assimilation project, at variance with Indian secularism. Let us then try and formulate another theory to explain what we are observing in India: religion(s) and the state are connected in Indian law, and the majoritarian effort is to separate them or to secularize the state, while the minority effort, also in pursuit of secularism, is to retain the connection. From the circularity and implausibility of these two attempts at explaining certain odd features of modern India’s political and social landscape, it should be obvious that there are competing meanings of ‘secularism’ in circulation, such that the BJP’s secularism and Indian Christian secularism can advocate policies completely opposed to each other. At the same time, such dissonance over the definition of a key modern political concept takes place within a common political vocabulary such that participants in Indian politics are able to mutually comprehend each other’s claims even when they disagree. This book is a history of that political vocabulary and of the legal-institutional context in which it was generated, from the early nineteenth century onwards. Partly, it is my contention that to understand ‘secularism’ as a political principle one needs to read the meanings that political actors bring to it, and this can only be done by locating claims for or against what is described as secularism in the context of state policies that are advocated or opposed. And since state policies change over time, when we describe ideology in an institutional context we also have to locate it against time. Following Talal Asad I agree that secularism is a project, just as all modern political ideologies are, but in understanding the emergence and popularity of such a project in a particular country, I think we need to concentrate on the historical specificities of that place and people rather than any general landscape of the secular. To take another pointer from Ritu Birla’s work, ‘hegemonic actors and institutions translate, though never perfectly, the specificities of practice on the ground into universalizing discourses of modernity’. 37 In fact, this book will suggest that even non-hegemonic actors performed such translating functions: making the local into the global, the little tradition into the great tradition. Modernity is a narrative, but whose story is it?


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8


To many, it has appeared that it is the story of the state, specifically the colonial state, and of its pathetic bastard child, the post-colonial state, a story of freedom and equality which is in reality deployed for suppressing liberty and enshrining privilege. Modern state practices, such as secularism in India, deserve a richer political history than can be encompassed by any binary: colonizer–colonized, majority–minority, modern–traditional, elite– subaltern. They also need to transcend the tyranny of national boundaries and timelines. Unfortunately, comparative law appeals less readily to historians than to political scientists and legal scholars, and the latter appear to find historical process hard to handle, especially the connection between imperial policy and Indian law. But the postcolonial state is clearly heir to the colonial, not in the sense of being derivative but in continuing to develop and transform policies and processes begun a long time ago and not simply terminated in 1947. What then, about British imperial policy: was it ‘secular’? In fact, the imperial term of choice was ‘neutrality’ towards all religions, a term whose sheer insipidity and indication of vacuum may have prevented historians from paying close attention to British imperial religious policy. When such attention is paid, the focus is unduly narrowed to an examination of the relations between Christianity and imperial rule, which is admittedly a capacious theme in itself, not to mention the politically charged analytical disagreements it has generated,38 and the even larger range of thematic interests it overlaps with, such as issue-based lobbying (e.g., abolition) by missionaries and their supporters,39 as well as ‘vernacularization’, that is, the complex processes of cultural and theological shifts involved in translating the messy entity known to protagonists as religion and the power struggles in which such cultural negotiations are embedded.40 Acknowledging the richness of the field does not however preclude the necessity of pointing out the strange analytical closure which has induced scholars to focus solely on Christianity when discussing ‘religion in empire’. Robert Frykenberg’s suggestion that the English East India Company had effectively set up a ‘Hindu Raj’ in India through its discrimination against Christian missions and active patronage of Hindu religious institutions and orthodox practices41 remains no more than an audacious and polemical claim, which is less often taken up for its implications than it is quoted. Did granting privileged legal positions to Roman Catholicism in Malta, or Islam in the Malay states42 and recognition of Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist laws in places as distant as Egypt, Ceylon and Burma43 indicate a Catholic Raj, a Muslim Raj or a Buddhist Raj? If so, is there a more general analytical language through which we can understand such British imperial policies in different parts of the world, periodize them and maybe even explain them?


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At the same time, it appears to most scholars that Christianity was rather special within the context of British imperial rule and that it was more than just one of the many religions that populated the different parts of the globe to which the British Empire spread. The ‘First British empire’ in North America was indeed conceived of as a territorial expansion of white Protestants, religion serving as a marker of distinction from those that were seen as ‘natives’ whether these be Native Americans or slaves of African origin.44 With the loss of what became USA, and the simultaneous turning to the East, the fact of a large non-settler territorial empire in Asia and Africa, over people who widely failed to meet the traditional confessional criteria for political community, provoked anxious rethinking among British intellectuals and statesmen regarding the principles of government.45 Opinion remains widely divided over the place of Christianity in the novel forms of government generated at such imperial locations; what does appear clear is that European patterns of an established church did not take shape in such places. As we have mentioned above, some scholars have therefore decided that the British Empire in India was ‘secular’ from the start. Was it? What did the fact that India’s British rulers were Christian signify for the government of India? Andrew Porter’s work suggests that the answer arises to a large extent from the North American experience, where the Anglican establishment was rickety, Anglican missions (principally the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, SPG) were underfunded and hence unambitious, while Dissenters were vociferous and even aggressive and political interests in the colonies as well as in London made the working of the Anglican Church as an arm of state impossible. Voluntary religion, that is, religion organized around lay societies as much as around churches, and religious activities funded by the subscribed funds, had become the norm.46 And yet, America did not produce a model that could be transported to India. The Indian experience caused particularly rapid unravelling of the political vision that saw church and state as two arms of the same polity. The policies that the Company’s fledgling government adopted (and which caused much heartache to committed Christians a few decades later) derived to a large extent from the nature of the Company’s entry into political power in the subcontinent. Abusing Mughal permits for trade and tax exemptions and refusing to adopt the malleable position required of them by the ambitious and penetrative post-Mughal regime led them to conflict with the Nawab of Bengal and, through a series of intrigues and wars, the title of the diwan or Mughal revenue authority of Bengal.47 This was certainly not a position that lent itself to the creation of an Anglican establishment, but, on the other hand, stepping into Mughal or Nawabi shoes meant treading in earlier footsteps by lapping up the large revenues and political input that derived from the oversight of large religious institutions, as the Mughals had done with remarkable lack of religious discrimination.


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When the tide turned and the Company’s antics became increasingly difficult to ignore in Britain, Evangelical petitioners were up against what had become an administrative and legal tradition, whose devilish structure was something entirely novel to British political experience. Hence it generated novel responses, even when the language deployed in such contests was directly derived from contemporary British law, politics and religious traditions. This book begins its story with the moral/Christian turn in British imperial notions during the Age of Reform in the 1830s.48 An important strand of British reformism turned on the Company, both for its mercantilism and its un- Christian demeanour. when the Company’s eighteenthcentury interpretation of ‘neutrality’ as a parallel patronage of the principal Indian religions came to be seen by a significant section of the British public as undue association of a Christian government with false religions. This political moment did not in itself transfer from Britain to India a ready-made policy called ‘secularism’, as a mask for Christian motives or otherwise. What it did do was to provide malleable ideological space, which appeared at first to benefit European Christian missions and their followers disproportionately but which was rapidly appropriated by other Indian groups, each making specific demands on the state, with the understanding that the state did not support any particular religion for its own merits but could financially and administratively ally itself with functions performed by religious bodies that were for the public good. Education, for instance, was a prime arena for testing out this new policy. James Mill, and later Thomas Macaulay, denounced the spending of public funds for teaching subjects purely of religious value, and, 20 years later, Sir Charles Wood devised a system whereby ‘private’ schools, including those run by Christian missions, could receive support from public funds for the ‘secular’ education they provided (an early positive use of the term by a policy-maker). Initially causing an ascendance of Christian mission schools, this led eventually to vibrant entrepreneurship in private education of different religious hues, competing for the state’s bounty as well as for a share of the market. The range of religious enterprise facilitated by this legal framework is one that far transcends what could be conceivable in Britain of the nineteenth century or, for that matter, of the twenty-first century. At the same time, there arose in India particularly acrid debates and disputes about the obligations of such ‘private’ institutions towards their clients: the ‘private’ individual student, who, some argued, had an inherent claim to the fruits of public funds absorbed by ‘private’ educational institutions, without his most private self, the conscience, being violated by the imposition of compulsory religious instruction. While there were heated debates about religion and national education in Victorian Britain, the level of public scrutiny to which private religious schools came to be subjected in India, in spite of the misgivings of many British statesmen, produced a distinct legal implication for freedom of religion in the Indian educational


10


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context, one that highlighted the organic connection between the individual and the community, with the state as a referee, rather than a binary relationship between the individual and the state. One also sees the religious community emerging from the legal and political conflicts over the issue of ownership and management of religious institutions and their resources. Here again, the contrast with Britain is telling, not least because the divergent trajectories of different parts of the British Isles perhaps tangentially confirms that England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are different countries, the last very plausibly the first of Britain’s colonies. The fact that the Church of England remained established in England (and the Church of Scotland in Scotland) whereas it was disestablished in Wales and Ireland, are constitutional outcomes of the different ways in which religion meshed into the nationalist politics of each of these countries. Add to that comparative chart colonial India, where none of the numerically substantial religions were legally established, and one begins to understand the distinct politics of Hindu communalism, and its appropriation of the language of self- defence against state encroachment. This book will trace the history of that dissociation (of the majority religion from the state) back to the 1830s, demonstrating how policies engendered by British Christian Evangelical politics of that era ironically breathed life into the ghost of the religious community, which stepped in to claim what the state had become reluctant to partake in. The legal defences against state intervention that were created in this period had long-lasting implications not just for the organization of religious institutions in India, including churches, but also for the organization of social life. Of course, all this goes against the grain of taking the community as a more authentic source of personhood and citizenship than the modern state, with its tainted colonial past.49 For surely from this inner realm, marked by domesticity, religion and cultural difference, the colonial state was excluded, especially by Indian nationalism? But I am not breaking fresh ground by pointing out that India’s personal laws, that is, religion-based laws of marriage, divorce, inheritance, succession, guardianship and religious institutions, were not simply religious traditions preserved within the framework of English law or that the division between religion-inspired laws of private relations, the personal laws, and the public law of the state and the market was never effective.50 What I will add to that story is the quest for an universal realm of civil relations that Christians in India had the privilege of pioneering, from as early as the eighteenth century, but with legal effect from the 1830s. As with other parts of this story of Indian secularism, the origins and outcomes were mediated by complex processes of appropriation, reformulation and transformation. One startling outcome of that process was the production of a Christian personal law, whose story begins with the search by individual Indian Christians for the possibility of civil rights despite particular religious affiliations and ends with the production of Christian


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personal law, through egregious legislative and adjudicative activity by the state. However, once produced, Christian personal law can now be neatly folded into the story of a minority community and its culture struggling against state intervention and appealing to secularism for this purpose. In large measure then, this book is a legal history, but not the kind with which legal scholars tend to be comfortable. I have no particular interest in the tracing of precedents, nor do I find it productive to simply point at the distance between Indian cultural norms from imperial legislation. The model of law that I find most intellectually congenial is that of E. P. Thompson, who proposed that it is an ‘arena for conflict’,51 not the preserve of any class nor, we can say, any one vision of the common good. Even if power relations impinged on law, the process of law imposed restrictions on the way that states could behave, including imperial states. ‘If the rhetoric was a mask, it was a mask that Gandhi and Nehru were to borrow, at the head of a million masked supporters.’52 Unlike E. P. Thompson however, I don’t see that arena as a struggle between the rough and the noble against the moneyed and motivated; I see many ranks, not necessarily two armies, and I will try to show how the masks changed hands. The question really is not who the masks belonged to, or what lay under those masks, but why many Indians came to think of particular masks or political stances as modern, secular and legitimate.

Secularism as culture: Christian education, Indian nation Secularism is, of course, more than just a legal arrangement, it is meant to be a way of thinking and a social organization. Once again, Christians skew the expected picture through their role in the highly desirable Christian schools and colleges that fashioned themselves in colonial and postcolonial India, acting both as interested parties in debates about religion, law and public funds and as participants in a ‘market’ shaped by social aspirations, cultural expectations and legal regulations only very partially under their control. In the second part of the book, I will argue that, to the extent that Christian institutions in India were able to adapt themselves to these ‘external’ conditions, they were able to emerge as highly desirable schools, attracting both state endorsement and public demand and bridging the indistinct line between the public and the private. On the other hand, investigating the process of institutional transformation makes it inevitable that we discard any notion of Christians, or even Christian schools in colonial India as a homogenous agency. From the early twentieth century onwards, Christian schools in India began a slow transition to Indian management. This transition was accompanied by bitter quarrels between the European or American missionary managers and the new generation of Indian Christian managers, quarrels in which great differences of opinion were expressed regarding racial capacity, entitlement


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to autonomy, implications of Christian doctrine and the role of Christian pedagogy in modern India. These differences were clearly inflected by the racial divide that not only separated the ‘European’ churches from the ‘mission’ churches but the differential allocation of power and responsibility within institutions under the undisputed authority of the European or American missionaries. The conflict over the control of a few successful educational institutions were therefore the tip of the iceberg, sitting on top of an ubiquitous contest within Christian institutions in colonial India, which replicated the national movement in idiom as well as in the nature of issues involved, even when there was little explicit support for, and even antagonism towards the mainstream political nationalism on the part of the majority of Indian Christians. These contests, which were about much more than pedagogy alone, vitally structured the response of these educational institutions to their legal, political and social context. And different Christian schools responded to the emerging politicolegal features of ‘Indian secularism’ in markedly distinct ways. Once again, it was those schools that best adapted themselves to the mood and needs of the leaders of the emerging Indian nation, most of whom were not Christian, that gained the distinction of becoming desirable public schools of modern India, shaping not just an educational model but also a model public persona, the Indian public schoolboy (and, to a lesser extent, schoolgirl).

Secularism as community ideology: Indian Christians The history of the Christian schools invites us to look beyond and into the nature of such debates and contests which continuously shaped that protagonist, the Christian in colonial India, who as an abstract collective competed to shape the legal structure that regulated religion and was in turn affected by the structure as it evolved. It is the nature of mass politics and of histories that describe it that such obviously arbitrary abstractions such as ‘Christian’, or the equally arbitrary ‘Indian Christian’, are used to (mis)represent the racial, social, doctrinal and political variety and contests that constitute a shifting equilibrium which claims to be the collective opinion of a distinct group of people. To say that the claim of a certain political identity is a historically traceable construct is not, however, to deny its very tangible effects. How such claims became widely comprehensible in India, within and outside the projected collective, is part of this story. It is, however, the privilege of the historian to allow the more messy reality to emerge and to follow apparently coherent political demands literally back home, through the thorny hedges of parochial politics, to those distinctive experiences of education, family life and work that contributed to the formation of individual convictions subsumed under the label of ‘Christian’.


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It is an outstanding vacuum in Indian historiography that there has been practically no study of the intellectual and political history of Indian Christians. The history of Christianity in India was for the long time the history of missions and their ‘expansion’, but in the post-Second World War political context of the dismantling of the British and other European empires, such triumphalist narratives, which saw no reason to explain the value of Christianity for those who converted to it, or to criticize the imperial structure which at least occasionally assisted such a process of religious change, gave way to the discovery of positive missionary involvement in the development of the postcolonial national cultures, and even the occasional anti- colonial nationalism.53 Even so, Christianity in India has been almost exclusively the theme of social histories, whose examination of religious change has been further confined by an undue focus on themes that derive from missiological concerns, such as the motives and effects of conversions,54 which feed into the older and notionally larger theme of the ‘reforming’ effects of missions,55 and the theme of ‘syncretism’ or the theologically questionable combination of Christian doctrine with non- Christian doctrine, ritual and social practice.56 Even in such studies, the themes of cultural translation and slips in communication, the consequent ‘vernacularization’ of Christianity and the history of struggles for authoritative definition of religion have received relatively little attention,57 especially when compared to the rich historiography of Christianity in Africa.58 While there have been important compilations regarding the creation of the Christian ‘community’ in India,59 these encyclopaedic works are, like the mission histories that preceded them, of little interest to those not, a priori, convinced of the significance of Christianity and may in fact serve to reinforce the segregation of Christians and their history from the history of India. In recent times the Christians have managed to creep into the history of India in another guise, that of ‘subalterns’. This approach builds upon the outstanding sociological fact of ‘mass conversions’ or collective conversions to Christianity by underprivileged, low-status and mostly rural people in different parts of the country from the late nineteenth century onwards.60 These conversion movements being mostly from among dalits,61 the majority of Christians appear to be excellent candidates for ‘subaltern’ status. Within such a perspective, religious conversion is a species of protest against social hierarchy, in tune with other such popular protest movements. John Webster, the most prolific historian of north Indian Christianity, appears to have come to the conclusion that the history of dalit Christians is a part of the broader history of dalit mobilization in India,62 which, in my view, also obscures the specificity of Indian Christian history. Other scholars have chosen to treat Indian Christian history as a ‘fragment’, which has allowed them to explore the particular cultural, institutional and racial tensions involved in this particular phenomenon of socio-religious change.63 To my


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Introduction 15

mind, this is an extremely fruitful approach except that it totally disjoins the micro-politics of socio- cultural processes from high politics.

Even before Asad made his incisive interventions, sociologists did note that secularism was, in effect, a derivative concept, depending on implicit definitions of a quantity called religion. As Edward Bailey said in 1988, ‘Secular is really quite easy to define! Its meaning keeps changing yet remains consistent. It always means, simply, the opposite of “religious” – whatever that means.’64 This is, of course, a simplification, because Weber’s idea of secularization, for instance, was not the opposite of religious but a different way of being religious. This book goes back to those Weberian ideas, and in discussing how Indians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries debated how best to regulate religion, it is really a discussion of a process of religious change. Because what we know from the work of other scholars about religious transformation will constantly inform this work, let me introduce what I see as key contemporary processes shaping the specific political and legal debates on which the book focuses. This book is deeply concerned about a process that I call the transformation of ‘religion to community’. Central to this transformation is religion’s morphosis from a guide to salvation and an ideology of royal legitimation to a bundle of ‘rights’ apparently possessed by subjects known as individuals and also collectives known as ‘communities’. The notion of individuated religious subjects possessing a conscience and similarly individuated political subjects, possessing rights, including the right to perform duties enjoined by such a conscience, connected modern ideas of religion with those about the nation.65 In the modern conception, ‘religion’ and ‘nation’ do appear quite structurally similar, such that scholars have spoken of the ‘nationalization’ of religions, whether Anglicanism or Hinduism.66 Underlying such modern claims of religious and political coincidence is the contradictory notion that religious communities are finite and noncoincident with the entire political body, a notion that makes claims of religious rights meaningful (vis-à-vis the nation-state). Both these aspects of the religion-to- community transformation can be observed in nineteenthcentury Britain as well as India. In Britain at the beginning of that century, Anglicans began to claim as their right access to religious ministration from a church that they were taxed for, while non-Anglicans asserted the right to be exempted from church rates. These demands became politically viable in the context of parliamentary reform, and from the 1830s Parliamentary committees began investigating how the Anglican Church functioned and spent its money, leading to a programme of church reform.67 In reaction, High Churchmen claimed autonomy from a Parliament which had hitherto been the ultimate seat of authoritative decision-making for the Church of


Secularism: religion to community


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England but which, with the removal of disabilities for non-Anglicans, no longer exclusively represented that body.68 The latter is one beautiful example of a liberal argument being used against the liberals and one which was closely comparable to disputes animating many Indians at exactly the same time. In trying to explain the emergence of such a notion of religion it is hard not to see a clear genealogical connection with Protestantism’s foregrounding of the individual conscience. However, while the Reformation may have created the intellectual and theological prerequisites, the rise of the religious community was very much a nineteenth- century phenomenon, with the tortuous (and in the British case, partial) achievement of disestablishment: the dissolution of the privileged legal relationship between the church and the state, as well as laicization, in the specific sense of the laity taking precedence in matters religious, through the creation of ‘voluntary’ religious societies, funded by subscribed ‘private’ (i.e. non-state) funds and, especially, ‘voluntary’ foreign missions. And within Europe, Roman Catholics were part of the same story, developing comparable ideas and institutions of lay religious activism, especially in the voluntary sector. Histories of legal and religious change are rarely meshed together, but it is my argument in that to understand British response to Indian religions, it is important to remain aware of the evolving relationship between the Church of England with the British nation-state, a process, we might say, that created ‘Anglicans’ as a religious community comparable to Methodists, Baptists, Catholics and so on. A revealing indication of the intermeshing of the doctrinal, social and the legal in the transformation of religion to community are the highly public disputes involved in creating a structure of legislation, adjudication and coercion internal to the Church of England, distinct from the Parliament and the courts of law.69 As far as ideas of appropriate religious ceremonial, clerical comportment and lay entitlement were concerned, very similar ideas were at work in nineteenth- century India, and not only among those religions deemed by contemporaries and subsequent scholars to be the closest in inspiration and structure to Protestant Christianity.70 As in Europe, pre-national religion in India consisted of a mode of royal legitimation (Hindu/Muslim king) and the use of religious specialists for government offices, especially the judiciary.71 At the popular level, there were regionally diverse patterns of custom, mythologies and authority.72 In the Indian case, the diversity was greater than in Europe, because of the lack of a comparable church structure. Regional traditions were not so much deviations from a churchapproved religion but were upheld as true religion by local religious authorities.73 In the nineteenth century one finds Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism all in the process of becoming modern religions, with a newly emergent ‘lay’ leadership, neither born in the priestly lineages nor possessing traditional religious training, and valuing neither. Emphasizing


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on the semantic accessibility and social applicability of finite bodies of Scriptures, many were amateur Orientalists, labouring to produce their own translations and ethical interpretations of texts which were earlier heard, often only in ceremonial contexts, that too (among Hindus) by a privileged few. These were the mostly male leaders of Indian religious communities who almost inevitably had some stake in the shaping of a national polity as well and who were, in the meantime, the preferred interpreters and representatives of Indian ‘religion’ to the British judges, jurists, administrative officers and legislators. Religious specialists themselves adopted the language and concept of scriptural religion,74 even if their ideas about directly accessible doctrinal knowledge did not endorse the rise of ‘religious leaders’ with none of the traditional qualifications of religious knowledge. One outstanding example of the latter is Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who achieved prominence as a government officer, educationist and community leader rather than as a religious specialist and represented the growing trend for ‘lay’ persons to present religious opinions and to be taken seriously.75 Expressing priorities comparable to his Hindu counterparts, he urged the importance of a return to original Islam, relying on the truth of purified scriptures as well as human reason and the knowledge of natural sciences.76 Similarly, the Brahmo Samaj put its emphasis on an attribute-less God, printed exegesis of the Upanishads for doctrine and used purpose-made liturgy involving no idols or priests.77 By the mid-nineteenth century, the Brahmo Samaj was not the aberration but the norm. In western India, Dnyan Prasarak Sabha and Paramahansa Mandali shared common ideas about a single all-powerful Creator, distinct from the created world, the importance of internal consistency of Scriptures and doctrines as well as external consistency with scientific knowledge and the illegitimacy of rituals and priesthood.78 In the same presidency, the tiny but vocal Parsi community saw a definite shift of authority from the priestly families to the new mercantile class, prospering in the colonial economy of Bombay. The priests lost whatever respect they had when they failed completely to deal with the propaganda offensive launched by Scottish missionaries in Bombay in the early nineteenth century, and lay Parsis took it upon themselves to popularize Zoroastrian doctrine, to contest Christian missionary claims, and even to argue potential converts back into the fold.79 This book will connect these processes of social and intellectual change with the legal contests and political disputes that ultimately shaped the religious community as a recognizable entity in Indian law, politics and mental landscapes. It will demonstrate that claims made in the name of the community against specific state policies were most often demands for state actions against the entitlements of others within that community, whether that be corrupt priests, public-minded busybodies or simply rival claimants to the resources of an institution or a family. In such claims, references to extra-local ‘imagined communities’ of members served to discipline, control


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18


Chapters Part I of the book focuses on the legal changes set on train by the particular conjunction of events in Britain and India in the 1830s, in which a reformist temper was dominant. Through the study of three specific issues, it will be argued that these changes fed into an active world of public, political and individual legal contests, producing, on the one hand, the specific Indian interpretations of state secularism and, on the other hand, a new legally recognizable collective: the religious community. Chapter 1 will examine the withdrawal of state funds from religious education and the simultaneous establishment of a grants-in-aid system that allowed private religious bodies to act as educational franchisees of the state. By examining political debates regarding the dividing line between the public and the private, the relative claims of the individual, the community, the institutions and the state, I will trace the historical genealogy of the ‘hyper-secular’ education system of modern India in which Christian schools flourish. Chapter 2 will continue this story of legal privatization of religion and creation of religious communities in order to examine how privacy, property and religion produced a strongly plaited legal and political vocabulary that held off state regulation, looking closely at the specific implications for Indian Christians and their churches. Chapter 3 will pursue the politics of community down to its premises of intimacy and sacrality. The case in point is the history of the emergence of Christian personal law, an unintended by-product of a quest of resolve the tension between universal civil freedom and cultural specificity, officially grappled with by British legislators for the first time in the 1830s. In Part II of the book, we move on from legal history to the way in which such evolving laws were negotiated by specific Christian institutions, specifically educational institutions. Chapters 4 and 5 presents the success stories of two very different kinds of Christian schools established in colonial India. One offered an English-medium, liberal arts education for a clientele essentially of elite non- Christians and the other, originally intended to instruct poor rural Christians in scientific farming techniques, was ultimately hitched to nationalist philanthropy and its political-cultural goals which had little to do with Christians as such. In both cases, there are several stories of personal journeys – theological, physical and intellectual – by which a number of Christian educationists established productive working


or exclude local members of kinship of sacred complexes. This is acutely represented by the history of Indian Christians, during debates over the control of institutions such as schools or churches, and over the appropriate nature of Christian family relations. In telling this story, I will attempt to connect the social with the political, revealing the community for what it always has been: a political entity.


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relationships with the emerging Indian leadership, thereby securing for Christian education a stable position within modern Indian public life. We will also examine how each institution cultivated a particular persona, as an institution and among its individual students, producing in each case specifically Indian meanings about the purpose of Christian education. In Part III, the final section of the book, I will discuss the manner in which Christians shaped themselves as a community, a process that was mediated by law, politics and culture as well as doctrine. Chapter 6 focuses on the racial hierarchy within Christian churches in India, and the manner in which such hierarchy weighed down during disputes between Indian Christians and European or American missionaries regarding the definition of the Christian community and its location in Indian society. Chapter 7 expands upon these disagreements, examining in particular the doctrinal and cultural disputes occasioned by the effort to transpose Christian doctrine in a non-European cultural context, raising questions about the authority and entitlement to make such decisions. Chapter 8 connects these doctrinal and institutional discussions with those concerned with political participation and examines how lay Christian organizations, in particular the mostly Protestant All India Conference of Indian Christians, attempted to negotiate the question of the identity and entitlements of Christians within the emerging Indian nation.

On fragments and causation One word in defence before I start the story. Given the long-term scholarly trend of regional, local and ‘fragmentary’ histories established in the past three decades, a book with a subcontinental spread and a scope of 130 years may appear presumptuous. But the stories I am about to tell defy Aristotelian unities of time and space; hence, I cannot narrate them except by following their zigzagging path across huge territories: a judge’s decision in a Calcutta court set heads buzzing in Bombay; a short story about a young Christian girl in Bombay, printed in a missionary publication, set a young man’s heart racing in Calcutta. Perhaps Christians have the distinction of being the first truly Indian community: being affected by developments in areas beyond the ken of their non- Christian neighbours, aware of people ‘like themselves’ in such faraway places. And their experience was historically tied with the development of ‘Indian secularism’, a seemingly contradictory and even irrational pattern of laws, institutional practices and political norms, but one with method in that madness.


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Part I


Law

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1

In recent years, education in Britain as well as India has been in the news over issues of religious policy. The British debates arose in connection with a minor clause in the Education Act of 2002,80 which in popular discourse appeared to open the gates to novel entities known as ‘faith schools’, one that opponents felt would exacerbate the ongoing fragmentation of British society along religious and racial lines. The faith schools would potentially be organized by non-traditional (read non- Christian) educational agencies, with substantially greater financial support from the state in order to make such enterprises reality. In addition to the nature of management, such schools, actual or proposed, are to be distinguished by their admission policies (the use of faith-based criteria to rank applications for places) and by the nature of faith education they may provide.81 In the discussions that followed, participated in by politicians, educationists and members of public in the press, I was struck by the pervasiveness of the assumption that Britain was faced with a radical institutional innovation which had the potential to undermine the organization of the British polity. This in spite of the fact that (as advocates of the provision pointed out) faith schools are no more than voluntary aided schools and large number of ‘faith schools’ already exist in Britain, managed mainly by the Christian churches.82 It is established policy for such schools to set their own criteria for admissions, which are arrived at in conjunction with the local education authority (LEA). Such criteria usually include proof of church membership, in the form of baptismal certificates and letters from the incumbent priest of the local church, confirming regular attendance. Finally, faith-based instruction is no novelty to Britain, since religious education (RE) has been part of the national curriculum since 1947. Consider now the issues that exercised the Indian public in the recent years, also involving religion, the relative powers of religious institutions and the state and the relevance of the individual citizen’s religious identity. To take a leading case, in 1992, St Stephen’s College, Delhi, a much-sought-after institution of higher education under the Church of North India,83 was


Religion and Public Education: The Politics of Secularizing Knowledge

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taken to court by the University of Delhi (of which it is a constituent college) over its failure to conform to admission procedures for undergraduate courses laid down by the university. St Stephen’s, which is one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the country, held interviews to select candidates from a short list of applicants with the appropriate level of marks in school-leaving examinations. In order to be able to do so, it stopped receiving applications a few days before the final date ordered by the university authorities. In defence of its procedure, the college argued that as it received an extraordinarily large volume of applications it could not possibly select candidates in the very short time normally made available to colleges by the university and that it was entitled to its independent selection procedure, being a Christian minority institution. The final claim was premised on Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution, which provides that ‘All minorities whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.’ In dealing with this dispute, the Supreme Court, which is the highest judicial body of the country, framed three questions: whether St Stephen’s was a ‘minority educational institution’ (MEI), what regulatory authority universities had over such MEIs, and whether MEIs had the right to reserve places for members of their own community. The answer to the first question was yes, based on the history of the institution (that it was established by a Christian missionary body in 1882); the eventual answer to the second has been the constitution of an autonomous National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions with judicial powers to which MEIs were entitled to appeal against the university,84 and the third, again a yes, was limited to 50 per cent of the total number of seats.85 Opponents of such developments, including a prominent historian who is an alumnus of St Stephen’s, have foretold the impending decline of this august institution into mediocrity.86 In response, the current principal of St Stephen’s, who, since taking charge, has made significant changes to the admission policies of the college, has retorted that the Supreme Court judgment represented an unjustifiable 50 per cent reservation of seats for ‘non- Christians’.87 Thampu’s own appointment was marked by allegations of improper practice by the Delhi University Teachers’ Union, who accused him of hiding behind ‘minority’ status to claim an office he was not qualified to hold, given that he did not possess a doctorate, an essential qualification for the principal of a Delhi University college. Subsequently, when Revd Dr Thampu received a Ph.D. in Divinity from the Agricultural University, Allahabad, the genuineness of the degree was called into question.88 In the vigorous Indian exchanges, there are several shared and unstated assumptions about religion, pedagogy and the state, which present quite a striking contrast with the contemporary British debates mentioned above. In British terminology, St Stephen’s would be a ‘faith school’, one of several such ‘faith schools’ in India which have existed since the mid-nineteenth


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century, dependent on financial support from the state and regulated by state departments with greater or lesser ease. In contemporary India, such Christian ‘faith schools’ are disproportionately more numerous than the proportion of Christians in India, and, as shown by the fracas over St Stephen’s, it is not their right to exist or to receive state funds that is in dispute but the authority of the state to regulate them, and the claim of non-members of the Christian community to access them. In Britain, there is no suggestion that the proposed ‘new’ faith schools would be any less subject to the control of the LEA than the existing voluntary aided schools, and if there are non-Muslims in Britain demanding to be admitted to Muslim faith schools, they are certainly not as vociferous as St Stephen’s clientele, who form an important contingent of the ‘who’s who’ of India. Such people would be deeply offended at the suggestion that their alma mater is an example of a ‘faith school’, since, as everybody knows, St Stephen’s does not teach religion, at least not to the majority of its students, who have traditionally not been Christian. For that matter, neither does any ‘private’ school in India that receives state funds, whether an MEI or not, since there are constitutional injunctions against their doing so. Article 28 provides that: 1. No religious instruction shall be provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds. [ ... ] 3. No person attending any educational institution recognised by the State or receiving aid out of State funds shall be required to take part in any religious instruction that may be imparted in such institution or to attend any religious worship that may be conducted in such institution or in any premises attached thereto unless such person or, if such person is a minor, his guardian has given his consent thereto.89 In England and Wales on the other hand, Religious Education or RE is an essential part of the national curriculum, for which provision must be made by all schools, although individual students may be permitted not to attend such classes or worship if so requested by their parents.90 The actual syllabus for RE is decided by the LEAs, and in case of faith schools, the governing bodies. In an apparent reversal of priorities, British law makes religious education compulsory, allowing parents to withdraw their children if they do not wish to have their children taught the tenets of other religions, for which they must demonstrate the existence of satisfactory alternative arrangements. The difference goes further than this: in India, even the private schools, especially successful ‘faith schools’, such as St Stephen’s College, usually choose not to force students to exercise such a legal option and simply exclude formal religious instruction from their curricula. That they choose to do so has to do with the entirely different social location of ‘faith schools’


Religion and Public Education


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in Britain and India: British faith schools are meant as a special privilege for the marginal, while St Stephen’s College, Delhi, has traditionally educated privileged sections of the Indian population, across the religious spectrum. This chapter will connect the social history of Christian education in India with the history of law and religion in public education, indicating where and how ‘Indian secularism’, while directly connected to British ideas and policies, diverged along its distinct historical path.

Imperial education: secularism for political control? There appears to be a consensus among South Asianists that Indian education under British rule was ‘secular’. While some scholars have take the relatively straightforward view that this was the effect of European Enlightenment principles of secularism,91 others have made more complex arguments, pointing to the legitimating function that secular education performed within the imperial context.92 The scholarly works referred to above have correctly identified a remarkable feature of modern Indian state policy: the striking absence of formal religious instruction in public education.93 But there is no examination of how such a policy came about, because British educational efforts in India are assumed to have been ‘secular’ from the very beginning. As they are aware, there was no precedence for such a policy in Britain, but if secularism was purely a bit of imperial propaganda, why on earth did British statesmen think it would be particularly appealing to Indians? The answer to that question is that they did not; just because the scope of religious education is severely restricted by constitutional provisions in India, it does not follow that this was what British statesmen were out to create in the early nineteenth century. Certainly, Britain’s own legal and educational trajectory, as touched on above, should give us pause and lead us to examine what exactly happened in those bombastic decades when Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism made common cause to alter the un- Christian policies of Company government in India, and how these developments led to legal privatization of religious education in India while in Britain the state remained committed to religious education as a foundation for moral training. I will argue that the legal developments in these two countries, which emerged out of a century and a half of their connected but divergent politics, are distinct interpretations of the legitimate relationship between the individual, the community and the state, each interpretation being subsequently understood to represent secularism in the respective countries.


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Macaulay’s minute: the red herring If there is a moment of rupture in the historiography of Indian education, it is most commonly taken to be the occasion when in 1835 a Minute was penned


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by Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, the law member of the GovernorGeneral’s Council. This Minute is supposed to have ended a decade-long debate among British government officials regarding the appropriate content of Indian education,94 replacing an Orientalist policy of education with an Anglicist one. The heat generated by this esoteric debate among British officials in India appears to have been so intense that several generations later this historical moment continues to be accorded foundational status in modern Indian pedagogy. Because Macaulay’s cultivated wit, coming on the back of his prejudiced ignorance, sounds particularly disagreeable to modern readers,95 it has appeared to many scholars that something tremendous, and most likely quite pernicious, took place following his declamation. But what is it that happened? One scholar has suggested: ‘The 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck, which swiftly followed Macaulay’s minute of the same year, officially required the natives of India to submit to the study of English literature, irrevocably altering the direction of Indian education.’96 The specificity of colonial India was that there education had to be ‘secular’, hence the new discipline of English literature had to be invented in order to perform the same function of political control that religious education performed in Britain.97 There are two problems with this argument. First, there is the matter of facts: I have not been able to discover a statute such as the English Education Act. There was a brief resolution issued by the Governor- General, Lord William Bentinck, beginning with the statement of opinion that ‘the great object of the British government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India, and that all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone.’98 But resolutions by colonial councils were quite different from statutes, because the former often represented the opinions of a local clique of officials not in accord with the authorities in London and liable to be reversed on review, as was the case in this instance. In any case, nobody ever proposed anything like a law that would require Indians to ‘submit to the study of English literature’; the British colonial government had neither the will nor resources to create a system of compulsory education (another latter- day Indian demand, in fact). In a very substantial sense, this was no more than a storm in a teacup, although Bentinck’s resolution indicated the revaluation of curricular content such that when a hierarchical ‘system’ of education was created in time, the teaching of English and in English was concentrated towards the top. But that was a long time to come: until 1823 there were just three government schools in India: a madrasa (established 1781) at Calcutta and a Sanskrit college (established 1792) at Banaras, both endowed out of Indian revenues.99 It was against this Company policy of official Orientalism that the reformers fulminated. The arguments of British reformers were premised on the principles of utility and Christianity rather than any notion of secularism. I would argue




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that we need to redirect our attention to that long-identified conjunction in British thought to reveal its specificities rather than to transpose our understanding of current British society and (ir)religiosity into the nineteenth century.

The distinction of colonial India is, I think, the predominance of the principle of utility, trotted out frequently to justify the value of Christianity, a need politically absent in Britain. All spoke of the importance of useful and morally beneficial education for Indians and how best to achieve it,100 with Governor- General John Adam stating during the formation of a new General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI) in 1823 that its duties included ‘considering and from time to time submitting to Government the suggestion of such measures as it may appear expedient to adopt with a view to the better instruction of the people, to the introduction among them of useful knowledge and to the improvement of their moral character’.101 The official Orientalists, with their chairs and research teams to defend, put in a fair fight to demonstrate the usefulness of their labours.102 Since they dominated the GCPI in the beginning, the committee began its career in 1823 by endowing a new Sanskrit College at Calcutta. In the following year, they also took charge of two colleges at Agra and Delhi supported by endowments made by a Hindu Brahman and the Muslim Nawab of Awadh respectively.103 On the other hand, there was a vocal body of Indian liberals, pioneered by Raja Rammohan Roy, who opposed spending money on Sanskrit colleges, where, he said, young men would waste several years of their lives learning the niceties of Sanskrit grammar and learning to examine whether the word khaduti as a whole conveyed the meaning ‘he or she eats’ or whether separate parts of the word conveyed distinct portions of the meaning.104 This trenchant rejection of the artificial and non-functional nature of scholastic learning and argument was in practice seconded by Roy’s ‘conservative’ rivals, who, in 1817, established the Hindu College, eminently secular in spite of its appellation, proposing to teach English, Bengali, reading, writing, grammar and Persian.105 In 1824, following a few years of precarious financial and organizational existence, the managers of the Hindu College, Calcutta, appealed for support to the Government. The Government readily agreed, but with the imposition of supervisory authority by the GCPI,106 making it the first college under its auspices to teach any significant amount of English. In South India, when a similar bureaucratic body, the Madras Committee of Public Instruction, began functioning in 1826, it similarly attached itself to the Madras School Book Society, a mixed Indo-European association established in 1820 whose secretary was a man whose name was misspelt


Utility and orientalism


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by contemporaries as Vennelacunty Soob Row.107 In Bombay, the Deccan Education Society played a corresponding role.108 Education in India could have thus proceeded harmoniously, with Indians organizing the teaching of English and Britons, that of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, but the problem arose because of the parliamentary grant. The problem with parliamentary grants was that they were liable to higher-level supervision, which, in turn, was susceptible to the changing currents of political opinion in Britain. All this boded ill for the official Orientalists in India. In 1824, Bentham’s disciple James Mill, Assistant Examiner of Indian Correspondence at the East India House, questioned whether the Indian educational policies were indeed capable of conveying ‘useful learning’, or whether by instituting ‘Seminaries for the purpose of teaching mere Hindoo or mere Mahomedan literature ... [the GCPI bound themselves] ... to teach a great deal of what was frivolous, not a little of what was purely mischievous, and a small remainder indeed in which utility was in any way concerned’.109 This sparked off a decade of disputes within the GCPI – those wishing to change existing policy being led by Charles Trevelyan, T. B. Macaulay’s brother-in-law, appointed Chairman of the GCPI in 1835, replacing the Sanskritist H. H. Wilson. The happy conjunction of Trevelyan in the GCPI and Macaulay as law member in the Governor- General’s Council may easily be read to corroborate the thesis that Evangelical Christianity and secular Utilitarianism found common cause in matters of Indian policy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It is suggested below that we need to understand the manner in which Christianity pervaded both and hence produced not an exigent and eclectic but a coherent Liberal position on Indian educational policy, whose Christian dimensions become clear only if we look at the ideas of the principal British policy-makers in their twin locations of India and Britain.

Christian liberals, truth and public funds Charles Trevelyan represented a new kind of British official in India, one whose commitment to Evangelical Christianity inspired a dislike of illegitimate social privilege and esoteric knowledge that sustained such privilege.110 Quarter of a century ago, Burke’s critique of Company rule in India had denounced the privileges of despots as illegitimate, the unaccountable Company government and Warren Hastings in particular being prime targets.111 The next generation of British liberals concerned with India discovered illegitimate privilege more in the realm of religion and knowledge and once again found an entrenched Company tradition in alliance with such Indian failings. Trevelyan had played a leading role in dethroning Sir Edward Colebrooke, Resident at the Mughal court in Delhi; in the process he became convinced that Colebrooke’s courtly intrigues were organically




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connected with the esoteric, elitist and corrupt nature of Persian language and with false religions.112 Quite like the earlier generation of liberals, Evangelically minded officials such as Trevelyan spoke for the Indian people, and their rights, against misguided British policy. Language was identified as a particularly important realm in need of liberation; hence, Trevelyan, convinced of the right of people to be governed in their ‘own’ language,113 would have the monopolized elite languages of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian replaced by popular education in English and the ‘national vernaculars’. To his mind, knowledge, faith and society were parts of a total system; hence, pulling out the epistemological carpet would undermine the corrupt religious specialists, and it was his privately expressed belief that this would lead Indians from false religions to Christianity (Protestantism).114 These opinions found a concrete occasion for testing when the local education committee at Agra proposed to redirect funds supporting the Sanskrit and Persian sections of the Agra College to the English section. The Anglicist and the Orientalist camps debated the issue at various levels: the legality of reorienting endowed funds and the possible political repercussions of such a measure, as much as the ‘objective’ value of alternative curricula as such.115 Let us read the law member Lord Macaulay’s decision in this context: he argued that the Government was completely free to apply funds at its disposal as it thought fit. (Failing to refer to the distinct issue of endowments was undoubtedly a serious lapse for a law member, and perhaps not an unintentional one). There is much in that Minute about religion that scholars have ignored in favour of the cultural angle, but religion was far more crucial in shaping the substantive policies. As Macaulay put it, direct state proselytization in Christianity would remain barred, but, at the same time, Sanskrit and Arabic could no longer receive patronage from public funds, simply for being the language of Hindu and Muslim religious texts. It could not be expected that public funds would be used to teach false history, false astronomy and false medicine, even though these had religious validity (for Indians).116 Throughout this Minute, Macaulay proposed formal equivalence between different religions and declared that utility was the only criteria for establishing the eligibility for state patronage. In doing so, he was deploying a particularly mid- century Anglican and Liberal view of ‘establishment’, which did not entirely deplore a legally privileged state church but supported that connection only when and to the extent that it served the public and national good.117 Premised on this perspective, he would later defend the rights of Dissenters to their church property, deplore the Anglican establishment in Ireland,118 and urge the Parliament to make a larger grant to the Catholic seminary of Maynooth in Ireland. In the course of the Parliamentary debate in 1845 over the Maynooth Bill, which proposed increasing the existing grant from £10,000 to £26,000, and


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making it permanent, furious opposition expressed explicitly anti- Catholic prejudice alongside arguments for ‘voluntaryism’ or the rejection of state support for religious institutions.119 Macaulay’s speech is revealing: in supporting the measure, he contrasted Maynooth’s poverty with the opulence of Oxbridge, arguing that Catholic education was better than no education, and if the Church of Rome did teach many errors, it was impossible to ‘provide any machinery for the dissemination of truth which shall not, with the truth, disseminate some error’. In his view, all non-Anglican Protestant denominations suffered from similar failures. In a pattern of argument by analogy that appears to have been common with early Victorians, the Conservatives proposed that Macaulay’s defence of Roman Catholicism was similar to sympathy for Hinduism. Macaulay responded: Would you, says one gentleman, teach the people to worship Jugernaut or Kalee? Certainly not. My argument leads to no such conclusion. The worship of Jugernaut and Kalee is a curse to mankind. It is much better that people should be without any religion than that they should believe in a religion which enjoins prostitution, suicide, robbery, assassination. But will any Protestant deny that it is better that the Irish should be Roman Catholics than that they should live and die like the beasts of the field ... ?120 Macaulay’s argument may be read in two ways; one might say that his glossing over the doctrinal differences between Christian denominations paved the way for positing an ethical core allegedly possessed by all religions, and hence in effect autonomous of all religions, which alone justified state support. However, one has to take into account the explicit distinctions Macaulay drew between the spectrum of somewhat erroneous religious views which retained some element of truth, and those religions, such as Hinduism, which were inherently incapable of producing any public good. Macaulay as well as his baiters shared a consensus about the nature of Hinduism, which rode on half a century of Evangelical propaganda. In making a case for endowing a Catholic seminary, he was therefore at pains not to argue for the equal value or vacuity of all religions but of the special status for Christianity. What we will examine now is how the ecumenical utilitarianism expressed by Macaulay came to be wrenched out of its Christian boundaries by the historical specificities of Indian politics.



After the minute: locating the agency for public education, 1835–54 As mentioned before, the immediate outcome of Lord Macaulay’s Indian minute of 1835 was a resolution by the Governor General which proposed


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freezing all maintenance scholarships held by students of the Calcutta madrasa and the Sanskrit Colleges, subjecting all ‘Oriental’ professorships to scrutiny on their falling vacant and termination of state patronage for the translation of Oriental texts, the last two provisions arguably affecting European official-scholars as much as Indian students. The GovernorGeneral made it very clear that the Government was not going to close any educational institution while Indians found them attractive.121 These proposals, which occasioned heated debates in England and urgent petitions in India, were subjected to anxious scrutiny and lengthy dithering by the Court of Directors, with the final decision being something of a damp squib. The contribution of the Hindu College was a petition signed by the managers, students and guardians, along with ‘thousands’ of Hindus from Calcutta to Lord Bentinck, asking for Persian to be replaced with English as the language of the law courts,122 a petition that directly supported the new ‘Anglicist’ policy orientation of the Government. In contrast, there were petitions from students of the Sanskrit college, Calcutta madrasa and broader Muslim petitions, urging the Government to act appropriately by patronizing Sanskrit or Muslim ‘science and literature’, as the kings of yore and even the past members of the GCPI had done.123 When a new governor-general, Lord Auckland, was appointed in 1836, petitions flowed again, with a mass petition bearing the signature of 18,000 Muslims and a dignitary claiming to be the vakil (ambassador) of the Nawab of Oudh explicitly alleging not just ignorance and negligence by the Government but active religious intolerance.124 Faced with such expression of political criticism, however mildly stated, and in the absence of adequate guidance from the directors, Lord Auckland resorted to the politics of definition: writing a minute on the difference between scholarships and stipends and the validity of the former when attached to the criteria of ‘merit’.125 Given the reinstatement of this commitment, the ever-parsimonious Company government found that it had too little funds left to create the institutional structure for the proposed programme of useful and moral education from scratch. Consequently, a number of provinces, beginning with Bengal, undertook official surveys of ‘indigenous’ schools, which could be developed further with thinly spread government grants. Revd William Adam’s reports on Bengali schools126 appeared too dismal and potentially too expensive to Lord Auckland,127 who generally concluded the official argument by saying that the money in question was too small to deserve such heated discussion and that while Oriental seminaries may keep their purses, this was not a matter of principle but of liberal discretion, for English education was no doubt better. Such statements in themselves did little to answer those practical difficulties that disposed the Governor- General to take such a pessimistic view of what the Government could do for ‘native education’, given the immensity


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of the task and the scarcity of resources. Revd Adam’s survey had proposed developing existing Indian schools with government money; the government of the neighbouring North-Western Provinces, led by its Evangelical Lieutenant Governor, James Thomason, took the opposite approach and conceived of a system of model village schools teaching in the vernacular (Urdu) medium,128 and financed by a 1 per cent tax on landed property (in addition to the land revenue) with the promise that the Government would add an equal amount. Although the educational cess was meant to be voluntary, the added tax burden and its possible coercive nature remained a difficult political issue, preventing its extension to other parts of India, especially Bengal, where the revenues were considered permanently settled.129 Lieutenant Governor Thomason’s close association with Christian missionaries in running this state education system was also seen later as a political problem.130 In any case, such direct state involvement in mass education was precocious compared to Britain, where education was entirely the realm of parish and charity schools.131 Some years back, a member of the GCPI had concluded that in the absence of such Christian infrastructure, popular education was impossible in India.132 This question was reopened when the official surveys showed that there was in fact such a Christian infrastructure in existence in India: the Christian missions.

Educational franchisees: missionary educationists and the grant-in-aid system It was an indication of changed standards of valid and valuable knowledge that schools established by European Christian missionaries, and teaching distinctly Western curricula (although not necessarily in English) came to be deemed the best ‘private agency’ to which the Government could franchise its commitment to Indian public education. The dilemma was whether and how such schools could be utilized by the Government and the legal devices by which qualms about an explicitly formal association with Christian missionaries could be satisfied. And thus began the process of legal, administrative and financial innovation that led to the peculiarly Indian laws relating to religion and public education. In 1842–3, an official called Henry Tucker surveyed existing schools in the North-Western Provinces, both governmental and private, and suggested that the Church Missionary Society school in Jaunpur was of the kind that could be used by the Government for the spread of secular education. Tucker recommended that the missionary school be given a government grant only under the condition that it taught the Bible at specific hours to students who did not object to such teaching, no doubt feeling that a ‘conscience clause’ was necessary to quell Indian fears of religious coercion.133




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[It was to] be based on an entire abstinence from interference in religious instruction conveyed in the schools assisted. Aid will be given ... to all schools which impart a good secular education, provided that they are under adequate local management ... ; and provided also that their managers consent that the schools shall be subject to Government inspection, and agree to any conditions which maybe laid down for the regulation of such grants.134 Wood’s policy derived from a reworking of the public and private dichotomy; introduced in the ‘reformist’ decades and expounded by Macaulay. As discussed above, Macaulay’s exposition designated the private as a realm of practice, belief and knowledge that had no positive claims on the state as opposed to those systems of knowledge and belief which were said to contribute to the common good and hence deserving of the state’s munificence. Wood partially modified this approach, using ‘privacy’ to ensure negative rights against encroachment by the state. While ‘religion’ still remained a ‘private’ matter, such privacy now meant that activities, people and institutions could be seen to possess two aspects: the private aspect, protected against the state, and the public aspect, deserving the munificence of the state. Such an approach allowed (certain kinds of) religious schools to become public institutions. By a set of administrative laws, which were the grant-in-aid codes, the state defined those characteristics that made a certain form of pedagogy eligible for public funds, in the form of supplementary grants.135 These codes did not enjoin the restriction or prohibition of religious instruction as a necessary qualification, as Tucker had recommended, instead using the notion of privacy to interpret such regulation as violation of institutional autonomy. The private–public divide played itself out in other ways: helping to distinguish between the private and the state sectors of education, and the distinct policies towards religious instruction in each. There was, once again, difference of opinion over the permissibility or otherwise of bible classes in state schools, and, in spite of the recommendations of Revd Alexander Duff, one of his principal advisers, Wood eschewed compulsory bible classes. Recognition of the possible efficacy of Christianity as a source of civilization was one thing and compulsory religious instruction another, as Wood explained to the Governor- General, Lord Dalhousie.136 Following the Mutiny, vocal calls for a more ‘Christian’ policy were more difficult to ignore, and although


There was considerable difference of opinion among British officials about the political legitimacy of such an arrangement, even though great pains were taken to distinguish the ‘private’ missionary schools from the state. After considerable deliberation, Sir Charles Wood, the Secretary of State for India, instructed the Government of India in 1854 to create a ‘grant-in-aid’ system, the terms of which were as follows:


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Wood was personally inclined to prohibit even optional bible classes, under pressure from India led by Sir John Lawrence and from Britain led by the Duke of Marlborough and the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, he relented. Voluntary bible classes could now take place in state schools, provided the students asked for them, with equal provisions being available for creating classes on Hinduism or Islam.137 All suggestions for compulsory bible classes in state schools were resolutely rejected.138 The 1854 Despatch had also prescribed the creation of universities in India with the aim of providing a uniform set of examinations for evaluating scholarship attained at the diverse kinds of educational institutions already in operation and therefore offering a general guide to the qualifications of candidates for government service. Creation of the universities invoked contemporary British religious concerns: the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras being modelled on the nondenominational London University rather than the Anglican Oxbridge, able to affiliate colleges of all denominations. Notwithstanding Macaulay, therefore, the Indian universities were permitted to create professorships in Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, but because of the debates of the 1830s and the conclusions drawn from them, these subjects would have to be taught as language, literature and law, without any reference to the ‘tenets of the Hindoo or Mahomedan religions’.139 Even so, such innovative legal toleration did not satisfy all British officials, especially old-school Company Conservatives. After the Mutiny of 1857, such old India hands added their voice to those in the British Parliament who suggested that the uprising was a popular protest by Indians against uncalled-for meddling by the British in their national customs and religion.140 Sir George Clerk, retired from Bombay, sent a memorandum of protest against Indian education policies to Edward Law, Lord Ellenborough, who was Governor- General of India from 1842 to 1944 and who had been recalled by an unprecedented exercise of powers by the Court of Directors of the East India Company.141 Ellenborough combined Conservative dislike of over- educating the poor, particularly at state expense, with concern for what he saw as Indian cultural priorities. He alleged that the Government of India was misinterpreting the Despatch of 1854 and, in fact, coercing the Indians to contribute to the setting up of schools that they did not want. In his opinion, state grants derived from taxes on Indians and given to Christian missionary schools amounted to coercion, and to drive home the point he asked the Parliament to reflect on how the Scots would feel if Scottish taxes were spent on propaganda missions in Scotland.142 The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Frederick Halliday, responded that the analogy was not apt. Since by the 1854 Despatch it had been decided to give state grants to support secular education in any kind of school, to deprive the Christian missionaries alone would be equivalent to denying grants to Roman Catholic schools, or Free Church schools in Scotland, simply because these two denominations aimed at making converts. Besides, in




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his view, Christian missionaries were not the only proselytizing agency in India; even Muslim teachers might convert Hindu pupils, Shaivite teachers Vaishnavite students or even atheist teachers, students of all religions. To regulate the activities of all teachers in Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Parsi or Sikh schools lest they influence the religious views of their students would require unreasonably minute government supervision. In his opinion, the Despatch of 1854 had suggested a much wiser policy of not interfering in or inquiring into the religious education given in the schools assisted by the state.143

Official neo-orientalism in the late nineteenth century It might appear from the above account that by a combination of laws and financial policies the British Government of India had ushered in a monolithic system of Eurocentric knowledge and pedagogy, topped, if not permeated, by the use of the English language and dominated by Christian missionary educationists in fact if not according to principle. Yet this is only part of the story, for the above account of policy negotiations over the content of ‘neutrality’ related only to a part of the educational structure as it unfolded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Orientalism was not dead – the Sanskrit colleges and the Calcutta madrasa remained – but, more significantly, there arose new pedagogic programmes, which for their emphasis on the vernacular languages have been referred to by one scholar as ‘neo- Orientalism’.144 ‘Neo- Orientalist’ educational policies, originated in the North-Western Provinces, led by its Evangelical Lt. Governor James Thomason. Thomason’s ideas inspired the earliest generation of education officials in the Punjab (which was conquered 1849). These men, British and Indian, surveyed indigenous schools, especially maktabs teaching Persian, with a view to reforming them and including them within the modern education system. The ‘neo- Orientalist’ programme created its own disputes regarding religious policy, which added a different set of dynamics to the Indian education system. A Vernacular Translation Society had been established at the Delhi College in 1842, which achieved greatest vitality under the college’s third principal, an Austrian medical doctor called Aloys Sprenger, appointed in 1845. The college’s teachers and alumni, especially Professor Ramachandra and Maulvi Zaka Ullah, distinguished themselves for scientific and mathematical publications in Urdu, which they also publicized through the college’s journals, Qiran al-Saadain (The conjunction of two planets) and Muhib i-Hind.145 Other alumni of the college, Nazir Ahmad and Muhammad Husain Azad, produced a large volume of grammatical, fictional and critical texts that went far to recreate Urdu as a modern standard vernacular language distinct from Hindi.146 These Delhi college men played a major role in the shaping of the Punjab educational policies of the late nineteenth century, under an eccentric


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Director of Public Instruction, G. W. Leitner, a German-speaking Hungarian Jew.147 He was a leading exponent of the ‘neo- Orientalism’ that pervaded the ‘Punjab tradition’. Leitner was supported by the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, D. F. McLeod,148 an active patron of Protestant missions and himself a protégé of the Evangelical Viceroy, Sir John Lawrence.149 This little noted late-nineteenth- century conjunction of Evangelical Christianity and Orientalism underlay conservative government policy of backing ‘traditional leaders’ in order to counter the middle- class nationalists based in the Presidency capitals and bred in the Indian universities.150 The result was a re- entry of religions (other than Christianity) into the Indian education system. Leitner formed a society called the Anjaman-i-Punjab,151 consisting of ‘natural leaders’, the ‘Reises’152 of the Punjab, who were encouraged to contribute funds for the formation of an Oriental College. The college awarded degrees in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit languages, Unani and Ayurvedic medicine and offered traditional titles such as Maulvi, Pandit, Munshi, Bhai, Hakeem, Baid and Kazi. It was meant to top a system of indigenous primary schools, the maktabs, inspecting and supervising them.153 This showed that official views on religious education had changed radically since 1835: the Lahore Oriental College taught several religious texts, offered traditional religious titles and served as the core of the Punjab University, incorporated in 1882. To Leitner, the development of such indigenous learning was part of a plan of indigenous self-government, which drew upon native democratic traditions that supposedly abounded among the castes and communities of the Punjab. All this was to take place under the wings of a benevolent British empire.154 As a corollary to developing his neo- Orientalist college at Lahore, Leitner moved to destroy its older rival, the Delhi College. The college had been severely damaged during the Mutiny, and, in 1875, Leitner proposed that its funds could be put to better use by creating a superior institution for the province at Lahore.155 Many British officials disapproved, along with the appalled citizens of Delhi who organized a protest, in which Professor Ramachandra, the Christian Professor of Mathematics at Delhi College, joined. Leitner won, because the Punjab Government, eager to economize its educational spending, insisted that the movement of opposition was a conspiracy by the threatened professors of the Delhi College. It also offered the legal point that the Delhi College was in essence a Muslim endowment meant to be spent in that community’s interests alone.156 Leitner himself orchestrated a petition from the Nawab of Awadh’s descendants demanding that the endowment be used partly to set up a Shia religious school at Delhi, the rest being applied to Lahore University.157 The new Director of Public Instruction of Punjab complained in vain that this was a pandering to religious bigotry.158 In 1877, the Delhi College was closed, and all that remained at Delhi was an endowed Anglo-Arabic school,159 one among several madrasas that the




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Government of India maintained in an effort to incorporate existing indigenous schools into the official education system. Leitner’s Oriental College was not universally acclaimed; it was criticized by official British detractors within the Punjab Education Department, and by Indians less enthusiastic about reviving traditional Indian education, who accused Leitner of misdirecting public funds to finance his personal hobby, charges that Leitner saw as libellous and derived from petty conspiracies hatched by those with a vested interest in the Delhi College.160 In his own mind, he represented the ‘real’ Indians, whose distinctive cultural and religious requirements he sought to give positive recognition to within the state-sponsored education system, all for good, politically conservative purposes.

The education commission of 1882: religious schools vs. schools for religious communities If 1854 represented a pragmatic triumph for Christian missionaries, the taste of victory soon turned sour. In 1882, a commission appointed to investigate how well the system inaugurated in 1854 had worked so far, and to recommend future policies, revealed that Christian missionaries were no longer a determining influence on government policy. It also showed that Leitner was not a lone ‘neo- Orientalist’ maverick in government circles; the Chairman of the Commission displayed similar procilivities. W. W. Hunter felt that rigid exclusion of Indian religions from state- endorsed education was unnecessary and counter-productive, and offered the classic late-nineteenth- century argument for state patronage of religion: the rights of the ‘religious community’. Whereas Macaualy had rejected the teaching of ‘false religions’, for Hunter this was not a significant issue, if by making such accommodations educational facilities could be extended among the politically important underprivileged – in particular, the Muslims. The Commission recommended special financial and administrative provisions to correct the imbalance against Muslims, declaring that ‘the special encouragement of Mahomedan Education be regarded as a legitimate charge on Local, Municipal, and on Provincial Funds’. It also resolved to encourage indigenous Muslim schools (maktabs) to add secular subjects, and trustees of Muslim endowments to finance colleges or classes of English.161 Indian leaders seized this new orientation of government policy to extend claims, which, while premised on ‘religion’ in the abstract, showed relatively low interest in traditional religious education as opposed to special facilities for modern marketable education for their ‘communities’, another term that was changing, to take on the meaning of constituencies. Sayyid Amir Ali, an eminent Muslim leader from Bengal, orchestrated petitions through the National Mahomedan Association, which repeated Hunter’s concerns regarding the backwardness of Indian Muslims and suggested that the several existing Muslim religious endowments should be used to provide


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modern education to Muslims. In particular he referred to the endowments of the government madrasa at Calcutta and the privately endowed madrasa at Hugli, which was managed by the government.162 This demand, the debates over it among Muslim leaders and the Government’s reaction are revealing, both of the changing Indian concept of ‘religion’ and of the Government’s approach to it. Amir Ali’s principal political rival, the more conservative Abdul Latif, organizer of the Mohammadan Literary Society, urged that it would be a violation of religious neutrality to do so. Latif admitted that few Muslim students with worldly ambitions were interested in Arabic literature and Islamic theology but asserted that madrasas had to be maintained for those few unworldly religious persons who sought such religious knowledge and would provide guidance to members of the community on religious issues.163 What the liberal Amir Ali and the conservative Abdul Latif did agree upon was the exclusive claim of Muslims to the benefits of Muslim endowments. Both of them resented the fact that funds from Muslim endowments, especially the large waqf of Haji Mohsin, should be used to fund a secular college at Hugli teaching both Hindu and Muslim pupils.164 While the Government baulked at the prospect of intervening in nonChristian religious endowments, and even more at the proposal of radically redirecting the use of endowment funds, it did respond to accusations of diverting the ‘religious’ resources of a ‘religious’ community, deciding, as a result of the Muslim petitions, to take on the expenses of the Hooghly College,165 while the Mohsin endowment was applied to the madrasa at Hugli as well as to three new madrasas at Rajshahi, Dhaka and Chittagong. In addition, it provided a fees scholarship for Muslim students studying in any college in Calcutta.166 As can be seen from this episode, the Government, in pursuing its ‘neo- Orientalist’ policy, responded to Amir Ali’s demands by providing more madrasas. In the early twentieth century, there were efforts to create almost an alternative system of Muslim education in Bengal, with maktabs teaching secular subjects along with Islamic doctrine feeding into modernized madrasas as well as the secular university system.167 In spite of this, the government madrasas remained dismal places, the resort mostly of the desperate.168 Although there were dynamic movements for the learning and teaching of Islamic theology in late-nineteenth- century India, organizers of the new madrasa at Deoband determinedly rejected government affiliation and funds in order to retain the autonomy of the curriculum.169 Their attitudes were comparable to educators of the Hindu reformist group, the Arya Samaj, especially the conservative section which organized its own network of schools centred on the Gurukul at Kangri, near Hardwar.170 Official neo- Orientalists and conservative Indian educationists were both walking up blind alleys; mainstream Indian leaders, including those claiming to represent religious communities, had little




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interest in religious education, unless, of course, it was imposed without their consent.

The Education Commission was the site of special pleading on behalf of entities called religious communities, but, paradoxically, it also reflected a growing Indian demand for restrictions on religious instruction in public schools. During the debates it was found that Christian missionaries interpreted state religious neutrality very differently from Indian leaders, the latter preferring complete exclusion of religion from state-aided schools rather than denominational schools, each teaching their own creed. This move did not derive from a secular ideology but from the perceived dominance of the education market by Christian missionaries and the wish to restrict compulsory Christian doctrinal teaching in these schools. The Government did not agree with this proposal at this stage, supporting a policy of institutional autonomy in religion rather than individual freedom of conscience. The religious dispute was initiated by Christian missionary educationists who found that they were harried by the university system and what they saw as the ‘unfair’ competition offered by government schools and colleges, which did not need to teach religion and were therefore better able to tackle the syllabus.171 Scottish Free Church missionaries, pioneers in English-medium higher education in India and earlier located comfortably in the nexus of new pedagogy and government policy, now started a propaganda movement in Britain arguing that the 1854 policy of noninterference in religion had been violated. Revd James Johnston appealed for the closure of government high schools and colleges in India, arguing that the Government should concentrate its funds in providing primary education for the masses. Higher education should be paid for and would be most economically conducted under conditions of free competition, which could be supported by the Government with money grants.172 The campaign was notorious enough for two very high-profile Indian protests: the Diwan of the princely state of Mysore argued that the division between primary and higher education was a forced one, introduced not by Indians but those interested in the missionary cause alone. By trying to monopolize higher education, Christian missionaries were poised to lose the respect they had in the eyes of the people of India.173 From a neighbouring princely state, the Maharaja of Travancore denounced Johnston’s plea as a missionary conspiracy to monopolize the field of education, which would be greatly detested by Hindus as much as Muslims, Parsis and Sikhs. He did not agree that secular education produced amoral atheists; modern education swept away the ‘dross and scum’ of every religion, the true religious instinct remaining untouched.174 Incidentally, the Travancore state made


The Indian demand for a conscience clause in the late nineteenth century


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much greater use of Christian missionaries for public education than British India but controlled Christian sectarian instruction closely through legal and administrative measures, to which the missions adapted, in spite of protests and resentment. The conscience clause came into operation in 1904 in Travancore,175 long before it became possible in British India, where Indians had to struggle longer to achieve the ideal circumstances under which they wanted to partake of Christian missionary education. The demand for a conscience clause was raised in the 1882 Commission by K. T. Telang, Congressman and lawyer from Bombay. Telang felt obliged to write a dissent to the final report, in which he urged against Johnston’s pernicious ideas about government withdrawal from higher education, against aspersions on the character of Indian university students and against proposals of moral lectures in university colleges. Finally, he demanded that a conscience clause be applied to private educational institutions that received a grant from the government.176 While it was yet too early for the British Government to endorse a conscience clause for Indian schools, the missionaries themselves did not receive much support. The Hunter Commission concluded that while the development of private agency in Indian education was indeed desirable, the Government could not at that time discontinue its efforts because this would in many cases mean being substituted by missionary educators. The Christian agency, it said, was a very small and unrepresentative one in India, and it was private Indian agency that should be developed with state support.177 Indian opinion collected by the Commission revealed that Indians by this time found secularized government schools a safe religious option as compared to mission schools.178 The efforts of Christian missionary educationists to limit competition in the Indian education market were effectively squashed by Indian politics and by the new educational and political priorities of the Government.

Denominational universities: secular education and religious identity in the century While pressure was building up to restrict doctrinal instruction in aided schools, especially missionary schools, from the beginning of the twentieth century, Indians also pressurized the Government to modify its 1854 policy of nondenominational universities. In 1916 and 1920, the Hindu University at Banaras and the Muslim University at Aligarh came into existence. None of these were ‘Oriental’ colleges of the sort Leitner had tried to create; they were modern universities where religion was only a symbol of cultural and communal pride and, to some extent, a premise for securing autonomy from state control. The Aligarh University grew out of the Muhammadan AngloOriental College, established by Sayyid Ahmad in 1878,179 and the Banaras Hindu University out of a Hindu university movement with squabbling




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leaders: the conservative Sanatan Dharm Mahasabha, led by Madan Mohan Malaviya on the one hand, and the maverick Irish theosophist Annie Besant on the other. The two groups were never able to overcome their mutual suspicion but were forced to subscribe to a common scheme under government pressure.180 For both Aligarh and Banaras, the Government agreed to modify its policy of a formally secular university system, in the hope of earning political returns through patronage of indigenous, explicitly religious concerns, drawing Indians away from disaffection and nationalism. But the working of these universities revealed the inexorable marginalization of religion in Indian education. While doctrinal instruction might be an issue of community politics and pride, it had few real takers. Both universities reserved the right to require religious education of their students and also to reserve the membership of their executive bodies to their respective religious communities. However, the price paid for government patronage and inclusion in the mainstream of education consisted of secularization policies: students of other religions had to be admitted, as well as protected from doctrinal instruction. The Banaras Hindu University Act, XVI, of 1915, provided that the university would be open to persons of all classes, castes and creeds, but provision would be made for religious instruction and examination in the Hindu religion only.181 Even so, such provision would be made by regulations passed by the Court of the University; the Act itself did not make religious instruction compulsory, a fact that was bitterly resented by Madan Mohan Malaviya, who asserted that one of the primary reasons for the new university was to provide for instruction in Hindu religion to Hindu students.182 The university did have a Faculty of Theology and a Committee of Religious Instruction for students in boarding houses.183 But conflicts within these bodies, especially the refusal of conservative Brahman professors of religion to accept a non-Brahman as their colleague, showed that Hinduism was still very far from becoming a ‘faith’ that could be taught in a common acceptable form to its subscribers.184 At the Muhammadan Anglo- Oriental College of Aligarh, religious study had never been very successful. There was no department of theology, and even the Urdu section soon disappeared. Although Sayyid Ahmad found it politic to distance himself and his radical views, to frame a scheme of religious education generally acceptable to all Muslims proved unfeasible. The Deobandi ulama, among others, rejected the college for its inclusion of Shia Muslims. The separate Sunni and Shia Committees of Directors of Instruction in Theology rarely met, and students had a sole hour’s doctrinal instruction per week concentrating on rules of ritual cleanliness, prayers and laws of marriage, dower and divorce. Occasionally there were efforts to extend the scope of religious education at Aligarh, for example, that led by Shibli Numani, who left in disgust in 1898.185 Thereafter, Aligarh was very much an Oxbridge institution, its university syllabus aimed at producing Muslim gentlemen, trimmed with minimal collective rituals and


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doctrinal instruction that reinforced identity rather than deepen religious learning.186

The Hindu and Muslim universities were specifically intended to fulfil the alleged needs of the respective religious groups, but as public institutions they had to legally restrict their (minimal) doctrinal instruction to members of that group only. Christian missionary schools, on the other hand, had always sought and secured student clientele across the social board. While Indians found their educational package attractive, they revealed their political teeth in the early twentieth century, demanding that as public institutions Christian schools play by the rules of the education market in India: i.e. that they limit doctrinal instruction only to students of their own religion. This was completely opposed to the ostensible purpose of Christian missionary schools, i.e. to evangelize, but subsequent events showed that the political demand was inexorable. In 1916, Mirza Sami-Ullah Beg, a young Muslim League member of the United Provinces Legislative Council, proposed that in any nongovernmental educational institution that received supportive funds from the Government there should be a conscience clause in operation. Beg argued that since the Christian missionaries took about half the amount of grant-money given to private educational institutions in the United Provinces, they owed it to the Indian taxpayer not to impose any unwanted religious instruction on their children, the principle being the same as in all ‘civilized’ countries, such as England, Ireland and Japan. In supporting Beg, Hindu members such as Gokaran Nath Mishra and C. Y. Chintamani asked rhetorically whether the Government could tolerate a similar school set up by the Muhammadans which, while taking government grants, imposed the learning of the Holy Quran on all students, Hindu and Christian.187 The Government disagreed with these interpretations. The judicial secretary O’Donnell offered several arguments to show why a conscience clause was not needed: missionary schools did not undertake direct proselytization, he said; the Indian members disagreed. O’Donnell used the pragmatic argument: missionary schools took religious instruction as essential and would refuse a grant given on condition of a conscience clause. Since they would not be able to run without a government grant, a gap would be created that could not be filled by the Government. C. Y. Chintamani argued that institutions such as the Madras Christian College were too prestigious for their managers to contemplate closing down and quoted the Principal of the Madras Christian College, Dr W. Miller, in his support. O’Donnell tried to point out the difference between India and England; in India there was no church allied with the state, holding a monopoly of the education sector and forcing unwanted doctrines on non-members. Indians had nothing to


Secular public education: the conscience clause in legislature


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fear from their religiously neutral government, which gave them the option of going to government schools or starting their own schools and seeking government aid. Chintamani now argued that the request for a grant was often refused to a new school when there was already a functioning school in the area, even if it were a missionary school, on grounds of economy. At this point, the Indian argument moved a step forward. Motilal Nehru said that the question was not whether Indians had alternatives to missionary schools or not; the Government had no right to ask Indians to take or leave missionary schools, since these were funded by public money, which was derived from taxes that the Indians paid. Therefore, every Indian had a right to access a public (i.e. state-run or state-aided) school and should not be subjected to interference with his religious rights for this benefit. Pushed into a corner, O’Donnell got technical and pointed out that Christian organizations were no exception and that madrasas such as Nadwat al-Ulama also received a government grant and taught a syllabus in which religion could hardly be separated from secular instruction. Unless all such institutions were deprived of government support, the conscience clause could not be universally applied.188 In threatening to retract the government policy of ‘neo- Orientalism’ which had led to state patronage of a number of semi-religious educational institutions, O’Donnell was ignoring the thrust of the Indian argument. The leaders of modern India wanted to access desirable educational institutions, including those created ostensibly for the purpose of Christian evangelization, without facing the threat of religious proselytization. Indeed, they did want to have the cake and eat it too. The Nadwat was a non-issue, because nobody other than a Muslim without alternative opportunities or without worldly ambitions went to this institution, even if the Government used formal similarity to squash the legal demand raised by the modern Indian leaders. Put to the vote, the 1916 resolution was lost, but all Indians other than the princes voted in favour of it.189 Between 1916 and 1947 the demand for a conscience clause remained alive, and although Christian schools were the most important issue, the principle became generalized. Other institutions, especially those run by Indian proselytizing organizations, were also the target of such legislative efforts. In 1917, Sayyid Ali Nabi, an Indian Muslim member of the United Provinces Legislative Council, again raised the question of the conscience clause, this time in relation to the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic school at Aligarh. He asked whether Hindu religious instruction was compulsory for non-Hindu boys in this school, and, if so, whether the Government would prohibit this. O’Donnell answered that the school was aided by a government grant and that religious instruction was given in it, but no parent was obliged to send his ward to this school given that there were other secondary schools in Aligarh. He made it clear that compulsory religious instruction was not incompatible with the receipt of a government


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grant-in-aid.190 This is where Indian leaders disagreed most conspicuously with the British.

In 1921, the Government of India decided to form a Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), which could advise the imperial government on all matters of educational policy. Retrenched after two years, it was revived in 1935.191 In the 1940s with the independence of India a possibility, it discussed with some urgency the possible religious policy in education. During these discussions, the contemporary British Education Act of 1944 was referred to repeatedly.192 This British Act was that of a Conservative government, but one supported by the Labour Party. It was framed by the then President of the Board of Education, Richard Austen Butler, who had the indifferent support of Prime Minister Churchill. The Act provided for a necessary weekly minimum of religious instruction in every county (i.e. state) and voluntary (aided) school. The teaching was to be according to a ‘nondenominational’ syllabus agreed upon within the county and was to be subject to inspection. The conscience clause of 1870 was retained, i.e. parents were able to withdraw their children from such instruction, but the period of instruction was no longer conveniently located at the beginning or end of the school day.193 Although nondenominational, the religious education proposed was unwaveringly Christian, based on the Bible. In fact, the law arose out of a generalized feeling that greater Christian instruction was required to prevent horrors such as the Second World War recurring. Cambridgeshire, in presenting its revised RE syllabus in 1949 stated that the war had been fought on the issue of Christianity versus paganism.194 To arrive at this Christian consensus, Butler negotiated successfully with the heads of all the major churches and denominations, although the Roman Catholic Church was wary of such state- controlled Christian instruction. Churchill himself called the agreed syllabuses ‘county council creeds’, referring to their synthetic nature, and once as ‘Zoroastrianism’, no doubt alluding to their exoticism.195 However, post-war RE in Britain was hardly Zoroastrianism; it did not even propose to include the tenets of Judaism.196 In its first meeting in 1944, the Religious Committee of the CABE, chaired by the Anglican bishop of Lahore, G. D. Barnes, proposed similar nondenominational religious education for Indian students. The members recommended that religious instruction should, as in Britain, become a formal part of the school curriculum, given its importance in the development of the child’s personality and that most parents were too ignorant to undertake it themselves. They wistfully recommended, as in Britain, an agreed syllabus, expert teachers, the use of prime hours of instruction and the provision for a conscience clause.197


The divergent trajectories of Britain and India, 1940–50


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But the interpretation of India’s major religions as denominations could only go so far. At the second meeting, the Committee disagreed within itself while discussing whether the RE syllabus should consist only of general ethical principles or whether it should inform students about the distinct tenets of particular religions. Important Muslim members, including Khan Bahadur Dr M. Hasan, Vice- Chancellor of Dhaka University, felt that instruction in religion-specific doctrines was a necessity, at least for Muslims. Afraid that administrative hell would break loose if each school was to organize the teaching of different religious doctrines, and if government inspectors were required to supervise them, the Committee abandoned the idea of a common syllabus. Failure to prevail with the common syllabus led to the pious conclusion that religious education was desirable but should not be financed by the state.198

Constituting ‘Indian secularism’: Article 28 When the time came to actually legislate, pious statements melted away quickly. The Fundamental Rights Advisory Committee of the Constituent Assembly, headed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a right-wing Hindu Gujarati Congressman, tried to skirt the issue by only adding the conscience clause to the existing state educational policy. The then Clause 16 read: ‘No person attending any school maintained or receiving aid out of public funds shall be compelled to take part in any religious instruction that may be given in the school or to attend religious worship held in the school or in any premises attached thereto.’199 This permitted aided schools to continue to offer religious instruction as before, with the provision of a conscience clause. As for state schools, the matter was complicated by education having been a ‘provincial’ issue since 1921, that is, educational policies were made by the provincial governments, which had achieved some autonomy and democracy since the Montague–Chelmsford Reforms of 1919. Some provinces had permitted religious instruction within school premises when requested by the students; others had placed restrictions on its being financed by the school’s funds or taking place during school hours.200 Unlike Patel, the main body of the Constituent Assembly refused to let this laissez-faire policy continue. The two main amendments proposed, both by Bengali women, pointed at two distinct routes that state religious policy in education could take. The first, by Mrs Purnima Banerjee, approximated closely to the British route of an agreed syllabus: ‘All religious education given in educational institutions receiving State aid will be in the nature of the elementary philosophy of comparative religions calculated to broaden the pupils’ mind rather than such as will foster sectarian exclusiveness.’ Mrs Banerjee’s primary concern was the regressive nature of pathshalas and maktabs in Bengal which took


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state aid but did not teach the students to appreciate each other’s religion in a manner beneficial to the nation. In contrast, Mrs Renuka Ray (a Brahmo) proposed absolute distancing of the state from religious instruction. Her amendment read: ‘No denominational religious instruction shall be provided in schools maintained by the State. No person attending any school or educational institution recognized or aided by the State shall be compelled to attend any such religious instruction.’ With the impending reality of a Hindu-majority government looming, the discussion proceeded differently than in the 1916 United Provinces Legislative Assembly or even in the CABE meetings of 1944 and 1945. Without exception the Muslim and Christian members of the Constituent Assembly sided with Mrs Renuka Ray and found Mrs Banerjee’s proposal of an agreed syllabus not just impracticable but threatening. Right-wing Hindus, including K. M. Munshi and Sardar Patel himself, thought total prohibition of religious instruction in state schools, as proposed by Mrs Renuka Ray’s amendment, unnecessary. But a number of liberal Hindu members, such as Dr S. Radhakrishnan, future President of India, supported Ray, and the clause was referred to a special committee.201 When the clause came back for discussion to the Constituent Assembly more than a year later, Mrs Renuka Ray’s amendment had been incorporated. A Hindu member from the United Provinces, Professor Shiban Lal Saksena, complained that to prohibit religious instruction altogether from wholly state-maintained schools was an unnecessary deprivation of the majority community, and it should have been sufficient to offer a conscience clause to the children of minority communities. He did not have much support.202 From Hindus and Muslims complaining of imposed Christian instruction in 1916, the issue had turned, by 1947, into one of protecting the minorities, including Christians, against the possibility of Hindu religious education imposed by the state. The Indian minorities, even after the partition of the country, were sufficiently numerous and politically important for no such state-sponsored Hindu religious education to be possible. Also, the religions in question were too distinct for any agreed syllabus to be even remotely feasible. State education was destined to be secular. The question now remained: how much leeway was to be granted to minority communities to partake of public funds and to impart doctrinally specific education. Mrs Renuka Ray herself urged the prohibition of religious education in aided schools as much as in state schools. However, a general rule such as this would negatively affect all the incompletely secularized maktabs and pathshalas receiving state aid, the Aligarh and Banaras Universities and the Sanskrit Colleges. To ban religious instruction in all schools using public funds would not just modify the desirable Christian schools but would also destroy all these other educational institutions which had developed as the possessions of religious communities, Hindu




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and non-Hindu. The Assembly concluded in favour of a conscience clause to cover all these institutions which retained their right to state support.203 It was well comprehended that this would be sufficient to neutralize the threat of Christian and non- Christian missionary pedagogy. All knew that the law would rarely inconvenience the teachers of community-specific institutions such as the maktab, the madrasa or any neo-Vedic schools. The denominational universities had, of course, included their own conscience clauses right from their inception.

Conclusion: the secularization and ‘de-secularization’ of Indian ‘faith schools’ The above chapter has traced a history whereby a political conjunction of Utilitarianism and Christianity in the 1830s led the British Indian government to withdraw public funds from religious instruction, which at this stage implied classical education within the Hindu and Muslim traditions. This withdrawal enunciated two principles: the formal equidistance of all religions from the state and the practical possibility of state support on the basis of criteria premised on the principle of public good. Even if the mechanics of funding withdrawal from existing institutions proved complicated and ultimately divided by region, to a certain extent the new policies ‘freed’ the market in education, creating a favourable field for Christian missionary entrepreneurs in education, who were able to negotiate government policy and laws to offer a combination of secular and doctrinal instruction to their students. Their success was mediated by a legal arrangement for grants-in-aid for useful education and a cultural prejudice that judged European education most useful. This is where most other scholars stop, but this is only the beginning of the story. Christian dominance of the Indian education market was very quickly undermined by a number of developments: the growth of a sense of state responsibility for mass primary education, the mushrooming of private Indian educational entrepreneurship and a vernacular ‘neo- Orientalism’ modified to suit ‘special cases’ of alleged vulnerability. By the 1880s, Christian educationists found themselves buffeted by legal, political and ‘market’ forces beyond their control: the demands of their vociferous clientele, interventionist regulation by a bureaucratic government and by direct competition both from non- Christian entrepreneurs and an expanding state education sector as well. While some of them attempted to stall such developments by demanding the legal implementation of a certain version of the ‘free market’, which implied state withdrawal, and ‘religious freedom’, which implied institutional autonomy against state regulation, their arguments failed to cut ice with the Government, now more susceptible to Indian opinion, especially where religion was concerned.


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The Indian arguments about education and religious freedom in the late nineteenth century were articulated from two conflicting premises: the right of the individual student to the freedom of conscience, and the collective right of the religious community to ensure conformity by its members and autonomy for its institutions. British statesmen were far more willing to recognize the disciplinarian collectivism of the second demand rather than the radical individualism of the first, so communities, rather than individuals, became the prime location of religious freedom in colonial India. The latter trend produced the new denominational universities of the twentieth century, but the first principle remained alive in order to impose on these institutions restrictive conscience clauses, in order to protect the rights of students of other religions. In a good exposition of the religionto- community process, the Aligarh and Banaras Hindu Universities proved outstandingly unsuccessful in incorporating religion in any significant way in their courses of studies, while ‘neo- Orientalist’ schools with a certain religious content became essentially schools for the ‘backward’, demanded by elites but not patronized by them. The final change, that is, the imposition of the conscience clause on all educational institutions that were aided by the state, appeared only after independence, and by that time these were aimed at protecting students against Hindu as much as Christian proselytization. The principle of state non-interference in religious instruction had been adopted, modified and extended all around by Indian politics, restricting any kind of religious education in the public sphere, not only the ‘false’ instruction in Hinduism and Islam that Macaulay had been concerned about, or the Christian instruction that Telang, and later Motilal Nehru had complained against. But the constitutional provisions in question were not simply devices for excluding religion, they were also methods to include it: permitting low-status community-specific educational institutions to receive state patronage. Depriving these institutions, which did not concern any person other than a member of the community in question, was not found necessary by the political mainstream. None of this happened because of British Christianity, or British secularism, whenever that arose. With a different social pool and political context, Britain devised its own educational policies at home, which, in the 1940s, consisted of formal Christian instruction in all schools. State- controlled RE was retained and expanded, through constant political conflict, to include information regarding all the major world religions present in the country. By contrast, state-aided Christian schools in India, retaining their mainstream positions, voluntarily adopted a moral-science or ethical-instruction syllabus for non- Christian students, offering doctrinal instruction only to Christian students of the same denomination. The recent political and legal disputes surrounding ‘faith schools’ in Britain and MEIs in India still reveal traces of the connected history of Britain and




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India, as much as they point to their distinct trajectories. St Stephen’s College has in recent times undergone a change in orientation in the top managerial posts, and, in the view of prominent alumni of the college, the direction has been towards religious bigotry. What has happened in substantive terms is the administrative reservation of a large quota of places for Christian students, especially students from dalit Christian background. There have also been cosmetic revisions, as in the case of the college’s website, which now declares itself a ‘religious foundation drawing inspiration from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ’.204 In short, St Stephen’s is poised to become more similar to British ‘faith schools’, and the fears expressed for its eventual slide towards bigotry are very similar to those expressed in Britain about ‘faith schools’. Except that, in India, it is not St Stephen’s the faith school in law that arouses such fears, but the possibility that it might actually close its doors to the largely non- Christian elite Indian public who have so far been its patrons. Patently, the Indian MEIs are not faith schools in the British sense, but a distinctive feature of Indian secularism. The socio-legal position of Christian educational institutions in India reflects the historical process by which ‘religion’ was transformed into the private possession of legally defined religious communities in India, but only incompletely so as far as Indian Christians were concerned.


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2

Although St Stephen’s College now officially claims to be a ‘religious foundation’, it is obvious that minority educational institutions are ‘religious’ only in a very specific sense. They are religious institutions because they are claimed as such by people who define themselves with reference to a religious community and because certain constitutional and administrative provisions dealing with religion have been judicially interpreted to recognize this ‘religious’ claim as a valid one. In the previous chapter, we have seen how the language of religious rights, mingled with that of privacy and autonomy, facilitated claims both against state intervention and for state support. In this chapter, I will discuss another aspect of the same process: how the claim of religious autonomy was utilized by various parties interested in structuring and disciplining the community itself. Property, with all its associated modern claims of privacy, autonomy and civil rights (negatively, against appropriation by the state and damage by others and positively, the freedom to utilize as one sees fit), provided legal occasion as well as political vocabulary in debates over the state’s legitimate relationship with religious institutions in India. In this process, Christians played multiple significant roles. The story this chapter tells begins with British Christian activism of the early nineteenth century and describes how such activism led to a drastic ‘privatization’ of religious institutions and property in India, which was comparable with, but far more precipitous than, developments in contemporary Britain. The consequences of erecting this rather rigid and precocious wall of separation were multiple, but it is argued here that the most significant long-term effect of this development was the crippling of state authority, both judicial and administrative, over religious institutions in India. It was not as if British Christian activists intended such an outcome; that was the result of various Indian individuals and collectives utilizing the laws dissociating the Government from ‘Indian’, i.e. nonChristian, religious institutions and their property, in order to evade and to contest regulation and supervision. Ironically, such legal manoeuvring became a distinctive feature of Indian secularism, producing long-term


Regulating Trust: Law and Policy of Religious Endowments in India

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frustration for the ‘public-minded’ new leaders of India who struggled in vain to force the managers of wealthy religious institutions to act like the trustees of public wealth that they were supposed to be. What is perhaps even more ironic is that such entrenched Indian religious bosses behaved not very differently from their ‘western’ counterparts within the Christian churches in India, which, as we shall see, were subject to a completely different set of legal arrangements. I am pointing to the way in which the ‘heads’ of Indian Christian churches, who were, in this period, mainly European or American clergy and missionaries, adopted a similar language of ownership and autonomy from state intervention, i.e. property and privacy, in order to defeat the claims of their Indian congregations for organizing the church differently. When taken to court, this racially demarcated hierarchy proved outstandingly successful in defeating claims for organizing and deploying religious authority according to the wishes of the community, claims that were of a piece with those raised within all the other religious communities in India and which were subject to similar frustrations. This chapter, then, is about the history of laws regulating a special form of trust property created by religious endowments, about the century-long politics that gave the Indian religious trust law its distinctive character and about the role of Christians in that process. Trusts, especially religious trusts, were, of course, not just a colonial matter; they exercised leading churchmen, politicians and lawyers working in and on Britain equally during the nineteenth century, and, as in the case of education, laws, ideas and policies about the trust property created by religious endowments bounced to and fro between India and Britain. But, by the early twentieth century, the Indian and British trajectories had become remarkably distinct. This chapter reconstructs that history of tangled origins and developments, which alone can explain the apparently exotic (and marginal) politico-legal demands that keep bubbling up on the surface of Indian secularism, such as the constitution of the Taj Mahal as a ‘private religious endowment’.205

Redefining religion, relocating authority As discussed in the introduction, disputes over the nature and purpose of religious institutions were premised on a new notion of ‘religion as community’, emerging both in India and Britain in the nineteenth century. This religious development was inextricably connected with novel political principles and techniques and, more broadly, to new ways of conceiving and exercising authority that we may call, for want of a better word, democracy. As diocesan revival emerged in nineteenth- century Britain, ordinary lay parishioners of the Church of England expressed a demanding set of expectations from the church which they sustained with their taxes.206 In India,


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Religious Endowments 53

Many learned Brahmuns are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idolatry, and are well informed of the nature of the pure mode of divine worship; but as in the rites, ceremonies, and festivals of idolatry they find the source of their comforts and fortune, and they not only never fail to protect idol-worship from all attacks, but even advance and encourage it to the utmost of their power, by keeping the knowledge of their scriptures concealed from the rest of the people.207 The legal outcomes of these very similar religious processes turned out to be quite distinct. In Britain itself, the process revealed that since the Tudors, the Church of England was so essentially a part of the state structure that it possessed no specialized organs for resolving disputes over appropriate ceremonial by its clergy. ‘Establishment’, that is a legally privileged connection between the state and the church, meant increasing discomfiture for traditional religious specialists with the increasingly regulatory approach of the modern state. During one such stand-off, High Church clergy were accused of deviating from the legally recognized forms of worship (another British speciality) and were subjected to trial by ecclesiastical courts, which were presided over by judges who were not clergy and who were not even necessarily members of the Church of England. Very reasonably (in the modern view), the High Church defence said that such courts were not qualified to judge disputes over appropriate use of ceremonies within the Anglican church.208 As the ecclesiastical courts were gradually dissociated from the ‘secular’ courts and moved under the control of Anglican episcopal authority, there still remained the need for an organ that could make or at least amend the ‘laws’ such a court would apply. This was achieved in 1919, by the Church Assembly (Powers) Act, which created the Church Assembly, thereafter the principal governing body of the Church of England, consisting of all the bishops in the Provinces of Canterbury and York, along with a House of Laity. Since 1970, by the Synodical Government Measure 1969, the Church Assembly has been replaced by a General Synod, consisting of three chambers: the House of Clergy, House of Laity and House of Bishops. Even today, certain kinds of legislation by the Synod require formal permission from the Parliament, and the Parliament, in turn, may legislate for the Church of England, although by convention it does not do so any longer without the latter’s consent.209 In the nineteenth century, although Indian religions were evolving in very similar ways, this did not lead to the creation of centralized, bureaucratized


as we have discussed in the Introduction, similar arguments were made about the corruption of priests, and the discourse about the right of the community to its religion became hegemonic in the nineteenth century. In a pseudonymous publication attributed to him, Rammohan Roy complained that priests were well aware of the nature of true religion but kept common people in ignorance to further their material advantages:


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The British and Anglo-Indian law of religious trusts: religion, charity and regulation In British as well as in Indian law, endowment implies the perpetual dedication of wealth in the form of lands or money for a person or use.211 With respect to a person, provision might be in the form of a woman’s dowry, or, in more recent connotation, a life-insurance policy.212 Support for an institution may be general213 or specifically intended for some of its activities, including provision for maintaining a person in a certain office.214 The kind of endowments we will talk about here usually originated in gifts or bequests, and the act of endowing created a kind of property called ‘trust’. The double entendre in the word ‘trust’ is no coincidence at all; the idea being of property ‘entrusted’ to the care of a person or an organization, who would manage it for the benefit of others. Hence, the English law of trusts distinguishes between two simultaneous rights in the same property: that of the trustee to hold and manage it and that of the beneficiary. Trusts are broadly classified into private and public, private trusts being intended for specific individuals while public ones, intended for religious and charitable purposes (including church property), are meant to benefit the general public or a sufficiently large section of it.215 Different legal conditions are imposed on private and public trusts; public trusts, for example, can be created in perpetuity, unlike private trusts, but they are subject to bureaucratic supervision by the Charity Commissioners, again unlike private trusts.216 The Charity Commission was a permanent bureaucratic result of social, political and legal developments in nineteenth- century Britain which led to intense state regulation of religious institutions rather than a simple dissociation of the state from religion, as might be expected. Paradoxically, it is only this scale of state intervention that allowed the appearance of an effective217 legal form of property known as the religious and charitable trust and intended for the ‘public’. Things turned out quite differently in India. Indian trust law, while being largely similar to and derived from the English, recognizes a special entity known as the ‘private religious trust’, which has absolutely no equivalent in English law, because British religious (and charitable) trusts are by definition public. Under Hindu218 as well as Muslim personal law,219 a donor may create a religious trust to benefit members of a particular family (including his/her own),220 or the disciples of a particular religious teacher.221 This


religious institutions autonomous of the state, nor did there emerge effective administrative or financial regulation and public auditing of reconstituted religious institutions. There is no equivalent in India of the Charity Commissioners,210 in spite of clear efforts to create similar methods of regulation. To understand this divergence, let us turn to the history of the law of religious trusts in colonial India.


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eccentric form of ‘private property’ was actively used by Indians against other Indians, whether to ward off calls for bureaucratic state intervention in the interest of ‘public good’ or to simply thwart other rival claimants to the relevant entitlements. Even with ‘public religious trusts’, the British colonial state was timid in its supervision. This is because by the mid-nineteenth century domestic (i.e. British) political disapproval of bureaucratic involvement in non- Christian religious institutions prevented the formation of any body on the model of the Charity Commission. The state’s role vis-à-vis such institutions was limited to the judicial arbitration of disputes, especially after Act 20 of 1863, an Act to Enable the Government to Divest Itself of the Management of Religious Endowments, was passed. This legislation originated in that heady mixture of Evangelicalism, humanitarianism and Utilitarianism that shaped the Age of Reform in the 1830s. Within this political discourse, humanitarianism and doctrinal arguments were espoused interchangeably; patronizing Hindu temples was perceived to be an evil because such state encouragement upheld a false religion which not only condemned its subscribers to an eternity in Hell but also to worldly suffering on Earth. An examination of such British postures towards imperial policy reveals how distant and reified political rhetoric necessarily is from the details of policy-making and yet how influential sincerely held prejudices may be. As frustrated British officials in India repeatedly pointed out, the muchdenounced patronage of non- Christian religious institutions simply meant in many cases the responsibility of ensuring the due application of ‘public funds’ and the Government could not very well withdraw without locating appropriate Indian authority to act as trustees for such funds. Different sections of Indians of course rapidly presented themselves as such competent authorities, who could safely relieve the British Government of its embarrassing association with non- Christian religious institutions. The difficulty was that such claims did not always appear entirely credible to government officials, especially since many such claimants were the very persons whose allegedly despotic and corrupt authority over such institutions and their funds had been under investigation over the past few decades. On the other hand, as the nineteenth century wore on, differently constituted Indian leadership began claiming greater competence to be designated managers of institutions and funds that, according to them, belonged to a religious public. It is vital to the history of ‘Indian secularism’ that for the rest of the nineteenth century such assertions, which were transparently claiming access to state power, remained largely frustrated because of official government reluctance to reassociate itself with Indian religious institutions. Such reluctance derived very largely due to post-Mutiny paranoia and to the social conservatism of the colonial state, paranoia that attempts to re-establish state regulation may be perceived as intervention by Indians, and conservatism that made the regime seek ‘traditional’ Indian allies from precisely that




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class to which the landed religious lords belonged. The Mutiny then did not cause any radical change in policy trends but ensured that the reformist-led pre-Mutiny policy of dissociating from non-Christian religious institutions would not be reversed – a corrective to established historical periodization. In the twentieth century, some alterations did take place as new Indian elites in legislatures successfully asserted that a rigid exegesis of ‘neutrality’ was leading to the squandering of public resources. Rather than reverting to supervision by district magistrates, as had been the case prior to the Age of Reform, the by-now- entrenched policy of non-intervention in Indian religious institutions led to the creation of entirely new institutions: special ‘ethnicized’ departments, such as the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Board, which could spare British officials direct association with non- Christian religious institutions. However, the legal devices and political arguments sharpened over the preceding century and more in order to resist state regulation continued to frustrate the effectiveness of such bureaucratic supervision and to generate new legal challenges in every decade that followed.

The Company tradition: an un- Christian arrangement Let us begin by considering what it was that the British reformists complained against. Traditionally, the East India Company tended towards parsimony in religious spending. The Company’s charter of 1600 provided for chaplains to administer the sacraments to Company servants when abroad. Penalties were prescribed for non-attendance of prayers at the Surat factory, one of the earliest settlements in India,222 but these were rarely enforced. Life in the British ‘factories’ or trading depots was not unduly burdened with religiosity; many of the chaplains were busy businessmen themselves.223 Things changed as the Company began to act as government in parts of India by the late eighteenth century. As this period corresponded with the religious revival (and reorientation) in Britain, demands were raised in the name of British expatriates for the ‘right’ of British subjects, to Christian ministration when serving overseas. The ‘Clapham Sect’ of Evangelical Parliamentarians, led by William Wilberforce, MP for Hull, argued in 1793, when the Company’s charter came up for renewal, for the inclusion of a clause permitting the institution of an Anglican establishment in India. This conscientious proposal to restore British expatriate religiosity as well as to extend the benefits of true religion to Britain’s Asiatic subjects was opposed by the majority of the Company’s stockholders on grounds that it would threaten the Indians and cause a popular uprising against the Company, affecting its highly profitable activities.224 There was also a less exigent theological context to this disavowal; eighteenthcentury theologians were unconvinced of the possibility of communicating the Christian message to those unacquainted with it already, and their resignation did


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not cause much discomfort given their ambivalence about the relative value of different religions. Sydney Smith, among others, thought that the Hindus were better left alone than subjected to the religious ministrations of cobblers, revealing his class snobbery against the earliest generation of Nonconformist missionaries such as William Carey.225 To the gall of British Evangelicals, the Company, while denying its Christian responsibilities, welcomed the opportunity to inherit rights of control over the lavishly endowed Hindu and Muslim religious institutions, both for their revenue potential and for the political legitimacy such involvement offered. Pre- colonial Indian rulers, both Muslim and Hindu, had complex transactional relationships with religious institutions. These involved the exchange of honours and resources, serving to mutually legitimate the sacred and royal regimes and to incorporate local elites attached to such institutions into the political hierarchy.226 Noblesse oblige required kings to make provision for the large expenses of such institutions, including ritual necessities as well as the livelihood of the huge number of people the religious institutions employed.227 In most cases, such provision was made by granting title to revenues from lands without the obligation of paying taxes to the state. These tax-free land grants were called madad-i-mash in Indian administrative parlance.228 Such transactional practice between the king and the temple, dargah or imambarah229 continued even when Indian rulers submitted to British tutelage.230 Where the Company acquired direct territorial control, as in the immense province of Bengal, and in parts of presentday Andhra Pradesh, it was happy to use the political legitimacy and revenues derived from local sacred complexes. In 1751, the Tirupati-Tirumala temple complex in North Arcot, probably the richest Hindu religious complex in India, passed from the Nawab of Arcot to the East India Company. The Muslim kings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had appointed amaldars,231 whose authority over the temple and its resources was confirmed in return for a huge yearly payment. The British Company Government retained the same system, hiring a recently displaced amaldar, and the system continued for the rest of the eighteenth century, although rival claims by the French and Haidar Ali had to be beaten off from time to time.232 Fifty years later, Governor- General Wellesley, on conquering Orissa from the Marathas in 1803, arranged for a Bengali pandit to recommend British benevolence to the priests of the Jagannath temple, since control of this temple was deemed vital to the security of political authority over Orissa.233 Only one Evangelical in the Governor- General’s Council, George Udny, felt that the British Government ought not to collect taxes from pilgrims to the temple. All the rest saw no reason to deprive the Government of taxes from Hindu temples, which were collected in other parts of the country.234 But as the British Government soon discovered, involvement with Hindu religious institutions could be a very expensive and harassing proposition.




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The Company and its Indian ‘churches’: trust, ‘corruption’ and entitlement As the Company state stabilized and grew in India, rising British ideas about the appropriate deployment of religious and charitable property, as well as concerns for the proper marshalling of public revenue led to efforts at greater surveillance over Indian religious institutions in the early nineteenth century. Such efforts involved the British District officers in chronic conflict with the Indian managers of these rich complexes. At the same time, as Arjun Appadurai has shown, Indians very quickly appropriated the British legal language of public trust and embezzlement of public funds and deployed it as additional arsenal in rivalries over the resources and privileges of such institutions.235 To a significant extent, such efforts at surveillance led to both conflict as well as systematization of authority structures within such institutions. It also transformed a diverse set of privileges into the singular one of property, which proved to be the most effective deterrent to state regulation in the decades to come. A spate of legislations in the first two decades of the nineteenth century formally launched Indian religious institutions in their new avatar as religious trusts. The Bengal Regulation IV of 1809 elaborated new rules for the collection of pilgrim tax and the use of funds within the Jagannath temple. It reinstated the Raja of Khurda as supervisor of the temple, although he had been imprisoned for fighting against the British in 1804. Although his earlier claims that the Jagannath temple belonged entirely to him were paid no attention, in his new administrative capacity he certainly gained a great deal of power over the affairs and funds of the temple. In spite of conflicts with the district bureaucracy, the Raja managed to establish hereditary managerial control over the temple by 1818.236 In the Madras Presidency, the Board of Revenue decided in 1796 to substitute the rights of the endowed institutions to make direct revenue collections with equivalent grants from the Company treasury. Temple managers were to commit themselves by a bond to the due appropriation of the ‘Church’ funds and to submit themselves to any enquiry that the Board might wish to make.237 At Tirupati in 1801, it was declared that all temples and their servants were under the authority of the District Collector of North Arcot, who could punish any servant of the temple for misappropriating temple funds or for acting against the interests of the temple.238 Of broader jurisdiction were the Regulation XIX of 1810 Bengal and Regulation VII of 1817 Madras, which permitted the supervision of endowed


In a flush of benevolence, Governor- General Lord Wellesley began by abolishing the tax on pilgrims to the Jagannath temple, but when it was found that the expenses of the temple were immense, and without the proceeds of the pilgrim tax, the British Government would have to pay large annual grants to compensate, the tax was reimposed in 1809.


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Indian religious institutions by the Board of Revenue, with provisions for retrieving resources endowed for religious or charitable purposes which may have been ‘fraudulently’ diverted to personal use.239 These laws were closely associated with the effort to plug what were seen as illegitimate leaks in public revenue; hence, during the settlement of revenue demands in the North-Western Provinces in the 1810s, a large number of claims to tax-free land, asserted to be religious endowments, were cancelled,240 causing a great deal of Indian resentment. Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that the concept of public trust and the related conflicts over the ‘embezzlement of public funds’ were alien to Hindu and Muslim religio-political traditions, within which personalized religious authority made the public–private distinction meaningless. Without disputing the novelty of these developments, I want to move beyond atemporal notions of British legality impacting equally atemporal Indian religiosity. As we have discussed above, early-nineteenth-century British suspicion of personalized authority in religion arose from their contemporary domestic context, in which hereditary claims to privilege were becoming increasingly suspect. Utilitarian perception of the Indian landed classes as parasitic241 were therefore exacerbated where such landed entitlements appeared to be premised on religious claims, since these would have appeared suspiciously similar to private sinecures still being defended by Tories and High Churchmen.

Renouncing idolatry: Evangelical propaganda and a policy turn, 1840–63 To this populist trend was added a religio-cultural one from the 1790s, gathering speed by the 1830s. Increasingly, the dense network of bureaucratic and financial responsibilities acquired by the Company’s government, in connection with Hindu and Muslim religious institutions, was in political opprobrium in Britain. Evangelical propaganda created sufficient political pressure for the Directors to order dissociation of the Company’s government in India from non-Christian religious institutions. However, leaving Indians and their religions alone was not a straightforward matter. No matter what Evangelical Christians might demand and Company directors concede, both untroubled by the nitty-gritty of district administration, the consequent legal and administrative effects were not exactly what had been envisaged. British propaganda proceeded on the assumption that the Company state’s relation with such religious institutions consisted of a species of ‘establishment’ or state patronage. Where the lack of an Anglican establishment was seen as an omission, such non- Christian establishments were pronounced to be excessive commissions, especially by effective combination of humanitarian arguments with the doctrinal. Charles Buchanan, the Evangelical




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Company chaplain and propagandist, spoke and wrote copiously about the horrors of Hindu worship, his books running into several editions in Britain as well as in the USA, describing not only the ‘baleful idolatry’ but also the humanitarian disasters that often met the deluded pilgrims making their way to the Jagannath temple of Puri. Buchanan denounced the ‘Christian Government’, which paid around 69,000 rupees annually to the temple for its expenses (including the wages of courtesans), deriving this money out of a tax on the suffering pilgrims.242 There were also district officers morally anguished by Company policy, such as the Collector of Tanjore, John Cotton, appointed in 1820, who reversed the policy of his predecessor by informing the Raja of Tanjore that he would not help conscript the 20,000–30,000 labourers required to pull the procession- car of the deity. He was soon transferred, but the Sub- Collector, Robert Nelson, continued to complain, leading to a rebuke from the Board of Revenue and the Government of Madras. Nelson was in the right political camp, because pressure grew on the Government with the Bishop of Madras forwarding a petition signed by several military and civil officials, missionaries and chaplains, urging the cessation of conscription for festivals, on humanitarian grounds as well as the duty of a Christian government.243 In 1836, the Board of Revenue was compelled to write to the magistrates prohibiting use of force for attending Hindu festivals.244 Similarly, the fact that the British Government collected pilgrim tax and actually retained surpluses in some years was condemned by missionaries, the British Christian public and, ultimately, the Court of Directors of the Company. The pilgrim tax at Puri, and two other Hindu religious centres, Gaya and Allahabad, was revoked in 1840, in spite of protests from local district officers that this would mean either depriving the temple of an important source of its income, or the government undertaking large additional expenses to compensate.245 Whatever British Christians might have imagined, the laws abolishing pilgrim tax did not immediately end the connection, financial and administrative, of the government of India and the Hindu and Muslim religious institutions. It did, however, usher in a government policy of seeking a single identifiable Indian ‘trustee’ for each religious institution, to whom an endowment, usually in the form of rent-free lands, could be transferred. This measure had the benefit of ending periodic payments from the Treasury, which was constantly criticized by Evangelicals for associating the Government of India with false religions. The selected Indian trustees were in all cases notables with considerable hold over the institution in question, but their control was further entrenched by gaining an exclusive title to the institution’s property. Although as trustees they were not meant to benefit personally from such property, there was little legal or administrative machinery available to prevent them from doing so, and increasingly the Government of India decided that it made better political sense not to disturb such traditional elites and allies.


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At Puri, as the pilgrim tax was abolished, the Sattais Hazari Mahal, a large estate, was transferred to the Raja of Khurda, the Government asserting that he had no hereditary rights of private property in the temple and that the temple was a trust for the use of the whole Hindu community.246 The Government of Bengal continued to pay for the rest of the expenses, about 35,000 rupees per year, which attracted the ire of various missionaries and Evangelical chaplains,247 and, as a result, several more estates were transferred to the Raja, ending all direct payments to the temple by 1863. The Raja made the best use of the situation, demanding better estates, and more of them, on the grounds that he could not be expected to support the temple from the revenues of estates such as Khurda, which were his personal zamindari.248 British interest in conciliating large landholding elites, especially in newly conquered regions,249 added to the quest for identifying single trustees for large public institutions, effectively created large entrenched landholders with immense authority over religious institutions that they saw as their own. The problem arose where such single trustees could not be identified by the farthest stretch of imagination. This was particularly the case in Madras, where the Government was in charge of 7,600 Hindu shrines in 1833. The Government of India instructed Madras to hand over the management of the religious institutions to Indians of the same faith, liable to being sued before a court of justice for breach of duty or trust, while the endowed lands themselves could be managed by the Board of Revenue and the money handed over to the appointed administrators. Accordingly, from 1841 onwards, such administrators were identified: for small temples the priest sufficed, while larger temples required a panchayat (council) of two or more influential persons of the locality, the mathas250 were left to the mahants,251 (a solution that would cause much legal dispute in the following century), while the largest temples, often related to mathas, were left to complex jurisdiction, involving the mahants, dharmakartas252 of the temple, trustees and local committees.253 The big residue left by these ad-hoc disentanglements led to the Religious Endowments Act or the Act XX of 1863, which was intended to release the British ‘Christian Government’ once and for all from administrative responsibility for Hindu and Muslim public religious endowments in the Presidencies of Bengal and Madras.254

The hand-over: Act XX of 1863 In the attempt to transfer the management of non- Christian religious institutions and their property to Indian trustees, a legal problem was discovered. As certain missionaries pointed out, unless Bengal Regulation XIX of 1810 and Madras Regulation VII of 1817 were repealed, the Governments of those two presidencies could not divest themselves of the responsibility to supervise the management of lands dedicated to the support of temples and




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mosques. In the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, the newly formed India Office wrote a severe letter to the Government of India, reminding them of the repeated directives that had been sent from 1841 onwards, ordering the rescinding of the offending regulations. They asserted that while ‘It is the duty of the Government of India to see that those institutions enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law, but it is not called upon to provide specially for their management or superintendence by its own officers’, so long as adequate provision was made for access to established courts of justice for disputes over the management of such institutions.255 A Bill was duly framed by Sir Bartle Frere in order to summarily repeal these laws, but other members of the Viceroy’s council expressed doubts whether, as a result of the new law, the large amount of property possessed by religious institutions in India may be left unguarded.256 H. Forbes asserted that such a measure ‘would lead every Native in India to believe that the endowments of every religious institution in the country were to be given over to general pillage’, effectively destroying the credibility of the Government’s claim of being neutral towards all religions.257 In support, the member for Bengal, A. Sconce, produced the example of the large endowment of Mahomed Mohsin in Bengal, whose property was currently supervised by a manager appointed by the Collector of Jessore. Sconce predicted that the proposed legislation would lead to chaos in the management of this endowment and expressed his inability to distinguish between a ‘Christian Collector and Christian Judge’.258 If British courts could arbitrate disputes over Indian religious matters, why could British administrators not regulate them? After half a century of Evangelical agitation on this matter, Sconce’s arguments for continuing with established practice were unacceptable, but the concerns over the possible political repercussions of an inelegantly hasty renunciation of responsibility did strike a chord. This led to a new Bill that rescinded the Bengal and Madras Regulations only so far as they affected religious endowments and designed Indian administrative bodies to take the place of the British district commissioners. With full support from the district commissioners of Bengal and Madras, it passed into law in 1863.259 The law as formulated reinforced the existing distinction between private and public religious trusts, effectively put in place with the Bengal and Madras Regulations. Act XX of 1863 dealt with religious endowments that were ‘public’,260 in the sense of having been hither to managed by the Government to ensure appropriately charitable deployment of their funds. Public religious endowments were themselves classified according to whether the Government nominated the trustees, managers and other administrators, or those with hereditary trustees (such as the Jagannath temple). For the former, the law provided for the appointment of local committees, of three or more persons, professing the same religion as that of the institution, who would then be handed over the responsibility of




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appointing the managers, as well as managing the endowed properties. The members of these apparently supreme committees were to be appointed by direct elections. The members, once elected, would hold their positions for life, unless removed for proven misconduct.261

Act XX of 1863 replaced a certain definition of ‘public’ (associated with the state) with another (popular, open to a large section of society). But because religions in India were by definition finite entities not coincident with society as a whole, the law had to also conceptualize the boundaries of such a public and the means of affording it any regulatory agency. Sections 14 and 15 of the Act XX of 1863 provided for suing the trustee, manager, superintendent or member of committee of all kinds of public religious establishments by any person with an ‘interest’ in the institution. This ‘interest’ did not have to be pecuniary or direct involvement in the management of the trust. As the law put it, any person having the right of attendance, or having been in the habit of attending, at the performance of the worship or service of any mosque, temple or religious establishment, or of partaking in the benefit of the distribution of alms, shall be deemed to be a person interested within the meaning of the last preceding section.’262 On the face of it, this seemed to formalize a notion of religion as community, in tune with the demands of modern Indians from Rammohan Roy onwards. In reality, the new Indian leadership, who wished to define religious institutions as ‘public trusts’, were frustrated by a number of alternative legal categories that were available, a potent one being the classificatory dispute over whether an endowment was public or private. Where the Trusteeship was hereditary, as with the Raja of Khurda was for the Jagannath temple, imposing the boundaries of behaviour was impossible and became more so when such entrenched elites gained support from modern nationalist leaders as symbols of indigenous culture. Between 1886 and 1887, for example, the Government of India made its last effort to implement the notion that the Jagannath temple and its funds were a public trust, the Collector being instructed to institute a suit against the incumbent Raja (a minor) for misuse of public funds. Supported by a Bengali lawyer, the Raja’s guardian and grandmother, Rani Surjyamani Patamahadei, appealed to Calcutta High Court, which reversed the lower court’s orders for the appointment of a receiver who could be vested with the funds in question. Since at the same time the issue was made into a major grievance by Oriya nationalists, the Government of India simply relinquished any efforts to make the word of law effective.263 As far as the elected supervisory committees were concerned, it was found that the committees’ demands to perform financial audits could be disobeyed


Religion as community property


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with impunity by the working managers of religious institutions, the only remedy being expensive and lengthy legal cases. Since the committee members were honorary and had to bear their own expenses for their publicmindedness, litigation was rarely a viable option except where it attracted sufficiently broad political interest. Besides, given the clause of life membership, the committees themselves became virtual local oligopolies.264 In Madras, there were a series of legislative efforts introduced from 1871 onwards to plug the obvious loopholes in the Act of 1863, for example by including the large number of institutions classified as private religious trusts within the jurisdiction of district committees and subordinating the latter to a central board of bureaucratic supervisors, similar to the Charity Commissioners of Britain. Discussing such a Bill introduced in the Madras Legislative Council in 1871, Indian revenue officials complained that the committees appointed under the law of 1863 were ineffective, not for want of piety or efficiency but for lack of power. They deplored that the rulers of the country had ceased to interest themselves in the management of Hindu religious institutions as being a matter inconsistent with their religion, as a result of which such institutions had deteriorated.265 Such efforts were not limited to Hindus alone. As we have seen in Chapter 1, in 1882 the National Muhammadan Association, led by Sayyid Amir Ali, lawyer, historian and the first Indian to be appointed a Privy Council judge, sent a petition to the Government saying that the numerous Muslim endowments scattered in India were ill managed and inappropriately used and should be utilized to promote education among Indian Muslims. The Government responded that since most Muslim endowments were of quasi-religious character, it was unable to interfere with them because of the Act XX of 1863. However, since the same Act offered considerable scope of action to members of the community, it expected that the more enlightened among them would be able to bear upon their co-religionists to ensure that the endowments were best used.266 The Government was grudgingly convinced to appoint a Muhammadan Educational Endowments Committee to report on whether, ‘without violating the principle that the Government cannot connect itself with religious institutions, any change can be effected in the law, or its administration, by which the more effective supervision of Muhammadan educational endowments may be secured’.267 The Committee, dominated by the National Muhammadan Association, produced a massive list of ‘mixed endowments’ arguing that religious and educational purposes were inseparable in the towliatnamah or trust deeds of the older endowments, and so such endowments could legitimately be used for education, provided it was for Muslims only. Such revolutionary proposals were opposed by Abdul Latif, a more conservative Muslim leader, who had inveigled himself into the Commission. While Amir Ali expressed scant concern for Arabic language and philosophy and quranic exegesis, Abdul Latif felt that the study of Arabic and Islamic law


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was essential to the interests of Islam, and the few Muslims who spent their lives on such impecunious pursuits deserved support from the community. Related to this refusal to override traditional religious practices in the name of the majority was Abdul Latif’s deep suspicion of representative democracy. Abdul Latif was overridden in the committee, but Amir Ali’s attempt to reorient Muslim waqfs fell through due to the Government’s fear that such interference would sooner or later be resented by Indians themselves.268 The Charitable Endowments Act VI, passed in 1890, only dealt with public endowments of a non-religious nature and, even then, left the choice of vesting the control of the endowments in the Government with the trustees of the institution. Only one institution in Bengal took this option.269

How public are public religious institutions? Apart from devising methods for community regulation of religious endowments (which, as we have seen, were very largely ineffective), the Act of 1863 also introduced the crucial issue of the finite nature of the religious community that was entitled to benefit from any religious endowment. Once again, the notion of privacy could be and was used to define various degrees of collective entitlement and access to both religious and worldly benefit – excluding certain castes or sects from access to temples, for example. In examining some such high-profile disputes, one perceives the constant tension between the hierarchical and horizontal modes of imagining that continue to affect the politics of religious entitlement even today. Between 1899 and 1908, no less a temple than the Meenakshi Sundereshwara temple of Madurai and no less a public figure than the Raja of Ramnad (later an important member of the Non-Brahmin movement) were involved in an extended lawsuit over the claim of the members of the low-status Nadar caste to enter and worship in the temple. The Raja was the hereditary trustee of the temple, and after local Nadar men entered the temple forcibly with fanfare in 1897, he filed a suit in the subordinate court of Madura alleging that the entry of untouchables such as the Nadars into the temple was against the ‘religious principles of Hindu worship of Siva’, that such an exclusion was customary and that it did not constitute a deprivation, since the Nadars had their own temple in the same village. In 1899, the Subordinate Judge granted a perpetual injunction against such entry, and 500 rupees in damages as costs of ritually purifying the temple. Before the defendants appealed to the High Court at Madras, the Raja attempted to arrive at a compromise permitting some rights of worship to the Nadars. However, this proposed compromise was challenged by other persons ‘interested’ in the worship at the temple and hence rejected as unlawful. In 1908, the Privy Council heard the appeal from the Nadars and upheld the previous judgments, refusing to recognize their parallel claim to a custom of entry and worship, principally based on the evidence given by local Brahmin residents and officials of the temple.270




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By contrast, a similar legal device was unsuccessfully used to accuse Dr B. R. Ambedkar of encroaching on the exclusive right of caste Hindus to use the Chaudhari tank in Mahad. In 1923, the Mahad municipality, led by its reformist chairman, Surendranath Tipnis, declared its public spaces open to Untouchables and invited Ambedkar to hold a meeting at Mahad in 1927. From this meeting, Ambedkar and his followers proceeded to the tank to drink water. 271 Although the charges against Ambedkar were upheld by the Assistant Judge in Thana, who granted the injunction sought, the Bombay High Court by this time proved less open to capacious definitions of customs of exclusive use premised on the ‘principle’ of untouchability. It also made a significant difference that the legal owner was the municipality (i.e. the state) which for obvious reasons was not the plaintiff. The decision therefore went in Ambedkar’s favour.272 These conflicts were exacerbated by the gradual ‘Indianization’ of the Government of India, in the wake of the Montague–Chelmsford constitutional reforms of 1919. Religious endowments became a transferred subject to be dealt with by elected (i.e. Indian) members of the provincial governments. In 1925, the Madras Legislative Assembly decided that the imperfections of the Act XX of 1863 demanded new legislation. If the principle of strict religious neutrality of the executive government as expressed in the Act of 1863 had to be departed from, it was only to secure the efficient administration of religious institutions. Besides, endowments were now the portfolio of an Indian minister, so no religious scruples were felt to be relevant.273 Muslim endowments were not tackled given the disturbed political conditions over the Khilafat question.274 The Madras Act created a central bureaucratic body for the Presidency called the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE) Board, appointments to which were limited to Hindus. The law was revised several times, to broaden its scope, bringing all public temples and mathas under its control and giving it the right to determine whether a temple or matha was private or public. The HRCE Board supervised the working of district temple committees, and its reports in 1930–2 revealed that in spite of its considerable powers, the going was not easy: temple committees were often unable to control the administration and financial audit of temples and were sometimes themselves in conflict with the Board.275 It took longer to legislate on similar lines for Muslim waqfs. The Mussalman Wakf Act 1923 made it obligatory on the mutawalli276 of every waqf except private ones to annually provide information to the Court of the District Judge regarding the finances and management of the endowment and the activities it undertook, with provision for punishment for providing incorrect information. It also required annual auditing of the finances of the endowment. But the Act did not provide directions for resolving a situation where the waqf status of a property was denied, neither did it create separate administrative machinery. Hence, the overworked district courts caused


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little disturbance to the mutawallis. The Nizam of Hyderbad took the plunge by creating in 1939 a bureaucratic office of the Director of Endowments, both Hindu and Muslim. British provinces such as the United Provinces, Bengal and Bihar attempted to set up statutory non- official supervisory boards to administer waqfs, which predictably remained frustrated by their lack of control over the mutawallis.277 Other than political exigency, there were at stake questions regarding the meaning of religion itself. Having undergone tremendous change in the direction of popularization, with increasing focus on entitlement and representation, the plasticity of religion posited some limits. Could religion be solely a matter of opinion, even if of the majority? If privilege, hierarchy and clerical authority were denied, how were the purposes of religious institutions and their property to be determined and, more importantly, distinguished from those that were non-religious? If a popularly elected government attempted to impose answers to these questions, was its secularity suspect? In 1933, when the Imperial Legislative Council discussed a Bill to abolish untouchability and to allow all sections of Hindus to enter Hindu temples, the Shankaracharya of Puri, one of the most important mahants in the country, phrased the issue in terms of specialization, when sending a telegram of protest: Do you really claim that questions relating to medicine, engineering, etc., and to religious faith can be determined by referendum and especially by legislators not returned on such tickets or that it is moral or even constitutional to force such decisions on sincere Sanatanists however misguided you may deem them? Why this playing to the gallery and dancing to the tune of renegades from Sanatanism and true constitutionalism? Surely this is unworthy of you. Reflect and turn back. It is not too late now. Incidentally, the Shankaracharya was a personality who straddled tradition and modernity in Indian religion: an alumnus of the Madras Christian College, he held a MA degree and was a founding member of the Hindu Mahasabha.278

Post-colonial predilections Soon after India became politically free, the new state had to tackle these questions afresh. While it displayed unprecedented legislative confidence and passed several radical laws, including the Central Wakf Act, 1954, for the administration of religious endowments, it also faced tremendous opposition to such reforming measures, both by practical frustration at the ground level and by principled judicial impediments based on the constitutional




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guarantee of freedom of religion. The Constitution of the Republic of India incorporated these contradictory pulls on the state policy towards religious endowments. Article 26 of the Constitution provides:

●

● ● ●

to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes; to manage its own affairs in matters of religion; to own and acquire movable and immovable property; and to administer such property in accordance with law.279

This law, which interprets freedom of religion as denominational autonomy from state control, offers little succour to those within the denomination who are dissatisfied with the way the established religious powers manage the rich institutions. Even in cases where such managers blatantly diverge from their perceived legal role as trustees of public religious trusts, bureaucratic supervision is held at bay by the law. Two such notorious cases where the state was forced to retreat were those of the Dargah Khwaja Saheb at Ajmer and the Shrirur Math. The Dargah at Ajmer, which had collected endowments from the time of the Tughlaq Sultans of Delhi, was relinquished in 1863 to the control of its sajjadanashin,280 mutawalli and, supposedly, an elected committee. The predictable complaints of personal gratification of the managers and the khadims281 from the huge pilgrim revenues, and conflicts amongst them, led to the Imperial Legislative Council passing the Dargah Khwaja Saheb Ajmer Act, XXIII, of 1936. This Act aimed to create a more representative elected committee, whose members would be ‘independent’ Muslims, holding office for five years only. This did not resolve the disputes nor make the institution a better functioning public trust, and in 1949 the Government of India appointed the Justice Ghulam Hasan Committee, whose recommendations led to the Dargah Khwaja Saheb Act of 1955. This Act aimed to place the management of the finances and organization of festivities in the Dargah in complete control of an elected committee, which would also determine the jurisdiction of the sajjadanashin and control the khadims through licenses.282 While all this appeared to impose effective public and state control over the Dargah and reduce the sajjadanashin and khadims to employees of the trust, a recent Parliamentary enquiry made in 2002 revealed a familiar situation of tripartite conflicts between the sajjadanashin, khadims and the Dargah Committee, with a populist Muslim MP warning the Government against attempting to eliminate the influence of the khadims.283 Arjun Appadurai has described the HRCE Board, recreated as the HRCE Commission in 1951, as the instrument of a Leviathan. Appadurai sees in the institution’s power evidence of increasing state control being imposed


Subject to public order, morality and health, every religious denomination or section thereof shall have the right:


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on Indian religious institutions.284 The travails of the HRCE hardly corroborate this picture of unopposed domination, especially where the institutions of mathas are concerned. In 1953 the Supreme Court voided the Commissioner’s decision to remove a mahant on the grounds that he had undertaken expenses disproportionate to the income of and against the interests of the institution. The Court referred to Article 26 of the Constitution which gave full organizational autonomy to religious denominations, implying that any expenditure had to be managed by the denomination itself, i.e. the mahant himself.285

The Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment and mission churches So far we have spoken only of British Christianity and Indian (nonChristian) religiosity, but there were also Indian churches, which were not only affected by this connected history whereby churches came to be seen as community property but which also experienced distinct historical development in which racial difference and differentiation played a significant role. The story begins at the same historical moment; the religion-inflected reformism in Britain in the early nineteenth century. With the Company’s charter due for renewal in 1813, the pressure group of Evangelical politicians in the British Parliament proposed a ‘Prospectus of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for the Indian Church’, drawn up by the same Claudius Buchanan who denounced the Company Government’s association with Hindu religious institutions.286 Buchanan lamented the decline of morals among the British in the licentious Indian atmosphere, owing to lack of church discipline. No government could last without religion, and for the first time in the history of Britain, he said, the church and state had been separated. To traditional ancien régime arguments, Buchanan added his populist argument: the numerous British soldiers and employees who went to India and died without religious ministration could not be deprived of their religious rights.287 In introducing the East India Bill, the foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh argued ‘that while British subjects were governed in India by British law, they should be permitted to exercise their national religion’. Since Anglicans needed a bishop for certain essential religious ceremonies, such as confirmation, a bishop of India had to be appointed.288 In 1813, the Company agreed to pay for a small episcopal establishment, consisting of one Anglican bishop for Calcutta, assisted by three archdeacons of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras and, to the bishop’s great irritation, two Scottish Presbyterian chaplains.289 The 1833 Government of India Act added two more Anglican bishops to the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment, the British Parliament refusing on moral grounds to heed the Company’s complaints about the added expense.290 There were isolated doubts expressed regarding the morality of




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taxing Hindus and Muslims to support Christianity, but these found few supporters. The main issue was how to distribute state patronage among different Christian churches. British MPs displayed an unusual ecumenical spirit, with Charles Grant, the Evangelical Anglican MP, assuring the Irish Catholic MP Daniel O’Connell that the large Roman Catholic community in India would be taken care of. Even Nonconformists, who from the 1840s launched a campaign for the separation of state and church in Britain, urged the need for state-supported ministration in India. Initially it had been intended to provide for three Anglican bishops and chaplains of the Churches of England and Scotland only, but the Government of India Act 1833 finally provided for the payment of grants to other Christian bodies as well. 291 This merely regularized what had been the practice on the ground. In India, the Company had been paying stipends to Catholic priests to minister to its Catholic soldiers from 1820. 292 Such ecumenism was specifically imperial: a huge proportion of the British Indian Army being Catholic Irish, doctrinal differences among Christian churches were much less important for the Government in India than they were at the same time in Britain, as disputes over Maynooth showed. 293 Such a racialized conception of religion, which justified an ecclesiastical establishment in India for British subjects, created particular legal dilemmas with relation to Indian Christians, who were essentially conceived of as actual or future ‘converts’ produced by European missionaries. In British political discourse, the question was about two complementary sets of religious rights, both possessed by European Christians. On the one hand, as we have seen, the right of the British subject to religious ministration even when abroad was successfully claimed in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, from the 1790s, there arose a parallel demand for a proper interpretation of ‘religious neutrality’ such that Christian missions to Indians were extended the same level of ‘tolerance’ that the Government of India was said to proffer Hindus and Muslims.294 Much of the debate preceding legal provisions for the licensed entry of missionaries in 1813 were pragmatic; Company conservatives such as Warren Hastings strongly warned against their potentially incendiary effects on the Indian population,295 whereas Evangelical ‘liberals’ and free traders such as Lord Teignmouth argued that there was no danger where coercion was not employed 296 and that, in fact, positive responsibility adhered to the British who had providentially acquired an empire over vast numbers of heathens, to take the good news to those afflicted by such dangerous ignorance. 297 Although missionaries were ultimately allowed to enter the Company’s territories with a licence from the Company in 1813, and without any from 1833, their existence and activities created a constant conundrum. This can be described as follows: any success in the objects of missions, that is,


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in persuading Indians to become Christian, threatened the legal distinction between mission and church, because there was little theologically as well as institutionally to distinguish Indian Anglicans from the British members of the same church. Upholding the principle of ‘neutrality’ and maintaining formal distance from the missions, and the consequent need to separate ‘mission- churches’ from those meant to serve Europeans, led to the unusual development of formal racial distinctions in law. 298 The crucial effect that such legal arrangements had was in reinforcing the racial hierarchy between missionaries and Indian Christians. In a sense, this modern hierarchy was even more ‘traditional’, in the sense of being immune to the argument that religion was for the people, than the ‘traditional’ religious elites in Hindu and Muslim religious institutions. Such ‘neo-traditional’ racial/religious authority was most effectively exerted in the context of religious disputes that occasioned claims for arbitration by the state. In south and south-western India, where the SPCK had made the earliest Protestant beginnings in India through the efforts of their Danish Pietist missionary- employees, recognition of caste differences and concomitant social and ritual privileges had been part of mission policy on grounds that social hierarchy had little to do with the kingdom of heaven. In the 1830s, with the arrival of a new generation of SPG missionaries who took a different view of the issue, the customary claims of Christians drawn from the relatively higher-status landed caste of Vellalars to separate pews, precedence in eucharist (to avoid defilement) and ministration by Christians of similar status came to be questioned. The earliest of colonial Indian bishops had to deal with the rather complex issue of how to construe caste, and matters came to a head when the fifth bishop, Daniel Wilson, decided that it was directly connected with Hinduism and hence to be discarded. As congregations split, and many left, including into the welcoming arms of the rival London Missionary Society, there was something of a minor rebellion at Tanjore, which was a princely state with a Hindu ruler. On 5 February 1834, a congregation refused to accept the services of the deputed paraiyan catechist, leading to the Bishop’s rather strict decision that they be punished. The Vellalar Christians wrote first to the Resident, then to the Governor of Madras, and finally to the Governor- General himself, demanding restoration of their rights to their own church, but the Bishop responded that missions were beyond the jurisdiction of the Government. As a result, the Government decided that it was a matter for ecclesiastical authorities,299 a decision that formally reinforced the autonomy of the Indian church (much more than any other Indian religious institution) from civil regulation or arbitration, simultaneously reinforcing racially structured religious authority, and dismissing the value of the Indian congregation’s opinion (however misguided) about the nature of legitimate church government. This is a trend that would be established in court cases over very similar issues later in the nineteenth century.




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In a period when all Indian religions were being reconceptualized as ‘communities’ of human beings, leading to conflicts over the construction of religious authority, Indian Christians participated in similar disputes and, in a number of striking cases, utilized the language of legal entitlement that was being used by their other countrymen. In their case, however, the entrenched religious authority, premised on the non-doctrinal basis of race, defied such demands of popular control. In 1915, in a case reminiscent of the disputes in which Daniel Wilson had intervened half a century back, the Madras High Court heard an appeal against the decision of the District Judge of Tinnevelly. In the original suit, a group of Catholic Vellalars claimed, as representatives of a larger caste body, the right to segregate the parish church in Vadakkankulam according to caste against the prohibition of the parish priest and the (Catholic) bishop of Tinnevelly. In the view of the appellants, since they had contributed to the construction of the church, the church was their property, and also that customarily it was their exclusive right or vagaira to perform certain sacred ceremonies inside and outside the church. The priest and the bishop, who were both European missionaries, argued that according to canon law, church property, once consecrated, was vested in the universal church, no matter who had actually contributed to it, and by the law of the Roman Catholic Church no caste distinctions were recognized within the Church. Madras High Court upheld this interpretation, refusing to view a document of agreement between a previous bishop and the congregation to enforce such segregation as a contract. As the judge expounded, the bishops had unfettered authority to alter rules of comportment within their dioceses, bound only by canon law, and the congregation or any part of it could not digress from those rules if they wished to remain within the existing association headed by the Pope. If they wished, they could of course form a ‘voluntary’ church of their own.300 Such a hyper-coherent view of episcopal authority, which advised the Indian Christian parties to the case to take it or leave it, ignored the social reality underlying the hierarchy it took such pains not to interfere in. If the bishop’s power was unfettered by his congregations, given that there were no Indian Catholic bishops, the judgement was totally negating claims of lay power and entitlement that had by the early twentieth century become at least formally undeniable among all other religious communities in India. It is of course important not to valorize any side of the conflict any more than the other; while the European clergy were in this case staking their claim on a racially graded ladder of authority, the congregants were also making claims to privilege based on ascribed status: caste. The purpose here is only to point to the specific nature of authority within the Christian churches and the distinctive experience of Indian Christians in law courts apparently applying the same principles of autonomy for religious organizations as in cases involving other Indians.


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Nowhere was racial distinction as the basis of religious authority more visible than during the disputes that preceded and followed the appointment of the first Indian to the office of bishop within the Anglican hierarchy in India. Although from the late nineteenth century a few outstanding Indian clergymen had occasionally been proposed for episcopal office by some forward-looking British clergymen and missionaries, due to entrenched perceptions of lower racial capacity, allegations of incompetence and doubtful character traits always appeared to gather against such candidates . In the first decade of the twentieth century, one such partnership appeared to break through the restraints of entrenched prejudices of European missionaries, who were afraid of being reduced to a position subordinate to an Indian. It was then that the candidacy of V. S. Azariah, proposed by the Bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead, encountered the fact that the Anglican episcopate was a matter of state concern, in spite of all the legal fiction involved in separating the missions from the (established) Church. And yet, Bishop Whitehead had not proposed a very revolutionary course of action; what he sought for Azariah was essentially another racially segregated arrangement. Azariah was to be his assistant bishop, in charge of a ‘missionary diocese’, i.e. a diocese of Indian converts, actual and future, just as Samuel Crowther had been the missionary bishop of Niger. The very possibility that an Indian bishop may occasionally minister the sacraments to white British soldiers raised such fears within officialdom that explicit legal provisions were made to prevent the Assistant Bishop of Madras from ever officiating in the absence of the Bishop. 301 When, in 1927, the Indian Church Act was proposed in order to disestablish the Church of England in India and to constitute it as a religious body autonomous of the state, as in Britain, due to fears of non- consensual exposure to outlandish liturgical experiments under a future Indian hierarchy, British soldiers were guaranteed their ‘right’ to retain the prayer book and service with which they were familiar, as long as the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment persisted as the religious right of the British race in India. 302

Conclusion Some scholars have suggested that the frustration of the Indian state in regulating religious institutions arises from the misplaced quest to recreate them as ‘public’ trusts, which is especially meaningless for Hinduism, a religion that focuses on individual salvation.303 This chapter takes a much less static view of religion in India or, for that matter, of British law. Dominant ideas about what religion was or ought to be, the formation of political opinion on the subject and the development of relevant laws were dynamic processes in both Britain and India, and from the nineteenth century these processes shared not just structural similarities but also historical connections through the fact of Britain’s empire in India.




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The result of this connection was both similarity and divergence as far as the legal regulation of religious institutions were concerned, partly because the British legal models of the religious and charitable trust acquired a specific shape given British disinclination to provide adequate bureaucratic supervision for non-Christian institutions after Evangelical mobilization had shaped political opinion in that direction. By legally providing for the regulation of (non-Christian) religious trusts by members of the concerned communities, the British Indian Government produced the legal structure into which modern imaginations of religion as a limited human collective could feed. However, the distinction of the Indian story is that such imagination remained only partially fulfilled, because in the absence of bureaucratic intervention of the scale undertaken by the Victorian state, laws and the judiciary provided added arenas and ammunition for intense contests of power but no clear principle for resolving the question of authority within and over Indian religious institutions. That both secularism and the autonomy of religious institutions could be adopted as legal arguments for challenging the few bureaucratic efforts adopted in the twentieth century showed the readiness with which ‘big’ political theories could be used to defend a variety of positions. This story of religion and its negotiation in and by law has allowed us to indicate yet another instance of the significant role played by Christians while also underlining the complexity of the category ‘Christian’ itself. In fact, the experience of British Evangelical politicians and Indian Christian churchmen were so divergent that one might well question the validity of using a term such as Christian at all in this context. I have made a deliberate choice in using it, for two reasons, precisely because I wish to forcefully dispel the two-dimensional image suggested by an exclusive focus on any one side: Christians were neither only powerful religious polemicists and lobbyists nor always underprivileged martyrs. If these roles were differentially distributed across the racial divide, the actions of British Christians (say, in agitating against unpaid service in temple festivals) could well mobilize the aspirations of some Indians, including Christians, but, even more significantly for this paper, such lobbying could create specific laws whose consequences had to be faced by all Indians, including Indian Christians. If the history of Indian Christian religious institutions was distinctive for their constraining connection with the state, this was due to their religious identity; at the same time, the lack of financial advantage from this connection derived from their being Indian. To privilege the religious identity of such protagonists over the racial would quite obviously be pious nonsense but, at the same time, to privilege the racial over the religious would have been to impose a distinction that Indian Christians themselves struggled against in their effort to make the promise of the universal Christian church a reality.


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Universality in Difference: The Emergence of Christian Personal Law in Colonial India304

Indian Christians have played a rather significant historical role in invoking the search for universal principles of governance in India, and nowhere was this role more publicly and persistently expressed as in the realm of law. It is also in the nature of history’s irony that this aspect of their history has been almost completely effaced. In 2001, a BJP-led government legislated amendments to Christian marriage law with what appeared unseemly haste and without adequate consultation to many Christian activists.305 Their complaints made hardly a ripple in the Indian press, where these appeared to be no more than the predictable whines of a ‘backward’ minority community and its traditionalist leaders, successfully overridden by the reforming state, supporting the ‘progressive’ sections of the community, particularly women leaders. This characteristic inattention, such that Muslim personal law continues to be perceived as the principal ‘problem’ in the context of family laws upheld by a secular state, has in itself been attributed by some Christian activists to the marginal position of Christians in India, such that the problems of Christian women have failed to garner the mainstream attention as have the alleged inequities suffered by Muslim women.306 These critiques of Indian laws and politics undoubtedly have much to be said for them, but they reproduce the terms of a common political language whereby Christians, as a ‘minority’, may possess particular religious laws, which are inevitably in conflict with a notion of laws that are statusneutral and universally valid, even if such a purportedly universal agenda is most aggressively pursued by political groups whose universal definition of the Indian citizens inclines towards religious majoritarianism. It is of historical interest that Christian leaders in postcolonial India have absorbed the terms of the personal laws versus uniform civil code debate,307 but this development needs to be seen as a contingent outcome rather than as an apt description of a long historical drama in which the role of the Christians


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was not only to defend their particular ‘minority’ tradition but also to seek the universal basis for modern legal subjectivity. Such an approach to the seriously understudied Christian personal law in India places the experience of Christians squarely at the centre of the broader history not only of the personal laws but also of British efforts to determine the province of legislation, to borrow a phrase from an important work on British legal history,308 which tangentially connects with the issues that that this chapter will address. My approach is different from those taken in the only two other historical studies of Christian personal law; I do not agree, for example, with Gauri Viswanathan that Indian Christians were martyrs whose agency in choosing to convert (from another religion to Christianity) was crushed by the colonial government that forcibly imposed Hindu personal law on them (in cases where the conversion had been from Hinduism).309 As far as the motivations of Indian Christians were concerned, they were not any more inclined towards renunciation than other people, and, indeed, as Chandra Mallampalli has pointed out, there is no reason to assume they would have any objection to inheriting property under Hindu personal law, or should have had, in the light of religious faith.310 Mallampalli himself puts in much more effort to explain how the novelty of an Indian Christian personal law came to exist at all (rather than assuming, like Viswanathan, that a new religion automatically went with a new law). He concludes that it was largely an arbitrary imposition, created by the British rulers because of their misplaced effort to rescue converts from social oppression as well as their rigid view of Indian religious identities. The effect of such state action, according to him, was the isolation, and marginalization, of Indian Christians from the rest of Indian society, an argument that fits in with the overall tenor of his book. I find a number of problems with Mallampalli’s argument: as his work points out repeatedly, religious conversion did lead to acute social conflicts, including active aggression against those who had become Christian. British efforts to rescue converts were not entirely premised on a fictive view of the situation, and, as we shall see below, legislation occurred very largely in response to appeals by Indian Christians themselves, as well as those who appealed on their behalf, these being concerned British and European government officials and clergy, as well as missionaries. Besides, from Mallampalli’s argument, it appears as if it was a matter of open choice for the British Government whether or not to continuing applying Hindu and Muslim personal laws to those that had ceased to be Hindu or Muslim. This is a very strange view of colonial law, especially surprising since Mallampalli is aware that the families of such ‘converts’ refused to allow them a share in familial estates. Such exclusion was perpetrated by personal violence as well as through legal battles premised on the projected principles of the Hindu and Muslim personal laws, whose outcome was closely watched by the increasingly ‘nationalized’ Hindu and Muslim religious communities.


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The exercise of imperial power was in the last resort coercive, but this did not preclude systematic efforts at creating consensus, among them the principle and practice of ‘preserving’ the religious laws of Indians. This chapter deals in large measure with legal efforts to reconcile this principle of preservation, which had developed as a colonial tradition from the late- eighteenth century, with the principle of religious freedom, which came to the fore in the early nineteenth century particularly due to the appeals of Christians (European and Indian). I argue in this paper that it is entirely incorrect to see this conflict in terms of a singular moment of opposition, resolved by the imposition of the rule of law,311 or even by an expedient (if imperfect) division of spheres between public law and private law.312 The picture I offer is one of a complex legal system, evolving through the interaction of broadly stated legal principles and conflicting legal claims over very specific issues dealing with the content of substantive law, judicial procedure or the delimitation of jurisdictions. One by-product of this process was the unique novelty of the Christian personal law. One crucial issue in this discussion is the definition of who was a Christian. Indeed, this was a question that colonial tribunals dealt with repeatedly, their discussions revealing the intensely interconnected nature of categories such as race and religion as well as their elusiveness in the face of practical rather than theoretical efforts at taxonomy. However, history shows us that contradictions and even most outright paradoxes rarely have the effect of undermining the confidence people appear to possess in the terms they like to use to describe themselves or others. This was certainly the case when British judges and jurists from the eighteenth century onwards failed to disentangle race either from religious confession or from political status but nevertheless ploughed ahead with an ever- expanding repertoire of laws that would one day put everybody in their place. Within such a legal utopia of future stasis, Christians produced extreme turbulence, not because they were necessarily all products of ‘conversion’; some were, but others used the dominant legal paradigm that conflated ‘Indian Christian’ with ‘convert’ to extend specific claims which have to be understood in the context of not just their ‘own’ personal laws but also of the personal laws as an interlocking total system. From the eighteenth century until recent times, Christians in India did claim (unlike what Mallampalli would have us believe) distinct laws (including laws of inheritance) based on religious and racial status. Whether or not Christian doctrine provides any guidance regarding inheritance, the fact remains that many Christians in colonial India claimed distinct inheritance laws as their religious right, and what is more, such claims made perfect sense to other Indians as well as to British judges and legislators. The demands of Indian Christians appeared comprehensible and plausible to contemporaries not because they had doctrinal validity, but because they were made in the name of a supra-local religious community, echoing


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the demands of other such ‘imagined communities’ of religious affiliation. The ‘communal’ demands of Christians were no doubt shaped by the rising ‘communalism’ in late-nineteenth- century India, but they were also shaped by the particular legal experience of Indian Christians, who needed to combine their claim to distinctiveness with that of multiple belonging, both being in their view corollaries of civil freedom. I will argue in this chapter that in colonial India demands for ‘freedom’ and for ‘non-interference’ by the state usually meant, especially in the case of personal laws, demands for positive state action. In the case of Christians, especially those who asserted their identity as ‘converts’ during interpersonal disputes within their families, often over inheritable property, the claim to freedom was premised on the claim to be recognized as possessing a certain religio-legal status, not necessarily Christian. This was the case not only when a member of the family had converted to Christianity, but when the entire family was Christian and had been so for several generations. To explain this briefly: the assumption that Indian Christians were inevitably ‘converts’ (from Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, etc.) provided certain Christian men with legally comprehensible claims to a fictive past which was non- Christian, which could be deployed in order to deprive female members of the family of legal entitlements which would otherwise have been theirs. Indeed, the claim of ‘non- discrimination’ could be utilized to buttress such patriarchal agendas: if Hindu men could get by without sharing their ancestral property with widows in the family, why couldn’t other men, who happened to be descendants of converts from Hinduism to Christianity? If these paradoxical collective and individual demands did not in themselves create the Christian personal law, they did adopt it and take it into directions where we find it today.

Personal laws and the uniform civil code: an old contradiction I certainly owe it now to the uninitiated but generous reader to explain what the ‘personal laws’ are. The personal laws are a special set of currently judiciable laws in India, of which there are four: the Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi.313 These apply to people depending on their religious identity, and travel with them wherever they go within the country, as opposed to laws that are of territorial application.314 The Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi personal laws deal with marriage, divorce, inheritance, guardianship and religious endowments of those legally defined as Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis. The personal laws should not be taken to be religious laws in any simple sense; these laws are part of India’s civil law and are judiciable only so; any claims premised of religious doctrine are not in themselves recognized by the courts. Neither is there a separate system of religious courts in India,


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as, say, in Malaysia (although whether that makes Malaysian personal laws religious laws in any unmediated sense is questionable). The personal laws, just like all other laws, are administered by the single judicial hierarchy in India. As a result, the determination of a person’s religious identity becomes an essential function of the state (through the judiciary) simply in order to establish the relevant law. Lack of religious identity is simply not an option, even if the persons in question do not practise or believe in any religion.315 In that curious section of the Indian Constitution called the Directive Principles, which are non-judiciable and represent the aspirations rather than achievements of the India’s constitution-makers, is stated the aim of establishing a uniform civil code, which indirectly means the abolition of the personal laws. The personal laws were therefore seen by the dominant political elites of India immediately around its formation as a nation-state as a tolerated aberration, to be ultimately corrected. Prominent legal scholars have indeed pointed out that the upholding of religion-based personal laws compromise the Indian state’s claims to be secular. Such critiques are complicated by the paradox, strangely not perceived by such scholars, that even in the decades following independence the modification of any such laws, especially the Hindu marriage laws, consisted of religious intervention and was therefore described by political actors as well as analysts as unsecular.316 Since then, the paradox appears to have become paralysing, especially for feminists. With the rhetorical appropriation of the uniform civil code project by right-wing Hindu majoritarian politics, especially the BJP, few feminists are willing to be used as pawns in the baiting of minorities, especially Muslims, whose personal laws are projected by the BJP as an example of their excessive privilege. Therefore, even if certain aspects of the personal laws are acknowledged to be patriarchal and iniquitous to women, there appears to be no clear principle for gender- equitable reform, which would be compatible not just with a formal secularism but also the more positive principle of toleration.317 In such debates, it is very rarely noticed that the legal opposition between the personal laws and uniform civil laws has a long history and is neither a distinctive feature of postcolonial Indian politics nor the product of the growing strength of women’s movements in India. The legal debate over uniform laws and personal laws did not begin in the 1940s, as a leading feminist scholar states, but in the 1840s, possibly even the 1740s. And in British debates over what consisted of the lex loci, or the overriding law of the land, the leading concern was how to reconcile established laws, defined in the late eighteenth century as Muslim and Hindu laws, with the notion of a universal rule of law, protecting the civil rights of those persons who did not appear to fit these labels and regulating those aspects of social relations that were deemed to be independent of religion. It is a historical irony that this effort led to the creation of the Christian personal law, a modern tradition if there ever was one. By taking a long historical perspective, I




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will attempt to highlight both the contingent nature of the legal universal (indeed, for a long time, it was unsure whether the universal was Mughal law or British law) and the forgotten role of Christians in inciting the search for this universal law. Also analysing the statecentred nature of the process by which Christians in India acquired a ‘personal law’, this chapter attempts to question the view that personal laws are religious laws, preserved (if very badly) against the incursions of colonial legal universalism,318 and instead underline the novelty of limited jurisdiction, state- dispensed religious laws coexisting with a universal law disjoint from religion.

Christians and the law in eighteenth century India In the two preceding chapters we have indicated that the 1830s represented something of a turning point for British colonial policy in India and that much of this change was connected to the rise of novel principles of state action, especially that of Christian government, overlapping with other ideologies, such as Utilitarianism, whose advocates also possessed forceful views about the place of religion in modern society. What the crusaders of the early nineteenth century often railed against was a sedimented mass of policy created during the first 50 years of British rule in parts of India, created by that curious entity that was a trading company which had acquired sovereign powers. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, several aspects of this Company-state’s policies appeared strikingly immoral when seen from the perspective of the British Christian lobby. Conveniently, such immorality also appeared deeply irrational, especially where law was concerned, and it has been shown how Utilitarian legal reformers found in India an ideal space to try out their grand plans, which were hindered by the problems of generating a democratic consensus in Britain itself.319 In the view of reformers of all ideological hues, the inequity they were up against was only partly the creation of the Company and mostly the effects of a hideous Indian religio-political tradition, characterized by that marvellously broad but un-self-reflexive term, despotism.320 Much has been written about this reformist project and the discourses it mobilized. What we know much less about is how the law did actually work until the reformists took it upon themselves to get it to work better. Not knowing this may make the advent of colonialism, or at least the legal dimension of it, appear to be a total rupture, initiated perhaps by some major political event. Since instant and total conquest was exactly not how India was colonized, it is inaccurate to talk of colonial law as if it was an entirely novel product, distinct both from British law and ‘pre-colonial’ law. In India, British institutions of law and the judiciary did encounter a novel situation, but this novelty was experienced, and grappled with for more than a century, before the East India Company gained any political status in the country.


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When the British started building ‘factories’ or warehouse- centred settlements at various coastal locations in Mughal India in the seventeenth century, they were subject to Mughal law, and on several occasions there were Mughal judicial interventions in disputes between the rival British trading groups in India.321 Where such disputes did not affect Mughal notions of public order, British factors were largely without much formal provision for justice, since the first crown courts, or courts that derived authority from the British monarch, were the Mayors’ Courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, established by Royal Charter in 1726.322 Meanwhile, by acquiring zamindaris323 at Madras and Calcutta, the British East India Company had acquired judicial duties with reference to the Indian population within their territorial jurisdiction.324 In the eighteenth century, there occurred repeated conflicts between these two sets of tribunals, one deriving authority from the British Crown and the other, at least theoretically, deriving authority from the Mughal Emperor. But even in Bombay, which was officially crown territory gifted to the Company,325 there appeared similar disputes among the British regarding the legitimate method of dealing with religious difference in law, in the context of India. My emphasis on the last phrase underlines the difference between other locations, such as Australia, South Africa and, nearer home, Ireland, where it was possible to legally discriminate against those who did not belong to the Established Church; even in the dying days of the Mughal Empire, this was obviously not something that the fledgling British courts could contemplate doing in India. Such a novel and substantive (rather than theoretical) imperative to tolerance raised questions which by their very scale took the ‘problem’ of religious difference to new levels in British legal thought. In 1730, the Mayor’s court of Bombay awarded custody for a boy of 12 called Lakhsmana to his mother, a widow called Janaki, reportedly of the ‘tailor’ caste. Janaki had been a prisoner taken to Goa by the Portuguese during one of the periodic raids that still continued in the early eighteenth century and had there adopted, or been forced to adopt, Roman Catholicism. During her absence of five or six years, a relative called ‘Bendu’ took care of her son. On her return, Janaki found that Bendu was unwilling to return her son on grounds that she had become a Christian and hence had lost all claims as a parent. On Janaki’s lodging a suit, the Mayor found such deprivation illegal and ordered her son to be returned to her, provided she undertook not to force her religion on him. Subsequently, the Mayor was reprimanded by the Governor of Bombay, who was petitioned by Bendu and a collective of men of his caste. In the animated and verbose dispute that ensued between the Mayor and the Governor, the question asked was not whether ‘natives’ were entitled to distinct laws based on their religion and custom but how such customs were to be identified, how these were to be related to more universal ‘common’ laws and what kind of tribunals were competent to adjudicate on




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such distinct customary laws.326 For the Mayor, Edward Page, a principle called natural law established the authority of parents over children during their minority, and this was a universal principle, whatever the religion of the parent and whatever certain religious laws may have to say about it. The Governor, Robert Cowan, on other hand, pronounced that the correct approach to natural law was to recognize the diversity of (religious) customs among various people and hence to discard prejudices in favour of one particular set of customs, which British law was, after all.327 It is distinctive how natural law was used to address such issues. ‘Natural law’ was a legal concept with a complex genealogy with the underlying idea that there was, or could be discerned a universal legal order, which could apply to all persons at all times, transcending the actual differences in the laws of different countries.328 The empiricist idea that such a universal legal order could be deduced from the observation of human behaviour was part of medieval Christian scholastic tradition, but the vexed question was how natural law, so deduced, related to divine law as contained in the Scriptures and interpreted by the Church. Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist of the seventeenth century, is credited for suggesting for the first time that natural law may be independent of divine law, that it would be valid even if one accepted the (for him) unacceptable possibility that God did not exist.329 Those scholars of Indian history who have analysed early British references to natural law have seen it as a claim of transcendence that authorized the colonial state to overrule existing religious laws on the basis that these were no more than particular. Reading the report of Janaki’s case, one cannot help notice that ‘natural law’ is here less of a single argument and more of a vocabulary available to those European elites who had had a certain level of education. Certainly reference to natural law did not only justify overruling particular religious laws; for some British officials, it did; for others it indicated the need for limiting the claims of British laws. In the short run, the Mayor, who complained to the Court of Directors in England,330 appeared to win, since the Directors issued a stricture prescribing judicial autonomy.331 Very soon, however, it was the Governor who was vindicated. As it happened, the efforts of the Mayor’s Courts of Bombay and Madras to decide on the content of ‘native custom’ and to adjudicate accordingly did not go down particularly well with all Indians. There having been a sufficient number of visible and organized protests at both places, there was legislation in Britain in 1753 to exempt ‘natives’ from the jurisdiction of the Mayors’ Courts, unless they chose to submit to them of their own volition.332 This was, in a sense, a jurisdictional cop- out, an effort to wash one’s hands of the messy questions. It did not resolve the problem, for if ‘natives’ could have their own law (and own courts, if they could rustle them up), it remained to determine who the natives were, and, once again, one finds that Christians made waters muddy with their multiple belongings. In 1755, in a case from Calcutta, the contested issue was the definition of the term




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‘native’ and hence the appropriate jurisdiction. In attempting to answer this question, British officials at Calcutta, just as in Bombay 20 years earlier, evaluated the implication of religious affiliation, and disagreed among themselves. In 1755, J. Z. Holwell, later famous for surviving the ‘Black Hole’, heard a case as zamindar of Calcutta, consisting of a plaint by a woman called Phoebe and her husband, Mons. Demontaguy [sic.], against Sarah, Phoebe’s mother, seeking the restitution of certain jewellery and other valuables deposited with the older woman before Phoebe’s marriage. Holwell’s decision in Phoebe’s favour led Sarah to lodge an appeal in the Mayor’s Court. She argued that as a ‘British subject’ she was only subject to the latter court and not to Holwell’s zamindari court. Sarah’s claim was recognized by the Mayor, who issued summons to Holwell, who in turn complained to the Governor of being attacked in the commission of the duties of his office. In Holwell’s petitions, as well as in discussions within the Governor’s council (of which he was a member), the core issue was that of Sarah and Phoebe’s legal status: were they ‘British subjects’ or ‘natives’? These disputes, which attempted to locate irrefutable criteria for making such distinctions, referred to colour, genealogy and religion as well as tautologically to political status and appeared to Holwell to arrive at no satisfactory conclusion which would protect a British judge from accusations of improper conduct in the future. One of the important arguments Holwell made was that the Mayor’s Court was using the invalid criteria of religion to distinguish between ‘British subjects’ and ‘natives’, the latter being those who were subject to the Mughal Emperor’s authority. Holwell wondered why Sarah, the ‘mustee fringy’333 was considered a British subject by the Mayor. Was it because she was Christian? Did becoming Christian release a person from the status of a Mughal subject (and hence, native), and if so, would becoming Muslim similarly release a British subject from the authority of the British Crown (and British laws)? Unsurprisingly, those less involved felt more confident about the stability of the native–British subject classification, and the Council instructed Holwell to avoid cases involving ‘Fringys’ (meaning Eurasians) as well as Europeans, unless requested to act as arbitrator. They also imposed the restraint that a quorum of three judges had to be present to hear criminal cases involving Christians.334 Already in the early eighteenth century, therefore, patterns were emerging that predicted the legal puzzles that would expand exponentially in the wake of the momentous political events that took place in Bengal between 1757 and 1765. At the same time, certain patterns also appeared with respect to disputes among different British statesmen and judges and Indian efforts to influence the outcome of such disputes, both individually and collectively. Some of the basic questions were, given that ‘natives’ were acknowledged to be different, and known to belong to religions other than Christianity, what was their legal status? In Britain it was still normally




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essential to be Christian in order to gain legal status, but if this was not the case in India, what were the legal implications of natives being different? If it meant that they could have their own laws (customs), how were these laws to be identified, and what tribunals would apply them? How did one identify natives, especially when there were people who denied that appellation? Most perplexing was the question, given that native laws were to be ‘tolerated’, what did one do when a native changed his or her religion to Christianity and the native law in question recommended punishment? To state that again, did ‘toleration’ mean tolerating different laws or imposing ‘toleration’ on those laws? It was for the resolution of such unprecedented dilemmas, which were historically associated with the contact between the expanding commercial empires of Europe and the rest of the world, that ‘modern natural law’ had made its appearance in the first place. The historical role of natural law was ambivalent; some scholars have pointed out that it permitted the recognizing of ‘indigenous’ peoples, specifically non- Christians, as legal entities with rights, such as that of due process of trial.335 Other scholars have pointed out that the universalist arguments of natural law were much more often used to justify the rights of expansive European powers to travel to all parts of the earth, to use resources which were deemed by them to have been left unused and to wage war on those who did not conform to the allegedly universal natural law.336 I do not think that natural law had an undifferentiated career in the history of European colonialism, and I believe that scholars of Indian history have left this unclear by focusing on the universalistic claims of natural law and by demonstrating how these claims served to supersede indigenous legal traditions. Proposed in this manner, natural law appears to be the predecessor of the uniform civil code, threatening the autonomy of pre-existing laws, sanctified with reference to religious doctrines. But to state the process in this way misses a rather broad transition that takes place sometime in the eighteenth century, whereby from the earlier Spanish, Dutch and even British efforts at ‘tolerating’ natives or non- Christians as legal entities at all (but to be judged by the same laws) there emerged a concept and practice of ‘tolerating’ native laws. In the Bombay case, one finds that ‘natural law’ could justify a politic limitation of the remit of British law and also for the application of other laws. Such legal ‘toleration’, while apparently a promise of negative state action (protection of something in existence), in fact initiated a massive statecentred project of discovery because what were those different laws that were to be applied? This project redirected the locus of competing social claims; many Indians collectively and individually claimed to possess laws that ought to be recognized by the state. Others claimed not to be ruled by such laws, and their claims were also articulated in the available legal categories, whether political subjecthood, race or religion. The aim of all these efforts was to get the state (even if its statehood


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was pretty precarious) to do something rather than to stay out of their ‘private sphere’, and this set the pattern for the following century, quite unlike what has been suggested by a leading historian of India.337 In such legal efforts to identify and tolerate people and their laws, religion, in particular Christianity, was a crucial factor. Elizabeth Elbourne has suggested that in the British Empire in the eighteenth century Christianity defined the political community and rendered legal status, which is why conversions to Christianity by indigenous peoples were resented and opposed by white settlers. The implication of Christian affiliation appears to have been much less clear in eighteenthcentury India; it appeared much less to be a guarded gateway to political and legal subjecthood and much more a source of persistent conundrums about the specific qualities and entitlements of different sets of legal subjects, declared to be equal but known to be different. Race and religion were constantly interlinked in such puzzles; when natives became or asserted that they were Christian, the question arose whether and to what extent they had become similar to ‘British subjects’. These puzzles would prove a fecund source of legislation in the years to come.

Post-1765: the grant of diwani and the creation of personal laws Most scholars agree that the system of personal laws, as we know it today, was inaugurated in 1772.338 Important developments had indeed occurred in the years preceding this supposed originary moment. In 1757, the Nawab of Bengal had been defeated in battle by the East India Company, leading to a couple of puppet regimes, followed by a further confrontation in 1765, in which, the Mughal Emperor himself being involved and defeated, the Company was granted, as part of the treaty, responsibility for the diwani (the revenue department and civil justice) of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.339 After a period of working through the existing Indian administrative structure, the unsatisfactory revenue yields produced by the de-facto administrator, Muhammad Reza Khan,340 coupled with severe famine and social dislocation, led to the Directors of the Company appointing Warren Hastings as Governor of Bengal in 1772, with orders to arrange for the Company to ‘stand forth’ as diwan.341 This meant new and comprehensive arrangements for the collection of revenue and administration of justice, and Hastings, who claimed to be restoring the ‘ancient Mogul constitution’ following decades of dislocation, proposed a hierarchical system of courts divided into civil and criminal, designated diwani and nizamat, appeals going from the district up to the highest tribunal at the Sadr Diwani Adalat, located at Calcuta, and the Sadr Nizamat Adalat, located at Murshidabad (later Calcutta).342 The precise details of the hierarchy changed over time, as did their overlapping relationship with the




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bureaucracy of revenue collection.343 What is important for the purposes of our story is that the Company’s courts were in theory Mughal courts, just as the zamindari courts had been before them, and hence meant to apply ‘Indian law’. The scale had, however, changed to such an extent that the puzzles encountered earlier simply could not be papered over if the business of government was to proceed. Among other things, to determine who would pay the revenue for a certain estate, it was necessary to determine who held the legal title to it, and hence inheritance laws acquired a particular interest in British eyes. Inheritance, however, inevitably leads back to the messy question of legitimacy and further into the so-called private sphere of marital relations, and so we inevitably have British judges considering what constituted a valid marriage. There was no way of leaving the ‘natives’ to their own business, not just because as government the Company felt a duty to govern but because to pay its shareholders and debtors it needed the money that Bengal promised and yet seemed to withhold behind a mass of impenetrable local knowledge. Assumption of responsibility, and pressure to exercise it, did not necessarily imply that its fulfilment was automatic. To begin with, it was not clear what the sources of law were. As far as civil law was concerned, Hastings suggested in the diwani courts ‘all cases of inheritance, marriage or other matters for which Mahomedan law has made a provision should be decided by the established magistrate with the assistance of the expounders of law’ and, similarly, ‘that all matters respecting inheritance and the particular laws and usages of the casts of Gentoos should be decided by the established magistrate assisted by Bramins and the other heads of Casts according to Gentoo law’.344 Reza Khan, trained in Mughal administration, found the idea preposterous: ‘to order a magistrate of the faith to decide in conjunction with a Bramin [sic] would be repugnant to the rules of the faith’, he complained.345 The day of Reza Khan was coming to an end: with his being arrested for misgovernment in April 1772, his effort to train the British in the art of Mughal government was doomed.346 In British opinion, their policy was both a continuation of (original if not actual) Mughal practice and a measure of their liberal attitudes, which on several future occasions they could contrast with that of Reza Khan, who developed a posthumous reputation as the archetypical Muslim tyrant. Such an ascribed reputation permitted the British to conveniently ignore the fact that Mughals had long experience in dealing with non-Muslims and to make no attempt to discover how they had gone about doing so. Knowledge of the Mughal judicial system remains sparse, but we have some illuminating insights provided by scholars such as Lauren Benton, who has described an episode in seventeenth-century Bengal where a Mughal magistrate punished a Muslim man for slaying a peacock, which was prohibited by an imperial order that explicitly deferred to local Hindu sensibilities. Illuminatingly, a Portuguese Jesuit who was the principal cause of the dispute (having eaten the meat of


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the slain bird), but not a party as such, denounced the decision as inconsistent with Muslim law, which he proceeded to expound upon. His orthodoxy won the rhetorical approval of all present but had little practical effect.347 As far as civil law or, to be less anachronistic, those causes which would in the nineteenth century be considered the realm of civil law, is concerned, our knowledge is even more sparse. It seems unlikely that all non-Muslims, that is, the majority of Mughal subjects, were left without access to judicial processes of the state.348 As Robert Travers has pointed out, underlying British assertions of liberalism was a different notion of sovereignty and justice; while the Mughal approach was to countenance the diffusion of adjudication at various social levels, the British one was essentially statecentred.349 One might add to this the suggestion that on those infrequent occasions when the state did legally and judicially intervene, the law was theoretically unified in source (even if it was clearly not). To spell this out: Mughal statesmen were willing to allow the voluntary use of state courts for a wide range of social disputes, in particular for family and inheritance disputes of non-Muslims, but once approached, the qazi applied a unified law, which was, at least in theory, derived from Islam. On the other hand, there were causes in which the state had to intervene (these were cases that Reza Khan said were not open to interpretation), which may be seen as the analogical to modern- day criminal law except that these were explicitly ‘religious’ infractions. It is well known that in Islamic law the most heinous religious crimes include adultery and stealing, but as the Bengal case involving peacocks shows, the violation of an unorthodox emperor’s orders could also be seen as such. In the late eighteenth century, there was indeed a moment of intellectual as well as institutional transformation in Indian law, from which arose the quintessentially modern phenomenon of personal laws,350 but we will need to know much more about Mughal law and its practice before we can confidently state what the nature of this transformation was. It is certainly not adequate to characterize the transformation in contemporary British terms, such that the transition is one of intolerance to tolerance or lack of law to the rule of law. It does appear that the Mughal approach was one of systematic inconsistency, such that the purportedly unified Islamic law included some Hindu customs, for some places, but not ‘Hindu law’ in general. What’s more, it could present a system of courts whose jurisdiction was left deliberately undefined and whose exercise of jurisdiction in certain cases did not create binding precedent, as indeed did no other judicial decision. In the British approach, however, there appeared to be finite sets of people, with bags of substantive laws, that they could (or had to) carry with them at all times as a privilege. Once a Hindu, always a Hindu. Jon Wilson has suggested that this legal notion of the stable and bounded religious community observably arose in the early nineteenth century as a product of the colonial encounter, which had the effect of estranging the British rulers from the




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dense network of social relations from which British notions of legality and polity had hitherto arisen but to which they remained outsiders in India. Thus, increasingly impersonal notions of legal codes, inevitably applicable to bounded sets of people, made their appearance, and these were the personal laws. Wilson provides wonderfully close studies of the process of intellectual transformation that British officials, especially the jurists concerned with Hindu and Muslim law, underwent before producing works that came to be regarded as indisputable codes of religious law. Other scholars have also written about the perversion inherent in the compilation of digests related to that other entity which is even more difficult to name: ‘Anglo-Muhammdan law’.351 I am not sure that this transformation can be folded into the acquisition of formal political power, starting at the eastern edge of the country. From our discussion of the earlier cases from Bombay and Calcutta, we can see, for example, that the notion of finite groups of people, identifiable by religion (Hindu, Christian) and possessing discrete sets of laws was an idea that British judges had been toying with for a considerable length of time. The acquisition of diwani only exacerbated their legal dilemmas. But it is also true that while in fact the legal dilemmas of the late eighteenth century and later were similar to those of the early eighteenth century, the sheer number of and significance of legal disputes that involved such matters of principle required drastic innovation.

Universal law and religious law: supreme courts, natural law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction At the same time, the quest for universal law remained and expanded, especially with the institution of the Supreme Court at Calcutta in 1774, by order of the British Parliament and as successor to, and superseding, the Mayors’ Courts. The Supreme Court’s jurisdiction was, ab initio, limited: ‘racially’ its authority extended over all British subjects in the province, territorially over all persons within the city of Calcutta and, more expansively, over all persons employed by the Company or its servants. The territorial division of jurisdictions, with English law being applied in the capital city, and a hybrid Company-Mughal law applying elsewhere, was subject to tensions due to the overlapping jurisdiction of different tribunals. Because of the expansive and unclear jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and because judges of the court referred to natural law in order to establish their jurisdiction where it was not obvious, scholars, including Robert Travers, have seen this tribunal as something of a precursor of the legal homogenization to follow. As Travers points out, such homogenization continued apace even when the Supreme Court’s competence was challenged in particular cases; the rebuffed tribunal was then given the commission to frame rules for the functioning of the Company’s courts.352 The Company’s courts themselves


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were anything but authentic ‘Mughal courts’; manned by British officials, regulated by rules framed at Calcutta and applying laws that may only with some imagination be described as indigenous, these courts were as much part of the colonial legal system of India as the Supreme Courts.353 And yet, that recognition should not make us insensitive to the formal distinctions of jurisdiction and law between these two types of ‘colonial’ courts, simply because these formal distinctions determined how a person in colonial India would experience the legal system, and the nature of results the system would produce, even when dealing with apparently universal issues, such as the freedom of religious belief. Further, the formal distinctions we are talking about existed not only between the Crown and Company courts but also between the several jurisdictions that the Crown court (in this case the Supreme Court) possessed. One such jurisdiction was the ‘ecclesiastical’, which the Supreme Court possessed in addition to its civil, criminal, equity and admiralty jurisdictions. The very fact that these diverse jurisdictions, which belonged to distinct judicial hierarchies in Britain in the 18th and most of nineteenth centuries, were lodged in a single tribunal was a distinctive feature of the colonial legal system.354 Ecclesiastical law, which, since the Restoration, consisted of canon law as recognized by statute as well as parliamentary statutes, was, of course, an integral part of British law, applying (until 1857) to all matrimonial and child- custody disputes, and a substantial section of inheritance causes, particularly those involving wills on large estates.355 In Britain there was an entire hierarchy of ecclesiastical courts, ranging from the bishop’s (consistory) courts to the provincial courts (Court of Arches for Canterbury, Chancery Court for York) and, ultimately, to the Privy Council.356 For our purposes, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Supreme Courts of Calcutta, and later Bombay and Madras, was not just a historical curiosity but the concrete forum where Christians would have to resort to in order to assert their claims of religious freedom. The colonial Crown courts were accorded ecclesiastical jurisdiction expressly in order to give them competence to deal with the relevant causes (matrimony, custody, wills) of ‘British subjects’ according to the ecclesiastical law used in the diocese of London.357 Since the Company courts were in theory Mughal courts, they did not possess ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and in any case they had no jurisdiction over Europeans. On paper, therefore, the division was neat, with the Supreme Court dealing with the matrimonial and inheritance disputes of ‘British subjects’ according to British (ecclesiastical) law, and Company courts correspondingly dealing with similar causes for ‘natives’ according to the Muslim or Hindu law (however these laws were defined) depending on the status of the parties. But the reader can surely see the problem already: Sarah and Phoebe’s dispute in 1755 had shown that the imagined coincidence of religion and race on which the category ‘British subject’ was premised was no more than a taxonomic utopia. Predictably, therefore, Christians who failed to fit that utopia made their




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appearance on the ecclesiastical side of the Supreme Courts, demanding rights which, if claimed as universal, had to be substantiated within the reality described above. In 1839, one saw in a sense a replay of Janaki’s case, when two Parsi358 young men, Dhanjibhai and Hormasji, converted to Christianity under the guidance of the Scottish missionary John Wilson. Both took refuge in the missionary’s house and, while legal claims for custody by Dhanjibhai’s guardians failed,359 his married friend Hormasji had to undertake a protracted legal battle with his family and with that of his wife, who treated his conversion as the end of his claims on his family. A month after his baptism, his daughter was affianced, allegedly without his consent. Although Hormasji did not resist her betrothal directly, he kept up efforts to recover his wife and daughter, and only in 1843, when his wife was married to another Parsi man, he applied to the Bombay Supreme Court to regain custody of his daughter. The Court’s discussion, preceding the judgment, rehashed the issues raised by Janaki: whether the natural law right of the father to custody of his children360 could be shown to have been superseded in this case by the existence of a Parsi law directing loss of custody on religious conversion. Since no such law was discovered, Hormasji received custody of his daughter,361 but recovering his wife appeared to be out of the question. In the same year, a deserted Parsi wife attempted to recover her husband, or, at least, his obligations towards her, by instituting a case for the restitution of conjugal rights on the ecclesiastical side of the Supreme Court of Bombay. The husband, who was acting in defiance of the Parsi panchayat or body of elders,362 argued that since he was a Zoroastrian the court had no jurisdiction over him in the matter. Although Justice Erskine Perry ruled that it did, the husband remained recalcitrant, and in 1856 a further attempt by the wife was dismissed by the Privy Council on the grounds that ecclesiastical jurisdiction did not apply to the Zoroastrian marriage.363 These cases involving the Parsis, a community undergoing rapid religious and social change in the nineteenth century, including conversions to Christianity, allow us to perceive both how the legal system was developing and how a community that was itself ‘exceptional’ negotiated and experienced it. By being neither Hindu nor Muslim, the Parsi collective claim to a discrete body of law was weak, and this may have helped a young man (Dhanjibhai) claim his physical and spiritual freedom against his guardians and also a Parsi-turned- Christian father (Hormasji) to recover custody of his child in spite of changing his religion. In the case of marital obligations, however, it appeared that difference overrode any possible universality. In any case, each of these episodes alerted Parsis to the strength of the British legal system and the need to discover a coherent body of personal laws to prevent being subjected to British ecclesiastical laws or to decisions premised on an even more generally stated natural law. In fact, the counsel for Dr John Wilson and Dhanjibhai literally put words into their mouths when he


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said, ‘My Lord, what is Parsi law? Since I have been in Bombay, I have never been able to discover it; and I have never met with any man who had ... I think I may insist that the Parsis have no law ... [The parties]must have this case determined according to English law ... 364 To be without a law appeared disastrous in the context of a tremendous imperial legal project that had recently been commissioned: that of providing a uniform code of law for all of India. Given this projected ‘uniform civil code’, the absence of special ‘exemptions’ (as Hindus and Muslims formally possessed) appeared to imply the imposition of a law that was indifferent to religious status and incapable of imposing religious discipline. The Parsis organized themselves with tremendous alacrity, representing effectively to the British Government the rules that the Zoroastrian religion prescribed for marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance,365 which unsurprisingly included grounds for divorce and disinheritance on the premise of religious out- conversion.366

Law commissions and the debate over the lex loci As mentioned above, the Parsi project narrowly apprehended and dovetailed itself into a massive imperial scheme for rationalizing and codifying the laws of India. On the occasion of the Company’s charter being renewed in 1833, the British Parliament examined the state of government in India, and the legal situation was found particularly unsatisfactory. A number of British judges who had worked in India complained of the conflicting jurisdictions and conflicts of law endemic in the system. With the Charter Act of 1833, the British Parliament decided to add a specialized law member to the Governor- General of India’s Council, this office being occupied by T. B. Macaulay. In 1835, Macaulay was also appointed Chair of the First Indian Law Commission, which was to investigate the situation of Indian laws and to propose improvements.367 Among the issues with which the first Commission dealt were the petitions from groups of people who complained not of the unfairness of particular laws but of the travails of a condition of being without a law, one which the Parsis had adroitly avoided. These were petitions by people whose religion and race failed to slot them in the neat boxes that the colonial legal system (as it was so far) had provided for them: they called themselves East Indians368 and Armenians and complained that subjected to the Company’s courts they found themselves without a law, or subject to Muslim law by default, to which they objected. In their petitions, they represented their marriages and inheritance practices as being under threat. In 1842, the first Law Commission rejected an existing government proposal for a specific law regulating the marriages of East Indians, stating correctly enough that this racial category was too indefinite. However, their solution was no less problematic, as the future would show.




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In their opinion, the petitioners would be best served by there being one uniform law for all those not Hindus or Muslims, which should be the lex loci, or law of the country. This then led to the discussion of what the lex loci was or ought to be, which was of relevance in determining the validity of legislative interventions of imperial significance, such as the abolition of slavery.369 On this occasion, the law commissioners considered, perhaps for the last time, the possibility that Muslim law was the lex loci of India. This reprehensible possibility was, however, rejected by recalling Reza Khan’s condemnation of the personal law system. The long-dead Reza Khan’s opinion was taken as evidence that Muslim law was unable to restrict its scope to any extent, and hence to tolerate religious and cultural difference, in a manner that only English law could.370

The legal nature of property rights: Act XXI of 1850 Even with this declaration made, not all kinds of problematic persons were dealt with. It still remained unclear, for example, given that the ‘tolerant’ English legal system had undertaken to dispense Muslim and Hindu law, what rights accrued to a person who changed his or her religion, for example, somebody in the situation of Janaki, or Hormasji, when the Hindu or Muslim laws appeared to indict him or her for offences particular to those laws. Was there an area of civility outside religion? In 1830, the GovernorGeneral, William Bentinck, with instructions from the Court of Directors, was determined to establish that there was, especially where the civil rights of Indian converts to Christianity were concerned.371 To this end, he legislated Regulation VII of 1832 of the Bengal Code, of which Section IX provided: in any civil suit, the parties to such suit may be of different persuasions, when one party shall be of the Hindoo, and the other of the Mahomedan persuasion, or where one or more parties to the suit shall not be either of the Mahomedan or Hindoo persuasions, the law of those religions shall not be permitted to operate to deprive such party or parties of any property to which, but for the operation of such laws, they would have been entitled.372 It might then appear that Hormasji’s winning the custody of his daughter in 1839 followed from this legislative declaration, made a few years earlier. But the Bengal Regulation did not even apply to other presidencies, and, notwithstanding Hormasji’s (partial) good fortune, an Evangelical Anglican bishop of Bombay, Revd Thomas Carr, wrote repeatedly between 1845 and 1849 to the Government of Bombay, remonstrating against the British Government’s failure to protect converts to Christianity from loss of civil rights, especially from being disinherited. He proposed that the


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Bengal Regulation be extended to all parts of India.373 When the then current law member, J. D. Bethune, considered such a possibility, he wondered whether it would be valid to prescribe automatic transfer of property whose inheritance was tied to certain conditions. Conditional bequests were well known in English law, and Hindu inheritance happened to be dependent upon the performance of funerary rites, of which the convert was incapable due to loss of caste.374 Had the Bengal Regulation really severed the connection between Hindu doctrine and inheritance? When consulted, the judges of Calcutta’s sadr diwani adalat375 stated that they knew of no cases being argued under the Bengal Regulation, and the sadr diwani adalat of Banaras could only refer to one case of which they provided no details.376 Meanwhile, the Government received volumes of angry criticism from Hindus of Calcutta and Madras. The conservative Hindu leader Radhakanta Deb stated that the Bengal Regulation of 1832 had been completely unknown to him and that the law was an invasion of Hindu laws of inheritance. Strongly reacting to the suggestion that they were being intolerant, Deb and his co-petitioners argued that Hindus were the most tolerant of people since they had little interest in proselytization. All they asked for was protection of their own rules of inheritance, which was a religious matter and long recognized by the Government.377 In spite of these criticisms, Lord Dalhousie’s government asserted in a brief legislation that the state had complete authority over succession to property. Act XXI of 1850, which has come to be called (inaccurately) the Lex Loci Act declared: So much of any law or usage now in force within the territories subject to the Government of the East India Company as inflicts on any person forfeiture of right or property by reason of his or her renouncing or having been excluded from the communion of any religion shall cease to be enforced as law in the Courts of the East India Company and in the Courts established by royal charter within the said territories.’378 This particular debate was crucial enough to continue beyond this declaration and to occasion comment in the British Parliament, where the Conservative MP Lord Ellenborough, ex- Governor- General of India, took the role of representative for Hindu conservatives, also adding the more palatable and comprehensible glosses for the British audience, that Hindu inheritance laws filtered out immoral persons from familial estates.379 One person who took great offence at this insinuation was a Bengali Hindu teacher, who had converted to Christianity in 1832, had suffered greatly in his personal and professional life as a result, and had later been ordained with Anglican orders.380 Rev. Krishna Mohan Banerjea argued that it was a simple matter of conflict of laws, in which, by established rules, the laws of the defendant were to be used. Since the Christian convert was likely to be the defendant against his or her relatives, it was Christian personal law that ought to be




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applied.381 Radhakanta Deb, who had been a patron of Krishna Mohan in his pre- Christian youth, and who had since then become a vicious enemy, spat back the crucial question: what personal laws did Christians in India have?382 Radha Kanta Deb had located the crux of the problem: there was no such thing as a Christian personal law, although Christianity had been referred to often enough in the legal discussions and declarations of British-ruled India. Archetypically a people without a law, Indian Christians, particularly those who had converted to Christianity, were located in an indeterminate zone, excluded from the realm of Hindu and Muslim (and the emerging Parsi) law by their religion and from automatic entry into British law by their race. If Hindu law was to apply to Hindus alone, and if inheritable property devolved (among Indians) by religious law, then what law applied to the Indian who had ceased to be Hindu (or Muslim or Parsi), if he or she couldn’t demonstrate that he or she had a law of his or her own? The debate in Parliament had no legislative effects, but the consequences of the so- called Lex Loci Act were more complex than most historians have realized; the Act certainly did not consist of an uncomplicated assertion of the sovereign right to regulate the transfer of property and responsibility to protect against civil injury for religious belief.383 But neither was this declaration of universal intent completely hollowed by state imperatives to retain ascriptive status in law in general,384 or its need to protect the Hindu social order in particular.385 While there were indeed powerful Indian voices seeking the ear and arm of the colonial regime to sustain or, as Washbrook has suggested, to create ‘traditional’ social orders, there remained the search for the universal, which, however muted, added a dynamic to the system. The historical role of the Indian Christians was not just to expose the hollowness of the unsubstantiated universal but also incite a quest for making it more substantive. Ironically, it was substantiated through a claim that was in itself discriminatory: that of Christian men’s superior rights over ancestral property, against female members of their own families.

Could Christians be Hindus if they wanted to? Abraham v. Abraham, 1863 The case of Abraham v. Abraham was in many senses representative of a wide range of Indian society, and not Christians alone. It involved familial conflicts over property following the death of a male member, efforts by other male members to exclude the widow and children of the deceased and competing claims based on religious status. But the distinctive feature of this case was that all parties belonged formally to the same religion: Christianity. In my opinion, the case revealed how the highly diverse social group of Indian Christians manipulated their multiple affiliations as well as


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the increasingly dominant equation of Christians with converts, in order to maximize individual benefits. In a more abstract sense, the case showed that declaring non- discrimination on religious grounds as the lex loci did not help close the continuing conflict between difference and universality but added further conduits for passage between both legal ideas. The case itself was a sordid one involving efforts by the brother of a dead man to deprive the latter’s widow and sons of any benefit from his substantial property. In 1855, Charlotte Abraham, widow of Matthew, complained in the Civil Court of Bellary, in presentday Karnataka, that Francis Abraham, the surviving brother, a junior partner in the business during Abraham’s lifetime, and subsequently the de-facto manager, was depriving her and her sons of property and profits related to her husband’s business. Francis retorted that since his family were descendants of Hindus, Matthew Abraham’s property devolved upon him by Hindu inheritance laws of joint family property, the widow being entitled merely to maintenance. The main point to be decided during the judicial proceedings was the applicable law. It was clear that being Christian did not entail any particular law as far as property was concerned; therefore, Hindu law could be applied if the family appeared to be Hindu in practice. The Bellary Civil Judge’s decision denied Francis’s claims, which was reversed by the Sadr Diwani Adalat of Madras and overturned again by the Privy Council. The highest judicial body of the British Empire decided in 1863 that Matthew, on marrying Charlotte, who was ‘East Indian’ had adopted ‘East Indian’ customs, which were similar to those of the English,386 and hence revealed no inclination to retain Hindu customs, even though he might have done so.387 This case has received attention from two scholars in recent times, but, unlike them, I have not found this case an occasion to celebrate open- ended constructions of Indian Christian identity without reference to their gendered implications,388 nor to discover arbitrary manipulation of religious or racial identities by the British Government.389 I find the case symptomatic of the categorical disjunction at which Indian Christians were located, which allowed the combination of the universalist premise of the lex loci and the trope of the ‘convert’ for patriarchal interests. But this was not the end of the story.

The Indian Succession Act, 1865 Abraham remained unchallenged precedent for less than two years. While the Privy Council discussed the status of the people in the Abraham family, the third Law Commission of India was working (in Britain) on an Indian Civil Code, with the law member Henry Maine leading the efforts in India. Unlike the Penal Code, promulgated in 1860, the Civil Code of India was never completed, with the fourth and last Commission declaring that it was a matter that depended on the will of the ‘native communities’ themselves.390




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What remained of this old ‘uniform civil code’ project was a unified judicial system, abolishing the conflicting jurisdictions of the Company and Crown courts, a law of civil procedure and certain laws bearing the proud title ‘Indian’, recalling the (failed) agenda of universalism out of which they were born. One such law was the Indian Succession Act, X, of 1865, which, on the face of it, purported to be a uniform inheritance law for India. In reality, the law applied to very few Indians, since Hindus and Muslims were totally exempted from its provisions and Parsis from the provisions of intestate succession.391 Given these exemptions, the law applied to those whose indeterminate legal status had often in the past invoked the search for the universal, namely, the Indian Christians.392 The Government of India did investigate whether the law could be applied to all Indians, seeking the opinion of prominent Indians from all over the country.393 Parsis, who had been collectively working on their own marriage and inheritance laws, accepted the section on wills only.394 Prominent Muslim leaders, including Sayyid Ahmad himself, rejected the law entirely on the basis that the rules of Muslim intestate succession were known and that their own laws regarding wills limited testamentary capacity to onethird of the estate, in absence of the unanimous consent of the ordinary successors. This varied from the total testamentary power contemplated under the Indian Succession Act. In addition, Sayyid Ahmad pointed out that since the Quran itself recognized oral wills, the Indian Succession Act, which made registration of wills compulsory, would be an invasion of Muslim religious laws.395 Hindu respondents similarly did not need to contend with intestate succession, and many chose to argue that Hindu law did not countenance wills, since the share of inheritance was preordained. This was contradicted by the fact that Hindu wills were in evidence aplenty in India from the late eighteenth century onwards in the British courts. The law member Fitzjames Stephen took this to mean that Hindus had admitted to the non-religious status of wills and that Hindu wills were merely derived from English example, therefore open to regulation by the Government. Accordingly, the Hindu Wills Act was passed in 1870, extending the section on testamentary succession in the Indian Succession Act to them. But in response to pressure from prominent Hindus, including the landlord- dominated British Indian Association, the Hindu Wills Act incorporated several additional privileges, such as the ability to create ‘perpetuities’ to support religious endowments, without the year’s notice required by the Indian Succession Act,396 which remained a powerful tool in the hands of disgruntled parents. It was not as if Indian Christians were particularly eager to embrace the succession law modelled on English law; Abraham at least showed that there was difference of opinion on the subject. But men like Francis Abraham, who would be happy enough to claim the Hindu law of inheritance, especially mitakshara, which excluded females, could not really argue that, as


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Christians, they possessed an older law of inheritance. The possibility of claiming multiple religious and hence legal status (as in Abraham) went against the grain of the personal law system, hence all those for whom specific exemptions were not made were subject to the Indian Succession Act. The irony was that, by sheer delimitation, this ‘universal law’ became a personal law of inheritance for Indian Christians.397 Many Christians took this development to be opposed to their interests, the All India Conference of Indian Christians, formed in 1914, complaining that this denied them of their full rights under Hindu inheritance laws, in spite of the Lex Loci Act of 1850.398

Christian marriage: the religious history of British civil marriage law Christian men in India had indeed a lot to complain about, not least the fact of being legally required to practise more gender equity than any other Indian men of their generation. If in the case of inheritance such an unfortunate development had to some extent been arrested by the skilful deployment of claims to the status of a convert, and to not be discriminated against for such, marriage proved a more tricky arena, because in matrimony above all other aspects of social life, religious and well as civil authorities expected Christians to maintain their confessional purity. As in other aspects of law affecting Indian Christians, the law relating to ‘Christian marriage’ originated in the perceived need by state authorities in India as well as Britain to regulate the domestic life of ‘British subjects’, but because Christians not quite of that description necessarily got entangled in that category, such legislation saw a complex trajectory, with unexpected punitive effects on those who had converted to Christianity. The origin of the problems that led to the first Christian marriage law in India lay in Britain and in the nature of the British state–church relationship as it stood in the early nineteenth century. Canon law recognized marriages that were no more than declarations of intent in the present tense, even without the presence of witnesses, but by the sixteenth century British courts took the view that the presence of a priest in ‘holy orders’ was essential for the complete validity of a marriage.399 Following the scandals involving the indiscreet marriages of the wealthy, often performed in secret by ‘rogue’ priests, Lord Hardwicke’s Act (26 Geo. II c. 23 of 1753) outlawed all marriages not duly celebrated, ministered and registered in an Anglican church or chapel, with five exceptions: the Archbishop’s licence, royal marriages, marriages abroad (provided such marriage were celebrated by a law that recognized Christian marriage), marriages between Jews and marriages between Quakers.400 As an effect of the above law, all marriages of Christians performed in India, in order to be valid, had to be performed by an Anglican priest. There




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arose doubts regarding the validity of marriages performed by ministers of the Scottish church in India401 and hence a specific legislation in 1818 permitted such marriages, provided ministers were also chaplains of the East India Company.402 This still left a significant number of people out in the cold, and these happened to be Nonconformist missionaries, whose deeply held religious views led them to officiate at marriages when invited to do so. This deeply scandalized the (Anglican) Bishop of Calcutta, Daniel Wilson, known to historians as an Evangelical,403 but who took, on this occasion, an acutely High Church position. He wrote to the Governor- General of India in 1833 complaining that the law of marriage had been disturbed by such activities and that the law should be clearly settled, because it affected ‘all the bonds of moral and domestic happiness, spreading in its consequences to every branch of the social, civil, and religious relations of families, and involving the rights of property and the order of legitimacy and succession’. Taking an intensely statist view of religious law, he asserted that the English law of marriage was the canon law as recognized by the Parliament, which the Nonconformist ministers had violated.404 Nonconformist ministers themselves naturally took quite a different view, naturally and petitioned the Governor General for a law that would validate marriages performed by ‘Protestant dissenting’ ministers, which the Government of India forwarded to the Court of Directors of the East India Company.405 At this stage, Bishop Wilson stated sharply that he failed to appreciate the scruples of Dissenting ministers, and, indeed, how was a Dissenting minister, his faith, creed and competence defined? Could a Socinian, denying the Divinity of our Lord, or a mere printer or schoolmaster be counted as a Dissenting minister and stand in the place of a priest in holy orders?406 Bishop Wilson’s assertions were slightly dated, since in 1836 a law had been enacted in Britain, permitting civil marriage before a registrar for those who had conscientious objections to being married in an Anglican church.407 Obviously, the Bishop was attempting to contain this damage to the Anglican Church’s authority but, despite his wishes, a special parliamentary commission was appointed to decide on an issue which was considered to be of empire-wide concern. This Commission used the 1836 law as a model for what was, in form, India’s first civil-marriage law. So far, it might appear as if this was a conflict entirely within the remit of British church history or, at least, within the history of British sectarian politics. But the introductory clause of the law intended to regulate ‘marriages in India’ belied the insularity that characterized the text of the law itself; by only restricting itself to marriages where at least one party professed the ‘Christian religion’, this law exposed the manner in which religion was embedded in the category of ‘British subject’ and hence predicted widespread legal implications for Indian Christians. The commissioners were not entirely blind to these possibilities; they were aware that there were




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European Christians in India who were not British subjects, just as there were ‘East Indians’ (i.e. Anglo-Indians) who were Christian but imperfectly European, and there were those who had converted to Christianity from Hinduism or Islam, being in many cases repudiated by their spouses but not legally divorced (there being as yet no divorce law in Britain). But while considering these racial-religious complexities in great detail (somewhat in the manner of Holwell in 1755), the Commission declared them beyond its competence, deciding that it could get away with recommending a law for ‘British subjects’ alone, leaving the messy business to others.408 Statute 14 and 15 Vic. c. XL of 1851 embodied their efforts and produced the paradox of a confessionally limited civil law whereby parties of whom at least one was Christian, if they fulfilled the necessary conditions of minimum age (and/or consent of guardian), absence of a living spouse and not being related within prohibited degrees, could, after due notice to the Marriage Registrar, have a purely civil marriage. The Government of India, whose concerns were a bit more pragmatic, protested that the requirement of parental consent until the age of 21 would discriminate against Indian Christians, who tended to marry young and might not have a Christian guardian.409 This referred to the fact that young men or women converted to Christianity might have to wait until they were 21, which was exceptionally late for marriage in nineteenth- century India, since their aggrieved parents were unlikely to assist in their marriage by offering consent. The authorities in Britain failed to be moved by the exotic difficulties of their Indian co-religionists, and the Government of India was forced to enact Act V of 1852, replicating the British parliamentary law. This law referred to Indian Christians only in the passing, clauses 7 and 12 providing that ‘native Christians’ marrying under this law were to be made aware of the obligations arising out of it, most importantly that of monogamy. This was an ominous indication of things to come.

From Indian Marriage Act to Indian Christian Marriage Act: the sacralization of a civil law, 1864–72 Act V of 1852 in itself did not cause much concern to Indian Christians or to the missionaries who ministered to them, since most Indian Christians married in church and remained unaffected by these legal provisions for civil marriage. But in 1864, once again as part of its uniform civil code project, the Government of India attempted to create a ‘universal’ (read, by exclusion Christian) marriage law for India encompassing civil as well as church marriages. This time, it caused uproar among missionaries, especially Roman Catholic priests from the Madras presidency, who found that several of the provisions conflicted with their established practices. There were several offending aspects of the Act XXV of 1864; these consisted of prescriptions regarding the performance of marriage within daylight hours,




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the prohibited degrees of kinship and also the minimum age of the parties, although the minimum age had been specifically lowered to 13 for ‘native’ Christian women and 16 for ‘native’ Christian men. In addition, permission had been given to ‘converts’ to marry without parental consent provided they were of the minimum age.410 Because of the Catholic protests, Act V of 1865 made further modifications to the Indian Marriage Act: following recommendations from the Madras Government,411 it removed the requirement of parental consent for all ‘native Christians’ (not only converts) and entirely exempted Roman Catholic marriages from the application of Part 5 which dealt with the conditions under which alone a marriage between ‘native Christians’ was valid: ● ●

● ●

●

That the bride was at least 13 and the groom 16; That they should not be within prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity; That neither should have a spouse living; That they took take the marriage vow in a certain form, before two witnesses; And that the marriage should be celebrated within daylight hours.

But even with Roman Catholics (seemingly) out of the picture,412 the Indian Marriage Act needed further modifications before it could placate the vocal leaders of Indian Christians. A now venerable Revd Krishna Mohan Banerjea, as President of the Bengal Christian Association, complained bitterly against the removal of the requirement of parental consent for marriages of Christian minors. He urged that this left Indian Christian children as unprotected as orphans, liable to be misled into inappropriate marriages. Converts might require unusual freedom from parental control, but, in his view, the children of converts certainly did not. In the final version of the marriage law of Christians in 1872, which retained the minimum ages of 13 and 16, the requirement of parental consent was re-added until the age of 21.413 Debates over a statutory minimum age of marriage and marital relations exercised significant sections of the Indian public from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. In their legal form these debates often replicated the apparent binary of natural law and religious law, with the Government’s responsibility as well as right to offer protection to vulnerable sections of Indian society, in this case, young girls, being evaluated against the doctrinal requirements of Hinduism and Islam, as well as the entitlement of Indians to protect their domestic space against encroachment by a state increasingly vilified as alien.414 In the Christian context, the debate took a different shape, with the ‘universal’ ideals of freedom (from religious or parental control) serving, unlike in the Hindu and


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Muslim context, to justify a lowering of the age of marriage. In conceptualizing the Indian Christian as essentially a convert from other religions, legislation sought to pre- empt punitive constraints that such religions might impose on the person exercising religious choice. But such a conflation of ‘Christian’ with ‘convert’ and of parental control with hostile religious prescription threatened to undermine the age and gender hierarchies within Christian families. Krishna Mohan’s complaints have to be seen in this context; being a ‘convert’ seemed to unfairly preclude being a sufficiently authoritative father.

‘Monogamy’ for Indian Christians: the Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Act, 1866 As the British Parliamentary Commission had already been aware in 1850, the most numerically substantial legal problem with regard to Christian marriage in India was related to the fact of religious change. They had examined with great curiosity the informal procedures adopted by missionaries in dealing with the thorny personal and marital dilemmas that conversion to Christianity gave rise to; learning that missionaries did not view conversion to Christianity as an end to the pre- Christian marriage, although this view was most often unreciprocated by the non- Christian spouse. Lengthy procedures were established, prohibiting remarriage of the convert before adequate communication and persuasion had been attempted, extending over a period of two to three years, only after which the convert was permitted to remarry in church.415 We can assume that such procedure continued, in spite of the Commission’s refusal to formalize it. With the passage of the Indian Marriage Act, 1865, Christians who were already married (even if such spouses had repudiated them) committed the criminal offence of bigamy if they married again. This gave Indian Christians an unwanted legal distinction since polygamy was not illegal for any other Indian male.416 This situation, which would practically force the new convert to be celibate until the death of his or her spouse, was represented by missionaries all over the country with sufficient vigour as inequitable, and by 1865 the Government of India had compiled an immense dossier of petitions, dating back to 1852, which requested a law permitting the dissolution of non- existent marriages in which Indian converts to Christianity remained trapped.417 Britain had in the very recent past legislated a divorce law, but its provisions did not appear to fit the circumstances; hence, the Government of India proposed creating an entirely new law, using a provision from ecclesiastical law, that of suing for restitution of conjugal rights. The deserted spouse, as plaintiff, would demand the restoration of conjugal rights, and if the deserting non- Christian partner refused to comply, a divorce could be granted after the fulfilment of necessary procedures in court.




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Most missionaries found the proposed law inconvenient; Revd Fennelly, the Catholic bishop of Madras, urged that the provisions of the proposed law were unnecessarily complicated and time- consuming, as well as humiliating for women, since the procedure required the establishment of the fact of consummation in court.418 He strongly recommended that the Catholic Church be permitted to follow its own canon-law procedure for dissolving such marriages, which it had pursued so far, in India as well as in other countries.419 Taking a completely opposed point of view, urging prohibition rather than facilitation of divorce, urban Protestant Christian leaders of Calcutta and Delhi denounced the proposed law on the grounds that it would prevent reconciliations which in most cases did eventually take place and would lead to a loss of opportunity to spread the Christian message further. Revd Krishna Mohan Banerjea (once again) felt that the law was entirely the creation of missionaries who were totally unrepresentative of Indian Christians and who treated the latter as their serfs.420 Banerjea was to some extent unfair: Revd R. Winter of the Anglican SPG’s mission to Delhi similarly stated that he did not know of any Indian converts ‘panting’ to be readmitted to marital life.421 On the other hand, Revd W. T. Satthianadhan, of Madras, an Indian clergyman, responded to Banerjea (and Winter) that the scale of religious conversions in south India made the legal measure essential, implying that the righteous moral posture of north Indian and Bengali Christians arose from their being acquainted with a unrepresentatively small number of conversions.422 There were also petitions from Hindus and Muslims alleging that the law impinged on their religious rights under law. As a result, a number of provisions were modified, especially those requiring the physical presence of deserting wives in court. Muslims managed to secure a complete exemption from the law, on the grounds that it was unnecessary, since a Muslim marriage was completely dissolved by apostasy, and also that it was invasive of Muslim personal law, since it forced the Muslim spouse to postpone remarriage beyond the period of probation or iddat under Muslim law.423 This exemption would give rise to the phenomenon of the cuckolded but celibate Christian husband, whose impotent helplessness provided an emotive symbol of oppression for Indian Christian community leaders in the twentieth century. Such was the iconic figure of Zabardast Khan.

The Indian Divorce Act 1869 and the fate of Zabardast Khan When the Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Act XXI of 1866 was passed, it proved incapable of addressing the marital problems of Indian Christians. The procedural requirements of this law necessitated that the deserting spouse be produced in court and subjected to a long process of interrogation and attempts at reconciliation. Where the spouse was untraceable, as was often the case, the law offered no remedy.424 The Native Converts’ Marriage


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Dissolution Act of 1866 was not repealed; an additional law, Act IV of 1869 or the Indian Divorce Act was legislated to supplement it as well as to provide one more ‘universal’ law to complement the Indian Marriage Act. This law extended the provisions of the British divorce law of 1857, under which adultery was a necessary condition for divorce, adultery of the wife being sufficient grounds while adultery of the husband required additional grievances such as cruelty, desertion or ‘unnatural’ sexual acts.425 In the Indian context, where converts’ wives, especially if Muslim or Parsi, remarried (as Hormasji’s wife had), their new marriage could be legally construed as adultery. Similar behaviour by the non- Christian husband was construed differently: in this case it was change of religion, coupled with remarriage, that provided grounds for divorce, since adultery of the husband in itself was not adequate grounds for divorce in British law.426 Even so, when in 1870 a man called Zabardast Khan filed for divorce in the district court of Farrukhabad, a north Indian city, on grounds of desertion and adultery by his wife, he could not be granted a divorce. The case was moved for specialist opinion to the High Court of North-Western Provinces, at Allahabad. The court heard that Khan and his now- estranged wife had both been born Muslim and had married as Muslims. They had later adopted Christianity under the aegis of the American Presbyterian mission, but the wife, who decided to revert to Islam, married again. Khan had returned her dower, signifying the end of his relationship with her under Muslim law, and had appealed for divorce. The judges declared that the case did not lie under the Indian Divorce Act, which was ‘intended to apply to such marriages as are recognized as marriages by Christians, and not to polygamous contracts, such as are the unions known as marriages to the Mahomedan law’. Khan was Christian and had married only once, but it was true that he had married under Muslim law and could have been polygamous had he remained Muslim.427 This placed his marriage beyond the scope of British matrimonial law and the Indian Divorce Act which was based on the former. As far as Muslim law was concerned, Maulvi Asadullah Khan, previously Qazi al- Qazat of the Sadr court of North-Western Provinces, now Subordinate Judge,428 opined on consultation that by Muslim law Zabardast Khan was separated from his wife the moment he converted because by Muslim law an apostate was considered socially dead. But the judges could not let Zabardast Khan avail of the provision of Muslim law either, because he was at the time of the suit a Christian and had filed his case under the Indian Divorce Act.429 Bigamy was a criminal offence for Christians,430 so Khan was effectively excluded from marital life until his ex-wife died. A similar decision was reached by the Madras High Court in Thapitha Peter v. Thapitha Lakshmi. One of the three judges was Muthusamy Aiyar, the first Indian to be appointed to the High Court in Madras.431 They decided that the Indian Divorce Act did not apply to a Hindu marriage, even if the parties themselves had both become Christians, because the Indian Divorce




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Act was not meant to apply to polygamous marriages (as with Khan) and also because the court had no jurisdiction to hear matrimonial causes of Hindus. Since the matrimonial jurisdiction of the High Courts derived from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the erstwhile Supreme Courts, matrimonial causes relating to non- Christian marriages could not be heard in these courts.432 The principle that the Indian Divorce Act could not dissolve nonChristian marriages held for at least another half a century, until in 1912 the Calcutta High Court ruled that if the plaintiff was Christian at the time of the suit the Indian Divorce Act could apply.433 The All Indian Conference of Indian Christians voiced animated complaints against a marriage law that permitted, according to them, the undeterred adultery by Christian women.434 I found this complaint baffling, not least because it was hard to believe this self-portrayal by Christian men as victimized, constantly cuckolded husbands. Unless Indian Christian middle- class women were remarkably unlike middle- class women of other communities, there was obviously more going on than the political narrative of this community revealed. An investigation into the actual cases cited led me into the complex story of religious change, personal and social conflicts, and legal negotiations narrated above.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to address two historical questions, one relatively more empirical than other. The first and more empirical question is why and how there arose in India a set of laws known as the Christian personal law. In choosing to highlight the tortuous legislative and judicial history of this law, I have attempted also to answer the more analytical question of why India’s secular policies have a problem with the personal laws. In examining this apparently inevitable modern conflict between religious laws and universal laws, one which is not, in fact, restricted to India, my suggestion is that anything that claims to be universal, whether these be substantive laws or legal principles, is historically contingent. But the purpose of this assertion is neither to revert to the banal proposition that India’s secularism is marred by majoritarianism nor to ‘provincialize’ Europe and the modernity that it allegedly engendered.435 In fact, I believe this not to be the case at all; after presenting the narrative above I feel confident enough to suggest that modernity is the product of a historically particular encounter between widely divergent cultures, polities and legal philosophies. Modern India’s problems (and successes) with secularism are the result of this historical encounter that left indelible marks on the Indian polity, which many scholars have noticed but which they have explained without reference to its colonial history. By focusing on the process rather than on the origin of the legal conundrums described above, I have chosen to locate causation in a diversity


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of substantive ‘factors’, such as the mechanisms of judicial exercise, the constraints derived from British religious and legal traditions, the novelty and variety of political, personal and social experiences with which these inadequate categories had to contend and the manner in which Indians and Britons struggled to put those categories to the best use, according to their perceived interests and aims. This is not an effort to negate ideology but to locate hyper- coherent and hyper-articulate programmes against the messiness of society, politics and traditions of government which made the dream of a clean slate no more than purely imaginary. Such accumulated governmental, especially legal, traditions constrained as well as enabled thought and action in all legislative as well as judicial contexts; as a result, known words and deeds acquired unexpected meanings such that a claim to particularity (I am a British subject and a Christian) could incite a search for universal principles, whereas an assertion of universal principles (I am entitled to be free from discrimination for my religious affiliation) could be a demand for hierarchy and inequality, especially when such claims were made by Christian men asking to be judged by a version of the Hindu law that offered disproportionately greater privileges to men than to women. Through the history of Indian Christians and their encounter with colonial law, we are privileged to perceive such complex and contradictory pasts, and possible futures, of modernity.




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Part II


Institutions


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Creating a Public Presence: The Missionary College of St Stephen’s, Delhi

In the previous three chapters, we have seen how Indian Christians negotiated a system of laws that, while hardly of their making nevertheless permitted them opportunity for manipulation, if in some cases more successfully than others. In many ways, the role of Indian Christians was similar to Indians of other descriptions who exerted effective pressure on the colonial government, by using the contradictory principles of individual freedom and community entitlement in debates over religious freedom. Christians were also affected by imperial lawmaking by becoming marked by a separate set of personal laws, in spite of their distinctive historical role of disrupting stable categories of classification and legal governance by their very presence. In spite of this, the quest for a universal law of civil relations, which became less and less of a government priority as the nineteenth century wore on, remained a legal and political demand for Christians because of the needs and possibilities of boundary- crossing that it afforded to a community conceived of as converts by British law-makers, the Indian public and Christian leadership itself. Ideological commitment arises out of specific social locations, for individuals as for collectives. It would of course be justified to ask whether high politics, law and courts had much to do with the everyday life of most people, and, if not, whether the study of government policies tells us anything substantial about how people felt and behaved about religion, and, by extension, secularism. After all, most scholars agree that secularism is a certain way of thinking and being in the world. My effort in Part I of the book has been to demonstrate how the imperial quest to tolerate private religious differences in fact entrenched the significance of religious identity in law and, contradictorily, how such legally constructed religious communities competed to restrain the state from forming a legitimate connection with any one of them. I have also tried to show how the emerging disciplines of community and law


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affected a wide range of people and required them to marshal their intellectual and other resources to contend with that experience. In this part of the book, I will consider another level at which the state’s relation with religion was deliberated upon: the functioning of regulation of educational institutions, specifically Christian schools and colleges. Arguably a more concrete entity than either the individual or the community, such institutions had to deal with more than one axis of pressure, namely the religious expectations of their distant subscribers, the evolving Indian laws controlling private educational enterprise and the demands of their clientele. Added to this, the management of such institutions was internally divided by race; this was a divide that reflected a broader phenomenon affecting all Christian institutions in India, including churches and ecumenical societies. We will discuss this phenomenon in detail in Chapter 6. For the purposes of the present chapter, we will see how one such internally fractured institution negotiated the Indian market to constitute a specific public presence for itself, also tracing how the religious approach it developed shaped the attitude of its students towards itself and towards the broader issue of religion in public life.

Ideologies of missionary pedagogy: preparatio evangelica and fulfilment theology Scholars studying missionary pedagogic efforts in colonial India have attributed great importance to the theology that justified their work, to themselves and their contributors if nobody else. One such theological trend upon which scholars have remarked is that of preparatio evangelica, according to which missionary educationists were said to have convinced themselves that even while teaching subjects that they denounced as merely secular they were paving the intellectual way for the ultimate religious conversion of Indians. According to some scholars, this self-justifying theology then allowed even the most uncompromising of Christian missionaries to pragmatically postpone conversion indefinitely, to adjust to the Government’s policy of secular education and to fulfil their historical role of legitimizing imperial domination to their students.436 What the above-mentioned works correctly identify is the fact that Christian mission schools, while extremely popular with Indian students, were outstandingly unsuccessful as means for their conversion. They also underline the manner in which such institutions functioned and the dominance of their curricula by subjects which had little to do with religion (whether such subjects could be used to convey religious messages successfully is another debate). What is less accurate is the characterization of this theology as a well-planned strategy to inveigle Christianity into the minds of unsuspecting students rather than recognizing that it was a species of post-facto justification for failure, directed towards ‘home’ audiences that




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held (some of) the purse strings. As for empire, it was one thing to exalt in its projected glory and quite another to be one with it; to imagine that missionary educators called the shots in determining education policy in India is to focus on their moments of success in influencing the Government, which became fewer and further apart as the nineteenth century wore on. In fact, by the late nineteenth century, missionary educationists were no more than numerically cornered entrepreneurs selling wares that other ‘private agencies’ of Indian origin were also offering, the latter having the advantage of being able to offer doctrinal security to parents and ‘authenticity’ to a government keen on demonstrating that it was in touch with the ‘real’ people of India.437 A recent study on Christian missionary education in colonial northern India by Hayden Bellenoit demonstrates how missionaries had to act as entrepreneurs, tackling the financial and legal policies of the Government on the one hand and the expectations and prejudices of their increasingly nation- and religion- conscious students on the other, giving rise to an atmosphere of ‘cultural secularism’ in mission schools and colleges.438 I think however, that Bellenoit makes the mistake of conflating Christian pedagogy with missionary pedagogy, which is why he attempts to discover an European ideology to justify such an approach to religion and knowledge, turning back to discover, once again, the importance of ‘fulfilment theology’. In brief, this theology, to which such potency has been attributed, consisted of the belief that God had left no people without traces of the true light, although it was only in Christianity that this was fully expressed. In their view, therefore, it was the duty of Christian evangelists to identify those true elements in other religions, which could be developed, or ‘fulfilled’, into Christianity. Such an approach made late-nineteenth century missionary teachers less eager to uproot the tree of Hinduism, as Alexander Duff had aspired to do a few decades earlier, but instead eager to graft better doctrinal conclusions onto a recognizably advanced philosophical culture. Bellenoit suggests that this led the missionary educationists to respect knowledge in the broader sense and to eschew doctrinal confrontation in favour of a genuinely dialogical approach to other faiths. I believe that Bellenoit, in spite of his acute observation of the context that shaped missionary pedagogy, makes an error in attempting to discover the results in the origin. St Stephen’s College, the focus of this chapter, was created by a mission that was explicitly inspired by a version of fulfilment theology, but a study of the first quarter century or so of its existence shows that ‘fulfilment theology’, as proposed by British theologians writing in England, hardly prepared missionaries for any kind of ‘dialogue’ on central religious issues once in India. In my view, what really transformed the ‘religious policy’ of St Stephen’s, equipping it to deal with increasingly successful Indian political demands for restrictions on unwanted religious


St Stephen’s College


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instruction, was the Indianization of that institution, which took place in the early twentieth century. ‘Indianization’ was of course a slogan used in a variety of meanings and contexts, whether in Indian politics or within the Indian churches; in all contexts, however, it was taken to mean more than simply racial change in personnel and suggested different cultural and intellectual approaches more suitable to the Indian situation. What might constitute such a suitable approach was disputed by a variety of claimants; the St Stephen’s version of it happens to be one of the more successful efforts.

St Stephen’s College: the origin of an institution One of the most successful Christian colleges in India today was created by a mission born in a vision of ‘fulfilment theology’. In 1873, Brooke Foss Westcott conceived of a mission of Oxbridge alumni, living as a monastic house in the field, attempting to learn about Indian culture and to graft Christian doctrine onto it. In his opinion, to produce the entirety of Western Christianity in India would not only be impossible but would also be a failure even if successful.439 Westcott was a rather eccentric Cambridge fellow, subsequently a teacher at Harrow, the Bishop of Durham and professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Elitism, scholasticism and the British imperial fantasy of recreating the Roman Empire led him to believe that Cambridge men could do in India what the Alexandrians did in the days of the Early Church: appropriate Greek and Eastern knowledge as the receptacle for the truth of Christianity.440 ‘University missions’, consisting of temporarily celibate Anglican priests, trained in Cambridge or Oxford and residing as a community when in the mission field, already existed but were a rarity.441 This eminently High Church vision found little support with the CMS, even though that organization and its appointees had themselves come around to accepting the importance of adopting Indian forms to convey Christianity to Indians.442 Although the idea had influential advocates at Cambridge University, especially among Westcott’s colleagues Joseph Barber Lightfoot (later Bishop of Durham) and the biblical scholar Francis Hort, these scholarly enthusiasts could not sustain an entire mission financially, hence the other Anglican missionary society, the High Church SPG, proved to be the only resort. The Anglican Bishop of Calcutta (Metropolitan for India), Robert Milman, approved of the programme, with the less theological and more pragmatic view that it would restart the Anglican mission to Delhi, which had dwindled since the Mutiny. Known as the Cambridge Brotherhood of the Ascended Christ, the mission was to be organized by a Cambridge committee, which included Bishops Westcott and Lightfoot as founder members. This committee shared the responsibility of finding funds and directing the mission with the SPG, retaining the right




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to nominate missionaries itself. The missionaries (or members of the Brotherhood) were to be alumni of Cambridge and Oxford Universities exclusively. In time, the Cambridge Brotherhood would create a college that may claim the distinction of being the most sought-after liberal-arts college in north India if not in all of India. Having educated an astounding number of Indian diplomats, politicians, writers, artists and performers, one may say that the college has secured an eminent place in the Indian public sphere. It has, however, been in the public eye in recent years for the controversial attention it has attracted over the issue of its legal status as a minority educational institution and over its policy (or lack thereof) of privileging the application of Christian students for admission. What these high-profile legal disputes reveal is that until the 1990s St Stephen’s was a Christian college with very few Christian students and precious little Christian instruction. Whether it should remain that way has of course been the subject of the disputes mentioned, and we will describe the issues raised in those conflicts by a wide range of parties at the end of this chapter. Before doing that, however, I want to evaluate how St Stephen’s College became what it had been until the 1990s: the leading ‘public school’ of India. Religion, of course, had a lot to do with this being and becoming, as is revealed by the disputes that have recently disrupted that existence. But can St Stephen’s be explained with reference to a planned missionary strategy of postponing conversion or acculturating Christianity? I think not.

Postponing cultural exchange: the early years of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi To begin with, let us see what the Cambridge Brotherhood did to further its own stated aims of grafting Christian doctrine onto Indian thought. In 1876–7, when the Cambridge Brotherhood began to function as the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, the rump SPG mission there consisted of three mission workers: the missionary Robert Winter, his wife Priscilla and Tara Chand, an alumnus of the Delhi College. In numerical terms, mission personnel were predominantly Indian. Prominent Khatri converts, such as Professor Rama Chandra443 and Chandu Lal, supported it informally, and Pandit Janki Nath ran the school. In addition, there were 45 or more catechists.444 Although the Cambridge Brotherhood should have had little to do with the details of such mundane missionary practicalities, being an SPG-funded mission meant that they had to pull their weight. Given their intellectual background they initially took charge of the educational aspects of the mission, but soon they had to go the whole hog. With missionary preaching tours, church services for Indian Christians, zenana missions and hospital services, they became, in other words, just




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like any other mission.445 They also developed strong opinions about the work which they should not have done in the first place; the first head of the mission, Edward Bickersteth fought in public with Revd Winter regarding his methods, in particular the latter’s policy of leaving lower- caste converts among their unconverted kinsmen, exposing them, in Bickersteth’s opinion, to moral and religious temptations.446 After Winter’s death, the Cambridge mission took up the entire charge, becoming, in effect, SPG’s branch in Delhi. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Cambridge Brotherhood was parachuted in to infuse fresh blood, figuratively as well as literally, recreating the normative hierarchy of missions, that is, with Europeans at the top, after a period of exceptional Indian eminence following a serious dislocation. On taking charge, what these (alleged) intellectual pioneers did not undertake for several years afterwards was theological dialogue. In fact, they appear to have found communication with Indians fairly difficult. According to Bickersteth, there was little scope for any such thing; he reported pessimistically that the mission’s high school for upper- class students was sought after only for its lower fees, and that such students were obsessed with government examinations and the prospects of future government service. Any interest in Christianity that might be aroused in them was quenched when they moved on to higher education in secular government colleges. Bickersteth commented in despair that it would be better to abandon the educational work altogether than to continue in the same way. Lower- caste converts, on the other hand, were never considered worthy partners for conversation.447 There was a separate school for them, but Bickersteth believed them to be so ignorant as to be practically unaware of the step they had taken.448 What the Cambridge Brotherhood could do depended on their situation; in 1878 they had no adequate platform to even experiment with their stated objectives. Luckily for them, this was to change soon, and unpredictably, as government policy and its effects often do. The government policy in question was not that of surreptitious Evangelicalism but the neo- Orientalist educational policy that characterized Punjab in the late nineteenth century. This policy trend proved to be an unlikely ally for the Cambridge mission by making the field of higher education in the region open for taking.

Mavericks and missions: Leitner’s educational projects and St Stephen’s College



As mentioned in Chapter 1, the ideas and intrigues of a Punjab education department official called G. W. Leitner prevented the Delhi College, an eminent site of early-nineteenth- century educational experiments, from


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being revived after the Mutiny, by pushing the Punjab Government to redirect its funds to the creation of an Oriental College at Lahore, to form the core of the Punjab University. Government withdrawal from the regional market for higher education in English left a huge field free for taking. Leitner pursued his own construction of indigenous education, which failed to enthuse most of his colleagues in the Education Department, and a great many Indians as well. For Leitner’s Indian critics, ‘Western education’ was by this time no longer a threat. The problem was its combination with compulsory religious education and with Christian doctrinal instruction in particular. As we have mentioned before, the missionary view of religious freedom as institutional autonomy, which the Government continued to endorse, did not appeal to Indians, who saw in it the danger of forced religious instruction. The situation in Delhi following the closure of the Delhi College appeared to justify such fears of a religious conspiracy; the Government had withdrawn from the market in higher education, leaving the field open to Christian missionaries. K. T. Telang, the only Indian member of the Hunter Commission, 1882, specifically mentioned the grievance of Delhi, where, in his opinion, Indians had to submit to compulsory Christian instruction for lack of an alternative.449 Incidentally, the Indian objection was to Christian instruction, not to instruction by Christians: after the demise of the Delhi College, the Cambridge Mission received offers of cooperation from the citizens of Delhi, who wanted to offer them funds in exchange for help in rebuilding the Delhi College. The Cambridge Mission refused, and a senior member, G. A. Lefroy (later Bishop of Lahore), explained to the committee back home that ‘in a native college our position as missionaries must be more or less anomalous, and might become untenable if ... the European at its head were a professed sceptic.’450 Determined to be a Christian college, and seeing that things appeared propitious for such initiative autonomous of potentially diluting Indian patronage, the mission started college classes in 1881, in the very high school of which Bickersteth had earlier despaired. It received a government grant in 1882, and over 1882–3 it affiliated itself to the equally new Punjab University as St Stephen’s College.451 Lefroy, and the college’s first principal, S. S. Allnutt, rejoiced that the Delhi College had been entirely replaced with the Christian one, which, they said, would protect Punjab from the ‘disastrous’ effects of secular education in Bengal. Allnutt knew that citizens of Delhi did not quite see it in this light, and reported:



though our College may not be popular, and many wish that they had a purely secular [emphasis mine] college of their own, yet there is a vis inertiae


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which operates very strongly, and probably more than counter-balances the positive force of their inclination ... But meanwhile there is reason to fear that these efforts may tend to affect prejudicially the development of our College, as it will incline many to hold aloof who would otherwise have accepted things as they are, and students may be induced to go to Lahore rather than the Mission College, thus making it appear that we have no chance of attracting students, and justifying the appeal for a Native College.452 Rather than confidence in their alliance with the Government, Allnutt revealed himself and his brethren for what they were: entrepreneurs struggling to prove their worth to a variety of sceptic audiences. The most important such audience, the local Indian parents, appeared to want something that Allnutt called ‘secular’ education for their children, which in fact meant education without Christian instruction. Allnutt did not, at least in this instance, aim to convince them that religion and education could not and should not be separated but to use government support to impose that connection. The first couple of years were a worrisome time for the new college. In 1881, the first class consisted of five students from their own school, four Khatris453 and a Muslim. Of these, four candidates were presented for intermediate examinations (corresponding roughly to the GCSEs) in 1882 to the Calcutta University (the transition to Punjab affiliation being incomplete), in addition to two other candidates who had been admitted through ‘new arrangements with the Government’. Only three passed. The next year, the failures were prepared for the Punjab University examination, and Lefroy displayed signs of stress: We are very anxious about our College boys who are in for the FA ... these boys are the failures from the last Calcutta examination in January, and we have just had to put in the time in the utterly unsatisfactory cram for the Punjab one, and they are not bright material ... If they see we can pass boys, caste and religion and race prejudices and all the other bundle of prejudices will give way and they will come in, especially as the Government is very steadily supporting us ... All the Government’s support could not temper the hard-nosed bargain that the Indian parent was wont to drive, and only with a successful set of Punjab University examinations in 1883 did the college begin to receive applications from bright Delhi students. Even then, it was a small college, with 20 in the first class, but ‘very thin’ in the higher classes.454 The Brotherhood had some cause for cheer when the rival scheme of a ‘secular’ government college, funded by Indian money, was abandoned




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and when the distance and expenses of board in Lahore, added to the success of St Stephen’s in university examinations in 1882 and 1883, induced Delhi parents to choose the ‘Mission College’. They did not remain without competition for long, for, in 1892, a Chandni Chowk merchant endowed the Hindu College, essentially a ‘secular’ competitor of the kind that Allnutt had feared, in spite of its name. It was up to St Stephen’s to prove itself to the Indian market, and it was working against a ‘bundle of prejudices’.

‘Fulfilment theology’ and the Cambridge mission’s approach to other religions St Stephen’s in its first years was therefore neither an organ of the state nor an open forum for religious dialogue. Refusing to accept a position where its claims to religious (Christian) truth may be compromised or marginalized, it had seized the opportunity presented by the particularities of government policy in the region and had secured a college under its exclusive control. Within the legal framework that allowed it complete institutional autonomy, it could of course put its founding doctrine of fulfilment theology to work. Early efforts to do so revealed that it was one thing to make inspiring speeches on liberal theology to an audience of British Christians and quite another to deal with the reality of religious difference in the mission field. Although members and supporters of the Cambridge mission believed that they were very liberal towards other faiths, Indians did not necessarily agree. During moments of what were supposed to be religious dialogue, missionary educators discovered how little they knew even about the attitudes of their (non- Christian) teaching staff and how uncomfortable ‘dialogue’ could be when the rules of conversation were not shared. In 1886, Allnutt reported that there was a ‘religious stir’ among the students, occasioned by local confrontations between the Sanatanists,455 represented by an organization called the Varnashramadharmavarddham Sabha, and the Delhi branch of the Arya Samaj, with several meetings to debate on the validity of various traditional Hindu practices including idol worship. Allnutt noted that the Sanatanists were led by none other than the college’s pandit or Sanskrit teacher Vihari Prasad Dube.456 Dube was reported to be pessimistic about the possibility of return to pristine tradition but believed that the present rule of mlechhas, or barbarians, fulfilled the known prophesies about Kaliyuga.457 The missionaries at St Stephen’s were inspired by this rise of religious enthusiasm in the city to throw down their own gauntlet and invited a ‘well-known’ American mission lecturer to speak on transmigration and salvation, themes preferred by Christians in debating with Hindus. Allnutt personally approved of the lecture but admitted that discussions afterwards did not go well at all, even when Lefroy, who was




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used to bazaar debates, joined forces in answering the ‘quibbles’, some of which Allnutt listed as follows:

If Adam transmitted his misery, how come some are more miserable than others? Clearly each man’s misery is the result of his own actions, therefore there is variety. The law of compensation (suggested by the Lecturer in lessening the difficulty suggested by cases of men born blind) is not accepted as sufficient counterpoise of punishment: as men would rather not be blind than be blind and have an acute sense of hearing. If a child goes to heaven on dying, the best thing a missionary can do is kill it. (This reductio ad absurdum met with great applause.) If children dying go to heaven, why are they born at all?458 Obviously, the audience had its own theological ideas, and a sense of humour besides. This occasion hardly fitted with the ‘Alexandrian’ schemes of Bishop Westcott, but Westcott’s patronizing benevolence did not have to face a heckling Indian audience as did the Cambridge Brotherhood. The Cambridge audience, on the other hand, continued to be comforted by lectures of the kind Lefroy gave in 1895 when raising funds: he quoted Matthew 5:17, ‘I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’, which was fulfilment theology’s scriptural justification. Then he set himself to prove that there was such a possibility for fulfilment in Hinduism (as in Judaism). Caste, he said, was not just about hierarchy but a germinal sense of brotherhood; incarnation, although perverted in Hinduism, was a principle allowing the rapprochement of God and man, unlike Islam, and even false ideas about transmigration represented a yearning that Christianity could fulfil.459 While the Cambridge Mission disapproved of abrasive rhetoric of the kind that had been popular in the early nineteenth century with missionaries such as Karl Pfander and Evangelical officials such as William Muir, their own reflections and activities revealed them to be hardly ready for anything like a religious dialogue. The problem with fulfilment theology, of course, is that those described may not feel any such inadequacy, or urge to be fulfilled. Hence, ‘dialogue’ fell back to superficial contestations, and even until the early twentieth century religious education classes at St Stephen’s rehashed old missionary themes, such as scientific proofs against Hindu mythology. In fact, one finds that it was the mythology that had evolved, and a young member of the Brotherhood, called Charles Andrews, who had a much more distinctive future ahead


Transmigration is proved by reason: for example, a child instinctively withdraws from a snake, distinguishes between good and evil and all animals instinctively suck milk.


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of him, reported in 1909 of having to disabuse the students of their belief in the Vedic provenance of aeroplanes, not to mention all other modern scientific discoveries.460

It appears to me that nineteenth- century missionary educationists were simply unable to produce adequate theological understanding of their work in India, both fulfilment theology and preparatio evangelica being justifications for failure rather than clever plans for inveigling Christian faith into the minds of their unsuspecting students. Neither were these nineteenth- century theologies in themselves capable of appreciating the virtues of religious plurality sufficiently for ‘dialogue’ to take place. St Stephen’s College, just like other missionary schools and colleges of the late nineteenth century, was too harried by the demands of university examinations, and the expectations of their fickle clientele to be prepared adequately for those examinations, to give much thought or effort to ‘religious dialogue’. When occasionally such conversations took place, they took the form of arguments, which revealed that even the college’s teaching staff consisted of Indian Trojan horses, who, through their experience, appeared to have reified, separated and distanced themselves from the religious aspect of the institution, although to the missionaries this was why the institution existed in the first place.461 Meanwhile, distant organizers and subscribers had to be placated with the argument that if they had not converted too many persons yet they were still working on it. It was, of course, not quite simple for missionary educationists to argue for the indefinite postponement of conversions; contrary to the view some scholars have presented, large missionary societies were characterized by diverse specializations, strategies and theories, all seeking the attention of the headquarters and, through them, the subscribers, and all seeking to challenge the value of the approach taken by other kinds of missionary specialists. Missionary educationists, especially those involved with higher education institutions that catered almost exclusively to upper- caste and upper- class non- Christian Indians, whom they hardly ever managed to convert, were a sore point with those missionaries who in their own opinion did the real work, producing thousands of converts and struggling for funds and manpower to respond to the aspirations of these underprivileged Christians. To them, the secular education of upper- class Indians who never converted was a hideous misallocation of resources given the needs of thousands of recently converted illiterate villagers who urgently needed education, and preparatio or dialogue appeared to them as excuses for wasting money and doing nothing.


Debates regarding the purpose of Christian education in India


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By the turn of the century, missionaries and their supporters were neatly divided into those who advocated concentrating funds and personnel in mass-movement areas and those who would continue to invest in colleges such as St Stephen’s. One outspoken critic of missionary colleges, and of St Stephen’s in particular, was Henry Whitehead, Bishop of Madras. In 1907, he deplored that the best- equipped mission stations of the SPG were in Delhi, Kanpur, Calcutta and Pune, where there had been at the most 1,000 conversions in the past 30 years, while in the diocese of Madras, where 12,000 conversions had occurred in the same period from among the Telugu pariahs and Shanars, there was a shocking shortage of men. Two million men were waiting to be gathered into the church, he said, and however valuable the work of spreading the leaven among the upper classes might be, it was incomparable with the work of converting millions.462 The Principal of St Stephen’s College wrote a rejoinder in the annual report of the mission, using the familiar language of preparatio, reiterating the importance of moulding character and of maintaining a leadership of ideas in the emerging Indian nation.463 Neither Whitehead, nor the then Principal, S. K. Rudra, were cardboard characters expressing typified opinions. Both were men with long careers, the twists and turns of which epitomized the contradictions that characterized Christianity in India. Henry Whitehead had come to India in 1882 as Principal of the Bishop’s College, Calcutta, becoming the head of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta in 1890, which, like the Oxford and Cambridge hostel at Allahabad, provided a boarding house for (non- Christian) Indian University students, this being a missionary method in itself. In 1890, Whitehead declared total lack of anxiety because of lack of conversions, since the education would definitely undermine Hinduism and allow Christian truth to win. By 1897, however, he expressed acute frustration, declaring that the general body of educated Hindus were not nearer to Christianity than they had been 30 or 40 years earlier and seemed instead to be moving away from it. Once consecrated Bishop of Madras in 1899, Whitehead did a volte-face, and, after this point, his favourite whipping – boys were the ‘elitist’ educational missions, against which he constantly asserted the claims of the Christian church, meaning, by this term, the existing Indian converts. With a great deal of determination, he pushed the candidacy of his protégé, V. S. Azariah, a Tamil Christian of lower caste background, for the post of bishop, succeeding in the end in securing him no more than an assistant bishopric.464 There could perhaps hardly be a more striking contrast to Azariah than Sushil Rudra: Rudra was Bengali, whose father had in early life been a typical upper- caste student of Alexander Duff, except in that Peary Mohan Rudra chose to be baptized Christian and to work thereafter in the employ of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Sushil Rudra was born in 1861, and in the early years of his life was more sceptic than Christian. Nevertheless,




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Rudra had significant connections with both Whitehead and Azariah. To begin with, Rudra resided at the Oxford Mission hostel as a university student (before Whitehead’s time) and later saw this period as the time when he turned towards a spiritual commitment to Christianity.465 Besides, he shared with Azariah the fact that they were both among the handful of firsts within institutional Christianity in India: he was the first Indian principal of any missionary college in India. We need to keep in mind these connections, similarities and differences in personal backgrounds and careers when analysing Rudra’s assertions regarding the value of higher education as a worthwhile missionary endeavour. It would be incorrect to reduce his attitudes to a mindless mouthing of the preparatio formula, and it would be facile to point simply to his caste and class background; what I wish to highlight here is how Rudra used a certain definition of Christianity, knowledge and ethics to pursue a project not so dissimilar from Azariah’s, that is, establishing the autonomy of Indian Christianity from its missionary authorities. But such a characterization is also inadequate, for if Azariah had his missionary friend, so did Rudra, and this was one of the most remarkable Christians who came to India from outside; a man called Charles Freer Andrews.

Turning point: the Andrews–Rudra partnership When Charles Freer Andrews came to India as part of the Brotherhood in 1904, he was not very different from his other missionary colleagues, looking upon empire as a civilizing mission and an opportunity for Christian mission and service.466 He remained to become one of the best-known British advocates and activists for Indian independence, being successively attached to Tagore and Gandhi in their broad range of cultural and political activities.467 In his less spectacular years as an educational missionary, he pushed for changes no less revolutionary, even if the site was limited. With an emotional nature given to forming passionate friendships, Andrews grew deeply attached to Sushil Rudra, a much older man, who had joined the teaching staff of the college in 1886.468 Andrews said later that Rudra, a widower with two young sons when Andrews met him, gave him the unique gift of making India a familiar country from the start. He also said that under Rudra’s guidance his religious faith was transformed, such that he was able to step beyond all narrow dogmas and realize that the Christian ideas were not entirely novel to India.469 The notion that the fundamentals of Christianity were indigenous to Indian thought was fulfilment theology turned on its head, replacing its patronizing benevolence towards misguided others with an rival claim of origin and ownership. As we shall see in Chapter 7, it was a claim that consisted of rearranging European theological concepts to produce entirely new




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messages, messages well suited to the desire of Indian Christians who wanted to be masters of their own faith. This claim, which was first and most copiously made by the Bengali theologian Krishna Mohan Banerjea (whom we have met in Chapter 3), had become well known across the breadth of Christian India by the turn of the century. Besides, Rudra’s Bengali background no doubt lent him particularly close exposure to these ideas that had been in circulation in that region for half a century, and not only among Christians. When Andrews arrived in Delhi, Rudra’s ideas, as much as his person, had decidedly inferior status within the mission. Even though he had acted as vice-principal since 1900,470 with the vague assurance of being appointed principal in the future, with the Principal’s post falling vacant in 1903 Rudra was passed over in favour of G. Hibbert-Ware, the usual Cambridgeeducated English missionary. Hibbert-Ware himself belonged to a different generation; he welcomed government regulations that required the principal to reside on campus, seeing this as an opportunity for proximity with his Indian Christian colleagues.471 In 1906, he wrote that nationalist feelings were running high among the college’s students, such that an Indian Christian principal, rather than an Englishman, was more likely to retain authority and not give offence.472 Feeling himself drawn towards work among the poor, he returned to England on home leave in the same year, whereby Rudra took up the reins as acting principal.473 In early January of 1907, it appeared that Hibbert-Ware did not intend to return to his post, and this precipitated a crisis. In spite of all the promises made, and the fact that Rudra was in fact doing the job without the title, members of the Brotherhood suggested that Andrews should take up the post of the principal. This was one of the earliest and most immediate encounters that Andrews had with institutional racism, and he rose to the occasion. He refused to supersede his senior friend. The other two English missionaries being young, inexperienced and devoted to Andrews, there was something of a stalemate. All parties wrote to the Cambridge Committee, seeking justification for their own views. In January 1907, Allnutt asked to clarify whether in principle a non- Cambridge man could be principal of St Stephen’s.474 The Cambridge Committee, which obviously did not get the point, said that provided the candidate was qualified enough, the appointment of a native Christian was commendable.475 A disgruntled Allnutt pointed out in his next letter that the Cambridge Mission had no constitutional provisions for appointing anyone but a member of the Cambridge Brotherhood to the post; the Cambridge Committee continued to be obtuse by offering to redress the problem by changing the rules.476 At this stage, a thick packet arrived from Delhi, containing detailed memos from all the members of the Brotherhood regarding the appointment of Rudra. This included Lefroy’s exposition, replete with racist stereotypes




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about the Englishman’s grit and the Indian’s lack of leadership qualities. Lefroy wanted Rudra to be retained as ‘acting principal’, i.e. doing the job without the title, until someone from Cambridge volunteered.477 No such providential intervention occurred, and, to clinch matters, HibbertWare died unexpectedly in 1907. In spite of Allnutt complaining that the missionary spirit had been displaced and that an anti- English spirit had entered the college,478 Rudra became principal. This was, of course, only the beginning.

Doctrinal correctness and institutional autonomy: new ideas in the ascendant Sushil Rudra’s appointment was only the first of the hurdles; in subsequent years his ideas (thoroughly supported by Andrews) on religion, education and the institutional status of the college would manage to disrupt the complacent benevolence of mission authorities even in England. What began as a minor dispute over the relations of Anglicans with other Protestant churches soon escalated far beyond of the imagination of British missionary authorities, producing a novel ethos of public religiosity. In order for that to happen, the college had to free itself of the control of the mission. Ironically, this happened because of the incursions of another controlling authority: the Government. In 1911, the Cambridge Committee and the SPG’s India Sub-committee complained about the ‘inappropriate’ appointment of a Baptist, C. B. C. Young, in a pastoral capacity in the men’s boarding house, symptomatic of increasing cooperation with the Baptists in the city. The Cambridge Committee chaired by V. H. Stanton, as well as the SPG Secretary H. H. Montgomery, communicated to Bishop Lefroy and Allnutt that ‘undenominational acts’, such as scriptural instruction or prayers in common with the Baptists, were not acceptable,479 and that influential British contributors might withdraw their patronage.480 The matter might have been pragmatically resolved, but the mission authorities in England found that much worse was in the offing. In May 1911, the Cambridge Committee received from Principal Rudra a draft constitution of St Stephen’s College, as required by the Universities’ Act 1904.481 The Cambridge Committee felt that the control of the mission over the religious affairs of the college had not been adequately safeguarded by the proposed constitution, which appeared to render executive power to a ‘managing committee’ which would include a number of non- Christians and over which the control of the Cambridge mission was not guaranteed. Worst of all, it had not been provided that the Principal and Vice-Principal of the College had to be Christian. The Cambridge Committee proposed to rectify all these lapses, complaining about them to its partner, the SPG482 and also to Allnutt in private.




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Meanwhile, Rudra and Andrews had arrived in England to seek approval for their version of the constitution, in the name of ‘an Indian Christianity’ and ‘our Christian independence’.483 Displaying the modus operandi of institutional racism, the Chair of the Cambridge Committee, V. S. Stanton, suggested to Allnutt that their discussions be kept secret from Rudra and Andrews and only the final approved constitution be sent to them with a ‘conciliatory letter’.484 The SPG proved to be even more authoritarian, wanting to improve upon the Cambridge Committee’s draft485 by adding provisions whereby professors appointed by the SPG would be removable only by them and whereby all property of the college would be vested in the SPG.486 Rudra wrote to the Cambridge Committee disapproving of vesting the College’s property in the SPG and insisting that the bursar be a member of the managing committee, specifically to allow non- Christians to hold ex- officio posts in this body. He also wanted the proportion of college staff increased on the committee, as opposed to members of the Brotherhood or diocesan committee, and the number of Indian members to be assured.487 Rudra was obviously attempting to make the College as autonomous and as Indian an institution as possible. In October 1912, H. H. Montgomery, Secretary of the SPG, complained to Bishop Lefroy that Rudra and Andrews, who had come to England to discuss the matter, had been ‘causing trouble’. Obviously exasperated, he suggested that no proposals be forwarded to the SPG without the Bishop of Lahore’s previous approval, so as to prevent disturbing the doctrinally sensitive SPG with undenominational ideas.488 The Cambridge Committee was caught between the Delhi mission and the SPG and found in December that year that the SPG legal counsel had accused it of failing to come to an agreement regarding the religious instruction of the students of St Stephen’s College.489 After a few more months of negotiations, in 1913, the first Constitution of St Stephen’s College was finalized, which spelt out that the object of the legal body called the Association of St Stephen’s College was to prepare young men for university examinations and to instruct them in the doctrines of Christianity, in accordance with the doctrines of the Church of England. Also, the vice-principal had to be a Church of England man, but the bursar need not be so. The religious and moral distinctiveness of the institution was sought to be maintained by the exercise of control by a purer religious body, called the Supreme Council, consisting of the Bishop, the mission head, appointees of the Cambridge Committee, SPG and the diocese, and the principal. This body could remove the principal, if needed. The day-today management of the institution, on the other hand, lay with the governing body, which included all members of the legal association, including the non- Christian ones.490 Rudra and Andrews won a partial victory.




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In 1883, two years after the college opened, Allnutt reported that the ‘cold neutrality’ of the students, who inevitably referred to the college as ‘your college’, had been replaced by a sense of belonging. This had happened on the occasion of a cricket match, when students requested leave to watch ‘our college’ play.491 Whether Allnutt believed that attachment to the college’s cricket team was an instance of preparatio at work, he did not say, but during Rudra’s principalship students and teachers of the college began to feel able to bring their religious views into the open and not merely on the occasion of a public dispute but during the everyday functioning of the college. While the SPG had been worrying itself over a Baptist’s view of Christianity, St Stephen’s was experimenting much more broadly with the concept of religious education. In 1911, Andrews wrote that the scripture period had been modified; instead of instruction by Christians alone, liberal-minded and high-thinking Hindu and Muslim teachers of the college were invited to speak on any moral topic, illustrating the theme from their own religious books, without introducing controversy. He felt that this removed the prejudice against compulsory Christian teaching and was regarded as a mark of Christian fairness.492 Later, Rudra explained that all this was done with the aim of incorporating non- Christian teachers more closely in the work and aims of the college rather than retaining them as paid teachers of secular subjects alone.493 Perhaps on the same principle of permitting full enfranchisement of all religions and religionists, the college allowed the functioning of Hindu and Muslim religious societies, in addition to other clubs such as the Falstaff Club (dramatics), Boarders’ Club, Criterion Club (debating), History Society and so on.494 All this might have proceeded to a congenial coexistence of multiple religious creeds, perhaps evolving into something similar to an informal version of the RE in British schools in the post-1970s. Indian political opinion was opposed to this, as we have discussed in Chapter 1. These opinions, which began to take the shape of legislative efforts in the 1910s, made themselves felt within the college and, because of Rudra’s intervention, made the college more malleable than other institutions, such as, notably, the Scottish Church College of Bombay.495 In 1917, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, Chairman of the Servants of India Society, raised a proposal for a conscience clause in the Imperial Legislative Council. Although he did not move the resolution, choosing instead to wait for correspondence from the local governments, the Cambridge Mission took close note of the development.496 Allnutt and Rudra wrote separate letters to the Cambridge Committee, Allnutt informing Cambridge that St Stephen’s proposed working with a conscience clause of its own and that


From ‘your college’ to ‘our college’: turning the college around


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he totally disagreed with such a measure. Rudra, in his turn, forwarded an extract from a letter that Gandhi had written to him. Gandhi explained in this letter that Sastri’s conscience clause was not a political move; that Sastri was a sincere Hindu and an educationalist himself, and that the aim of the conscience clause was to prevent the growth of hypocrisy among students who were forced to make an opportunistic submission to religious teaching that they did not wish to receive.497 Rudra agreed that it was very important not to produce such ‘scoffers of religion’ as agnostics and atheists, and for this reason the conscience clause was a good idea.498 The Cambridge Committee remained unmoved by Rudra’s arguments, and other missionary bodies made periodic statements that they would withdraw from education in India if impeded from offering a ‘full Christian education’. As the conscience clause came closer to becoming a reality, an investigation into the functioning of the missionary colleges revealed this declaration to be bravado. In 1922, the SPG circulated a questionnaire to Christian schools and colleges in India, asking them about their management, staff, student composition, finances, current provisions for religious education, and seeking suggestions in case the conscience clause should become law. F. J. Western, now head of the Cambridge Mission and Chairman of St Stephen’s governing body, sent the completed questionnaire to the Cambridge Committee. It showed that St Stephen’s had nine Christian students against 214 non- Christians, five European professors (including one Baptist) and 11 non- Christian professors, and that it received 74 per cent of its funds from government grants (42 per cent) and student fees (32 per cent), the rest being from the SPG diocesan grant, the Cambridge Committee and SPG Delhi.499 The institution could in no way function without the government grant and certainly not without the approval of its student clientele. As a way out, Western suggested that it may be worthwhile to pre- empt the conscience clause before it became law by offering students the option of withdrawal from religious instruction at the beginning of each session. If this was not done, he felt that the law would lead to a ‘landslide’. But non-religious instruction was not the aim, he hurried to assure Cambridge; perhaps ‘theistic instruction’ by Christian laymen might be an option. In contrast to Rudra, Western suggested that Hindu and Muslim religious lectures were best avoided so as to avoid getting involved in the religious controversies specific to these communities.500 None of this formally eliminated compulsory religious instruction from the curriculum of St Stephen’s College, but it did create an atmosphere that permitted belonging and not just calculated functionalism. What students believed they belonged to is a more tricky issue; what is clear is that it did not necessarily imply respect for Christianity. Chowdhry Chhotu Ram, a successful Jat political leader (and, along with Mian Fazl-i-Hussain, the mainstay of the non-sectarian Unionist party of Punjab), who was an




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alumnus, came to pay his respects during Rudra’s farewell function in 1923 and said, ‘St Stephen’s, though a missionary institution, is looked upon by Jat students as, in a way, their own. The credit of generating such a feeling belongs chiefly to you.’ Sir Chhotu Ram also declared the institution of a Jat Rudra Scholarship Fund.501 The point was made more bluntly by an adoring ‘old student’ who declared Rudra the consummate teacher. To underline his point, he pointed out that although Rudra was a ‘Native Christian’, his exceptional qualities allowed him to overcome his countrymen’s dislike of ‘Native Christians’.502 Rudra’s principalship saw the devising of a religious approach that recognized plurality without attempting to grade them or to alter them. In fact, by offering public space to all religions, along with the implicit injunction to each to tolerate the others, religion appeared to become a hobby to be pursued in special clubs or sublimated into ethics that could be accepted by everybody else. If this appears very familiar to those working on the secularization theory, it has to be noted that in this case the process took place within an Indian ‘faith school’, formally affiliated with one particular religion but constrained by external forces of law, politics and the market from coercing its clientele on the one hand, and enabled on the other by certain creative managers who adopted novel methods of dealing with religious difference. This is the local, and religion-inflected history of an educational and institutional practice the Indian elite came to call secularism.

Nationalism and St Stephen’s If ‘Indianization’ rather than imperial strategy caused the ‘secularization’ of St Stephen’s, what exactly was the political role of this eminent Christian college? In-house historians have tended in recent times to underline the personal connections between Rudra and two great doyens of Indian nationalism, Gandhi and Tagore, via the personal mediation of C. F. Andrews. One iconic moment that is often referred to is Rudra’s hosting of Gandhi in 1921, an occasion on which Gandhi drafted an open letter to the Viceroy informing him of the expectations of the Indians of their government and his intention to launch a non- cooperation movement if these expectations were not fulfilled.503 Perhaps the citing of this incident tells us less about the college’s political role than the altered political environment of contemporary India, where attachment to Gandhi the symbol has obvious legitimating functions for a institution whose contribution to nationalism, or to any form of politics, for that matter, was minimal. It is this lack of political involvement that has in fact been seen by insiders as a cause for celebration, as outstanding proof that ‘Stephanians’ were not swayed by mass emotions, being thoughtful individuals in their own




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right. In 1914, Andrews departed from the Brotherhood and St Stephen’s College to arrive at Tagore’s Shantinketan, because his associations with Indian nationalism had become an unsurmountable embarrassment for the Mission.504 His personal connection with Rudra continued, and this connected his new friends with his old, as seen in the episode above. Rudra was well liked both by Gandhi and Tagore.505 But Rudra’s exhortations to exercise ‘liberty of conscience’ and to avoid ‘precipitate mass action’ were so successful that only 11 students of the college joined the non- cooperation movement. In a prize-giving ceremony held within the college in 1921, he appreciated the fact that these young men had not returned, as they would certainly have done if they had only been carried away by ‘mass action’.506 This classical liberal view of the sources of political action of course lends itself very imperfectly to any substantive political programme, which, to be effective, has to possess a mass dimension. The next Indian principal,507 who took charge in 1926, was a man who is remembered in that contradictory way that reveals him most tellingly as a liberal. One of the most illustrious scholars produced by St Stephen’s, the historian Ishtiaq Hussain Qureishi, reported: It was the beginning of the academic year 1924–25 when a young man, clad in khaddar, wearing a Gandhi cap with a fringe of a beard rather wild looking, entered the office of the Principal of St. Stephen’s College. Mr. S. N. Mukerji was the acting principal as Mr. Monk was on leave. If I had been the principal of the college, I would have turned that man out of my office immediately. This young man was no one else but myself. ... The college made me what I am today.508 The picture Qureshi drew was one of tolerance, but it is hard not to think that such ‘tolerance’ was meant to reveal the folly of Qureshi’s youthful past as an Indian nationalist. For those who could not similarly rejoice in the discarding of nationalist follies, the story came out differently, as with Mukarji’s own son, a future bureaucrat who defied his father to attend a national flag-raising ceremony together with the more politically active students from Hindu College. Because Nirmal Mukarji had defied the explicit instructions of the Principal, who happened to be his father, he was given a note for his guardian to sign. His only other guardian, his mother, was much more of a nationalist, and mother and son had a hearty laugh together over the father’s dilemma.509



Delhi University and its demands It would, however, be unfair to see Principal Mukarji as the pawn of British imperialism. The outstanding contribution of his time in office was his


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leading St Stephen’s to participate in the formation of Delhi University, incorporated in 1922. The formation of this university precipitated the developments that Rudra had encouraged adopting internally, but which missionary authorities in England refused to accept, remaining caught in a time warp that failed to recognize the inexorability of legal and political changes taking place in India. The University of Delhi was proposed by the Education Secretary, H. Sharp, as a residential, teaching university in the manner of the recently formed Dhaka University, but it was unclear to the three existing colleges in Delhi (St Stephen’s, Hindu and Ramjas) whether or not this would mean an annihilation of their individual existence, and in 1921, when the Bill for the university was drafted, St Stephen’s stated that it could cooperate with the concurrence of mission authorities in England only if it could preserve its institutional identity, including its freedom of religious teaching.510 The Bill as passed in 1922 appeared satisfactory, and, in fact, for the first two years, academic staff of the college dominated the university’s organs, under the vice- chancellorship of Hari Singh Gour, known for his activism to reform the Hindu law. This dominance led to such conflicts with the other colleges that the college chose to withdraw from the university’s executive council for a few months in 1925 to prove its bona fides.511 In 1926, Monk declared himself burnt out and with little taste for the fine diplomatic negotiations required for preserving the college’s fortunes within an Indian university. Mukarji was recommended for the principalship not only for his proved capacity but also for his being Indian and thereby (according to Monk) being capable of establishing that the college was a truly national institution.512 Mukarji did so by establishing cordial working relations with the new vice-chancellor and with Hindu College, to the extent that the latter provided classes on certain subjects free of charge to St Stephen’s students. In the heady nationalist days of the 1930s, on the other hand, ‘invasions’ of students from other colleges, demanding the participation of Stephanians, were argued away, apparently by students themselves, without harm to classes.513 At the same time, Mukarji proved himself adept at fielding missionary critics and was a participant in the Lindsay Commission on Christian higher education in India, which was in general highly sceptical of the value of such institutions as a missionary method or as a means of strengthening the existing Christian church in India.514 However, Mukarji’s membership of the commission appeared to lead to its finding his own college, the outstanding example of such failure, absolutely perfect.515



Conclusion: the importance of cricket and other gentlemanly pursuits Almost all the anxious discussions among mission authorities and the college’s management regarding religious instruction took place beyond the


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ken of the college’s students. While the policy decisions arrived at in the contests between the SPG Cambridge Committee, the Delhi Mission, the college governing body and the Indian Government or university authorities affected their experience, they remained largely unaware of it and brought their own expectations into the everyday life of the college. To gain some entry into the results of this pedagogic effort, it is useful to read the students’ own words, turning the pages of the college magazine, started in 1907 and continuing to date. The one issue largely absent in these pages is religion. As F. Monk, Principal, regretted in the 1930s, although the college had been liberal enough about religious variety, most students of the college displayed no interest in religious lectures. In 1883, Allnutt had reported that it was cricket that imparted to the students a sense of belonging to the college. On the occasion of the college’s team playing in the city, the students asked for a day off to see the match, referring to the team as that of ‘our college’ for the first time.516 From the 1910s, regular reports of sporting activities, including cricket, tennis and hockey, reports of the doings of the clubs and temporary committees (such as the Women’s Franchise Committee) and reports from the hostels made up the regular and substantial section of the magazine. While all this might be said to conform to the pedagogic practice now despised as ‘muscular Christianity’, there was nothing particularly Christian about these pursuits. The Muslim Religious Society discussed the impracticability of the Hindu– Muslim political pact of 1916, or, if feeling particularly religious, the ‘goal of life’. The Hindu Religious Society found difficulty in getting members to attend lectures titled the ‘Future of Hinduism’. Students later prominent in public life excelled in the Criterion Club (debating) and the History Society, and this included the future historian of Muslim rule in India and a supporter of the Pakistan movement, Ishtiaq Hussein Qureshi. Many students expressed deep attachment to their college, but they thought of it as ‘our college’ in a way that rarely revealed any admiration of Christianity as such. The views of the Jat politician, Chowdhry Chotu Ram, has been discussed above. Khuswant Singh, one of the numerous famous writers the college has produced, claimed in a reminiscence that his short stint at the college in the 1930s meant a lot to him, among other things for introducing him to the Bible. He went on to elaborate: the bold, often sexual, language of this ancient text inspired him to become a writer.517 Singh is too much of a maverick, known for his sensationalist writing, to prove anything about what the average student thought. But it does typify a flippant approach to admittedly serious issues, especially the issue of religious identity. The St Stephen’s persona was a consciously cultivated one, and it consisted not so much of casualness about religious affiliation as a studied denial of its importance to the modern Indian man. In the sharing of such an ethical view of the self at least, the students of St Stephen’s College reflected the aspirations of their teachers: Andrews and Rudra had actively


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encouraged students to lay aside their religious and caste differences and to participate instead in new modes of being and acting, articulated through the debating society and the social service league, none of which had any political goals. The Stephanian was in some senses a brand, one that was meant to transcend the inherited bonds. As Rudra is reported to have said once, ‘What does it matter? We are all Stephanians here.’518 This ‘we’ was uncompromisingly elite, male and, while non-religious, definitely not Christian for most students. In their own perception, the students of the college were ‘exceptional people’: talented and entitled to privilege, a perception some have denounced as exclusivist male upper-class selfglorification.519 In the view of a historian writing before the appointment of Revd Valson Thampu, the ‘Christian communal programme’ threatened the universalism of the college, a universalism represented by the participation of the non- Christian majority participation in the annual carol service modelled on King’s College, Cambridge, and in Christian gatherings in the chapel.520 Harish Trivedi, an alumni of St Stephen’s and a critique of its idiom, has argued that entering the ‘modern’ world of St Stephen’s involves compulsory relinquishing the particularities of indigenous identity, including caste.521 In my opinion, it is much more the case that St Stephen’s entered India’s modernity by an effacement of its sectarian identity as a Christian institution and also that it is the shaking of that historical compromise in recent times that has caused its traditional clientele to predict doom for their revered model of secular education.



Figure 2 St Stephen’s College, Delhi, 1911


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Figure 3 Hindu students at St Stephen’s College

Figure 4 Christian students at St Stephen’s College


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Figure 5 Muslim students at St Stephen’s College

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Figure 6 Principal Sushil Rudra


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5

I began this book by proposing that there are a number of gaps in the scholarly as well as popular narratives about religion and secularism in modern India, gaps which have become so entrenched that nobody in the recent furore over St Stephen’s and its ‘Christianization’ appeared to notice any irony in the very fact that demands of rigorously secular policy could be comprehensibly made with regard to an institution which started off, at least officially, as an instrument of Christian evangelization. With due respect to the present Principal of St Stephen’s, Revd Valson Thampu, one of the principal architects of the recent college policy, such widely held expectations cannot be explained purely in terms of majoritarian elitist hypocrisy, although convenient amnesia is of course part of the politics of creating any tradition, including secularist traditions. What is interesting to me, in the context of the present study, is the process by which certain stories come to be told about certain institutions, stories noticeably different from those told by those who created such institutions in the first place. In connection with St Stephen’s College, we have seen how such narrative transformations were intimately connected to internal policy changes within a Christian missionary- created college which morphed to fit the expectations of a new nation, and how, in so far as St Stephen’s is still an evolving institution, there continue to be conflicting narratives about its past and future. This is, of course, not distinctive to St Stephen’s, nor even to the kind of liberal, cosmopolitan and (until recently) largely upper- class- oriented Christian educational effort that it represented. In this chapter we will discuss another kind of Christian (and, at the time, missionary) school, one motivated by a different religious ideology, aiming at a very different student clientele and peddling a different curriculum. This curriculum, which came to be designated ‘agricultural science’, was as much a novel discipline as English literature has been shown to be. It was a nineteenth- century European and American innovation, embodying the idea of putting abstract knowledge generated by the loftier scientific disciplines to concrete applications, in this case the improvement of agricultural production.


Education for ‘Uplift’: Christian Agricultural Colleges in India

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This was a notion of utilitarian knowledge, but of a very different kind from the sort recommended by James Mill or Lord Macaulay. Although not originally intended as such, this pedagogic idea became rapidly associated with the philanthropic one of ‘education extension’ or offering educational opportunities to those social classes that were otherwise unlikely to access the traditional higher- education institutions. In line with other aspects of Victorian altruistic thinking, it was believed that such education should be customized to suit the specific social functions of the classes taught. To its already complex social and pedagogic baggage, this educational concept, as it found its way to India via more than one route, that is, via state, missionary and Indian nationalist efforts, added a range of nuances which allowed agricultural education to become a distinct medium through which Christian pedagogy could connect with emerging nationalist concerns. This chapter traces the development of working relationships between certain theologically conservative Christian missionaries and different kinds of Indian nationalists, all highly sensitive to any perceived cultural slights or religious threats. Developing such relationships required a great deal of religious, cultural and personal creativity, and the story here is how certain people played the historical role of forming those individual connections, becoming themselves transformed in the process while also contributing to a public culture in which it was possible to appreciate the social value of those with whom one did not agree doctrinally.

Dalit Christianity and the Social Gospel There was a particular demographic context to Christian missionary involvement in the developing and teaching of agricultural science in India. From the late nineteenth century, Christianity became demographically both an Indian religion and a dalit religion, as large numbers of low-status, poor, rural people became Christians, not only in places where there were already substantial numbers of Christians, such as Travancore and what is today Tamil Nadu, but also in completely new areas, such as Punjab.522 As we have indicated in the chapter on St Stephen’s College, missionaries in India were deeply divided over the relative importance of educating upper-class and upper- caste Indians, who very seldom converted to Christianity and educating poor dalit Christians, as a means of deepening their doctrinal commitment to Christianity, while also assisting them to lead a better life in material terms. The latter orientation, grouped in missionary conferences under the rubric of the ‘native church’, advocated devoting men and money to the education of dalit Christians and to strengthening the existing Indian church rather than pursuing vague and, at least in the short term, unrewarding efforts to expand it. Theologically, while those aiming at the higher classes of Indians emphasized the importance of knowing about and engaging with non- Christian religions and philosophies, and often subscribed


Agricultural Education


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to ‘fulfilment theology’, missionaries engaged with mass movement areas tended to be theologically conservative, perceiving cultural accommodation as doctrinally dangerous and philosophical niceties as dilettantish pandering to upper- class Indian prejudices against the very social classes from which the vast majority of Indian Christians were drawn. There was often a personal angle; missionaries involved with mass movements tended to be those who felt or had come to feel more at home with (those they saw as) unpretentious, poor Indian villagers and had developed a non-theological appreciation of earthy Indian rural culture, while rarely growing out of an attitude towards Indian rural religiosity which was patronizing at best and dismissive at most. But for all their self-representation as being less distracted from their primary functions as missionaries (as opposed to those who taught Hindu and Muslim college students), they needed to justify to their subscribers why they were organizing credit cooperatives and digging trenches for ‘nightsoil’ and why their ‘social work’ should not be considered as yet another kind of distraction from their primary agenda of religious communication. They justified themselves with reference to the theology of the ‘social gospel’523 which emphasized that work to improve social conditions was not secondary or derivative but an important form of full-time evangelization in its own right. Justification always happens at different levels, and what was satisfactory to subscribing audiences at home was not equally attractive to government officials in India, and certainly not to articulate groups of Indian leaders, with their own concerns about rural poverty, but from an entirely different religious corner. This chapter will explore the unexpected connection such missionary educationists established with Indian leaders committed to serving the nation524 and, in doing so, will indicate the complex religious and intellectual activism that formed the creative underbelly of political nationalism. The story will show that while Christian agricultural education originated in a doctrinal orientation that was contentious in the age of Indian nationalism, professional and personal networks developed between a significantly large section of Christian missionaries, Indian Christian leaders and other Indian activists, premised on their shared enthusiasm for a regenerated society. These social networks did not just temporarily take the edge off acute doctrinal differences; they created positive new ethical codes of work and public service which allowed multi-religious belonging.

British and American backgrounds to ‘agricultural science’


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As mentioned above, agricultural science was very much a child of the nineteenth century and therefore coeval with the heyday of British imperialism. Unlike English literature, however, it seems much more difficult to demonstrate that it originated in an impulse for imperial control (although, as we shall see, some attempted to put it to that use later on).525 British universities


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were much more resistant to the study of technology than to theoretical and experimental science, and their reluctance was complemented by the entrenched expertise and interests of the guild-like institutions which provided the necessary training for ‘professionals’ such as engineers (and, for that matter, law). Even when British engineers became significant in numbers and public importance by the mid-nineteenth century, most of them had not pursued a university course in engineering,526 because none such existed. It was only at the turn of the century that ‘college’ training partially replaced the traditional system of apprenticeship with flourishing departments at Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester, as well as technical colleges meant for working- class students.527 The concept of agricultural science, incorporating practical applications of chemistry, botany, zoology and, to some extent, geology, represented a similar effort to use scientific knowledge to transform agriculture into a capitalist industry. It began to be felt that the pursuit of agriculture by traditional methods was increasingly unsuitable for Britain in the nineteenth century, and the application of science could raise production, which would benefit not only the agricultural entrepreneur but also the nation as a whole. This new view of science as an economic tool was unmistakably connected with the emergence of the notion of the ‘economy’ as an abstract but finite entity, comparable, and to a great extent coincident with the ‘nation’. Edinburgh University created the first Chair of Agriculture and Rural Economy in 1790,528 a development which at least one scholar has connected to the Scottish physiocratic tradition, with its doctrine that agriculture was the source of national wealth.529 The first British college to offer agricultural science to sons of farmers was founded in 1845 at Cirencester by the private donations of a group of Cotswold landlords enthusiastic about scientific, profit-making agriculture.530 To assuage fears that educated peasants would be less deferential to their social superiors, Charles Daubeny, Professor of Rural Economy at Oxford, argued that constant physical exertion and appropriate religious observance and instruction would remedy any such tendencies.531 Popular contempt for the new discipline spilled over into contempt for the intellectual capacity of the potential students; Punch suggested that Cirencester would be the alma mater of ‘worthy clodhoppers’, where the Chair of Newly Laid Eggs could be held by the Professor of Poultry, and where lectures on the philosophical doctrine of making hay while the sun shines would be highly popular.532 Braving such cynicism, the Cirencester College began to function and served as a model in the Anglo-Saxon world, including America. Across the ocean, the American Government was involved in agricultural education much earlier and much more substantially than in Britain. The earliest agricultural colleges, such as Michigan Agricultural College (1855), Massachusetts Agricultural College (1867), twinning the Institute of




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Technology, and Cornell College at New York (1868) were created through private donations, just like Cirencester, but they received substantial state support from the 1860s, particularly in the form of land grants. In fact, the Land Grant Act of 1862 offered federal land grants to the states on condition that the money from their sale would be used partly to sustain a college of mechanics and a college of agriculture in each state.533 Agricultural science progressed in Britain and America in the form of scientific research, producing new seeds, fertilizers and implements, besides a host of academic articles. In spite of the initial fears about social upheaval, the agricultural colleges were not very successful in creating a course of study useful and attractive to farmers themselves; in America they remained dominated by the classical literary model of education, teaching theoretical courses, struggling to find specialized teachers and to retain the class composition of students originally intended.534 In Britain, the very idea of class-specific education became less acceptable as the nineteenth century progressed, leading some to argue that specialized instruction in agricultural science should only follow a course of primary education common to all.535 There were therefore two principal ideas informing agricultural education: the application of science for greater success in capitalistic farming and better health for the economy as a whole and scientific education for raising the income and lifestyle of those at the bottom of the rural social ladder. These were two rather distinct social visions, whose association was close and yet uncomfortable. Towards the end of the century, they were institutionally reconciled when colleges teaching agricultural science became aligned with the movement for ‘education extension’, offering special facilities of education to those social classes otherwise unlikely to achieve them.536 To a certain extent, this reconciliation perverted the original purpose of producing scientifically aware farmers. The agricultural institutes split into two sections: professional scientists undertaking research and professional educationists teaching a general syllabus to various groups of underprivileged people. It is with such internal contradictions that the discipline spread to India in the nineteenth century, becoming something of a craze in the early twentieth century. From the beginning, the promotion of the discipline reverberated with India’s specific political and social context. There the altruistic dimension of agricultural education proved to be its strength, adopted most readily by conservative British officials sceptical about the utility of the existing universities and the qualities of university graduates, especially the latter’s right or ability to represent the Indian ‘people’. Of course, who represented the real Indian best was a moot question, and philanthropy was a prime site for moral and political contests between the British Government and Indian nationalists, each keen to prove their commitment to alleviating the suffering of the ‘masses’.


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As Christopher Bayly has argued recently, in South and South-East Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, welfare and development were an imperial ideology that was at least as widespread as that of ethno-religious difference. But it was an ideological trend which nationalists of these regions worked with much greater aplomb than the imperial officials.537 This chapter attempts to fill in some finer details about the agents operating on this contested terrain. It shows how Christians, both missionaries and Indians, who had developed an expertise in agricultural education for reasons internal to their community, were able plug their activities and ideas into the philanthropic activism of Indian nationalists, establishing their status as disinterested public-minded servants of the nation. Such public-mindedness never squared entirely with political nationalism, although it overlapped with it in parts, that overlap being a reminder of how simplistic it is to look upon Christian education either as an instrument of social liberation or of imperial domination only.

Agricultural education and imperial control: the official agenda The utility of scientific education in agriculture for India was first suggested by British government officials for facilitating the production of high-value cash crops and for preventing the periodic occurrence of severe famines, which drained revenues and labour supply and produced social unquiet. From the beginning, however, this educational agenda was marked by an anti- elitism, which translated into resentment of politically restive Indian elites educated in the modern universities. It was as political rhetoric, rather than as a viable alternative curriculum, that agricultural education became an official mantra in India from the late nineteenth century onwards. The first department of agriculture, inaugurated in 1871 because the Viceroy, Lord Mayo,538 thought it could work at improving the supply of cotton from India, received a frosty reception from British officialdom in India, dying rapidly in 1878. In 1880, a new Imperial Department of Revenue and Agriculture was set up on the urging of the Famine Commission, with Sir Edward Buck as the first director. The department mainly worked at collating and analysing information in the Settlement Reports, the idea of using scientific knowledge for agricultural ‘improvement’ being too avantgarde.539 In any case, the limitation of the educational budget meant that agricultural science was promoted rather patchily in a few British Indian provinces: an agriculture department opened at the Pune Science College in 1879, an experimental farm at Saidapet near Madras in 1868, followed by a college in 1876, and the Nagpur farm and agricultural school in 1883. There was also a farm in Sibpur, near Calcutta, with the idea of starting an associated agricultural department in the Sibpur Civil Engineering College. In fact, some of the princely states were equally early pioneers: in the 1890s




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there were agricultural colleges in the princely states of Baroda (in presentday Gujarat) and Dumraon (in presentday Bihar).540 On the other hand, the agenda of ‘agricultural education’ produced a vigorous official rhetoric about the ‘deracination’ of Indian university graduates and their dependence on government employment for livelihood due to faulty education. Sir Edward Buck, the first Director of the Agriculture Department, wrote a Minute on Technical Education in 1886 saying: ‘The fault of our educational system is, that nothing in the scheme of instruction sufficiently connects the knowledge to be acquired by the son with the cultivation of paternal acres.541 Sir A. Mackenzie, who as Governor of Bengal, 1895–8, altered the Calcutta Municipal Act to increase European official and commercial power relative to the middle- class Hindus,542 wrote in 1890: ‘There is a need of something more than a purely literary curriculum ... our graduates ... have schemes by the score for reforming the Empire, but no idea of exploiting and developing resources.’543 On the other hand, authorities in Britain were unconvinced that a new discipline making a tenuous start even in Britain would be a beneficial addition to the costs of Indian public education. The Secretary of State, after much prodding from the Government of India, appointed an agricultural chemist from the Royal Agricultural Society of England to make enquiries and to ‘advise upon the best course to be adopted in order to apply the teachings of Agricultural Chemistry to, and in order to effect improvements in, Indian agriculture’. The appointee, John Augustus Voelcker, toured India from December 1889 to January 1891, producing a massive report in 1893,544 which suggested that there was little to teach Indian agriculturists in places such as Meerut and Ludhiana and that an internal transfer of technology might be more suitable to address the shortcomings of other areas.545 He did prescribe the inclusion of agricultural science as a discipline from the primary to the university level, but only in order to equip a new generation of low-ranking Indian government servants in the Land Revenue department.546 Nevertheless, the Government of India continued to chant its populist educational rhetoric. In 1903, the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa in Bihar was founded with large donations from the American millionaire Henry Phipps, a personal acquaintance of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon. While founding this elite research institute, the official speeches resounded with visions of the great benefits it would render unto the toiling rural masses of India.547 Lord Curzon praised the assembled indigo planters for their industry and loyalty and expressed his belief that they would model their farming techniques on Pusa’s demonstration farm, ignoring the exploitation of cheap rural labour on which indigo-planting was based.548 There was no equivalent of the Fairford and Cirencester Farmers’ Club in India; Indian landlords lived off their rental income, spending it on urban pleasures and educating their sons in modern universities, with little


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interest in the model of the improving landed entrepreneur that the British Government had projected in the late eighteenth century.549 As far as the Government was concerned, that lack of a social base for agricultural education was a minor problem, since the proposed curriculum was primarily a rhetorical stick with which to beat the nationalists.550 The subsequent career of agricultural education in India reveals its role as an arena for conflicting elite claims, British as well as Indian. Eventually, agricultural education did find a social base in India, but only when reinvented as a genre of ‘social service’ by Indian elites in search of a philanthropic project and a constituency, not as a source of technical skills for poor farmers looking for a way up the social ladder. In the following sections, we will look at the history of competing philanthropists, each determined to offer their own panacea to the toiling rural masses of India.

Social analyses, government policy and political difference: debt vs. land revenue The first set of such philanthropists were actually British officials. In the late nineteenth century there arose a form of official social activism, aimed at protecting the Indian rural masses against all kinds of pernicious ‘outside’ (Indian) depredation, whether this be ‘parasitic’ moneylenders or sedition-preaching nationalists. At the base of such a project lay a particular interpretation of Indian society and a set of prescriptions for its ills. Rural debt, which led to the Deccan riots of 1875, with peasant crowds attacking moneylenders, was said to be the reason why the hard-working and exploited agriculturist hated the unscrupulous moneylender. Economic analysis complemented ‘racial’ ethnography: agriculturists were discovered to consist of traditional rural castes, even races, while the moneylender was cast as an urban intruder.551 In the Punjab, where such racial ethnography became dominant, laws were passed to prohibit the sale of land by agriculturists to non-agriculturist castes.552 Contemporary developments in the Malay peninsula, and in South Africa, whereby landownership was legally restricted to certain officially identified ‘races’, seem to point to a broadly similar trend in British imperial policy in general.553 Parallel to legislative intervention, the British Government initiated a more proactive programme for providing peasants an alternative to loan sharks. The cooperative movement, when formed, hinged on an official registrar in each province, supported by a large staff of Indian assistants. It became most active and successful in the Punjab, not least because of Punjab’s highly vocal registrars such as Edward Maclagan, Hubert Calvert, C. F. Strickland and, most of all, Malcolm Darling. While the Bombay movement was less successful, it was more inclusive of Indians among whom was Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary. Clive Dewey has noted that paternalism and Evangelical Christianity, added to uncompromising mistrust of Indian nationalism, framed the




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governing ideology of the British Indian Civil Service554 from which sprung the official cooperative societies movement. In spite of their occasional involvement in this movement, Indian nationalists were keenly aware of its political dimensions. The socio- economic analyses underlying the official cooperative movement were highly contentious for Congressmen who insisted that the cause of rural poverty was the burden of land revenue imposed by the Government, not debts to moneylenders. Debt versus land revenue became a recurring flashpoint; Pherozeshah Mehta and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, both ‘moderate’ Congress leaders, staged the first ‘walkout’ in the history of the Bombay Legislative Council in protest against the Cooperative Credit Societies’ Bill, which became law in 1904, offering easier registration for cooperative societies. They also vehemently denied Lord Curzon’s allegation that thereby they revealed the pro-moneylender attitude of the Congress.555 In the next two decades, in spite of the Indian disagreement over the rural debt issue, cooperation, along with agricultural education, became a widely accepted genre of social service across the board, as part of a broader concept of ‘rural reconstruction’. Agreement over a course of action or of study for that matter did not imply a shared political aim. What we shall see below is how the idea of a special course of study called agricultural science became attached to the concern for rural ills and also how such a combined project was harnessed to a variety of political aims.

An official social reform ‘movement’: Brayne’s ‘Village Uplift’ Arguably, it takes an eccentric to turn a jaded official notion into an exciting programme of activism. Frank Lugard Brayne, a British official in the Punjab, was certainly an eccentric in more ways than one, and it was he who took the concept of rural reconstruction beyond the official cooperative societies movement, adding several other dimensions to it, including customized education for agriculturists, thereby giving a new lease of life to two lacklustre ideas which had been around for more than a quarter of a century. Brayne was equally creative with his powers and prerogatives within the district bureaucracy, diverting official funds and personnel to what became an obsession with him. In the end, his own project was destined to fail because of his inability to create lines of communication with the new Indian leadership, towards whom he felt a visceral repulsion. A study of his failure can show why others, including Christian missionaries, were more successful in contributing to new ideas of education and public service in India and in claiming a permanent place for themselves within the emerging nation. Brayne came of a British Evangelical family with an established tradition of theological conservatism, employment in the colonies and attempts at civilizing natives.556 This was a carry- over, as in other similar cases, from ‘uplift


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work’ among the poor parishioners in Britain itself. Frank Brayne came to the Punjab as Assistant Commissioner in 1905, and, after a break during the First World War, he was back as Deputy Commissioner in Gurgaon. In 1920, he began his project of ‘village uplift’, lasting from 1920 to 1927. In 1927, he wrote a book, Village uplift in India, describing his methods.557 It is important here to point out the distinction between Brayne’s ideas and the official cooperative movement. Among others, Malcolm Darling, the contemporary Registrar of Co- operatives in India, had little interest in a special course of study to achieve his agenda of rural uplift.558 This was true even of cooperative society officials who were scientists themselves, such as Harold Mann of Bombay, although Mann played an indirect role in shaping agricultural education in India, which we will touch upon later in this chapter.559 Brayne’s contribution was to convert science into propaganda, to add the familiar morality of social uplift programmes in England and to use government infrastructure with such liberty that many contemporaries saw him as corrupt. Brayne’s own efforts at rural amelioration in India were firmly premised on Protestant ideas; in fact, he could be bowdlerizing Weber in the pamphlet which said: Christianity ... by linking home with the Kingdom of Heaven, exploits the most powerful incentive of all to the intensification of human effort and endeavour. Not only does it teach dignity of labor and encourage hard work and good craftsmanship but it teaches mankind to work and the glory of God. Best of all it sanctifies the home and family life, which must be the center of all plans for raising the standard of living. Getting rid of disease, suffering and unhappiness which come from dirt, malnutrition, squalor and apathy is part of the Christian Gospel and is being increasingly included in the work of the Christian Churches and Missions.560 In propaganda material more exclusively intended for an Indian audience, social reform subsumed Christianity entirely, except for formulaic codes such as ‘Holy War’561 which was interpreted (in a nice parallel to debates over jihad) to imply credit cooperatives, better methods of cultivation, cleanliness and hygiene, postponing marriage well beyond puberty and educating women.562 Most of Brayne’s Indian pamphlets were in Urdu, with some in English for the army and the press.563 Such propaganda material, he explained, was for the use of ‘lecturers, schoolmasters, social workers, and all those, official or non- official, who are endeavouring to better the conditions of the people of Gurgaon District and to improve their conditions of life’.564 It was distributed in the 35,000 villages of the Punjab, he boasted, by the medium of 9,000 patwaris,565 10,000 schools, 25,000 teachers, doctors and compounders, 23,000 cooperative




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societies, several thousand inamdars,566 and thousands of post offices, railway stations, courts and offices used by the rural public. There were also fairs, one- day shows, ploughing matches and demonstrations in private farms. In addition, he tried to convince the Education Department to train a cadre of village schoolmasters and ‘guides’ to play the role of the country parson and his wife.567 He himself set up a School of Rural Economy in 1925568 and a School of Domestic Economy for Women in 1926.569 The Gurgaon District Board, which he chaired, paid stipends to students studying in his school,570 following this up by employing them as village guides, along with the Cooperative Department, the Rural Community Council and various other ‘agrarian departments’ of the government.571 Although less malleable, the Education Department also hired the schoolmasters Brayne trained, and, by 1937, it began to adopt a similar curriculum in its normal (teacher-training) schools.572 In addition, Brayne used the help of various charitable organizations, many of Christian affiliation, such as the Red Cross, Prisoners’ Aid Society, Boy Scouts and the YMCA. Looking upon these organizations only as vehicles for his programme, he suggested combining them with the Dehat Sudhar (Rural Reconstruction) Committee, a combined official and non- official association that had been set up by the Ministry of Education in the Punjab in 1923. This effort was much less successful, primarily because such organizations had their independent agendas and did not wish to serve Brayne’s personal hobby-horse.573 Brayne’s liberal use of the government machinery, money and his authority as ex- officio chairman of the District Board came under increasing suspicion from higher echelons of the Government, especially since Indian leaders with a similar agenda but fewer resources took care to publicize his blatant ‘corruption’. Brayne did have a rather broad streak of megalomania: he offered prizes such as the ‘Brayne Challenge Ploughing Belt’ and named public buildings after himself and members of his family. At the Palwal village show, a ‘Harry Tower’ (named after his son) loomed over the tents.574 An anonymous letter-writer to the Lahore Tribune revealed on 1 February 1928 that Brayne as district officer did not pay salaries or repair roads while running up a bill of 40,000 rupees for printing his pamphlets and books.575 This and other allegations were officially investigated, and the Punjab Government expressed official disapproval over the way in which he used public funds and bent rules at his pleasure.576 Although he did not suffer any punitive sanctions as such, he was transferred to Jhelum as Deputy Commissioner, where official warnings preceding him regarding his tendency to let his enthusiasm outrun his discretion. The Commissioner of Rawalpindi was instructed that the District Board accounts should be kept under close supervision.577 To add to his humiliation, the new Commissioner was an Indian. When Brayne protested against Commissioner Ashgar Ali’s orders and complained that his personal integrity was being attacked, the Government of Punjab refused to respond.


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Clive Dewey suggests that Brayne’s efforts were doomed to failure because the contemporary Indian political situation (in the 1930s) made the paternalist tradition of bureaucratic governance obsolete. While Dewey is correct in noting the mutual animosity between conservative British bureaucrats and Indian urban politicians, he is not equally correct in saying that the agrarian programme itself was sidelined with the rise of Indians in political power. It was not so much the content of the programme that was in dispute: Indian politicians were equally keen to appear as saviours of the rural masses, and ‘rural uplift’ as well as ‘agricultural education’ were by this time as much Indian slogans as British. The point was really that there was a vigorous contest for leadership of such programmes, and, after the 1920s, it was difficult to popularize schemes of rural reconstruction, agricultural education or other such genres of social service without deferring to nationalism and to Gandhi’s moral authority. Gandhi did in fact express an interest in Brayne’s work, albeit a critical one, deputing Lala Deshraj to write a detailed report, which was published in Young India in 1929. This report suggested that the project was not particularly successful because it had been artificially imposed from outside, making use of a government official’s power and access to funds.578 In spite of this, a few years later, Gandhi wrote to Brayne personally, saying that he was engaged in similar rural reconstruction work and that he wished to learn from Brayne’s experience. Gandhi’s letter caused a flurry of activity within the Punjab Government, and Brayne could only send a noncommittal answer, vetted by his superiors. Personally, he noted, with some wistfulness, that Gandhi’s review was the best response his book had ever received.579 But when, a year later, an American Methodist Episcopal missionary called Eli Stanley Jones wrote to Brayne urging cooperation with Gandhi over similar work, Brayne wrote back saying that as a government servant he could not do so and that in fact he did not entirely believe in Gandhi’s desire to ‘put his shoulder to the common wheel’.580 Over time, Brayne’s contempt for Indian nationalists and Gandhi in particular increased, and he refused to acknowledge that his paternalistic methods of improving India were no longer feasible.581 Among other things, Brayne was unable to understand why his superiors did not appreciate his activism and his use of Christian missionary organizations for his projects. Complaining to H. H. Petersen, head of the Lahore YMCA, he said, the Govt. attitude seems to be, ‘we wont or cant do it ourselves and we will jolly well see that no servant of ours shall get hold of outside help to do it for us.’



Petty but understandable in view of the general ignorance prevailing about rural reconstructional work going on in the West. Until Govt. can realize that they are some twenty years out of date in their attitude towards what they call ‘Missionary’ work, and that this so-called missionary work is


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being done as a normal part of rural activities in England and elsewhere, so long will they refuse to be interested in it.

To recapitulate then, the eccentric British bureaucrat Brayne’s contribution was to include in the concept of ‘rural uplift’, current at least since the 1870s, a novel form of education, which included agricultural science in the form of dilute parcels of scientific information. This class-specific syllabus was meant to improve all aspects of peasants’ lives within their own social space. Brayne’s curriculum was ‘informal’ in the sense that it was outside the contemporary university system, but he attempted to ‘formalize’ it within an alternative educational structure using government funds, and to some extent government personnel, supplemented by the Christian organizations. He failed because such activism was alien to the colonial government, and he had deliberately made himself unpopular with the most dynamic social activists in twentiethcentury India: nationalists of various hues, as well as Christian missions. It now remained for the last two to find a way of relating to each other, and therein lay the future of agricultural education and village-uplift programmes in India until the time arrived when the state could assume an equally active role.

Christian missions and the needs of a dalit church As we have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Christian missions had their own specific interest in rural social reform and village education. From the late nineteenth century, large groups of rural dalits unexpectedly converted to Christianity, forcing missionary societies to rethink their aims, methods and use of limited resources. As we saw in Chapter 4, many contemporary missionaries suggested that it was utterly wrong to spend a great deal of money and time on the education of upper-caste Hindus while the Christians remained uneducated. Webster suggests that (European and American) missionaries in general responded more eagerly to dalit overtures than did the upper- caste Indian Christians,583 and, among mission societies, the United Presbyterians in the Punjab went the furthest in adopting a new approach and becoming a rural and mass movement church.584 The lines of difference were less neat than Webster suggests; many missionaries remained committed to creating contact with the upper castes and classes, and the attitude of the Indian Christian leadership was more complex than simply upper- caste disdain of the new dalit Christians. While the dalit influx did disturb their self-representation as an educated social group serving the nation, many Protestant leaders responded to this by undertaking lifelong vocations of offering better education and economic opportunities


[ ... ] I am terribly tempted to pull out and start again in rural England. It would mean the waste of half a life-time, but it does look as if I shall never get a move on in India.582


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to their less fortunate brethren.585 In addition, Indian Christians created their own missionary societies in the early twentieth century, such as the National Missionary Society, which by the beginning of the twentieth century,586 worked in mass-movement areas in the western Punjab, United Provinces and Central Provinces.587 All this led twentiethcentury leaders of the Christian community, both missionary and Indian, to seek novel educational methods suited to village life. It is ironic that this enthusiasm created a bridge with Indian political leaders and social activists, most of whom were stridently opposed to mass conversions to Christianity. The cases of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute and of the YMCA, two organizations largely shaped by American Protestant ideas, reveal how such connections were established.

The Allahabad Agricultural Institute and Sam Higginbottom The Agricultural Institute in Allahabad was set up at Naini, in 1910, by a missionary of the American Presbyterian church, Sam Higginbottom. Born to a poor farming family from Wales,588 Higginbottom studied in the USA, at the Mount Hermon school, Northfield, in Connecticut, set up by the well-known evangelist Dwight L. Moody.589 This school was at the centre of student Christian activism, hosting meetings that led to the formation of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions in 1888.590 Here Higginbottom met several missionary leaders, such as Dr Robert Speer (President, Board of Foreign Missions of the American Presbyterian Society) and Dr John Mott (later Chairman of the International Missionary Council). Continuing to Princeton, Higginbottom was pleased to find a similar atmosphere of enthusiasm for missions but failed to study theology for the requisite three years that would qualify him as an American Presbyterian missionary. Lucky coincidences allowed him to replace Henry Forman in north India, the Board of Foreign Missions deciding that the mass movement area did not require a theologically trained missionary. Higginbottom’s initial encounters with India were uncomfortable, its extremes of climate, wealth and poverty, sophistication and ignorance greatly disturbing him. All of this only served to deepen his commitment to the battle cry of ‘The evangelization of the world in this generation’. From the start, he found the dirty and the ignorant much more ‘lovable’ than those Indians whom he described as the brilliant, impressive and courteous intelligentsia; he would prefer to turn Indian society upside down. From all this it might seem unlikely that Higginbottom would be popular with the Indian leadership, and yet he did secure their approval, and this he did by defining his religion in terms of a social vision about which they were equally enthusiastic. While his theology remained doctrinally conservative,




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because of its total focus on social reform, it appeared non-threatening in religious terms to Indians interested in similar projects. Higginbottom was peddling novel ideas, even among the missionaries in India. Although the American Presbyterian mission was redirecting its educational efforts around 1905–6, it took time for his idea of a school to teach agricultural science to be accepted. His relations with the North India Mission of American Presbyterian Church deteriorated to the extent that it disenfranchised him for several years. He was placed under direct probation with the Foreign Missions Board, which made an extended but ultimately positive assessment of the value of his institute for poor village Christians. On the other hand, the British Government of India, in spite of Curzon’s speeches at Pusa, refused to recognize the validity of Higginbottom’s curriculum. Higginbottom’s school was set up in 1912, with some official help with buying the land,591 but it struggled for 15 years before receiving a government grant because the Board of Education did not recognize it as an educational institution and the Department of Agriculture found it beyond its jurisdiction.592 In 1926, the Government of India turned around and selected his institute for a two-year course ending in the Indian Dairy Diploma. In the same year, the first class of students that had prepared for the Government’s Intermediate Examination in Agriculture graduated. In 1932, the Institute became associated with the University of Allahabad. The first class of candidates for a Bachelor of Science in agriculture graduated in 1934, and in 1942 the Institute inaugurated its own course in agriculture, the first such course offered in any Indian university. A course in home economics was started for women in 1936 and in 1944 was recognized for intermediate examination.593 Higginbottom developed his syllabus and teaching methods ex tempore, inspired by many sources, including a project in the Naini Central Jail next door. His aim was to train village Christians to produce larger crops at lower costs by pursuing scientific agriculture and animal husbandry.594 He devised what later became popular as the ‘project’ method of teaching,595 creating interesting lectures by relating everyday transactions with economic theory, for example by requiring students to grow crops and to market them in order to understand agricultural economics. The Institute’s earliest students were all that he could hope for: a group of lower- caste Christians from the Punjab who had secured land in the canal colonies596 and who demanded to be taught how to farm it. In spite of this genuinely radical beginning, the Institute failed to maintain this student profile and social role. As early as 1928, Higginbottom confessed to the Royal Commission of Agriculture that few of his students had ended up farming themselves.597 This was reflected in the list of students who had taken the Indian Dairy Diploma examination at the Agricultural Institute in 1931: they were almost all upper- caste Hindus, including many Bengali Brahmins and Kayasths.598 The Institute’s magazine complained that most of its graduates


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tended to seek government jobs in the Agricultural Department and in the Military Dairy Farms rather than start dairy farms of their own. It was not for being a social revolutionary that Higginbottom and his educational ideas gained prominence in contemporary India. What transpired instead was the general recognition of Higginbottom’s expertise and the connections that this helped him develop across a wide religious and social spectrum. To begin with, several Indian princes, interested in developmental activities, found in him the right man. The first to invite him was the Prince of Gwalior, to whom he was introduced by Sir James Roberts, medical adviser to several Indian princes. Higginbottom worked a few months every year for five years in Gwalior, creating its department of agriculture. The Prince was willing to allocate the necessary budgets for creating a demonstration or model village in every one of his 11 administrative districts. Higginbottom also undertook the reform of a settlement of ‘criminal tribes’ after the Maharaja heard that Christian missionaries were experts in this field as well.599 All this camaraderie ended when Higginbottom refused to become a permanent employee of the Gwalior state. Pressed to do so, he offered the condition of a donation to the institute at Allahabad. This the Maharaja refused to do, objecting that it meant paying for the undermining of his own religion.600 Obviously, Higginbottom’s ideas, methods and personal expertise were welcome, but his religion, represented by his particular institute, was not. Finally, the inevitable encounter with Gandhi occurred: in 1927, Higginbottom met and argued with Gandhi about the best methods of rural reconstruction. Although they differed completely, among other things over the justification of maintaining old cows, and of spinning, Gandhi characteristically concluded that he himself knew little of economics, adding an invitation to Higginbottom to take charge of the rural and economic activities of the Congress.601 Only two missionaries had made a plunge of this kind;602 Higginbottom was not one of them. On the other hand, he did much better than Brayne in maintaining cordial relations with Indian leaders. When he retired in 1945, he continued to serve on several official Indian committees, especially a special committee of agricultural education, which aimed to develop the existing colleges and to set up a research institute in every province. The Central Institute of Pusa, transferred to New Delhi, was also to be greatly enlarged and given all-India jurisdiction. The agricultural member of the Viceroy’s Council, Jogendra Singh, a Jat Sikh and sugar mill- owner in the western United Provinces, and his Parsi Oxfordeducated secretary Sir Pheroze Kharegat, sought Higginbottom’s help. Sir Kharegat was initially not very impressed but was converted after a visit to America and exposure to American ideas of agricultural education. He then requested Higginbottom to help develop the departments of agriculture that had been set up in the Banaras and Aligarh Universities. Higginbottom had been adviser to the Banaras University from 1916 onwards and, before




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leaving India, left plans to develop agricultural colleges both at Banaras and Aligarh Universities.603 Before we move on, I would like to return for a moment to Higginbottom’s own school, which the Raja of Gwalior had perceived as a doctrinal threat (as opposed to Higginbottom the professional). It is difficult to know how the Raja had come to form this opinion; the class lists at the Agricultural Institute showed that several upper- caste Hindu parents felt otherwise. In the published recollections of Ethel, Higginbottom’s wife, one encounters lively pen pictures of tricky social moments and strategies used for overcoming them. One principal problem with welcoming new students from small-town or rural backgrounds was overcoming their inhibitions over eating inappropriate food. A simple gathering at the Principal’s house for tea and cake could be a doctrinal minefield, but Ethel proved culturally savvy enough to assure the cringing vegetarian student that the cake had no eggs and was in fact a ‘Hindu cake’.604 While this was not particularly subtle theology, it certainly indicated a willingness not to waste time and energy over issues that had become remarkably minor (for Christian missionaries). It was such a rearrangement of priorities that allowed the Agricultural Institute to become a centre of expertise rather than threat.

The YMCA in India: producing a secular doctrine Let us now look at another Christian organization, one much more international in its scope, which also undertook projects of agricultural education and rural regeneration in India and which was able to make that further transition necessary to be completely accepted as ‘secular’ servants of the Indian nation. The idea behind the YMCA was in some ways similar to that of the ‘social gospel’, but it was also more evangelical: the idea was to take Christianity where the Church did not go, to organize activity centres where young labouring men in sin-infested cities could socialize in an atmosphere of Christian morality and spirituality. Begun in 1844 in London, the idea caught on with astonishing rapidity, leading by 1855 to an international organization known as the World Alliance of YMCAs, with its national branches in a number of European countries and the USA. In 1878, it acquired permanent headquarters at Geneva, and from 1880 the US and Canadian branches began to undertake missionary work in Asia, South America and even Europe. In 1875, India had become the only country outside Europe and North America to possess a YMCA, established in the city of Bombay.605 In 1921, the YMCA World Service sent Spencer Hatch, an agricultural expert from Cornell, to Martandam, in the princely state of Travancore, within presentday Kerala. Hatch offered a programme that we can easily recognize as ‘rural uplift’; on the face of it there was little to distinguish it from the efforts of Higginbottom, or even Brayne. As we have noted earlier, it was not really the content of the programme that determined its




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acceptance but the agency and its methods. Hatch ran his rural reconstruction project with financial support from the ‘progressive’ Hindu prince of Travancore.606 Unlike Higginbottom, Hatch also had a wide institutional network in place to work his projects: since the region had a significant Christian population,607 churches and Christian community centres were available to form village-level branches of the YMCA.608 In fact, the formation of the YMCA in Travancore as well as in neighbouring Mysore and Bangalore city had been dependent on the enthusiasm of members of the London Missionary Society, which had been working there since 1806.609 This ecumenical character of the YMCA, whereby it was prepared to draw its members from all existing Christian organizations (in practice Protestant ones) was a very good start, but to become a truly public organization in India, attracting Hindus, Muslims and Christians of Catholic and Syrian Orthodox churches,610 the YMCA had to develop further. Hatch’s programme showed how far this development had proceeded by the second quarter of the twentieth century, in terms of personnel, patronage and priorities. As we have observed, the YMCA at Martandam had the patronage of the Travancore kings; similarly, the YMCA at Bangalore acquired its premises in 1912 from the Wodeyar Rajas of Mysore. Internally, there were changes very similar to those undertaken at St Stephen’s College: the Martandam YMCA’s religious secretary remained Christian, but Hindu members could lead religious classes, consisting in this case of the study of the Bhagavad Gita.611 At the 21st international meeting of YMCAs, held at Bangalore in 1937, such inclusion was critically recommended. Speakers noted the moral challenge presented by Gandhi and his charge that Christian social service was aimed at gaining proselytes. Here was a ethical reorganization: while in missionary conferences from the mid-nineteenth century onwards ‘social work’ had had to be justified for its evangelical value, the YMCA in 1937 responded defensively that collecting ‘scalps’ was not its intention and struggled to make the distinction between evangelism, i.e. making the Christian message known, and proselytization, i.e. inducing conversions.612 Such organizational and ideological transformation of the YMCA in India was reflected in its aesthetics and vocabulary, of which two distinctive features were sublimation of Christian missionary zeal into ‘secular’ social work and the systematic inclusion of Indian heroes and non-sectarian symbols in its pantheon, as it were. The Flaming Milestone, an official account of the YMCA’s 21st international meeting held at Mysore, in 1937, pictured on its cover milestones built by the Mughal emperors to guide pilgrims on the highways. It appeared to Basil Matthews, the author, that the image was an apt metaphorical representation of the light offered by God to lead men gathered at the meeting to discovering his will. Even this explanation was open- ended, and it is unsurprising that the meeting was flagged off by the ‘cultured and devout’ Hindu prince of Mysore, as well as by the Muslim diwan Sir Mirza Ismail, and the multi-religious patronage




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of the YMCA was consciously recorded by the chronicler of the event. The Maharaja himself, in his speech, commended the YMCA for its work with the youth, who he said were the source of ‘new ideals of life, of religion and of dedication of self to the good of others’,613 a description that could apply as much to a Hindu reformist organization such as the Ramakrishna Mission as the YMCA. During the deliberations of the YMCA international, it was noted that there were several possible attitudes towards other faiths, including the one of Karl Barth which did not recommend establishing any points of contact with them. The YMCA itself decided that this was not its favoured approach, that since there was divine truth in other religions as well, it was necessary to learn from them without being patronizing, and the means of doing that was to genuinely include ‘brethren of other religions’ in the work of the YMCA.614 Presumably, this was the approach that Hatch himself adopted. His own book, published in 1949, describing his rural reconstruction programme at Martandam, began with



Figure 7 YMCA symbol


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a psalm from Isaiah, followed by a poem by Tagore. The ‘five-sided triangle’ which was the symbol of the YMCA at Martandam, could have easily been that of a Travancore government project: the ‘spiritual’ arm among the mental, physical, economic and social, being in no way specifically Christian (See Figure 7). What we have here then is a culture of deliberate doctrinal obfuscation on all sides such that people from a variety of religious backgrounds could nominally subscribe to a doctrinally uncontentious set ethical of principles while concentrating on the pragmatics of social work. By looking closely at the career of the man who led the Indian YMCA’s ‘rural work’ wing for two decades, we have the opportunity to examine the intense intellectual and emotional foundations of Indian Christian secularism.

K. T. Paul: servant of the nation The man in question was called Kanakarayan Thiruselvam Paul. He was a Tamil Christian from Salem, whose grandfather had been a Hindu converted to Roman Catholicism. Paul’s father became Protestant in 1852 and worked as a government official, the Serishtadar of the Collector’s Treasury in Salem. Paul’s mother, Amaravathi, came from a highly educated south Indian Christian family, which included women with university degrees.615 K. T. Paul himself arrived at the Madras Christian College in 1892 to study for his BA degree and followed this by studying law at the Madras Law College. After this he took a less conventional turn, deciding to work as a farmer in Salem. He returned to urban life with mission-school teaching in Coimbatore, followed by a lectureship at the Madras Christian College.616 Paul’s real entry into public life happened through the YMCA, when Sherwood Eddy, later Asian Secretary of the YMCA, organized a conference at Serampore (near Calcutta) in 1905, to consider how the Indian church (rather than foreign missions) could spearhead Evangelistic advance in India.617 The meeting led to the formation of the National Missionary Society, of which Paul was founder member and in which he remained in directorial positions until his death.618 Alongside this apparently confessional commitment, Paul got drawn more and more into the kind of non-sectarian social work of the YMCA that we have been discussing. In 1914, he was appointed the first Rural Secretary of the newly formed ‘Rural Department’ of the National Council of the YMCAs of India, Burma and Ceylon and, in 1916, the first Indian National General Secretary of the YMCAs of India, Burma and Ceylon.619 Paul was also prominent in Indian public life as a political representative of Indian Christians, through his membership of the All Indian Conference of Indian Christians, formed in 1914, an aspect of his career that I will discuss in Chapter 8. Suffice to say here that he developed a conception of ‘Christian citizenship’ which entailed unselfish service to the nation, with




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no demands for compensatory political privileges as a minority community. For a model Christian citizen, Paul pointed to Gandhi.620 When Paul died, obituaries by leading Indian politicians, including Gandhi, applauded his ability to prevent his faith from diluting his nationalism.621 Even in his non-political career, K. T. Paul’s servant of the nation persona was prominent, and this was enhanced by his self-distancing from the Government. Describing the YMCA’s village work, he asserted that the official cooperative movement had failed to cure rural poverty and indebtedness, that government officials were entirely resistant to new ideas and that for the success of rural reconstruction projects it was essential for them to function autonomously of the Government. The YMCA under Paul’s direction organized its own central cooperative bank, starting with Madras and spreading to other provinces, offering credit to poor farmers without the security requirements of commercial banks. Beginning in villages with a substantial population of Christians offered the grass-roots infrastructure that Hatch had found useful, although Paul insisted that the banks were not ‘denominational’ and that their services were available to all. Cooperative banks were only one aspect of the project of rural reconstruction; Paul felt that it was useless to help the Indian peasant in any way other than holistically, and education was the most important feature of such holistic help.622 From being the Rural Secretary of the YMCA, Paul went on later to become the National General Secretary of the YMCAs of India, Ceylon and Burma. This was a position of extraordinary eminence within a Christian organization for an Indian at this time, and Paul constantly reflected in public over the implications of his singular station. In a paper written for the missionary conference at Calcutta in 1912, Paul insisted on the immediate need for Indian leadership in mission as well as church, arguing that the domination of the incipient Indian churches, including the clergy, by foreign missionaries was an alien and unproductive arrangement derived from the ‘Western’ genius for organization and domination, one that suppressed the development of the Indian church.623 In this pamphlet he also summarized views on a more incendiary subject: The Problem of Race Relationship, especially in the context of strained relations between the younger generation of Indian Christians and the older paternalist missionaries. The latter pamphlet, which was not for public circulation, was the product of a ‘retreat’ in which a number of prominent South Indian Christians, and a few missionaries, including Paul’s future biographer, H. A. Popley, participated.624 Racial awareness and resentment of racial hierarchy did not necessarily translate into anti-imperial nationalism. Paul was unexceptional in the 1920s, if somewhat stodgy, in his constitutionalism, ‘loyalism’ and faith in the possibility of a federated empire, and it is misleading to seek the roots of such political ‘misalignment’ in his religious identity, as at least one scholar has done in passing.625 In fact, the ‘Christian’ aspect of Paul’s ideological make-up became increasingly more complex as his career progressed.


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In 1909, Paul voiced classic fulfilment theology when he reflected that while much of Hinduism was indeed ‘darkness’, the works of the eighthcentury monist philosopher Sankaracarya indicated that God had left light in India.626 Reading this statement in context reveals cultural pride rather than paternalism because this reflection was part of Paul’s speculation on how to create truly Indian missions, free of foreign control. By 1916, K. T. Paul wrote to in response to a younger friend’s confession of doctrinal perplexity that he had suffered the same. Paul elaborated that the Great War had melted away the foundations from under him, leading him initially to perceive it as a failure of Christendom. While over time this attitude of condemnation had mellowed, it had left a feeling of perplexity, confessed Paul. At the very least, he felt himself unable to be dogmatic and aggressive about his own convictions. He said candidly: I feel now that though my conviction is strong enough to determine my own conduct I cannot propagate it to others. The entire ethical standards are so essentially in the melting cauldron and volcanic water that while my own feet shall be on the rock ledge which I feel below me, I shall not preach my faith to others. I feel that it is yet too premature. It will at this time only irritate and confuse and make things really harder for them. They know too, they are sincere too, they have Christ as well. Who am I here. Let me act in sweetness and confidence, in service. For the rest, there is CHRIST and his DAY. Is this ‘illogical’? Is this a ‘compromise’? Not indeed. To abstain from proselytizing is no compromise. It may be due to a true humility. I don’t compromise my own acts: how could I? But I should not impose my principles on others who are also earnestly striving to know and to feel aright [unclear] and to whom in His own way he is surely sending. I shouldn’t interfere with Him, His guidance of them. How could I? My actions and abstensions shall bear their silent testimony. I shall draw the line at offensive proselytizing. There – I have opened you a window in my soul. Will you counsel me?627 We do not have record of the reply that Paul received from his friend, but we are at least equipped to conceptualize a novel religio- ethical universe where toleration of difference becomes in itself a matter of doctrine. In the next two chapters, I will develop further my argument that the Indian Christian leadership of national eminence in the early twentieth century was particularly steeped in such an ideology and that they developed such a doctrinal bent through their efforts to claim their church and religion as their own from the missionaries on the one hand and to make sense to their countrymen of other religions on the other. The YMCA’s institutional achievement was developing the image of a disinterested charitable organization, explicitly dissociated from the




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Government, polite empathy if not open sympathy towards the nationalist cause and, above all, a doctrinally inclusive positive ethics of social activism, in an age when any activist project was susceptible to divisive implications. As Paul’s career shows, such superficial apolitical placidity lay over tense negotiations over religious, racial and institutional authority. Institutionally, the YMCA approached Indian nationalism the closest without ruffling its relations with the Government or its Christian sponsors overseas. However, the YMCA provided a stepping stone for some individuals to take a longer leap from Christian philanthropy to service of the Indian nation, and one of these persons was Paul’s correspondent over doctrinal dilemmas, Leonard K. Elmhirst.

Agricultural education for national service: Tagore, Elmhirst and Sriniketan As we have seen above, Rabindranath Tagore and his poetry were recognized non-sectarian national icons by the YMCA in 1937. During the decades in which the YMCA developed its ideas of education and rural work, Tagore was working out his own ideas of national education. Since the nation and its culture were defined very differently by different contemporary thinkers, naturally ideas about what genuine Indian education should comprise varied. Nevertheless, certain themes recurred, including the one of cultural authenticity, which was inevitably defined with reference to religious ideas, and also national utility. Obviously what was useful to the landlord’s son was not necessarily so for the landless labourer’s daughter, but the ideological strength of the national education schemes arose from enveloping utility with authenticity and baptizing elite education as national service. Having developed an early apathy for the existing educational system, Tagore himself was never able to undergo a complete course of formal schooling. In his short story ‘The Parrot’s Education’ he caricatured the education system in India through the image of a parrot-student who is caged, maimed and force fed dry pages from learned books until it stops singing and finally suffocates to death, to the satisfaction of its teachers. In Tagore’s mind, the sterility of Indian education derived from its foreign nature,628 and in 1892, he wrote an essay titled Shikshar herpher (‘Variations in Education’) arguing that the education of a country had to be in the hands of its own people.629 Among other contemporary Indian educational activists seeking to develop their institutions, the issue of government support was a disputed one. Those aiming at universities obviously sought government endorsement and secured change in official policy to accommodate their novel schemes, including, for the first time, religious instruction in public institutions. Others, such as the conservative wing of the Arya Samaj, continued to believe that association with the Government would pervert the purpose of their projects.630 Tagore was of the latter school of thought,




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In Indian education we shall have to collect together treasures of Vedic, Puranic, Buddhist, Jaina and Islamic minds. We shall have to find out how the Indian mind has flown along these different channels. By some such means India will feel her identity in her diversity. We must understand ourselves in this extended and interlinked way or else the education we will receive will be like that of the beggar. No nation can be rich on begging.631 At Bolpur, Rabindranath’s father Debendranath had established an ashram or spiritual retreat in 1863.632 Here Tagore established a little school in 1901, in the context of the developing Swadeshi movement that erupted in 1905 against the partition of Bengal. Among the earliest teachers was the maverick Christian nationalist Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, whose career we shall detail in the next two chapters. The school had few students, consisting mostly of Tagore’s own son, relatives’ and friends’ sons, with a high turnover of teaching staff.633 Here Tagore attempted to design a plan and method of study free from what he called the tyranny of examinations and connected to what he saw as the life of the people. In describing the aims of his ideal school, he said: a truly Indian school ... must from the very beginning implement its acquired knowledge of economics, of agriculture, of health and all other everyday sciences in the surrounding villages. Then alone can the school become the centre of the country’s way of living. This school must practice agriculture, dairy-keeping, and weaving on the best modern methods. And to obtain its own financial resources it would adopt cooperative methods bringing together students, teachers, and the people living around. I have proposed to call this ideal school Visva-Bharati.634 Tagore’s concern with villages and their decay arose out of his experience in the 1890s of managing family estates in Silaidaha (in Assam).635 During a short term as the Chairman of the Provincial Congress, he tried unsuccessfully to propose that village reconstruction should be at the core of national regeneration.636 At Santiniketan, finally able to experiment according to his visions, he required students to develop contacts with the surrounding villages and to undertake projects for their development as essential parts of their education.637 This was meant to benefit the students as much as


but move due to his dislike of existing curricula and examinations than for sectarian reasons. Although religion was deeply enmeshed in Tagore’s ideas of national culture, his conception of religion was itself diffuse. Added to his Brahmo background was his cosmopolitan liberalism, and this led him to insist,


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the villagers; Tagore’s ideas of national redemption through education and service can be placed in a historical line between Swami Vivekananda and Gandhi.638 But Tagore was also intellectually related to nineteenth century Indian agricultural experts, a good many educated at Cirencester, who felt that scientific knowledge and its application had an important role to play in serving the village, villagers and the nation.639 Working on this principle, he sent his son Rathindranath, son-in-law Nagendranath Ganguli and friend’s son Sanstoshchandra Majumdar to Cornell University in 1906 to study agriculture and dairy-keeping. In 1912, agricultural science gained a distinct space on campus when he bought a house and some lands for this purpose in the village Surul, two miles from Santiniketan. The building was meant to house students of agriculture, who would, among other things, work on projects of developing the neighbouring villages. Santosh Mitra, already a teacher at Santiniketan, was relocated there as its first teaching staff.640 The Surul project really took off with the arrival of an Englishman, the son of a minor Yorkshire landowner, who was also a curate out of a need for employment rather than any serious religious vocation. Leonard K. Elmhirst (1893–1974) suffered greatly from the 10 years of public-school education that was traditional for boys of his social class, as from his father’s conventional patriarchy. Following his mother’s earnest religious spirit, he duly went to Cambridge to study history and divinity, in order to prepare himself for ordination in the Church of England. When there, he became active in the Students’ Christian Movement and the YMCA, whereby his Christianity became more ecumenical but also somewhat undermined, especially with intellectual inputs from the moral philosopher Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who suggested to him that a just society may be possible without relying on Christian dogma. Working with the YMCA with English soldiers at Eastbourne, he began to notice that the unquestionably good and well-admired English soldiers left the tent when he began to ‘take’ prayers. And yet Elmhirst did see himself as something of a missionary when he came as a YMCA worker to Ahmadnagar in 1915. Instantly immersed in the life of a colonial sahib with myriads of servants and a racially limited social circle, he nevertheless managed to develop some knowledge of Indian society since his job description consisted of making the ‘Tommies’ friendly towards the Indians. Whether or not he succeeded with the soldiers, he seems to have been charmed himself. In 1916, he found a job as secretary with E. C. Carter, the American head of the YMCA in India, and moved with him to Calcutta. However, as Carter left India for a higher post, Elmhirst found himself without a job and took himself to Iraq (then Mesopotamia), doing the YMCA’s ‘war’ service. It was there that he first made a public break with religious conformity, refusing to impose ‘orgies of hymns’ on tired and frustrated soldiers every Sunday, substituting this with non-religious music.




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For this, he was duly censured by other YMCA officials, and when he was invalided out of Iraq to India in 1917, he found a non-religious job as private secretary of Lionel Curtis, the British statesman who proposed the constitutional scheme of Dyarchy for India, legislated in the Montague–Chelmsford reforms.641 Although these (inadequate) reforms led to the first major confrontation between the Indian National Congress and the Government, Elmhirst never retracted his comments of 1921–2, about his ‘hero-worship’ of Curtis.642 Elmhirst then, was not much of a Christian, but he was not by any means a sympathizer of the Indian nationalist movement. But there were other routes to participating in the broader nationalist developments of the time. From Curtis, Elmhirst moved on to Allahabad, to become Sam Higginbottom’s secretary, accompanying him to Gwalior to set up the agriculture department there. After this, at Dr Harold Mann’s suggestion (Registrar of Co- operative Societies, Bombay and Professor at the Poona Agricultural College), Elmhirst toured the Deccan before leaving India in 1918.643 Elmhirst had heard of rural reconstruction projects before,644 but Higginbottom managed draw his full enthusiasm to the subject, and it was on the latter’s advice that Elmhirst went to America to acquire a degree in agricultural science at Cornell, after serving once more in the army for a few months. He wrote later that during this period he hoped to find a chance to return to India and to work in a village, preferably for Tagore, of whom he had already learnt and whose Nobel-winning Gitanjali had deeply impressed him. Although Higginbottom made personal efforts to have him recruited by his mission at his own institute, the missionary society found him too doctrinally suspect to be employable.645 Higginbottom then thought of employers he wouldn’t himself consider, and in 1921 recommended him to Rabindranath Tagore, who was then travelling in the USA. The spring of that year, Tagore summoned Elmhirst to a meeting in New York and told him about Santiniketan as well as his wish to discover the causes of rural decay and possible solutions. For Elmhirst, this was apparently a dream come true, although there were no funds available at Santiniketan for a salary, and when, on completing his degree the following year, he wrote to ask if he could come, Charles Andrews, who had by then moved on from St Stephen’s College to Santiniketan, cabled back, ‘Don’t come, no funds available.’ This appears to have been the beginning of a subtle but definite rivalry between the two Englishmen, both travelling great spiritual and physical distances for the affection of and proximity to Tagore. Luckily for Elmhirst money was no longer a problem since an American millionaire, Dorothy Straight (who would later be his wife), had agreed to fund the project in India. Elmhirst cabled back, ‘Fund available, can I come?’ and the perfect answer arrived, this time from Tagore himself, ‘Delighted come, Rabindranath Tagore.’646 Elmhirst never missed an opportunity to recount this set of telegraphic exchanges when later telling his story of Santiniketan.




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On arrival, he was asked to finalize plans for the agricultural school, working with Rathindranath, Santosh Majumdar, and two other members of staff. Tagore let him know rather baldly that he was not to attempt to become indispensable, like any foreign missionary, but should aim at transferring his skills to the students and teachers.647 The group decided that the institution would be called the ‘School of Agriculture’ and that the following should be invited to become its trustees: Sir P. C. Roy, a Bengali chemist; Sir Jagadish Bose, physicist; K. T. Paul, whom we already know; B. N. Seal; Dr. Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell and Sir Michael Sadler, former Vice- Chancellor of Calcutta University and at that time Vice- Chancellor of Leeds University.648 Several conflicts troubled the fledgling school, its staff and students from the start. In 1921, Tagore refused, even on Gandhi’s personal appeal, to lend his support to the non- cooperation movement on the grounds that the nationalism being promoted was undesirably chauvinist and xenophobic. Quite a few students at Santiniketan thought otherwise, and Charles Andrews himself was of the opinion that seeking the District Board’s support for Surul amounted to alliance with the Imperial Government. In 1922 there was a small rebellion at the school in Surul, with some expulsions, and, ironically, Tagore scolded Andrews for introducing nationalist politics in his school. Elmhirst himself felt that rural reconstruction work amounted to national service, and this justified abstaining from direct political action. He qualified this in his later writing, explaining that he had expected the political liberation of India to take place very soon after the Montague–Chelmsford reforms of 1919, and not after 25 years, as it turned out to be. The foreign source of funding was also an issue. Again it was Andrews who raised the concern, reporting to Elmhirst that Gandhi felt projects such as Surul, financed by foreigners, could not permanently benefit India. This disturbed Elmhirst a great deal, since a large section of the funds for Sriniketan came from his future wife Dorothy, and he later decided that this particular scruple was Andrews’ own rather than Gandhi’s.649 Elmhirst was able to negotiate all these differences with a great deal of personal humility and a single-minded devotion to the cause of rural reconstruction. He was a useful person to have around, and not only for his studies at Cornell. As he remarked, there were few Englishmen at the time who socialized intimately with Indians, and this made him a social go-between who opened certain doors for Santiniketan. For instance, he was able to secure the personal support of the District Collector, a Scotsman who otherwise had no interest in Tagore or rural reconstruction and believed Gandhi to be a Bolshevik.650 Unlike, say, Brayne, Elmhirst was equally comfortable with the new political authorities, especially Indians in the elected district board and the Ministry of Agriculture. In fact, a deputy of the Department of Agriculture in 1921 proved to be a classmate from Cornell so that


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provision was easily made for government grants of seeds, implements and loan of officials.651 As for his liberal Christianity, although not all missionaries in India were happy about his position in Santiniketan,652 a visiting bishop especially sought to meet and congratulate him on his work.653 On the other hand, Andrews’ resignation from clerical orders disturbed him greatly,654 although once again this might have involved personal dynamics much more than doctrine. In all this, what developed was not so much a scheme of practical education for farmers but a centre of charitable work, dispensing scientific advice, health care and some limited education to the children of the villages. The name of the primary school established at Surul, Shiksha Satra,655 itself revealed it as a centre of dana or charitable giving, in this case the handout being education. Elmhirst himself was completely opposed to the idea of distinct agricultural schools, feeling that what the rural child needed was a basic primary education.656 Even so, Shiksha Satra remained distinct from Patha Bhavan, the primary school at Santiniketan. Tagore justified this distinction by describing Shiksha Satra as the ideal school, which would eventually overwhelm the other one, where examinations and imperfections had had to be introduced to serve the students’ ambitions of finding government jobs. At Shiksha Satra, villagers who did not have such ambitions could receive true education.657 Other developmental schemes consisted of a brati-balak movement for village boys, modelled on the Boy Scouts, aimed at invigorating their elders to embrace the new ideas emanating from Sriniketan. There was also a health clinic established with further help from Dorothy Straight, this time involving the loan of a friend, Miss Gretchen Green. As it happens, Gretchen was Dorothy’s open effort to arrange a marriage for Elmhirst, who had been importuning her to marry him for over a year. The very ‘plain’ Miss Green failed in this mission, but Surul gained health cooperatives due to her professional expertise.658 Elmhirst himself left Sriniketan after only two and a half years, accompanying Tagore on world tours and finally separating in 1925. Returning to England, he married Dorothy who had finally relented, deciding to move to England with her three children from her first marriage. They were agreed upon the idea that they had an educational experiment of their own to undertake. Dorothy’s wealth allowed them to purchase the ancient and immense estate of Dartington in Devonshire, but gaining acceptance of rural society in Devon, in face of their distaste for hunting, disinterest in tea parties and the Church and determination to pay the minimum wage to their labourers was an uphill task. The school, which started in 1926, with Dorothy’s children as the first students, was seen by many as the work of the Devil, an impression that deepened with unconventional practices such as co-residential dormitories and a remarkably relaxed approach to nudity among children.659




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Elmhirst’s connection with India and Sriniketan continued, and he found the institute another director, this time an Indian, Sudhir Sen, in 1939. Sen was thoroughly a man of science and thought Sriniketan was a practical failure, either as a centre of rural development or an educational institution.660 But its purpose, which lay in adding the humanitarian angle to an outstanding model of ‘authentic’ national education, had been fulfilled. Superficially, it appears to me that the similarities continue: Dartington now has a college for short-term courses, in addition to the Cider Press Centre, which produces and sells locally made food and crafts, besides being a beautiful holiday home open to visitors. Sriniketan is less opulent, but it has similarly become part of a prosaic present where none of its activities are unusual or even beyond the bureaucratic norms of welfare and education: possessing a ‘cottage industry’ cooperative and store and an institute of rural reconstruction, having lost the department of agriculture to the main (Visvabharati) university.


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Figure 8 Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Andrews


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Figure 9 Leonard Elmhirst with Tagore at Santiniketan

Conclusion Christians, Indian and non-Indian, played a significant role in the development of Indian education, and this role was not limited to their endorsement of any one kind of educational programme or promoting of a particular socio-political ideology. Of what public education in India should consist was a disputed issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even the Government endorsed a number of divergent curricula, some involving the use of English as a medium, others insisting on carefully crafted vernaculars, such as Urdu, and yet others asserting the need for technical rather than literary education to serve the interests of the majority of Indians. Each educational scheme was associated with a distinct political and social ideology. Christian missions developed their own split in educational strategies: while English-medium higher schools and colleges taught upper- class non- Christian Indians, other programmes were developed for the educational needs of Christian villagers. Novel curricula and teaching methods, in many cases derived from an American context, led to Christian agricultural schools in India, primarily aimed at training dalit Christians to produce and earn more. From this niche, Christian agricultural experts were able to expand into a general market for agricultural education, which developed because of




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political sensitivity of the Indian nationalist conscience to the plight of Indian villagers. Although Indian nationalists were resentful of official uplift schemes, seeing them as intended to de-legitimize their leadership, they welcomed Christian organizations and individuals to share their experience and expertise on the tacit understanding that neither religious orientations nor nationalist commitment would be questioned. Since the concept of nationalism and its implications varied across different sections of the Indian leadership, Christians making their accommodations also made different choices. Also, the distances each individual travelled depended on their personal religious understanding as well as social skills. Sam Higginbottom, for instance, drew back even when invited by Gandhi, while making the connection between Elmhirst and Tagore possible, out of which grew more than two experiments in education and social work, one Indian and one British, each apparently located within completely distinct national contexts but in reality closely connected by personal journeys towards a new religion of social ethics.


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Part III


Community


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6

It is impossible not to notice that the two rival ‘outside’ participants in Indian nationalism, Charles Andrews and Leonard Elmhirst, had to step out of the domain of Christian missions in order to take up their new mantles as servants of the Indian nation. Skill-sharing across a diverse, even conflicting spectrum of religious and political hues was indeed a reality, but the boundaries imposed by organized Christianity were equally substantive. These boundaries included those imposed by law: other scholars have pointed out how, in the twentiethcentury, the British Government of India required missionaries to sign a pledge committing themselves to refrain from involvement in politics, especially subversive politics. The burden of this pledge was passed on to Indian employees of missions, restricting their ability to participate in nationalist politics,661 while they remained under the authority of the Christian missions. Both Andrews and Elmhirst did in fact remove themselves from the control of such authority, but their trajectories were exceptional. This chapter will discuss the structure of religious authority that constrained and shaped the opinions of most Christians in India in our period, both Indians, and others. In doing so, it will reopen the issues raised in Chapter 2, where we noted that Christian churches were part of a spectrum of religious institutions in India, which were all undergoing rapid reorganization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was suggested there that the specificity of Christian religious authority in this period was its expression as a racial hierarchy; it is to this distinctive experience of Christians that this chapter will return. The examples of Andrews and Elmhirst should not of course be taken to imply that all Indian Christians and a great number of subversive young missionaries were struggling to express their commitment to nationalist politics. This was not the case. But, as the two previous chapters have demonstrated, there was plenty to disagree over apart from formal politics, whether that be strategies of religious communication, the purpose of pedagogy, the choice of professional partners or the pragmatic question of


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entitlement to decision-making authority. Indeed, it was such differences, rather than nationalism per se, that occasioned most confrontations and led to the greatest changes, although nationalism also weaved itself into the internal dynamics of transformation within Christian institutions in India. To talk of ‘internal’ aspects of Christian institutions in India is not to resurrect the notion of an autonomous and insular religious agency after having demonstrated that the nature of such agency was constantly shaped by the dynamics of Indian society, politics and government, which exerted concrete pressures through legislation, economics and cultural expectations. It is instead an effort to point to the importance of religion-specific institutional contexts within which Christians in India debated various approaches to the issues of religious diversity and state regulation. Such specific and divided contexts shaped what purported to be public statements on behalf of a single religious community, whether with respect to a proposed legislation or a particular pedagogic approach. Attention to such contexts explains why voices that claimed to be united often sounded discordant. The argument here is that expressions of identity are organically connected to structures of authority. Who ‘we’ are depends on who is speaking, in all cases, but the question for the historian is how certain representations become more effective than others, whether by suppressing other voices ‘within’ or by gaining recognition from without. In the period we are studying, there arose within all major Indian religions new ‘religious leaders’ who were not traditional religious specialists in terms of their training, profession or lifestyle. C. A. Bayly has pointed to the conjoint role of monks, priests, the intelligentsia and the ‘middling sort’ of people in shaping ‘new-style religions’, organized along bureaucratic lines, subscribing to ‘an authorized set of recorded beliefs’ (Scripture) which were propagated in print to non-subscribers.662 What Bayly therefore shows is a tendency towards uniformity and centralization in the great world religions, processes that replicated those of the nation-state. The organizational implications were contradictory, both for ‘new religion’ and for the ‘nation’. While by the very nature of its conceptualization ‘new religion’, quite like the nation, was a horizontal human community, powerful arguments continued to be made for the constitution (not just retention) of unrepresentative and transcendent religious and political authority, on the basis of claimed special capacity. This chapter will focus on the interplay of such reformist and conservative agendas structuring modern religious communities in India, with particular attention to that religion which was supposed to have provided the model: Protestant Christianity. In marked contrast with growing scholarship on Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism, there are no works on Indian Christianity demonstrating how Christian community leaders intellectually adapted


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to modernity, adopted novel organizational methods or came to conceive of Christians as a horizontal, extra-local, bounded, nation-like community with a political presence.663 In all likelihood this neglect arises out of an implicit assumption that Christianity or at least Protestant Christianity in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury India was essentially a modern European religion and all that was left for Indians to do was to embrace it.664 Chandra Mallampalli’s work stands out for its discussion of social hierarchy, cultural disputes and leadership contests in the context of the formation (and marginalization) of Tamil Christians as a community. But while he refers to the intervention of religious authorities such as Catholic bishops in the process, he offers no insight into the formation of religious authority itself.665 It is historically the case that in the case of Indian Christians, such authority was constituted as a racial hierarchy. It is not particularly pathbreaking to reveal that European and American missionaries were racist; as one scholar has recently remarked, it would have been very odd if they had not been.666 In the late nineteenth century, it was respectable to believe in ‘scientific’ theories that postulated elaborate taxonomies of distinct races with characteristic physical as well as mental attributes and to accept that such differences were natural and hence insuperable. This chapter looks at one very large instance of institutional racism, the mission-churches of colonial India, to reveal how a variety of theological, political and cultural arguments continued to supplement biological theories in justifying differential access to power and resources by Indians and Euro-Americans. In doing so, it adds to studies of the theory and practice of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is also a less theoretical reason for studying institutional racism in the Indian Church(es), which is the obvious importance of this issue for Indian Christians of the period, as evinced by their constant statements on the matter. That very few scholars have taken note of this is perhaps due to the irrelevance of this unpleasant debate to available historical metanarratives, whether nationalism, sub-nationalism/separatism,667 subaltern resistance,668 or the more traditional themes of church history, such as ecumenical union669 or disestablishment.670 Just like all these other scholars, I may have decided that disputes over religious organization were a marginal if unfortunate issue had I not come to believe that such disputes demonstrably shaped ‘Christian opinion’ in colonial India. And as I have been arguing in the previous chapters, Christian opinion on matters of doctrine, social vision and political and legal issues had a substantive role to play in the shaping of Indian secularism. In arguing my case, I will focus on the Anglican Church and its two missionary societies: the High Church Society for Propagation of the Gospel (SPG)671 and the Evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS).672 From


Race in the Indian Church


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virtual absence at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were around 2.9 million Protestant Christians in India in 1921 (61% of all Christians in India). Anglicans formed the largest denomination among Protestants.673 I have focused on Anglicans not only because they were numerically significant but also because they were somewhat unusual for belonging to a church that had a legal relationship with the British state. As I will show, this relationship produced a particular set of laws and justifications supporting racial hierarchy within the Church of England in India and its associated missions. However, the need for such laws arose from a much broader culture of racial hierarchy; hence, Indian Christian leaders subordinate to other missionary denominations experienced very similar forms of discriminatory belief and practice and were equally vocal in protesting against them. We will see how this conflict was endemic within the widest-ranging Protestant association in India – the National Missionary Council (NMC; later National Christian Council) – an association that included most major Protestant missions in India: British, American and German.

Religion by subscription: missionary societies as a modern form of religiosity Let us now step back and look at the entity known as a missionary society. Sociologically, these were something akin to social clubs: one chose whether or not to belong. An eminent sociologist has suggested that the distinctive feature of religion in the modern Western world is its transformation from the all- encompassing church (and the marginal persecuted sects) to mutually tolerant and competing denominations. Unlike the church, the denomination did not see itself as coincident with society, and, unlike the sect, it did not aspire to be so in the future. It competed with what it thought were similar entities to ‘sell’ its opinion but did not expect or even wish to negate other opinions entirely. It was also distinctive in its organizational form because it involved an active participatory role for the laity, based on each individual’s conscientious decision, which was completely opposed to the traditional view of religion as the domain of specialist mediation between earth and heaven, for which the laity were supposed to be submissively and passively grateful. The denomination therefore could be said to be the archetypically modern form of religiosity (just as the ‘cult’ is the post-modern one), connected with the decline in religious coercion, privatization of faith and ultimate decline in religious belief (i.e. secularization according to Bruce).674 Bruce’s thesis is explicitly concerned with Western Christian societies and is difficult to apply to religious contexts where there had never existed such coercive or even ambitious religious authority, whether in the form of the Church or the ‘ecclesiastical polity’. Indeed the implied narrative of increasing freedom in religious life makes sense only against the specific




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early modern European history of enhanced penetration of everyday life by a regulatory form of government, including church government. The sociological specificity of the denomination is, however, an important starting point for understanding religious authority as Indian Christians experienced it in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury India, that is, in the form of denominational missions. The denomination’s alter ego was the missionary society; it is probably symptomatic that Methodism, arguably the first denomination, worked simultaneously as a mission right from its inception.675 Other missionary societies followed: the Baptists, the Congregationalists and even the Anglicans, the last taking their time in coming to terms with a notion of religion that was distinct from the state.676 Membership of a missionary society was a further exercise of religious choice: not all members of a denomination were enthusiastic about missions, and some missionary societies, such as the London Missionary Society, were ecumenical. Organizationally, the nineteenth- century Protestant missions resembled another modern institution: the joint-stock company, with its large body of financial (and spiritual) subscribers contributing to the cause of preaching a particular version of the Christian doctrine to the unconverted, whether non- Christian or nominally Christian, while complex and centralized bureaucracies collected and deployed information and funds and employed ‘missionaries’, lay as well as clerical, to do the ‘on-site work’.677 This picture of clear- cut organizational autonomy and the implicit narrative of religious democratization become blurred when one recalls that the missionaries of the SPG and CMS submitted to the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury,678 himself the head of a church very inadequately distinguished from the British state. It is the tensions generated by this legal relationship to which we now turn.

Chaplain, missionary, bishop and convert: Christian hierarchy in colonial India The East India Company’s Charters imposed on it a duty to provide chaplains for the ministry of British subjects abroad.679 Just like the Mayor’s Courts which would be instituted a century later (see Chapter 3), the chaplains sustained an aspect of British government, albeit one simplified according to the contingencies of the overseas situation. Naturally, therefore, attendance at prayers at the factories was officially compulsory,680 just as obeying British laws was. Chaplains could be shared with other Protestant companies, such as the Dutch,681 but the conversion of an Indian produced legal complications that could only be resolved at the discretion of the Crown and the Archbishop of Canterbury.682 While in theory there was a neat distinction between the state-funded chaplains ministering to (and spiritually governing) British subjects overseas




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and missionaries, who were (according to our analogy) members of a specialized religious club, preaching their religion to people who were neither British subjects nor Christians, the divide was as ambiguous as that between English law and ‘native law’. The East India Company traditionally used its status as a chartered private corporation to restrict and regulate the entry of missionaries into its Indian territories, but the early nineteenth century saw the entry of Trojan horses in the shape of a new generation of Evangelical chaplains. These men, often coming from centres of Evangelical revival in Britain, were convinced of their Christian duty to make the gospel known to the benighted and tested the terms of their employment by collecting information about the un- Christian misdemeanours of the Company (Claudius Buchanan), sent out feelers to retrograde Christians (Buchanan again) and worked on preparing vernacular translations of the Bible that others could later actively distribute among the ‘natives’ (Henry Martyn).683 On the other hand, while the Company could and did restrict the activities of full-time missionaries in India,684 by the early nineteenth century it began to recognize the linguistic and pedagogic skills developed by missionaries keen to communicate with Indians. Several such individuals were elevated to official employment, such as the Serampore Baptist missionaries in the early nineteenth century685 and educational missionaries more generally after 1854.686 In addition, because the CMS and the SPG were Anglican missions, that is, since they recognized the authority of the Church of England, this led them into protracted debates over the implications of episcopal authority in an established church, but in a non-settler and largely non- Christian colony. The bishops were meant to be the spiritual leaders of all Anglicans, but, as paid officials of the Ecclesiastical department of government, they were primarily employed to supervise the chaplains who served the British Anglicans in India. As a result, the first Anglican bishop of Calcutta, Thomas Fanshawe Middleton, claimed jurisdiction over all ordained CMS missionaries. He demanded that they work with his licence alone and refused to permit them to work in and around the presidency towns or anywhere near European congregations.687 He created a further problem by claiming the exclusive right to perform any ordinations into Anglican ministry in India and refusing to ordain the candidates the Corresponding Committee presented, including two Indian Christians.688 The Corresponding Committees of the CMS were local associations of expatriate laypersons (who were often government officials, acting in ‘private’ capacity) and clergymen. Such committees received donations of money from local expatriate supporters and frequently created autonomous funds and trusts for specific activities, albeit under the overall direction of the CMS Home Board. The earliest CMS committee was created in Calcutta in 1814; it and other such committees received funds and directives from the Parent Committee in London, owned any locally acquired mission


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property, directed mission work in north India and employed and controlled all Indian assistants. This arrangement led to serious ambiguities in the status of Indian clergymen. In the mission field, the partly lay mission committees formed the immediate authority over Indian priests, even though ceremonial ordination was offered by the bishop. This had little theological justification but reflected the makeshift relationships that had developed between British/ European missionaries and their Indian assistants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, mission-minded chaplains and all missionaries employed local assistants at their discretion, to teach them the necessary languages, to work in the schools and dispensaries and to accompany them on preaching tours. Most of these helpers were not Christian, but assistance in the religious portion of the work was sought from Christians alone. Indian Christian assistants were designated as readers or catechists689 and were meant to precede the missionary, often a lone European in a huge region, making preliminary contact with their countrymen and following up after the missionary left. As small congregations of Indians arose, the more educated and respectable of such assistants were soon found essential for the pastoral care of the flock. Their language skills suited them for sustained everyday ministry, while their inexpensiveness released the scarce and more expensive missionary for breaking new frontiers. To be able to administer the sacraments, the Indian assistants had to be ordained. Ordination did not however make Indians the equal of European priests: they had different employers and racially different congregations to minister to. A case in point is the ashraf convert Abdul Masih, who was baptized in 1812 and worked as a catechist for several years in Agra, employed by the Calcutta Corresponding Committee.690 When Bishop Middleton refused to ordain him, the CMS took a ‘progressive’ decision to defy the Bishop and ordain Masih in a non- episcopal ceremony together with the German Lutherans. With the advent of a more tractable bishop in the person of Reginald Heber, such defiance became less necessary; Heber regularized episcopal discipline and Masih’s position by reordaining him in 1825.691 This left the distinction between Indian and European Anglican priests untouched; Masih continued to be an employee of the Calcutta CMS Corresponding Committee, as before, and to minister to Indians only. The reason for this division was as follows: although the Anglican Church was ‘established’ in India, that is, it received funds from the Government of India, Indian Anglican priests did not receive their salaries from the Government. When the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment was created by statute in 1813, it was intended to extend the right to religious ministration to British expatriate subjects.692 Government salaries were thus available to




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chaplains ministering to British civil and military congregations, and the bishops, but not to Indian priests ministering to Indian congregations.693 Missions to ‘natives’ were not to be paid for by the Government, on the principle that the religions of the ‘natives’ were not to be interfered with. Crucially, the principle of not patronizing missions was extended to ‘mission churches’ or Indian congregations gathered by the missionaries as well. This made the Indian priests dependent on the mission’s funds for their salaries. There was common-sense racism at work here: it may have been asked why Indian priests could only serve Indian Christians, especially if they were able to speak English, but nobody really did, at least not until the early twentieth century. What Indian priests did dispute was the racial division of spheres between the church and the mission, and their own subordination to the mission. In the early nineteenth century, an eminent Bengali Christian called Krishna Mohan Banerjea saw in such subordination a travesty of the principles of church government. In order to understand the relevance of Banerjea’s High Church plea for the transcendence of episcopal authority, it is important to turn to the experience of racism against which he was protesting.

Indian Christians and their missionary employers: conflicts of perception Krishna Mohan Banerjea was practically the first upper- caste Bengali convert to Protestant Christianity694 and among the most important Indian Christians of the nineteenth century. His prominence arose out of his prolific journalism, studies in Sanskrit literature leading on to a membership of the Asiatic Society, involvement with the Calcutta University as a Fellow and positions of leadership in the nationalist Indian Association. His literary work was also vital in producing early Christian Scriptural translations and exegesis in Bengali, and, as professor of Bishop’s College, he trained several Indian priests in theology.695 Even a person who gained such prominence within the Christian sphere and in general Indian society was forced to contend with the discriminatory structure of missions and churches that automatically assigned Indians to subordinate positions. For a person such as Banerjea, such permanent subordination was unacceptable, given that he was of the Indian social group that undertook religious experiments in a quest for purer religiosity and better inspiration for social codes. Such persons saw their conversion in terms of their personal intellectual and spiritual journey, their baptism marking their attainment of an elevated spiritual state.696 This conflicted with the missionaries’ perception of themselves as religious teachers, the tutelage only beginning with baptism rather than being completed by it. An incident of conflict, right at the beginning of


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his career in mission employment, revealed to Krishna Mohan these differences in perception. After his conversion in 1832 Krishna Mohan was offered a job as a schoolteacher by the Calcutta Corresponding Committee of the CMS which he accepted, no doubt with some relief. Within a few years, he found himself in irreconcilable conflict with his employers. In 1836, after two bouts of fever, he applied to the Calcutta Corresponding Committee for a month’s leave and, rather more presumptuously, for help with renting a large boat for a ‘change of air’, assuring them that he felt morally compelled to make all efforts to recover his health.697 In response, the Committee asked him to go to Barddhaman and take charge of their schools there, as something of a working holiday. Banerjea replied that he could not do this, given his state of health, his wife’s advanced pregnancy and because he was studying with the Archdeacon in preparation for his ordination, which was soon to take place.698 The Committee offered him the alternative posting of Nadia and asserted that he had to serve an adequate period of probation before he could be ordained a minister in connection with the CMS. Things started to get bitter, and Banerjea accused the Committee of forcing him to disobey his ecclesiastical superiors (Bishop Daniel Wilson and the Archdeacon T. Dealtry) who required him to be in Calcutta to train for ministry. He also reminded them that he had served sufficient probation as an evangelistic schoolteacher as well as assistant to the CMS missionary Revd Timothy Sandys and that the CMS had announced his upcoming ordination in their Annual Report of 1834. Finally he declared that in spite of his willingness to make sacrifices for Christ, the proposed salary of 100 rupees a month was inadequate.699 The Committee noted excerpts from Banerjea’s letters to convince themselves that he had been treated a bit too indulgently from the start, owing to his being the first Bengali upper- caste convert, and regretted the moral harm he had thereby sustained. As for the question of obedience to ecclesiastical authority over a semi-lay committee, they felt that the problem could have been easily avoided by postponing the ordination, since no definite date had been promised. In spite of an embarrassing difference of opinion with Archdeacon Dealtry, who supported Banerjea, the Committee decided that it could not in good conscience permit the ordination of a native Christian who would not prove his obedience by serving his period of probation. Krishna Mohan Banerjea was dismissed by the Calcutta Committee, his connection with the CMS dissolved.700 Banerjea’s appeal to episcopal authority was rather naive, given that the Bishop could not directly employ him and that he needed a missionary society to place him in charge of a native congregation. In this case, the patronage of the Bishop and Archdeacon did help; he was ordained in 1837 as he had wished, and his literary talents led to his being found a temporary job in the Bishop’s College seminary, and then as pastor to a native




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Figure 10

Krishna Mohan Banerjea

church under the SPG.701 None of this addressed the pervasive assumption that Europeans and ‘natives’ were different and ought to be treated as such. A few years later, Krishna Mohan disappointed his patron Bishop Wilson by refusing the post of canon in the new cathedral at Calcutta because he was offered a lower salary than European canons.702 While Bishop Wilson urged that the Indian church could not afford an expensive clergy; Krishnamohan responded that the Anglo-Indians and poor Europeans could similarly not afford their European chaplains and were nevertheless supplied with them.703 Finally, Krishna Mohan found suitable employment as third and later second professor in the Bishop’s College, posts with no comparable equivalents and hence no obvious discrimination in terms of salary. He worked at the Bishop’s College from 1852 to 1867.704 Krishna Mohan’s experience was not an isolated one. Another prominent Bengali convert, Madhusudan Dutt, christened Michael after his conversion in 1843, studied at the Bishop’s College at his (Hindu) father’s expense. When in 1846 the long-suffering parent threatened to stop paying the fees and to disinherit him, Madhu began investigating the possibility of a scholarship. He was told by a professor at Bishop’s College, Revd Alfred Street,


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that if he worked for the SPG he would be given board and lodging and a job after becoming qualified, at par with other ‘native’ students of the college. This was unacceptable to Madhu, and Street complained that this was because Madhu deceived himself that he was as good as a European, having learnt European ways at Hindu college. Street concluded that Madhu lacked the vocation of a missionary and was more interested in worldly returns, as also shown by his refusal of a job offered him by the Bishop of Madras, no doubt again at a ‘native’s salary’.705 Madhu proceeded to a chequered career marked with literary success, personal unorthodoxy and financial turmoil and finally died in abject poverty and in practical excommunication from the Church. When he died on 29 June 1873, his body lay rotting in the summer heat while Krishna Mohan appealed in vain to Bishop Robert Milman to permit his burial, and the missionary periodical Friend of India discussed his many moral failings. In the end, an elderly English chaplain demonstrated humanitarian spirit by burying him without awaiting the Bishop’s permission.706 Such experiences were not limited to Anglicans. Other missionary societies did little better in their treatment of Indian employees. Lal Behari Day, one of Alexander Duff’s students, ordained in the Scottish church in 1855, was refused a position in the Scottish Free Church’s Mission Council, the equivalent of the CMS Corresponding Committee. European missionaries held such membership automatically, but Revd Alexander Duff himself found Day’s demand unacceptable.707 Day’s twentiethcentury biographer wondered whether the mission council had not violated ‘Presbyterian principles’, but Day’s old teacher from Duff’s school, Dr Thomas Smith, argued that the mission council was not a church organization. As a lay organization controlling funds donated from Britain, it could co- opt missionaries as ex- officio members, but not the ‘native brethren’. This simply meant that British donors would feel nervous about placing their money in native hands.708 On similar principles, the various CMS Corresponding Committees, decided the Indian church workers’ salaries did not include any Indians in the first half of the nineteenth century.709 The American Presbyterian Mission appeared to follow a similar policy of all-white mission councils, angering Golak Nath Chatterjee, one of its earliest high-status Indian converts. As discussed, Chatterjee had in his youth travelled across the country, personally seeking out the American missionary at Ludhiana for baptism in 1836. He preceded the American missionaries in preaching Christianity in the Punjab. Understandably, the imputation that an Indian convert was shallow in faith and lacked the capacity to bear equal responsibility with European or American Christians distressed him greatly throughout his life.710 So the Government would not pay for any Indian priests, Anglican or otherwise, and the mission committees that did so maintained their Euro-




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American exclusiveness and dictated the terms of their employment. A large proportion of the early upper- class Indian Christians attempted to escape this galling situation by seeking employment unrelated to the Church or by setting up independent churches. A medical doctor called Parani Andy, along with other Indian Christians, set up the ‘National Church’ in Madras, which took no foreign aid and was entirely self-financing as well as selfgoverning.711 Kali Charan Banerjea, another Scottish Church mission convert, decided against mission employment given the conditions. Later, as a well-known lawyer and member of the Indian National Congress, he was also organizer of a Christo Samaj, which stank of heresy to missionaries.712 The first Parsi convert from Bombay, Dhanjibhai Naoroji, was involved in the formation of the Western India Native Christian Alliance which aimed at independence from missions and ending European denominationalism in India.713

Bureaucracy and hierarchy Independent churches did not have long lives because they lacked money and organization, often dying with their first charismatic leaders. Most Indian Christians had to seek opportunities for self- expression within the structures of the missions and churches as they evolved over time. In the late nineteenth century, the structure of missions in India tended to become more bureaucratic, with systematic training for Indian assistants, associated with structured pay scales and terms of employment. Bureaucratization did not immediately imply the end of discrimination but made its impact systematic. Among other things, differences between the salaries and status of Indian mission employees and missionaries remained huge, occasioning constant criticism from Indians. Such criticism found some formal space within the second kind of bureaucratic development in Indian mission churches, which consisted of Indian church councils. Krishna Mohan Banerjea found a salary of 100 rupees inadequate in 1836, and the CMS committee complained that they had been treating him better than any of their other employees, better even, than most government servants. The Committee was right on this occasion; in 1866 the Agra and Muttra (Mathura) District Conference of CMS missionaries decided on the following scales of salaries for native assistants,714 and European missionaries, which are compared in Table 1.715 As indicated by these salary scales, published in 1866–7, promotion in mission employment now depended on undergoing systematic theological training, passing prescribed examinations and completing fixed periods of service in each rank. Some of these conditions could be bypassed in special cases, just as the possession of all such qualifications might not lead to promotion, but unusual decisions could not be taken by individual




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179

Reader

Catechist

Head Catechist

3rd grade

Rs. 5

2nd grade

Rs. 10 (after passing examination for reader) Rs. 15 (after 15 years of service)

Rs. 20

Rs. 30

Rs. 25 (After 10 years of service)

Rs. 1

Rs. 2

Rs. 40 (After 10 years as catechist, and only if possessing knowledge of English) Rs. 2

Rs. 6

Rs. 6

Rs. 6

Rs. 7 and 8 annas

Rs. 7 and 8 annas

Rs. 7 and 8 annas

1st grade

Allowance per child Allowance for horse Allowance for horse and cart Conveyance

CMS Missionary (married)

CMS Missionary (single)

Rs. 203

Rs. 138

Rs. 12

Rs. 17

Sources: 15th meeting of the Agra district mission conference, 10 and 11 September 1866, CI 1/04/1/14; North India salaries: memorandum for use of sub- committee, 1867, CI 1/L7, pp. 123–4, CMS Archives.

missionaries and had to be vetted by other missionary colleagues, followed by the Corresponding Committee.716 The Agra and Mathura missionary conferences acted as examining bodies for catechists and readers, using a course developed in Banaras.717 The system was later extended to include deacons and priests as well, with five years experience as a catechist being essential for a candidate to priesthood, and in addition a BA for town pastors.718 This bureaucratic system did not however override the importance of patronage; candidacies for ordination had to be presented to the bishop along with letters of recommendation from the ‘clergyman’ of the district.719 Some missionaries would dispense with examination altogether, such as Robert Clark of the CMS who complained in 1868 that imposing strict criteria would exclude from priesthood the ‘brightest ornaments of the church’,


Table 1 Relative salaries of European missionaries and Indian mission employees of the CMS, c. 1866–7


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such as Safdar Ali, Imad-ud- din and Nehemiah Goreh, none of whom knew English.720 Clark’s ‘Punjab-school’ appeal for personal discretion721 questioned bureaucratic criteria and procedure for the selection for native priests; it said nothing about the relative position of the missionary and the Indian clergyman. From the 1870s, however, the effort to attract rare educated Indian Christian talent led to a reconsideration of the tiny salaries that Indian mission-workers were generally paid. In response to a query from London, the Secretary of the Madras Corresponding Committee responded in 1870 that highly educated Indian Christian men may be employed at suitable salaries, even if lower than in government jobs. They proposed that such unusual men may be appointed as ‘assistant missionaries’ under the supervision of a European missionary until they were considered capable of independent charge. The native church, on the other hand, was deemed to have neither the need nor the resources to require highly educated clergymen.722 A further division was afoot.

Consulting native opinion The ‘native church’, on the other hand, began to be systematically consulted by missionaries regarding its own management, from around the same time, i.e. the 1870s. The earliest conferences of native Christians had no formal status and were held under close supervision of the European missionaries.723 These later developed into ‘native church councils’, a strange racially demarcated derivative of the parish council, which served as a means of conceding some local authority to caste and village leaders, who had, in many cases, actively sought baptism from the European missionaries.724 Such local leaders often resented the authority of the Indian pastor or catechist, clearly an outsider dependent on the mission for his position. After a violent dispute between the Indian leaders of the CMS congregation at Krishnagar,725 and the area’s CMS missionary, J. Vaughan, it was proposed that a method of incorporating such men in the local church government be devised.726 That local self-government could act as a safety valve for power struggles became common wisdom for missions, just as in government circles in the same period. In 1876, the CMS published Regulations for native Church councils for North India, which conceived of native church committees associated with every native church, consisting of the native pastor and at least three members of the congregations but with a chairman appointed by the Calcutta Corresponding Committee. All these church committees were to feed into provincial native church councils, whose chairmen would be appointed by the Parent Committee in London and treasurers by the Calcutta Corresponding Committee. The rest of the members were to be Indian: all the native clergy working in connection with the Council, and at least two


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lay delegates elected by each native church committee, with the restriction that not more than half the lay delegates were to be salaried employees of the council. The duties and powers of the council were extensive but also race-specific: it would employ and transfer all native clergymen and lay workers and pay their salaries from its funds, which would include a grant from the parent committee. All these powers were hedged around by several caveats: the chairman could veto any of the council’s proceedings, and appeal would lie only with the Calcutta Corresponding Committee, whose decision would be final. Also, the council would have to get the approval of the CMS Conference (i.e. the missionaries of the province) and the Calcutta Corresponding Committee before making any appointments of clergymen.727 To put these regulations into effect, the Punjab CMS missionaries empowered Robert Clark, who had been appointed Chairman of the yet-tobe-formed Punjab Native Church Council (henceforth PNCC) by authorities in London, to take the necessary steps. He wrote to missionaries in every CMS station in the Punjab to have two lay delegates elected by every Native Church Committee, to meet at a conference during Easter 1877. He decided that all native clergymen should be ex- officio members of the Council.728 The meeting was a lively one, including the most eminent of north Indian Christians at the time: the Delhi Khatri converts Ram Chandra and Chandu Lall and Revd Imad-ud- din. Invited by the Chairman to voice their opinion and to take a leading role in the government of their church, Professor Ram Chandra defined the native church as ‘a congregation of Native Christians, who elect their own pastor at their own expense, and carry on the affairs of their Church by means of a Council composed of members from among themselves’.729 Abdullah Athim, a government servant from Amritsar, suggested that all church officials, including the bishop, should be elected by the members of the church.730 Clark, on the other hand, was sceptical about the capacity of Indians to independently succeed in any venture and felt that the ‘native brethren’ and English missionaries of the Punjab should proceed ‘hand in hand’ in everything.731 It is not hard to guess how the meeting, in spite of its generally subversive tone, officially resolved that the local missionary should be ex- officio chairman of each church committee and that the PNCC would be subordinate to the Punjab Conference of European Missionaries. It also resolved that the Chairmen of the PNCC should be appointed by the Parent Committee (i.e. London) from two or three missionary candidates chosen by the Council.732 The Parent Committee, in its response, ignored the last resolution, retaining its own authority to appoint Chairmen to Indian church councils but refusing to formalize these as fiefdoms of the local missionaries. It admonished Revd Clark for attempting to create new rules of his own and




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chided him for wanting to retain the personal authority of the European missionaries over the native church councils.733 Distant bureaucratic authority rather than personalized dominance was obviously the order of the day. It appears that Punjab missionaries continued to find it difficult to stay out of the way of native church committees and council, and London sent a further admonishment in 1899, forwarding a memorandum from a missionary who had worked in western India. The memorandum described how overlapping jurisdictions of the Western India Church Council and the missionary province had caused a great deal of friction, and how peace had been achieved by separating the jurisdictions, the Church Council being in charge of the areas where there were sufficient Indians to justify pastoral organization.734 To recapitulate briefly then, while developments in India did reflect the increased tendency for lay authority and activism within the Church of England, the clergy–laity division proliferated into several other spheres because of the necessity of maintaining racial distinctions in the mission field. The initial distinction was between government- maintained churches for British subjects, and missions to Indians. Over time, distinctions also arose within the domain of ‘missions’, as Indian Christians attempted to acquire control over what they saw as their own churches, while missionary authorities struggled to frustrate or restrict that effort, leading further racebased partition between ‘mission’ and ‘native church’ structures.

Separate zones of work: mission and ‘native’ church The Bombay memorandum clearly recommended two separate zones of work: that of evangelizing the heathen, for European missionaries, and that of ministering to the Indian Christians, reserved for Indian clergymen. Even the sphere of the ‘native church’, that is, the Indian church councils and Indian clergymen, struggled in vain for independence, as the authority of the parent committee of London became devolved, through ‘decentralization’ strategies, to the (still-white) corresponding committees, which continued to act as the employers of all Indian mission workers, clerical and lay, as they had done in the early nineteenth century.735 At the turn of the century, the situation in the Indian church replicated that of white settler colonies in the British Empire: increased local (European) control implied continued, even greater apartheid. The separation of zones between mission and pastoral care was not one of principle, since the CMS also constantly insisted upon the duty of the Indian Christians to evangelize their countrymen: the native church councils were not exempt from missionary work. The separation was real as far as salary scales were concerned: Indians could not expect


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the salaries of European missionaries for similar work. The argument was that Indian churches should also support their own missionaries, paid for at a level that the church could afford. In the early twentieth century, owing to shortage of European personnel, a few highly educated Indian Christians were employed as missionaries, with a European missionary’s salary, such as J. S. C. Banerjee in 1913. The parent committee, while endorsing his unusually high salary, recommended that Indian Christian University graduates should be employed by the native church council rather than by the missionary society, with the corollary that the council should pay most of their salaries,736 at a level that native church councils could afford. This limited experiment of appointing Indians as missionaries, undertaken in the first two decades of the twentieth century, continued to cause friction, because differences in the salaries of Indians and Europeans persisted.737 It was ended on the recommendations of the CMS delegation to India in 1921–22, which decided to stop employing any more Indians as missionaries under the CMS. This measure was represented as giving independence to the Indian churches, allowing diocesan councils to be responsible for them.738

‘Diocesanization’: subordination of missions to churches or continued separation? From the 1920s, the CMS insisted on efforts towards diocesanization, thereby implying, first, control of Indian churches by Indian church councils and, second, subordination of the missions to the church authorities of the diocese. Although this sounds revolutionary, real change was slow, since the ‘diocesan authorities’ in the colonial church were European bishops.The CMS ‘Mission Boards’, which replaced the Corresponding Committees, liaised between the home authorities in London and the bishop of the diocese in its proceedings, including about the use of funds sent by the parent society. In theory, this might have meant subordination of the missions to the Church, but since there was just one Indian bishop, it did not mean greater power for Indians.739 Europeans and Indians continued to worship in separate churches, with European congregations being ministered to by government chaplains. Europeans and Indians also had separate diocesan councils, at least wherever there were a sufficient number of resident Europeans. Indian church councils even lacked autonomous power over the Indian churches, and large zones of work were designated as ‘missions’ from which Indian authority (not service) was excluded. That first Indian Anglican bishop, V. S. Azariah, appointed in 1913, complained against the missions maintaining such separate zones of work for themselves, independent of the church. He denounced the dominance of




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mission work by mission councils appointed by home boards rather than Indian church councils, even when the latter were adequately organized. According to him, the best efforts by missions so far only consisted of including some Indians in the all-powerful mission councils or in making grants to the few self-governing Indian departments, for example the Department of rural education.740 In contrast, the church historian Stephen Neill, who came to India as a CMS missionary and remained to become a bishop, pronounced Indians unsuited for democratic church councils with alien procedures such as voting.741 In fact, the CMS delegation in 1934–5 warned against excessive Indianization of mission work, warning that this might lead to abandonment of responsibility by missionaries and mission societies. It was pointed out that the Indians replacing such missionaries would not have the thoughts and prayers of the home boards, a euphemism for financial support.742 Almost until independence therefore, there continued to be three organizations relating to the Anglican church in India: European missions, government-financed European churches (with all-European congregations, priests and councils),743 and Indian churches, with Indians beginning to gain some autonomy only in the last sector, and only in the 1940s.

The Indian bishop in the church universal If apartheid could not be overcome, how far could Indians become independent, at least in the management of their own churches? Could Indians really have a say in the election of their bishops, as Abdullah Athim had proposed, and, in fact, could Indians become bishops themselves? Although the CMS insisted that this indeed was their aim, any attempt to achieve this immediately threatened peace based on the neat racial division in the colonial Anglican church, where European clergymen of the Government’s ecclesiastical department, headed by the British Anglican bishops, ministered to the European expatriates, and the mission societies, missionaries and Indian clergy managed their Indian flock. In 1864, a CMS missionary, John Thomas, closely involved with the Nadar congregations in Madras Presidency, proposed that an Indian bishop be appointed, without the possibility of his proceeding to full episcopal office. He suggested that 15 financially self-supporting Indian congregations could be transferred to the Indian bishop’s care.744 Robert Caldwell, SPG missionary,745 opposed the proposal, arguing that the Indian congregations wished to retain the protection afforded by an European missionary and that the Indian bishop would find his authority undermined if appeals continued to be made to European missionaries who were, after all, only presbyters. Besides, he felt that in spite of self-supporting congregations, the expenses of a bishopric could not be borne by Indians. His opinion


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was that the time was about as ripe for an Indian bishop as an Indian governor.746 As a result, the Metropolitan, Bishop Frederick Gell, wrote to the CMS that Madras was not ready for an Indian bishop. The Colonial Clergy Act of 1874 permitted the bishops of the Church of England in India to consecrate new bishops locally, but this independence granted to the colonial ecclesiastical establishment did not help, given the entrenchment of racial prejudice in the colonial church. Other attempts made by the CMS Parent Committee to consecrate Indian bishops in the nineteenth century also met with intractable opposition, from the local Corresponding Committee and the missionaries.747 In 1913, V. S. Azariah, the first Indian bishop, was consecrated after protracted negotiations between his patron, the Bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead, and the Government. Whitehead convinced the Metropolitan that to offer Azariah the episcopal position with different conditions from other British bishops was inevitable and convinced the Government that they would not have to pay for his salary or countenance his authority over European chaplains.748 Azariah’s case permitted a separation of spheres compromise, his pay coming from a special endowment fund and his episcopate over the mass-movement area of Dornakal largely precluded the problem of presence of Europeans, lay or clerical.749 Even then, this precipitated the need to legally separate the Anglican church in India from the Church of England and the Government of India. In 1927, the Indian Church Act was introduced in the House of Lords as a Conservative Government Bill, with the full support of the bishops in India and the National Church Assembly in Britain.750 It was passed without much opposition: the Government presented it as a measure to afford selfgovernment to the Indian Anglicans in their church. There was some ultraconservative concern about the rights of the British soldiers and civilians in India against being exposed to outlandish Indian liturgical experiments, which was assuaged by the provision of ‘maintained churches’, paid for by the Government, in which the British liturgy and Prayer Book would be upheld. Obviously, these were to be the churches for the British Anglicans in India. There was some opposition from individual Labour party members against taxing Indians, most of whom were not Christians, to maintain churches, into which unwilling British soldiers were herded. This extreme disestablishment view did not prove politically sustainable. Neither did the ultraconservative opinions of Sir Charles Oman, Conservative member for Oxford, who questioned letting Indian Christians, most of whom were, according to his information, uncivilized and of primitive races, to take charge of the Anglican Church.751 However, the Act did exactly as it said: it left the Indian church hierarchy to its own devices, permitting, but not prescribing, change in the appointments. No other Indian bishop was appointed until 1945.




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Conflicts and change within the Anglican Church in India, described above, were also reproduced in a multi- denominational organization of Protestant missionary societies, formed in the early twentieth century. The National Missionary (later Christian) Council, formed in 1914, was successor to the local informal camaraderie between Protestant missionaries of different denominations from the earliest days, which crystallized into inter-sectarian missionary conferences at provincial level from the 1850s. While denominationalism and competition were acute among British missions in the nineteenth century, the sheer enormity of the unknown in the ‘mission field’ forced a level of ecumenical cooperation unseen in home countries. These conferences included missionaries as well as lay supporters, usually Evangelically minded British civilians and military officers, and their wives. There were also a handful of Indian Christians present, but the ‘native brethren’ made Europeans uncomfortable whenever they spoke. At the Punjab Missionary Conference held at Lahore in 1862, for example, Indians spoke little, and only on subjects in which they were presumed to have insider information, such as Indian women and their education. On the subject of the Native Pastorate, its importance and the methods of training, one Indian from the American Presbyterian Mission, Revd Golaknath Chatterjee,752 spoke briefly at the end of a long session saying that native ministry was impracticable in the Punjab, where there were not enough educated Indian Christian men. Golaknath was not arguing for permanent European ministry but for English-speaking Indian ministers. He felt that education was English was essential for a capable ministry and felt personally challenged when missionaries at the conference suggested that English denationalized Indians or made them bad servants of the Church.753 This had a personal angle: Golaknath had sent his son to America for education and full immersion in a Christian culture. He had hoped to thereby remove from his son any disqualifications that adhered to him for being a first-generation convert. This naive effort at achieving equality with Europeans and Americans was not successful; his son, when applying for a missionary’s job in America, was sent back to India to contact missionaries in the field.754 Revd Golaknath later struck a harsher dissenting note in the panel on ‘Sympathy and Confidence: How Can Foreign Missionaries Secure, in the Highest Degree, the Sympathy and Affectionate Confidence of Their Native Brethren’. He spoke of the immense social distance between the European missionary and the Indian Christians, which belied any claims of brotherliness. His speech was followed immediately by denials and accusations of taking a biased and extreme view, generalizing from the faults of few. The European and American missionaries generally asserted that much of the trouble arose from the frustrated greed of the converts and the inadequate


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appreciation of the sacrifice the missionaries had made for them. In response, other Indian members pointed to below-subsistence salaries, peremptory behaviour and their own sacrifices which were not taken into account. The European members, finding things too tough to take, suggested that the Indians were lacking in the spirit of love. The session ended in such bitterness that the Chairman had to make a declaration the next day saying that after the end of the last day’s session the native brethren had been called to a long meeting and had been convinced that they had been one-sided and unfair. When a report of the conference was published, Revd Goloknath’s essay had to be preceded in the compilation by a note disclaiming that it displayed any signs of subversive malcontent.755 The duality of independence and obedience continued to inform missionary discourse about their native brethren for several decades to come. In the Allahabad Missionary Conference in 1871–2, in a paper on the ‘Church in Bengal’, J. Vaughan of the CMS lampooned the mass- converted Krishnagar Christians as ‘horse-leeches’ who demanded worldly benefits from the mission societies as a matter of right and who persisted incessantly in their chorus of ‘Give! Give!’ Even congregations in Calcutta, formed of people proud of their independence, thought nothing of depending on foreign funds for their ministrations.756 On the other hand, he said, when admirable organizations such as the Bengal Christian Association were formed by Revd K. M. Banerjea and others, promising to liberate the missionaries from their position of domination, these were animated by suspicion and dislike of foreign missionaries, proved by the ‘hard knocks’ regularly delivered to missionaries in their meetings. On the question of the native church and its autonomy, missionaries in this conference lamented the inability of Indians to maintain their own churches with their own money. Indians, however, tended to interpret it more broadly: while admitting the need for self-financing churches, they asked for the possibility that Indians could become missionaries too, and on equal terms as the European and American ones. The decennial (Protestant) missionary conferences gradually led to the permanent organization of the NMC in 1914. Ostensibly, this was in response to a revival in European and American enthusiasm for evangelizing the world and the consciousness of the need for Christian unity to do this. In addition to the Ecumenical Council in New York, 1900, and the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, 1910, there were ecumenical efforts developing locally in India in response to the needs of the mass movements to Christianity.757 After an interim period of two years, the NMC took shape with provincial councils and with elected representatives forming the national council. For all this democratic structure, the NMC was still an organization of European and American missionaries, and not their Indian flock. It had 42 members in 1916–17, of whom seven were Indians. Of these, 32 were elected by the provincial missionary councils (not the




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church councils) and the rest co- opted. Indian membership in the eight provincial councils was abysmal: the United Provinces Council, for example, failed to secure even the target of four Indian members out of 38.758 The president and secretaries of all these provincial councils were Europeans or Americans, as was the national council’s executive (barring one Indian). Of the 13 standing committees of the national council, each dealing with a specific issue, only one, that of the Indian church, had an Indian convenor, Bishop Azariah himself. Even so, some Indian members consistently argued for a change in the situation, such as K. T. Paul, who in 1916 read a paper urging the importance and plausibility of transferring all responsibility for mission work to the Indian churches. A resolution was accordingly passed,759 obviously without much immediate effect. In his writings, Paul assertively questioned the assumption that Indian Christians ought to be permanently grateful and self-abasing given the foreign source of mission funds. In fact, missionaries, to remain welcome in India and not to embarrass the Indian Christians, had to be properly trained in humility, he suggested.760 In 1927, the organization was renamed the National Christian Council (NCC), and in 1929 Bishop Azariah was named its first Indian president. This year, an enlarged conference specifically focused on the theme of the ‘Relations between the older and younger churches’ – a euphemism for the old mission- church problem in India. The findings of the international Jerusalem Conference of 1928 were referred to, in which the Western missionaries had been warned against expecting to start in leadership positions immediately in the mission fields, and recommended their placing themselves in service of the younger churches.761 It still remained for external events to force the much- discussed institutional reforms, even in the NCC. The additional membership secured for the 1929 conference was ephemeral: only in 1944 did Indians manage to secure 50 per cent membership in the body and gain the positions of responsibility. In disgust, E. C. Bhatty, a senior Indian secretary of the NCC declared in 1942, ‘The Indian people are under one imperialistic control, the Indian Christians are under two, namely British imperialism and missionary imperialism.’ He compared the mission secretary to the Secretary of State and the board of foreign missions to the India Council, with the distinction that the mission boards did not even bother to appoint a few Indian advisers, unlike the Government. Discrimination in missionary service, he said, was as bad as in British government service.762 It was only in independent India that the NCC managed to become a body representing Indian Christians. In 1956, a new constitution defined it as an official mouthpiece of Christian public opinion in India, especially in relation to the Government. The assumption of this representative role justified its restriction of direct membership to organized church bodies only, allowing missions to be members only in association with the former.763


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This chapter has discussed at some length the issue of conflict of authority within the Indian Christian community that had been indicated in the earlier chapters. In the chapter on the St Stephen’s College, for instance, it was mentioned that the appointment of the first Indian principal, Sushil Rudra, occasioned a great deal of debate in the Cambridge mission regarding the capacity of Indians to hold positions of authority and responsibility, especially where the communication of religion was concerned. And yet it was Rudra’s appointment that transformed the college into the desirable public school that was sought across the religious spectrum. The problems surrounding Rudra’s appointment were only the tip of the iceberg; Indian Christians were in ubiquitous conflict with missionaries and lay Europeans or Americans for the control of their religious institutions. In this conflict, missionaries reproduced the arguments regarding Indian incapacity for responsible authority that elsewhere justified exclusion of Indians from secular governmental power. Indian Christians, on the other hand, found it unjustified that their faith and their capacity should remain indefinitely under question. In particular, this exclusion from decision-making power rankled in an age when all other religious communities were tending towards more popular control of religious institutions.764 Indian Christians gained complete control of their churches and other religious institutions only after the independence of India, when a series of external events telescoped changes that they had been demanding for a century and more. Ironically, such developments included the xenophobic strands present in Indian nationalism, even its liberal version. As the British Government left, along with most of the European British soldiers, there was no longer any institutional or political justification for a racially separate episcopate. The days of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment were over, and, from the point of view of the new Indian government, Christians formed another religious community free to organize its own affairs. In addition, legal restrictions on the admission of foreign Christian missionaries reversed the position of the latter with relation to their former subordinates, the Indian Christians. Now foreign missionaries were dependent on the goodwill and support of Indian Christian organizations for their work in India, and the pressure of new laws and politics led to the transfer of positions of authority and titles to property to Indian Christians.765 These abrupt changes only represented the formal aspects of the transformation of Christianity that had been ongoing in India for more than a century. For, along with the question of authority, Indian Christians had been debating the appropriate content of religious doctrine, its cultural expression and concomitant social ethics. In their diverse views, they reflected the


Conclusion


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range of ideologies of religious and social transformation that was animating different sections of Indians of their day. Chapter 7 will discuss how different Indian Christian leaders connected their ideas with those of other Indians and how this made Christianity part of the religious landscape of modern India.


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7

When I began the research that led to this book, I spent some time visiting the office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Baba Kharak Singh Marg, New Delhi. After receiving me and my inept queries with a great deal of grace and kindness, Fr. X, whose name is not important in this context, probed gently about the extent of my theological knowledge. For a start, he suggested that I explain to him the difference between Christian and Hindu ideas about incarnation. Since I failed to provide a satisfactory response, he wondered aloud how I could be trusted to understand the inspiration behind the public and political stands taken by Christians in India. This question has remained with me throughout my research, not necessarily leading me to seek doctrinal roots for all individual and collective Christian utterances and behaviour, but something quite the other way round. Theological controversies provided occasion for many of the conflicts over authority described in the previous chapter; this chapter examines why this was so. It attempts to understand arcane doctrinal disputes in the way that concerned contemporaries would have, alert to the implicit statements that were made about human competence and entitlement. Our awareness of the explicit disputes around these topics in the context of church organization in colonial India, discussed in the previous chapter, enables such a reading. Organization, which the previous chapter dealt with, and doctrine, the principal concern of this one, were never completely separate matters. When Christians in nineteenth- century India debated the proper constitution of religious authority, they were inevitably concerned with what Christianity consisted of, or ought to consist of. This chapter on Indian Christian theology deals in detail with those intellectual efforts and confrontations. Studying theology for its contribution to the contest-ridden formation of ‘identity’ has eminent historical pedigree,766 even if that particular coinage when referring to self- conscious human collectives is a more recent development. In particular, I am inspired by historians of Christianity in Africa, who have produced rich analyses of disputes over doctrine and ritual, situating


Rethinking Christianity: Formulating Their Faith

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them in the context of institutional contests which are very similar to the ones I have described in the previous chapter.767 In the Indian churches, these contests continue to take new forms even today, giving rise to new theological concerns and disputes, and will no doubt continue to do so in the years to come.768 The purpose of the present chapter is to historically situate the thought and writings of those people, who gave Indian Christianity its distinctive idiom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which has proved to be tenacious, even as its inadequacies continue to be pointed out. While these mostly male, and mostly uppercaste theologians presented visions of Heaven and Earth that were socially biased, lumping them as ‘Sanskritic’769 obscures from sight a dynamic and diverse intellectual trend, which deserves to be retrieved from its marginal position within Indian intellectual history. When studied in the broader context of Indian ideas, Indian Christian theology has been studied mainly as apologetics directed against other faiths, or as efforts at ‘acculturation’,770 but both these approaches posit a primary intellectual opposition between Christianity and other faiths, whereas, as this chapter will discuss, the ‘minor’ theological disputes that Indian Christian theologians had with each other, and with missionary authorities, were a much more frequent occurrence, whose significance emerges if we place them in the continuum of disputes over institutional and social authority that we have discussed in the previous chapter.771 What the apologetics and acculturation approaches do reveal is the driving dynamic of Indian Christian thought: the attempt to arrive at a theological, social and political relationship with the Indian environment, which was, and which remains, predominantly non- Christian, at least in terms of formal confession. This far, I have argued that the experience of racial and religious difference was the principal factor influencing the attitudes of the acknowledged leaders of Indian Christians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in this chapter I will also discuss the influence of their social location in terms of caste and gender. This chapter will focus on the theological and social visions that these men (for men they mostly were) articulated, noting how such visions were shaped by a specific social experience. When such men struggled to define who their god was, this was a code for who they were, or wanted to be.

Apologetics versus acculturation: being distinct but meaningful


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Apologetics and acculturation are not of course separate intellectual enterprises, even if they may be formally presented as such. To have any argument, the parties involved need to have a language in common, i.e. they need to be comprehensible to each other, but, at the same time, they also need to maintain the distinction of their respective positions. Comprehension does


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not simply involve facility in a common language, but, in case of specialized disputes, the sharing of the specialized language of expression, the ‘jargon’, if you will, is also essential. In the case of religious disputes, this would mean mutual comprehension of a set of core concepts, such as (say) god, sin, alienation, prophecy, atonement and redemption, and the acceptance of a specific grammar that constrains the manner in which these concepts can be connected. In Christian theology, for example, god may not sin. The problem that European and American missionaries faced in India was that their chosen audience did not necessarily recognize the core concepts in the manner intended, nor even their centrality, nor the grammar of their connection. All through the nineteenth century, European missionaries complained of their difficulties in communicating the central concept of ‘sin’ to a Hindu audience, for whom gods in the plural, as well as humans, not to mention animals, were liable to commit infractions of cosmic rules (dharma), which led to negative effects that had to be worked off through precisely measured suffering to be borne through multiple lives, as well as through effective good works. If doctrinal disjunction was not bad enough, ‘language’ in the everyday sense was also an issue. Relatively few Indians knew the European languages native to or familiar to the missionaries; hence, where mass evangelization was the aim, there was the matter of translation, and, as in all cases of translation, the effort to locate precisely or at least adequately matched equivalents occasioned both frustration as well as adverse cultural commentary by those who were eager to establish communication but who were often unable to do so.772 The debate over why miscommunication happens, particularly between representatives of the ‘modern West’ and the non-modern others, remains unconcluded.773 In recent times, far fewer scholars are willing to use a model of completely distinct cultural systems.774 The way out may be the one shown by Sanjay Subramaniam, in his exhilaratingly rich essay comparing other diplomatic missions to the Mughal court with that of Thomas Roe, in which he suggests that successful diplomatic conversation, just like other forms of verbal exchange, depends on the resources that each party brings to the task.775 This book is inspired by the kind of history that Subramaniam recommends by doing himself; I would rather revive the variety of efforts made by a particularly neglected group of cultural intermediaries, those highly educated and socially privileged Indian Christians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who attempted to interpret Christianity not just to their non- Christian countrymen but also to themselves and back to those who claimed to be their teachers. To this enterprise, they brought a variety of resources that derived from their particular intellectual and social backgrounds, and the oeuvre of these generations defined the trajectory of Indian Christian theology, for better or for worse. All such efforts were constrained by the highly organized nature of Christian religion, with its bureaucratic


Rethinking Christianity


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and institutional forms of ecclesiastical government and its acute racial hierarchy, which distinguished it from all other Indian religions, subjecting Christian thinkers to handicaps that their non- Christian interlocutors rarely appreciated. To make matters more difficult, nineteenth- century India abounded with religious entrepreneurs and cultural specialists, both Indian and non-Indian. Anybody speaking on specifics such as the exegesis of particular Scriptures or philosophical principles or on the generals, such as god, society, nation and race, had to compete in a dense market of public opinion. Indian Christian thinkers had to perform a particularly difficult balancing act in order to avoid accusations not only of syncretism or worse but also of deracination, inauthenticity and meaninglessness.

Cultural intermediaries The effort by Indian Christians to conceptualize and communicate their religion was very much an enterprise affected by authority and its negotiation, but not quite in the way that some leading postcolonial scholars have seen it – that is, as a ‘lifeless’ effort to transmit claims of authority over an ‘English’ book, by ‘English’ missionaries, over ‘natives’ of India. In the work referred to above, a Brahmin North Indian man called Anand Masih, who converted to Christianity in 1816776 and worked as catechist for the Church Missionary Society (CMS), is represented as discovering a group of Indian villagers under a tree near Delhi in the year 1817, in possession of a Hindustani777 translation of the Bible.778 Anand apparently hurried up and ‘accosted’ them, asking them how they came about to possess the book, and on discovering that they had been given a copy (probably by a Baptist missionary) at the Hardwar mela,779 proceeded to contest their assertion that it was a direct gift from God, informing them that God’s gift came to them mediated by Europeans (sahibs), to whom the book belonged. Masih urged the villagers to come to Meerut, where a European priest could baptize them, to which the villagers expressed polite interest, while vehemently rejecting the possibility of taking communion with ‘cow- eating’ Europeans. Although Masih attempted to restore the authority of his employers by arguing that ethics, rather than rules of commensality should be the source of purity (‘Not that which entereth into a man’s mouth defileth him, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man: for vile things come forth from the heart. Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts; and these are the things that defile’), the villagers said that they would take communion with flesh- eaters only when their countrymen did. Masih proclaimed, ‘The time is at hand, when all the countries will receive this WORD! They replied, “True!” ’780 Bhabha’s work has been embraced by a large number of scholars for revealing the creative and subversive potential of ‘hybridity’ that is said to characterize the colonial encounter. In many ways this chapter will build on that idea


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by demonstrating how authoritative ideas may be (mis)read by the audience to produce meanings subversive of authority. But my story allocates the roles differently and would therefore view this episode in quite a different way. To Bhabha, this effort at religious communication by an Indian Christian catechist to some (non-Christian) Indian villagers is an instance of the emblematic role played by the ‘English book – “signs taken for wonders” – as an insignia of colonial authority and a signifier of colonial desire and discipline’.781 There are minor factual problems that gird this reading of the episode, such as most Hindus are not vegetarian, and never have been, vegetarianism being an upper-caste practice, specific to most Brahmins, and some mercantile jatis. The point is that the discussion Anand Masih reportedly had with the unnamed villagers was inflected by the social background of the particular participants, which does not represent ‘native’ culture in its totality. Whether or not Bhabha intended it, it is hard not to come away from his rendition of the episode imagining that hybridity is a place between two cultures, other differences being relatively minor to that overarching binary, which also corresponds with the two-tier power hierarchy of colonial society. The problem with such a schemata is that it obliterates a great deal of history: the person Anand Masih, just like the Hindustani bible, appears merely to be a mask for English authority, taking religion entirely out of a conversation about Christianity and the life out of Masih the historical person. People such as Masih, who manned the lowest rungs of a religious hierarchy as ‘catechists’, were not quite as hollow a conduit for authoritative messages flowing out of a common religio-racial source of power as appears to be the case in Bhabha’s strangely isolated reading of a particular snippet from a particular missionary periodical, which appears to herald the arrival of the book in India’s wilderness. To begin with, it seems to me that the argument that the Bible in Hindustani was in essence an English text, representing English authority, is dubious. The episode discussed was certainly shot through with issues of authority, such that the North Indian villagers’ apparently free-wheeling interpretations of a religious text were structured by their own religious and caste backgrounds. This interpretation was questioned by a junior representative of a certain form of organized Christian religion, who attempted to redirect the villagers into what he saw as proper religious channels, through baptism and inclusion in the ecclesiastical structure. Was this necessarily an exercise in furthering English authority, even if it was a failed one? I think it is important to be cautious with such conclusions, since conflicts over the interpretation of the Bible are not limited to colonial history. Even in India, Catholic missionaries had preceded Protestants by two centuries in grappling with the problem of communicating doctrine in culturally intelligible terms without lapsing into syncretism, in the sense of an eclectic and unjustified juxtaposition of irreconcilable religious principles. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit




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Roberto De Nobili of the Madura mission ended up before the Goan Inquisition for his pains. Nobili’s infractions included the comportmental as much as the doctrinal, and, in an age when syncretism had none of the benign connotations it was rendered in the 20th, Nobili’s sanyasi’s (Hindu ascetic) garb, vegetarianism and ‘etymological’ translations of the Scripture into Tamil were all subject to censure. In 1613, the Jesuit Provincial Fr. Pero Francisco, located at Cochin, issued a series of orders, among which were the following injunctions: 3. Nor is the dress of Sannyasis which they have been using till now, modest or decent for religious. Therefore let them always wear a gown which reaches the ankle. As for the under- clothing let them wear some sort of pants or drawers or other kind of breeches, as religious decency requires. [ ... ] 8. The abstinence from meat and fish etc., must not be observed so strictly and rigorously that, even in case of necessity, sickness, disgust or natural weakness, they do not touch meat, for experience has shown that on such occasion it is absolutely necessary to yield to nature and help it by eating meat, and this must be done. [ ... ] 29. The name of God, Tambiran should not be given up, since all of India uses it. The last directive was particularly obtuse. Although it had been determined by Jesuits some time previously that Tambiran was the Tamil word for God, literally Lord of Lords, Nobili had discovered that non-Brahmin sanyasis also used it as a form of address for each other. (Just as prabhu or mahaprabhu may be used in north India.) To protect the Christian idea of the Divine from such indignities, Nobili had suggested sarveshwara, or Master of all things. This was typical of Nobili’s ‘etymological’ effort, that is to make literal translations of key doctrinal concepts as well names of saints, which the Provincial disapproved of, instructing: 30. The Angels, Apostles and Saints to be called by their proper names used by the Church, and not by their etymology and if the declension of the Tamil language does not allow it, let those words be made indeclinable rather than be modified. 31. In no case, Mass should be called Pujei, or Christian Pujei, but let the word Missa be retained, and if in its Tamil declension or termination it had a bad meaning, [Declined as misai, it meant moustache] let it be indeclinable or be called the mystery of the Mass or the Holy sacrifice of the Mass.


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32. I say the same of Sacraments, whose names Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist and the others, must be kept without any change. ... This is


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The question that ran through these disputes is whether and how far key doctrinal categories were translatable at all, given that words from a different language always carried a large cultural baggage, from which conflicting religious content was hard to purge. In 1619, the Pope ordered an investigation into Nobili’s methods, and it took all of Nobili’s articulate self- defence to extract a guarded approval of the ‘Malabar rites’ from Rome in 1623.782 In 1744, Pope Benedict XIV reversed this decision with the bull Omnium sollicitudinum, which required missionaries to take an oath that they would not tolerate the grafting of pagan practices on to Christiantiy.783 Nobili’s experience demonstrates both the necessity and dangers of culturally relocating doctrine, a problem that persisted even after the Inquisition lost its teeth. What is very often neglected in the telling of stories of heroic European intellectual adventure is the crucial but precarious role performed by those cultural intermediaries, the class of ‘native assistants’ to which Anand Masih belonged. These men often had different imperatives to the ones that motivated their missionary employers, and ecclesiastical authorities tended to be dimly aware but highly suspicious of those motives. The work of the sixteenth- century Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, was posthumously investigated by the Catholic Church, revealing that one of the most prominent Chinese converts, Michael Yang Tingyun (‘Dr Michael’) saw Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Christianity as equivalents expressing a universal principle and recommended the use of ‘ambiguous and equivocal terms’ which could reconcile everybody.784 Nobili had his own Trojan (Indian, really) horse, whose apparent faithlessness was discovered and derided in the nineteenth century. Nobili was long attributed the authorship of a text that purported to be the abstract of the Vedas, and which, when available in a printed French edition called the Ezourvedam in the next century, was seized by Voltaire as a godsend for his mission to satirize the pretensions of Christianity. The text appeared to contain the rudiments of the story of Genesis, which Voltaire used to argue the greater antiquity of Indian traditions over Christian. Voltaire was spared the later revelation that the Ezourvedam text had little in common with the texts known as the Vedas that became available to Europeans in print and in translation in the nineteenth century, due to the work of Sanskritists, pre- eminently the German scholar settled in England, Max Müller.785 But even in the eighteenth century, the French Orientalst Anquetil-Duperron expressed misgivings about the nature of argumentation in the above text, and by the 1790s, a war of expertise was afoot. In 1822, researches in ancient Hindu and Buddhist Scriptures by a British judge led to a denouement in Asiatic Researches.786


the teaching of the Roman Church which still retains many Greek and Hebrew words without ever changing them.


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This discovery was embarrassing for Jesuits, but for reasons that would have not worried the Inquisition of Nobili’s time. The allegation against Nobili was really academic misbehaviour: he was at best an easy dupe and at worst a forger. In a rather desperate attempt to vindicate Nobili, a Belgian Jesuit historian of the twentieth century suggested that the text was foisted on Nobili by his wily Brahmin assistant, Mariadas Pillai,787 which indeed might have been the case. Unlike the Chinese Dr Michael, we cannot be sure whether this was true, and, if so, what Pillai’s motivations were. But similar instances of ‘treachery’ by Indian research assistants, experienced by non-missionary British Orientalists of the eighteenth century, suggest that such men (who were often not Christian themselves) produced manuscripts that they believed would delight their employers, and in doing so continued the Brahmanical tradition of reinventing sacred knowledge in order to offer high pedigree to incumbent rulers.788 Suspicion of ‘native assistants’ therefore remained a constant with European scholars, missionary or otherwise, but between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, a novel sin was added to the possible infractions that such people could commit. While in the seventeenth century the principal fear of ecclesiastical authorities was the corruption of Christian doctrine, with the rise of academic disciplines of studying other cultures (Orientalism) in the late eighteenth century there arose the new suspicion that such assistants may also supply an inaccurate version of Indian culture to their missionary employers, wilfully or inadvertently, due to their specific social conditioning. It is in this context of hierarchy and suspicion but also of necessity that we need to understand the disputes between Indian and Euro-American Christians over ‘Indianizing’ Christianity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.

The authentic vernacular: language of command, or language of contest? But what exactly was Indian culture, and who decided which parts of it were innocuous enough to act as a cradle to Christian doctrine? Where exactly did doctrine end and culture, Indian or European, begin? Words and their use stand at the heart of this long-running discussion among Christian publicists in India. The identification of a linguistic norm of purity and taste was an exercise in discipline, but we shall see how such an effort was undertaken by a variety of people, each claiming special capacity for identifying normative languages that did not as such exist in practice. The effort to create a national literature has been identified as one of the modular aspects of nationalism789; but the history of standardization of a variety of languages (literary, administrative, legal, Scriptural, liturgical) spills far beyond the edges of anti- colonial nationalism. One rich source of this history are the debates over appropriate language for Christian Scriptures and Christian worship in nineteenth- century India.


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In a rich study of early Protestant Christianity in Tamil-speaking areas, Denis Hudson has traced some intense conflicts over Scriptural translations. As in other things, the Jesuits had of course pioneered the production of printed literature in the Indian vernaculars not only of religious content but also of dictionaries and grammars. One of Nobili’s successors in the Madurai mission, Constanzo Giuseppe Beschi, SJ (1680–1747) produced grammars of ‘low’ and ‘high’ Tamil,790 several multilingual dictionaries and Thembavani (The Unfading Garland), a life and teachings of Jesus Christ in verse which remains valued as a classic of Tamil literature even today. He was also the first European translator of the Sangam classic Thirukkural and also the author of satirical works such as Paramartagaru Kadey in which he described the pretensions and foibles of Hindu ascetics.791 In his lifetime Beschi saw the arrival of the earliest Protestant missionaries in the Tamil-speaking region of India. These were German Lutherans, employed by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), a British organization, as yet unable to recruit in Britain itself. In 1706, Bartholomaüs Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau were allowed by the Danish East India Company to settle in the small Danish station of Tranquebar (Tharangampadi) on the Coromandel Coast.792 Very soon after arrival, Ziegenbalg essayed translations of the Bible, prayerbooks, hymns and catechisms. To Beschi, their Tamil appeared faulty to the point of ridiculous, and he expressed his ridicule in his own Veda Vilakkam (The Explanation of Revelation), published in 1728. The SPCK procured better Tamil translations of the Bible through the efforts of two men, one a Sri Lankan Tamil called Philip De Melho and the other a German missionary, J. P. Fabricius. The two translators disliked each other’s work; De Melho found the other’s translation inadequately solemn, interspersed with foreign words and replete with words that consisted less of translation and more of interpretation. At Tranquebar, European missionaries recognized the excellence of De Melho’s work but expressed the very Protestant doubt that it may be unintelligible to the ‘common people’. On the other hand, at Jaffna, a gathering of Tamil Brahmins declared De Melho’s Tamil easily comprehensible to the common people, while also being ‘matchless, elegant, pathetic and heart cheering’.793 Even at this stage, these divergent evaluations of Scriptural language reflected the multiple racial and caste hierarchies within the Protestant churches of the Tamil region and Sri Lanka. Prescient of nineteenth- century British paternalism, but also reminiscent of Nobili’s detractors’ arguments, the European missionaries celebrated the value of humble ‘folk’ culture/language, not only for its accessibility but also, one suspects, for its relative doctrinal purity, whereas De Melho’s Brahmin audience wanted Scriptural and liturgical language to retain its ceremonial aesthetics. Familiarity, of course, breeds its own attachment, and Fabricius acquired his own Tamil supporter a generation later in the person of Vedanayagam




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Pillai (1774–1864), one of the most creative Christian poets of India. The son of a catechist in the Tirunelveli-Tanjore mission, Pillai was personally tutored by C. F. Schwartz, the missionary- diplomat, along with the minor prince of Tanjore, Serfoji II. Later, while teaching at a seminary at Tanjore, Pillai composed a huge volume of Christian poetry within the literary genres popular in the region. Among his works were the Jnanakummi and the Bethlehem Kuravanci, both of which were dance- dramas meant to be performed, the storyline involving the union of lovers in marriage after a great deal of hearty flirtation and authorial exposition of female physical beauty. Apparently these and other compositions where he used the wedding theme were intended to be allegorical representations of the marriage of Jesus and his bride, the Church.794 In 1824, the SPCK missions merged with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). This was a period of reform within Anglican mission theology, one which generally looked upon earlier accommodations with ‘heathen’ culture by Roman Catholics and the Pietists as misguided. As part of this reformism, a new generation of Protestant missionaries, including the SPG missionary L. P. Haubroe (arrived at Tanjore in 1819) and the German Lutheran working for the CMS, C. T. Rhenius (arrived at Madras 1814 and at Palayamkottai in Tirunelveli in 1820), essayed new translations of the Bible, aided by a printing press sent from Fort William College. Pillai found their efforts pretentious and distasteful. As he put it: ‘As the pottage of coarse grain is loathsome to him that has eat [sic.] wheatbread and the rice of Kangoomachamba (best rice), so the new corrections will not be agreeable to those who have used and relished the Rev. Father Fabricius [sic.] correction.’795 Contrasting the inevitable difference in the quality of work produced by Fabricius, who had perfected his Tamil over thirty-three years and that of the ‘junior missionaries’ who had not even studied it for ten years, Pillai indicted Rhenius’s new translation of the Bible not only for being ungrammatical but blasphemous, filled as it was with ‘gentoo (i.e. Hindu) words’. In a combination of professional jealousy and adroit manipulation of European prejudices, Pillai attributed these lapses to Rhenius’ reliance on ‘heathen’ munshis for assistance in his translation work.796 In a not-so-subtle indictment of the power structures in mission churches, Pillai alleged that there was nobody in the unhappy congregations to inform the ‘Honorable Societies’ about the injustices, since ‘ ... all those who serve under the Mission ... [were] afraid that they would lose their situation’.797 Pillai alleged that when the congregations rejected Rhenius’ ‘unnatural translations’, he and his fellow missionaries began to commit their ‘Four cruelties’, in an effort to cover up their own unjust acts. These cruelties consisted of imposing the unwanted new translations, forcing the congregants to abandon their caste practices, eliminating joyful festivals from the church calendar and trying to remove Tamil music including lyrics and instruments from festive celebrations.798 In all these alleged cruelties,


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culture and taste shaded into morality and doctrine. Sastri agreed about the need to arrive at a correct amalgamation of these distinctions but disagreed with the new missionaries’ decisions. For example, he thought that only Good Friday required sorrowful observation, while on the other festival days, joyful celebrations were not in any way deviations, just as the use of the author’s name in Tamil songs or the accompaniment of Indian musical instruments was not. For Pillai, these linguistic, musical and liturgical disputes were of a piece with his disagreement with the societal vision imposed by the ‘reformist’ missionaries. He criticized those ‘who should preach on the faith of the Son of God [but] preach now all the day long more than ten times upon the subject of eating with the Pallar and Parayer promiscuously’, quite contrary to the customs of the country, which used to be prudently respected by former missionaries, and protected against interference by the rules of government as well as the orders of Bishop Reginald Heber.799 In Pillai’s view, by forcing Indians to change their customs, the British missionaries were behaving like animals.800 In a collective document issued by the Vellalar Christians of the Tanjore congregation, it was argued that caste consisted of a civil distinction, akin to the rules observed by Jewish Christians of first- century Rome, which the Apostle Paul had found personally unnecessary but legitimate for those that believed in them. To these men of Tanjore, the observation of such customs was important if Christianity was to have any hope of success in ‘Malabar’.801 As a result of these conflicts, the Tanjore congregation split, with Pillai himself excommunicated in 1829. He continued the rest of his poetic career with the patronage of his old Hindu friend, now King of Tanjore, Serfoji II, and, after the latter’s death, that of a palace official. But trouble continued to brew at Tanjore, leading to a legal confrontation between the congregation and Bishop Wilson in 1834, out of which the latter emerged victorious by claiming the autonomy of the Church from judicial supervision.802 A blow was struck at caste hierarchy within the Protestant churches in India, but the question about the relation between doctrine and culture remained open, especially because it was quashed by the use of authority rather than argument. It was to this debate that upper- caste Indian Christians returned repeatedly over the rest of the century, examining to what exactly they had committed themselves when embracing Christianity.

Doctrine and culture: Hinduism as the Old Testament



It was not as if Evangelical missionaries of the early nineteenth century were blind to the need of establishing a common vocabulary with their audience in order to communicate their doctrines. As we have seen, in the 1840s, Evangelical government officials such as James Ballantyne, Principal of the Banaras Sanskrit College 1845–61, worked at an early form of fulfilment


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theology, recognizing the value of ancient Sanskrit literature and attempting to prove to his students that the Siddhantic astronomical texts logically led on to the truth of European science and from thence to Christianity.803 It is not clear whether Krishna Mohan Banerjea, the Indian Christian theologian, borrowed this idea from Ballantyne, or the other way round, but in November 1841 he published ‘A review of Onkar Bhatta’s A comparison of the Pauranik and Siddhantik systems of astronomy with that of Copernicus’ in the Christian Intelligencer, which made the same argument.804 In subsequent publications, he developed this concept further, arguing that just as the Newtonian system was a development of the Siddhantic astronomy, Christianity was a development of Vedic religion. He urged, in fact, that to be a good Hindu one had to be a good Christian.805 Krishna Mohan’s ideas look superficially like early fulfilment theology, which proposed that all religions consisted of partial revelation that may be perfected by Christianity, but there is a twist here. While in the late nineteenth century European fulfilment theology began to look for retrievable sections of non- Christian religions, to nurture in the right direction (Christianity),806 Banerjea’s emphasis, like that of the Vellalar Christians of Tanjore, was on establishing the equivalence between Indian (Hindu) and European Jewish cultures, as equally plausible precursors to, and basis for Christianity. Banerjea took his argument further, claiming that Indians had discovered essential Christian doctrines long before the Europeans did. In his last major work, published in 1881, he argued that the Vedas, composed between the second and first millennium BC, taught the essential Christian doctrine that sacrifice was necessary for the redemption of mankind. He offered a rather unusual interpretation of the well-known verse from the Rig Veda Samhita: the Purusa who sacrificed himself,807 did so to redeem the world, and the Samhita was only predicting what was to happen with the life of Jesus Christ. This placed Indian Scriptures at a level equal to the Old Testament, and, as a corollary, Indians at the historical position of Jews. This was a transparent effort at claiming Christianity as India’s own rather than a gift from Europeans requiring lengthy tutelage and grateful subservience. Richard Fox Young, in studying the work of Dr William Hodge Mill (1792– 1853), Principal at the Bishop’s College at Calcutta and Krishna Mohan’s superior, has proposed the irrepressible multi-vocality of Christian didactic compositions in Sanskrit verse.808 For example, no matter what meaning Dr Mill wished to give it in his work, dvija was born again, i.e. Brahmin, to a Hindu audience. Given this, the religious terminology used by Indian Christians such as Krishna Mohan appears to be a deliberate effort to establish continuity with Indian philosophical and religious traditions. K. M. Banerjea’s ideas were repeatedly reused by Indian Christian writers over the next century or so. Parani Andy, of the National Church at Madras, built upon Banerjea’s thesis to argue that Hindus were, in fact Christians. Andy asserted that the common religious heritage of Hindus/Indians


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(including Christians) consisted of the Upanishads, not the Vedas, which he found obscene. Equating the Upanishadic statement Aham Brahmosmi with the Old Testament phrase ‘I am that I am’, he insisted that Hindu religion illustrated the truth of Christianity. Not all critics were delighted with this inclusivist spirit; cudgels were taken up for the distinct identity of Hindus by the tutor of the prince of Bhopal, himself a Muslim. 809 For Indian Christian theologians themselves, the term ‘Hindu’ allowed assertion of cultural autonomy and ancient civilizational heritage, both arguments against their own tutelage under their Euro-American religious authority. That umbrella term, however, allowed a range of Scriptural and social choice. In the early twentieth century, the trend was definitely towards the monism of Vedanta rather than the pantheism of the Vedas. Bhavani Charan Banerji, alias Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, writing at the turn of the century, while influenced by Krishna Mohan’s ideas of ‘Indian Roots of Christianity’, produced a Vedantic description of the absolute God as Sacchidananda – being (sat), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ananda) – to describe the three figures of the Christian Trinity. Multiple influences produced this exegesis, which would become dominant in Indian Christian theology in the first half of the twentieth century; one of these was the disproportionately influential Brahmo Samaj. Brahmabandhav built upon Brahmo Samaj doctrine, especially as developed by Keshab Chandra Sen. An erstwhile member of Keshab’s Church of the New Dispensation and a Brahmo Samaj preacher in Hyderabad and Sindh, Brahmabandhav converted to Christianity under the influence of two CMS missionaries and then chose Roman Catholicism, at which point he adopted his tongue-twister of a name, an ‘etymological’ translation of Theophilus. Translating God as Brahma was only the beginning of his theological and cultural experiments which finally strained his relations with the Catholic Church. When his plans for a Catholic matha or monastery at Jabalpur were refused permission, he took himself to Santiniketan to work as administrator in Tagore’s national school.810 Bhavani Charan’s nationalism and social conservatism developed hand in hand, and so did his Christian theological creativity. Finding in Santiniketan the opportunity to actuate his vision of brahmacharyashram, he prohibited the use of shoes and umbrellas and enforced vegetarianism and separate seating for students of different castes.811 After a visit to Europe in 1902–3, his bitterness against Europeans increased, and he began advocating worship of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning in a school he ran, and performed the prayaschitta812 ceremony, ingesting cow- dung. Although earlier he had asserted that Christ was the unique avatara of Brahma (absolute God), he locked horns with the liberal missionary theologian J. N. Farquhar over the historicity of Krishna, arguing that Krishna was also a historical incarnation, of Vishnu.813 The historicity of Christ




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was an important argument made by missionaries, against the ‘mythical’ prophets and gods of Hinduism, particularly Krishna. Historians have studied how Indian writers, particularly Bankimchandra Chatterjee, attempted to establish similar historical pedigrees for Indian gods in their advocacy of Hinduism.814 For Brahmabandhab, the Indian Christian and Indian nationalist, the historicity of Krishna was important to establish the validity of Indian religious tradition and its equivalence to the Jewish prophetic tradition.815 Brahmabandhab’s approach to Krishna was in line with his championing of the Hindu ‘race’,816 and denunciation of ‘Europeanism’ parading as Christianity. Idealized as the ascetic-revolutionary by Rabindranath Tagore in the novel Char Adhyay, he was arrested in 1907 for a plot of sedition, and he appeared for the trial wearing the Brahman’s sacred thread, claiming thereby to display sympathy for his countrymen. This Indian Christian tradition of valorizing Hindu (high Brahmanical) religious tradition by equating it with the Old Testament became a common self-respect strategy in the twentieth century. Pandipeddi Chenchiah (1886– 1959), an alumnus of the Madras Christian College and later a judge, was a prominent Christian writer personally influenced by the Hindu thinker Aurobindo Ghosh. He rejected the historical relation between the Old and New Testaments outright: Why should it be necessary to understand the Old Testament to grasp the Sermon on the Mount? ... Why should a Hindu understand the complicated Pauline theology to follow Jesus? ... I can pick up material for an Old Testament in Hinduism making selections in the light of what Jesus said and did. That was exactly what early Christians did and later Hindu converts ought to do.817 Vedantic philosophy of course varied across a number of commentators, and Sankara’s absolute monism was a relatively rare choice for Christian theologians.818 Also, Brahmabandhab’s social vision, including his support for caste, disapproval of ‘reform’ efforts and advocacy of upper- caste ritual rules was particularly conservative,819 rarely matched by other Indian Christians of the twentieth century, who also read God as Sacchidananda. There was a gravitation towards the qualified monism of Madhvacharya or the dualism of Ramanuja; the later Vedantic traditions permitting the conception of a personal, anthropomorphic god, to whom personal devotion or bhakti might be professed. In addition, since they admitted the qualified reality of the world, post-Sankara Vedantic philosophers were found more amenable to a Protestant ethic. A. J. Appasamy, theologian, Professor of Bishop’s College, Calcutta, and later Bishop of Coimbatore in the Church of South India,820 spent his theological career reconciling the Upanishads and bhakti with Christianity. He applauded his own father’s rejection of the Old Testament and focus on


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the New Testament, exasperation with the Church and exploration of yoga as a spiritual exercise. Appasamy felt that the Gospel had to be connected with Indian heritage so as to overcome allegations of non- Christian Indians that Christians were illegitimate children of India.821 Within the huge range of Indian (which he took to mean Hindu) philosophy and doctrine, Appasamy’s choice was bhakti. While remaining loyal to Vedantic concepts of union with God, he insisted that this union was to be savikalpa samadhi in which the worshipper and the worshipped retained their distinctions, rather than nirvikalapa samadhi, in which the distinction between the two were lost. This was Appasamy’s theological answer to the long-standing Christian (and Muslim) objection to monism.822 Since Appasamy became one of the first bishops of the Church of South India, inaugurated in 1947, one might assume that such views eventually became acceptable within the Church in India as it became Indian in terms of personnel. But allegiance to the Vedanta did not translate into social conservatism for all Indian Christian theologians; Appasamy did not idealize varnashramadharma. If varna status was hereditary, he said, it was oppressive and divisive, and if it was not, then it was either unsustainable or indistinguishable from professional specializations in any modern society, not deserving a religious ideology to support it.823

Christianity as bhakti marga: Church or Christ? To come back to developments within European theology, liberal theologies of the late nineteenth century, which recognized fragments of truth in other religious traditions and were prepared to accept that Indian cultural forms were legitimate for Indian Christians, saw more radical development in the early twentieth century, especially during the First World War. In fact, during this period, a number of European and American missionaries contributed to the formation of a new dogma, that Christianity in India had to be authentically Indian. Almost inevitably, every such theologian had close personal ties with eminent Indian Christians, often acting as their biographers, but they also revealed an ambivalence in their attitudes, especially when Indian Christians themselves demonstrated inadequate interest in the new ‘culturalism’. The truly exceptional among them took tentative steps towards questioning the connection between Western culture and Christian doctrine – not just for Indians, but for their own faith. The Scottish missionary Nicol Macnicol wrote a Ph.D. on Indian theism at Glasgow, which was subsequently published by the Oxford University Press in 1915 to rave reviews.824 He went on to publish an anthology of (translated) Marathi bhakti poetry,825 a biography of the eminent Brahmin convert to Christianity, Pandita Ramabai, and a biography of Charles Andrews.826 In a book on modern India, Macnicol outlined his thesis that India’s essence lay in its religious spirit and clearly found Indian Christians too imitative of




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and dependent on Western missionaries to incorporate this spirit into their theology, with the honourable exceptions of Ramabai, N. V. Tilak, K. T. Paul and S. K. Datta.827 In the few sparks that Macnicol discovered within Indian Christianity, he detected a distinct rebelliousness against the Church. The American Methodist missionary, Eli Stanley Jones, suggested that this rebellion was entirely legitimate, one that Western Christians should embrace rather than resist, because that would free them up to present only the essence of Christianity, which was Christ. Jones’s 1925 book, The Christ of the Indian Road, a compilation of his lectures in America during his year of leave in 1924–5, began with the admission that Christian missions had arrived at a crisis in India, due to a new and challenging situation, which was the nationalist movement. He suggested that the only way to preach Christ’s universal message in a time of cultural and political conflict was to let go of the ‘very long line – a line that stretched from Genesis to Revelation, on to Western civilization and to the Western Christian Church’ and instead ‘take [one’s] stand at Christ.’828 Jones asserted forcefully that even the most anti-Western of Indians were prepared to accept Christ, untrammelled by Western churches or Western culture, but to this inclusivism, which was at least partly wishful thinking, Jones added a great deal of self-criticism. Quoting Charles Andrews, ‘As I looked upon him there [Gandhi fasting for 21 days], I felt as never before in my own experience the meaning of the cross’, Jones expressed regret that Christianity had not burst into meaning through the Christian missionaries but was still prepared to celebrate that through Gandhi India was seeing Christ and also helping ‘us’ [the missionaries? People in the West?] to see Him.829 Taking Christianity to mean Christ was, however, a difficult doctrine to uphold while maintaining the distinctiveness of Christian identity, especially since modern Hindus since the days of Raja Rammohan Roy in the early nineteenth century had proved more than willing to admit Christ as a moral as well as a spiritual ideal, but one among many such others. Because of the restrictive and discriminatory nature of religious organization in churches and missions in colonial India, Indian Christians had their own reasons for being disenchanted with the Church, and the twentieth century saw repeated efforts to formulate non- ecclesiastical forms of religious organization, derived from the Hindu context. Such efforts, while applauded by the avant-garde new generation among the missionaries, generally found little welcome from the established Christian hierarchy. There was acute controversy when a Christian sadhu made his appearance on the global stage. Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889–1929), a convert from Sikhism, was baptized in 1905 and initially followed the conventional route of studying in a Christian boys’ boarding school and then, at the suggestion of his missionary mentors, at the St John’s Divinity College, Lahore, which was a seminary created by T. V. French, aimed at an ‘Indianised


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Christianity’. Sundar Singh found himself unable to fit into the student body and course of studies intended for Indian priests. Because of his failure to complete his theological studies, and also because he refused to limit his ministry to particular churches, the Anglican bishop of Lahore, G. A. Lefroy (of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi) felt unable to ordain him.830 Although hurt by this decision, Sundar Singh proceeded free of restrictions that employment as a mission- church agent would have imposed on him, becoming a symbol of ‘indigenous Christianity’, a source of pride for Indian Christians and of great excitement for a section of European and American Christians. After the fiasco at Lahore, Sundar Singh spent some time in the company of an American missionary, S. E. Stokes, who was attempting to live the life of St Francis in India.831 In 1907, he met C. F. Andrews and Sushil Rudra and forged a friendship with them which led to the Sadhu being a welcome visitor at St Stephen’s College. Andrews later asserted that the Sadhu’s spiritual example turned many Christian students from lucrative government service to a life in service of the Church.832 Andrews himself claimed to have realized the importance of Sundar Singh as a phenomenon only after discussions with Sushil Rudra, who admired the Sadhu for his uncompromising Indianness, whether in clothes, in idiom or in the ascetic and mystic form of religion he practised. To the converted Andrews, Sundar Singh’s active pursuit of martyrdom and mystic experiences, including the visions of God reported by him, represented his successful emulation of Christ. Such mysticism did not inspire everybody equally, and controversy began to gather as the Sadhu became an internationally well-known figure. In 1918–20 he went on preaching tours to (what were then) Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore and Japan, and in 1920–2 he visited America, Britain and other European countries, speaking to interested audiences. In Britain he visited Oxford and there formed the acquaintance of A. J. Appasamy, then a Ph.D. student, working on Indian bhakti traditions in relation to St John’s Gospel. In the Sadhu Appasamy found a living embodiment of the possibility he was theoretically exploring, that of expressing Christianity in terms of Indian cultural and religious heritage. Together with a senior Oxford professor, Appasamy proceeded to write a biography of Sundar Singh, aiming to explain him to the Western world.833 With fame also came notoriety, the Sadhu’s supporters and detractors being bitterly divided, the former taking his accounts of miraculous experiences as proof of his elevated spirituality, even apostlehood, and the latter as proof that he was deranged and a liar.834 Two German theologians engaged in print battle over their evaluation of Sundar Singh, Friedrich Heiler looking upon him as an apostle to the East and West, while Oskar Pfister thought he was a neurotic, plagued by repressed infantile sex- complexes.835 Pfister found a strange ally in the Jesuits, especially a missionary in India, Henry Hosten,




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who became obsessed with calling the Sadhu’s bluff.836 His supporters, including Andrews himself, were not entirely sure how to deal with his claims of miraculous experiences but generally attributed the controversy largely to Catholics for their refusal to acknowledge greatness beyond their own church.837 And yet there was nothing particularly unusual about Sadhu Sundar Singh’s mysticism, seen within the broader spectrum of Indian religious traditions. His claims, such as having seen God physically, were very similar to that of Ramakrishna, the Hindu mystic who inspired Swami Vivekananda and who was revered by most modern Bengali Hindus. But to European Christians, especially Protestants accustomed to believing that Christianity was rational and historically true, such unlicensed miracles appeared disruptive of church discipline. Their suspicion was further deepened by Sundar Singh’s inability to adhere to confessional boundaries with adequate precision. Sundar Singh therefore remained an ideal, but one that no seminary in India encouraged Indian priests to emulate, at least in this period.

Re-thinking Christianity: an Indian Christian statement of faith Liberal theology, which inspired some of the European missionaries to look favourably upon such Indian experiments with Christian doctrine and expression, itself took a downturn in the 1930s in Europe with the rise of theological neo- orthodoxy. Karl Barth, one of the most important exponents of this new trend, was led to his theological position from the shock of finding his theological teachers aligned with the German cause in the First World War. Liberal theology’s celebration of ethnic and national characteristics in religious expression apparently left it morally incapable of criticizing any negative aspects of national culture or nationalist politics.838 Barth’s views reached Indian Christians filtered through Hendrik Kraemer’s The Christian Message in a Non- Christian World. Hendrik Kraemer, Professor of History of Religions at Leiden, wrote this book at the request of the International Missionary Council, expressly for the World Missionary Conference which was to be held at Tambaram, near Madras.839 He asserted that the Gospel message was complete and unalterable, universally applicable in the same form irrespective of differences in culture. Kraemer’s book elicited a sharp reaction from a group of lay South Indian Christians, who rushed through their book Rethinking Christianity in India to be on time for the Tambaram Conference. They urged that the idea motivating the book was that the Indian Church should be able to think for itself and that Christianity should become an indigenous movement in India. The book celebrated the reforming influence of Christianity on Hinduism and Hindus but denounced the domination of Christianity by




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missionaries, who hindered the development of a genuine Indian expression of Christianity. Denying that they were relativistic to truth, they urged that their enthusiasm for Vedanta was of the world-affirming kind espoused in traditions of qualified monism and that their aversion to the contemporary church structures arose not from their social snobbery but from their dislike of foreign domination.840 The unique restrictions placed upon Indian Christians in the redefining of their faith explain statements by Indian Christians denying the necessity of the Church as an expression of Christianity. P. Chenchiah, one of the members of the Rethinking Christianity group, felt that the Church was an alien institution which was hindering rather than fostering the Kingdom of God in India. In its place he suggested local religious communities, or ashrams, centred around a spiritual teacher or guru.841 Not only was this coherent in terms of Hindu and Muslim acephalic religious traditions, the disenchantment with ecclesiastical government reflected the particular experience that Indian Christians had of it, one that sharpened their own consciousness of themselves as defined by race, history and culture, beyond confession. Narayan Vaman Tilak (1862–1919), a Marathi Christian poet, did not mince words: You have set up for yourself a kingdom of slaves; do not call it a Kingdom of God. We dance as puppets while you hold the strings How long shall this buffoonery endure?842

Hierarchy and intimacy: upper-caste Indian Christian families and their social perceptions To come back then, to the valid criticisms of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Indian Christian theology, there is no denying that claims of autonomy (cultural or organizational) and support for discriminatory hierarchy (social or organizational) went hand in hand, not just for European and American missionaries but also for elite Indian Christian leaders who chaffed against their own subordination in the missions and churches of colonial India. Nineteenth-century religiosity, both Indian and British, was inescapably a social vision. The question is why the Indian Christian theologians discussed above failed to adequately address the inequality and inequity of caste hierarchy while denouncing that of race. The final section of this chapter takes a close look at the social background and personal experiences of such men, examining the particular form of social privilege they enjoyed, which allowed them to take an idealized and paternalistic view of social inequality. As indicated in connection with the disputes over caste in the 1820s in the Anglican churches of Tirunelveli and Tanjore, upper- caste Indian




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... you say that no Brahmins, Chatria, Vasias, Sudras and Parayers, be partakers of this Table but Christians. In answer to this I say ... although there are in India more than 100 Castes according to the professions, Politeness, various posture and habits of the people yet the ancestors have divided them into 4 Classes, as Brahma, Chatria, Vasia, and Sudra, without adding Paraya as a 5th Class. Why did you divide it into 5 Classes pointing out the Paraya Caste? If they must be mentioned should you not also mention Pallas and shoemakers whom Parayers abhor as 6th and 7th Castes?843 The idea that real ‘caste’ was jati, that is, numerous endogamous groups ranked locally in a variety of social scales, rather than varna, which was a pan-Indian (pan-human, even) fourfold division of society according to the ‘essences’ of persons as much as their professions, was both a participant’s view of a social practice and also a rather transparent denial of the Hindu/ Brahminical philosophical- doctrinal basis of that practice. Unlike Sastri, late-nineteeenth- century Protestant Christian leaders would not endorse caste hierarchy per se, but they were still capable of quibbling about definitions in order to deny its existence. In 1878, there was an ‘outbreak’ in Krishnagar, in which a large section of the local CMS church members held a separate gathering to defy the incumbent missionary’s call for a feast in which caste distinctions of commensality would be broken. An investigation group of three Indian Christians was sent to report on the situation: they came back with the opinion that there were indeed social distinctions among Krishnagar Christians, but these were not of caste. The upper section of Christians, which included converts from various Hindu castes and Muslims, did not dine with or marry the mochis or cobblers. Since this did not correspond with caste practices in the jati model, the delegation concluded that these were no more than understandable imperfections in Christian brotherly love, to be overcome gradually without coercion. J. Vaughan, the incumbent missionary, who had never got on very well with his congregations,844 wrote to the Calcutta Corresponding Committee that the report shocked him; the outbreak was about ‘Caste, caste and nothing but caste.’ The Indian deputation had completely failed to understand the situation, and this, in his opinion, cast doubt on the dependability of Indians in important matters. The Indian deputation, which was led by Piary Mohan Rudra, father


Christians disputed the necessary connection made by missionaries and Bishop Wilson between Christian confession and a certain social order, detecting pride and force rather than logic and legitimacy in the Europeans imposing their views on Indians. Vedanayagam Sastri also critiqued the Europeans’ understanding of the society that they were so keen to change:


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of Sushil Rudra, future Principal of St Stephen’s College, took understandable offence at the last comment, and reasserted that if indeed the issue was caste, it was not caste as they knew it. The Corresponding Committee concluded that perhaps the situation was somewhere in between, in that a Christian caste was taking shape in Krishnagar, which was an unwelcome development.845 This event and the reaction of the Indian Christian deputation to it resembled broader trends within contemporary Hindu society in India. From the late nineteenth century, caste underwent rapid change in terms of concept, practice and organization among Hindus, jati being increasingly substituted, especially in public discourse, by trans-local social hierarchies justified with reference to an idealized varna ordering of society. As Lloyd and Susan Rudolph have shown, caste in the late nineteenth century consisted of extra-local ‘para- communities’, whose membership was premised on birth in a range of jatis and also active interest in extra-local interests of the deemed community, represented by a voluntary association. The statusclaims of such an associational ‘caste’ were premised on a notional varna system, ignoring differences in the status of incorporated jatis relative to their respective local hierarchies.846 This de-localizing trend contributed to the hardening of (new) caste boundaries but also fed into an idealist discourse about Indian/Hindu society, which denied the violence inherent in the actuation of varnashramadharma. That elite Indian Christian leaders subscribed to such ideas had more intimate reasons besides their wish to contest the right of European missionaries to tell them what to do and their own tacit commitment to the status quo within Indian society. I would propose that they suffered from a genuine blindness to particular social barriers because of their personal experiences in the intimate realm of family relations. The self-perceptions of the topmost section of the Indian Christians were formed in this casteand gender-specific context, which they would then transpose onto the whole community (as all community leaders do). In north India, barring a few places, such as Krishnagar, the early nineteenth century converts to Protestant Christianity were a few, isolated upper- caste and upper- class individuals, a pattern that did not lend itself to the formation of a new local caste group. Besides, such converts saw themselves in the role of courageous heroes defying puerile ritual conventions in favour of an ethical religion and a more just society. Krishna Mohan had been a member of reformist groups before conversion and continued to write against the injustice of caste;847 Michael Madhushudan absconded when pressurized to marry a child he did not know848 Golaknath was disgusted with the combination of meaningless ritual and a traditional domestic life849 and Dhanjibhai Naoroji found that the doctrinal ignorance of Parsi priests and the unethical behaviour of community leaders contrasted badly with the moral uprightness of Scottish missionaries.850




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Indians who converted to Christianity in the early nineteenth century shared much in social ideology with reformist Hindus and Muslims of the same period, but, in addition, they were universally forced by their personal circumstances to actuate their ideology in their own lives. Compelled to form marriage alliances within the narrow pool of converts of similar status, their families stretched across the subcontinent and over wide linguistic and cultural differences, arguably giving rise to the first all-India religious community. Lal Behari Day, one of the earliest (relatively) uppercaste851 Bengali converts to the Scottish Church, married the daughter of Hormasji, one of the two first Parsi converts in Bombay, through the mediation of Dhanjibhai Nauroji. He decided that he wanted to marry this woman after he read about her in a book written by a European lady missionary.852 Piary Mohan Rudra’s son Sushil moved to Delhi in 1886, and in 1889 married the eldest daughter of Ishan Chandra Singha, one of the earliest Indian Anglicans in the Punjab and Headmaster of the Baring High School, Batala.853 The family became more north Indian in the next generation, with Principal Rudra’s younger son, Sudhir, marrying another Singha, Rajmohini.854 Another Bengali principal of St Stephen’s College, S. N. Mukarji, married Mary Chandu Lall, daughter of a prominent Khatri convert of Delhi.855 Raja Harnam Singh, ruler of Kapurthala, a princely state in the Punjab, married the daughter of Revd Golak Nath Chatterjee, a Bengali Christian working for the American Presbyterian Mission in the Punjab. A grandchild of Revd Chatterjee, writing a highly eulogistic biography, suggested that the cosmopolitan families of early Christians, incorporating the blood of all races of India, were models that the rest of India was bound to follow.856 Most of these marriages were ‘love-marriages’, i.e. results of personal acquaintance and affection for future partners, and the wives worked as professionals outside the home, since educated Indian Christian women were simply too invaluable as schoolteachers and nurses to waste in seclusion. The domestic life of the Protestant Christian leadership therefore often conformed to an ideal of marital partnership at which all communities were aiming, although this was as much due to the pressure of circumstances as personal choice. Given the irrelevance of jati distinctions in their personal lives, and the pride they took in this fact, most Indian Christians of upper caste felt unable to acknowledge the centrality of caste status in the lives of the majority of Christians who were dalits. They would have been loath to acknowledge that their ‘progressive’ marriages served to reinforce their distinction from dalit Christians, including those in the same geographical and linguistic regions.857 Along with contemporary Hindu social reformers, Indian Christian leaders expressed a disdain for jati distinctions and looked upon existing social distinctions and deprivation not as the result of their own actions but as general social ‘evils’ to be tackled by reformist activism.


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At the end of the nineteenth century, Indian Christian leaders became further desensitized to the inequities of caste in practice because of the influence on them of two political ideologies, both of which sought to define the nation in racial terms. The first of these was the nationalist application of the Aryan race theory to define Indian nationhood. Valorization of an Aryan past rendered Aryan sacred texts and the social practices they recommended, such as caste, less reprehensible. As we have seen, Indian Christian leaders had their specific reasons for claiming the Aryan heritage as their own: an assertion of cultural autonomy that committed them to the denial of social inequality. Brahmabandhab argued that the essence of the Hinduness was varnashramadharma,858 conflating Hindu with Aryan, the three upper castes, and Indian. Following the contemporary race theories, he argued that miscegenation had led to decline of the Hindu race, which could only grow worse if the discipline of the varnas was abandoned.859 To those pursuing social reform, especially elimination of caste differences, he urged caution, for abrogation of caste differences would lead to disappearance of the little Aryanness that was left in India.860 Brahmabandhab was rather a maverick and exceptional in his conservatism. Other Indian Christians who subscribed to the Aryan race concept of the Indian nation were more socially liberal. Lal Behari Day, in Bengal peasant life and Folktales of Bengal urged that comparative folklore, just like comparative philosophy, proved that the dark and semi-naked peasant of the banks of the Ganga was brother to the fair and well- dressed Englishman by the river Thames, however distantly related. In this case his ‘Aryanism’ was a code for a universal humanist position, opposed to European superiority, and also, to some extent, for Indian caste hierarchies. Representatives of his Bengali (Aryan) storytelling tradition included a Christian woman, an old Brahman, an old barber and his own servant, making his definition of the national ‘race’ more inclusive, but paternalistic nevertheless.861 Contemporary to Aryanism, another nationalist ideology, also racial in inspiration, developed in the south of India. Tamil nationalism was centred on the twin concepts of Tamil linguistic heritage, autonomous of Sanskrit, and of the Dravidian race, dominated by alien ‘Aryan’ Brahmans. The earliest Tamil nationalists owed much in inspiration to the linguistic researches of nineteenth- century missionaries, especially Robert Caldwell and later G. U. Pope.862 Some Tamil Christians managed to accommodate their religious identity within the larger racial and nationalist identity of Dravidian and the associated political agenda of Non-Brahmanism, none of which lent itself very well to the questioning of the hierarchies within the ‘NonBrahmins’ themselves.


Indian, Aryan, Dravidian – and Christian as well?


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It has been my effort in this chapter to indicate the connections between belief and authority and therefore to relate esoteric discussions about theology and its correct translation to the context of power relations within which articulate Indian Christian leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth century made their theological interventions. It has been discussed why parsing out the ‘essence’ of religion was a contentious matter; conscious decisions about choosing cultural forms met the organized authority of church(es), with the danger of provoking allegations of heresy and spiritual failure. These decisions were so controversial because each particular arrangement of Scriptures, history, religious organization and social order inevitably served as an argument for relative racial capacity, entitlement to authority and the possibility of reordering social, including racial relations. The above survey of Indian Christian religious and social thought is by no means exhaustive; among other things, it does not deal with the diffuse but distinctive forms of dalit Christian religiosity, suspect both to missionaries and to upper- caste Indian Christians. We have explicitly dealt with the ideas of those that came to take the place of public leaders of the community, whether in the Church, in lay community associations or in the broader political field. The reason for choosing this focus is to explain how the Indian Christian leadership’s range of social ideologies, from liberal social reformism to racial-nationalism, developed in directions that were uncongenial to the politicization of the caste hierarchy within the community. Many Indian Christian leaders were deeply aware of the realities of rural dalit life because of their involvement with the work of an increasingly dalit church. Their sensitive social conscience led them to seek the panacea for such evils in works of ‘uplift’, an approach that harmonized with the concerns of the national leaders and served to incorporate certain Christian leaders in the project of service to the nation.863 When such Indian Christian leaders chose to politically represent themselves in the context of broader nationalist politics, whether of Indian nationalism or Tamil nationalism, such nationalisms could and often did subsume religious identities under their banners if the religious identity did not explicitly contest the principal nationalist claims. Protestant leaders from the 1920s chose to increasingly act on the principle that the Christian community’s interests lay in a unified Indian citizenship without any statusspecific political or economic privileges. Such an ideology accorded well with that of the Indian National Congress, which was to achieve national leadership in this period. However, while the Congress’s victory was still unsure, Tamil Catholic leaders felt it would serve them better to claim separate Christian electorates, under the Tamil nationalist banner, whose nonBrahman ideology was premised on the political relevance of social status. In both cases, it made political sense to underplay caste differences within


Conclusion: disciplining faith, fashioning the self


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the Christian community, an approach that derived not only from such external political logic but also from the intellectual, social and theological make-up of those who would become acknowledged as leaders of that community. Therefore, as with other communities in India, the appearance and self-representation of the Christian community in India’s public sphere were premised on the effacement of the social hierarchies within.


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8

Beginning with the institutional disputes within Christian schools, we have explored the differences of race, caste, gender, pedagogic theory, theology, social vision and cultural idiom among those who functioned as the collective known as ‘Christian’ in colonial India. In this chapter we return to our primary question about the relation between religion and modern politics, addressing the historically specific issue of what being Christian entailed for the political attitudes of a certain group of Indians in the period when the Indian nation-state was being formed. As mentioned in the introduction, the effect of Christian belief has generally been taken to be politically conservative, especially in the imperial context, as most missionaries and their Indian Christian ‘pupils’ subscribed to the view that the British Empire was a providential arrangement for the furtherance of Christianity. While that view has now been nuanced, with reference to the distinct, and in some cases conflicting motivations of missionaries and imperialists,864 the political views of Indian Christians remain largely unexplored and conflated with those of European and American missionaries.865 This chapter addresses itself to that lacuna. In explaining the generally lukewarm response of Indian Christians to anti-colonial nationalism scholars have referred both to institutional restrictions, specifically the ‘missionary pledge’ to which missions and their employees were subject, and to apprehensions of domination by the Hindus who were in the numerical majority.866 Indian Christians were perfectly capable of and willing to forcefully contest the authority of missionaries for causes they cared for intensely, among them the structuring of religious authority. That this racial-ideological conflict, or ‘religious nationalism’ as George Thomas would have it, did not lead to active commitment to nationalist politics appears to be better explained by the constant conflict experienced by Indian Christian leaders in their effort to define themselves as members of a religious community and of a national polity. One could see this conflict as inevitable for a ‘minority’ community attempting to safeguard its rights against an overweaning, if temporarily


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powerless, majority and appealing to the external power of empire for justice that representative democracy may not have been able to deliver. But as this chapter will show, the nature of ‘minority politics’ is not a given, just as the identity of a ‘minority’ is contingent upon processes of conflict, competition and selective suppression that lead a diverse and discordant set of people to claim a collective voice and common interests. Many of the Indian Christian leaders we have discussed in the previous chapters were nationalists, Krishna Mohan Banerjea and Brahmabandhab Upadhyay representing the ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ nationalist positions. Some of them did make the connection between their anti-missionary resentment and anti-colonialism. P. O. Philip, a National Christian Council secretary, observed acidly: ‘It is pathetic that in all the history of modern European missions there is no single instance of missions lending their moral and spiritual support to people who were struggling to attain freedom from European rule.867 There was also considerable divergence over the political implications of Christian doctrine among missionaries as among Indian Christians. Harvest Field, the official organ of the NMC, carried an article in 1907 by W. Hinkley, which said, ‘We do not read in the Gospels of any effort made by Christ to free the Jews from Roman authority. Rather did he tell them to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” ’.868 On the other hand, Eli Stanley Jones, who saw the true image of Christ for the first time in Gandhi, stated clearly that he wanted to see India free, not only because ‘good government ... [was] no substitute for self-government’, but also because cultural, political and economic domination of India by the West produced an ‘oppression psychosis’ in Indians that made them unable to accept anything associated with Western civilization or the Western church.869 Nevertheless, in the first half of the twentieth century, there were even fewer Indian Christian nationalists than there were in the late nineteenth. Rather than attempting to explain this absence (Why were Christians not nationalists?) this chapter examines the political stances that Indian Christian leaders did take in this period. In particular, it looks at the response of the largest umbrella organization of Indian Christians, to the constitutional provision for separate and guaranteed representation in the gradually expanding Viceregal and provincial councils of British India, examining how the leaders of Indian Christians attempted to reconcile their religious affiliation with political membership, in other words, how they learnt to be a ‘minority’, but in a particular way, which, in spite of their slim contribution to active anti- colonial politics, allowed them to secure a mainstream position in the postcolonial Indian polity, quite different from that of Indian Muslims. Crucial to that process was the emergence of a political theology called ‘Christian citizenship’, and the eventual, although contested, success of Indian Christian leaders inspired by it. Tracing the history of the successful is not intended to valorize it but to situate it in the context of other real possibilities which were sidelined only


Christian Citizenship


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through a historical process. Indeed, the contingent process of such selection must alert us to the continuous emergence of new forms of being, believing and behaving. This is certainly the case where the political idiom of ‘Christian citizenship’ is concerned; this is an idiom organically connected to the personal, professional and theological make-up of the Christian leaders, to whom the reader has been introduced in other capacities in the previous chapters. As a result of the success of their approach, many views and many people fell by the roadside, especially Indian Christians of dalit background. This, therefore, is the story of how a modern Indian religious community constructed itself, in connection with the formation of the Indian nation, while suppressing its own social reality. It is important to remember that agency did not lie entirely with these elite leaders. Their success, and the fact that ‘Indian Christian’ became a valid legal, political and personally-believed-in appellation in India, in spite of the great dissimilarity between those tarred by that same brush, is also due to processes of governance, such as systematic, repeated, publicized enumeration (through the census, from which we are still constrained to draw ‘objective’ information), legislation applicable to an abstractly defined set of persons and institutions and administrative- cum-financial policies tangibly affecting a certain set of institutions and their personnel, which were all instruments for the creation of belief and attachment to such an appellation, in those to whom it applied and in those to whom it did not. Hitched to concrete implications for political representation and government employment, such authoritative enumeration acquired tremendous immediacy in the twentieth century; already in the late nineteenth- century counting people, grouped under a finite number of labels, had become the most potent political argument that one could make.870 In the process of counting, different identities emerged from out of the diversities of existence and acquired the appearance of objective reality: in the twentieth century, the very first all-India census counted Christians divided into Europeans, Eurasians and Natives, appellations which later became European, AngloIndian and Indian Christian and as such were taken to represent specific social interests. These classifications reflected real social divisions and tensions that had simmered for a long time but also suppressed others, especially that of dalit Christian. To understand why, we turn to the history of ‘Indian Christian citizenship’, an essential part of the story of ‘Indian secularism’.

Separate electorates, ‘separatism’ and special interests


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Separate electorates, arguably the most volatile ‘religious’ issue in preindependence Indian politics, have been studied mostly with reference to Muslim politics and ‘separatism’.871 In the case of Christians, thinly scattered over most parts of the country, forming no more than 4.1 per cent of the


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population in any part of British India, and only 32.3 per cent of the population even in Travancore, a separate territorial homeland was simply not feasible and was never contemplated. This offers the opportunity to study the issue as a mode of political representation, without looking upon it as a symptom of incomplete assimilation or as a prelude to partition. What I wish to underline is the connection made by contemporary Christian and nonChristian Indian leaders, as well as the British government officials between separate electorates as a mode of political representation and the legal and administrative devices of compensatory discrimination for ensuring more equitable distribution of non-political resources, especially education and job opportunities, known in Indian political language as ‘reservations’. Predictably, the nature of connections proposed between these two kinds of ‘religious’ rights varied across the spectrum of the community’s leadership, and through a historical process of competition and debate certain stances became dominant around the country’s independence, stances that structured the Christian leaders’ relations with the general Indian political leadership as well as the social groups within their own community. From the end of the nineteenth century, the structure of the government of India slowly changed to formally accommodate Indians in the governance of their country. One of the most controversial issues involved in this process of constitutional change was that of separate electorates for interest groups identified by the British Government. British justification of this measure was the political backwardness of India, where society was believed to be irreconcilably divided by caste and religion, and where, therefore, genuine political representation was impossible on the basis of territorial constituencies alone.872 The 1909 Indian Councils Act, otherwise known as the Morley–Minto reforms, introduced elections for the first time with relation to the Imperial and Provincial Legislative Councils. The franchise was extremely limited, and provision was made for separate electorates for Muslims, professionals, landholders, European and Indian businessmen. Of these categories, only Muslims represented a religious community, and the decision was taken with explicit reference to the demands of a deputation of eminent Muslims to the Viceroy in October 1906.873 By the time of the next round of constitutional reforms, in 1919, the principle had been extended considerably, with demands for separate electorates from a number of diverse groups, not all religious. Indian nationalists, including the socialists, looked upon this device as a conspiracy to undermine Indian nationhood and their claim to represent it.874 In contrast, a diverse array of Indian groups supported separate electorates and found them a suitable constitutional device for their political goals. Academic evaluation of the origin and impact of separate electorates continues to be split; some historians, mostly Indian, continue to emphasize British conspiracy,875 others underline the importance of ‘ethnic’ divisions in Indian society;876 and yet others assert that it was a matter of sheer political




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opportunism for elites scrambling for scraps of power.877 Most historians assume that separate electorates led to political competition that worsened communal divisions, even if they did not create them. Dick Kooiman has contested this assumption, arguing that by eliminating competition with representatives of other communities separate electorates exacerbated political competition within the community.878 From a different perspective, Chandra Mallampalli contests the separate electorates-separatism equation, arguing that when Tamil Catholics used separate electorates under the banner of the Non-Brahman movement, they were merely participating in the dominant political culture of the region, through which they sought political membership in the nation.879 While I agree that separate electorates should not be seen necessarily as a device for separating from the nation, this chapter will narrate how the dominant section of Indian Christian political leadership came to believe that it was exactly that, in the decade immediately preceding political independence. This was not simply a case of one section (the Protestants) opting for a more ‘Sanskritic’ culture and being similarly malleable to the national idiom of the Indian National Congress, as Mallampalli argues. As we shall see, there was considerable difference of opinion among Protestants, and the collective decision changed over time, in response to the political changes at regional as well as national levels. These decisions, which no doubt made a certain kind of Christian leader more acceptable to the Congress leadership, were related to a certain notion of citizenship, arising out of theological and ideological developments that we have described in the previous chapters. I will make this argument by focusing on the debates within a Christian political organization, the All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC). The AICIC, formed in 1914, was the broadest association of Indian Protestants.880 It was second in reach only to the National Missionary Council (NMC), and, while the NMC continued to be dominated by missionaries well into the 1940s, the AICIC permitted only Indians to be its members.881 There was a great deal of overlap in the membership of these two associations, and, in spite of the misgivings of some European missionaries,882 the NMC recognized the AICIC as a legitimate representative body of the Indian Christians. Among other things, the two organizations formed a joint law committee to appeal to the Government to amend the Christian personal law. The AICIC was not a political party and did not contest elections, but it was the principal forum for political discussions and decision-making for Indian Protestants and was recognized by the Government as a body representing the Christian community, or at least the Protestant part of it. Following debates within this organization in the period 1914–47, one can trace within it changing patterns of political ideology and leadership, leading to changing attitudes towards separate electorates.




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In the second annual meeting of the AICIC, H. David from the United Provinces read a paper on the ‘Disabilities of Indian Christians’, urging that Indian Christians had the right, like other subjects of the British Empire, to equal citizenship and should not be ground fine between the upper and lower millstones, that is, between the two largest communities: Hindus and Muslims. He asserted that representation was still a dream with Christians, proved by the fact that there were hardly any Christians in the Provincial Councils leave alone the Imperial. He thought that religious prejudice prevented Christians from being elected in general elections, and that the Government did not compensate for this lack through nominations in spite of its promises. Separate communal electorates appeared to be the only way in which Indian Christians could be elected and claim their rights as Indian citizens.883 In 1919, with constitutional reforms imminent again, the AICIC sent K. T. Paul as its representative to the Joint Parliamentary (Reforms) Committee,884 but he disappointed the organization by not arguing hard enough for separate electorates. The AICIC withdrew recognition of his statement,885 and the matter was brought up in its subsequent annual meeting. Mr Devadoss, nominated member of the Madras Legislative Council, started the discussion by saying that ‘communal representation’ had been the unanimous demand of the Christian community for the past 12 years and that its refusal would be a great injustice to loyal subjects. Alfred Nundy, a nationalist Christian from the United Provinces,886 also asserted that separate electorates were most suitable for political enfranchisement of the Indian Christians, since they had been granted to the Muslims, Sikhs and Anglo-Indians. Few voiced complete opposition to separate electorates; only some members of the Madras Re-Thinking group887 suggested that although Indian Christians did have distinct political interests and required representation as a community they might secure such representation better through an agreement with their Hindu and Muslim ‘brethren’. K. T. Paul himself proposed that ‘adequate separate representation’ might be achieved by reserving seats for Christians in general electorates, something more likely to be accepted by the Hindus and the Muslims. S. C. Mukerji, head of the Law Committee, a powerful member and a staunch supporter of separate electorates, accused K. T. Paul of a volte-face and argued that candidates elected by general electorates would be unrepresentative of the community. S. K. Roy, a foundation member and member of the Central Council of the AICIC summed up the argument in favour of communal representation. Denying that he was narrow-minded, conservative and lacking in the true national spirit, he accused objectors to communal representation such as Mr K. T. Paul of being conservative, incapable of recognizing that the ‘salient


The AICIC and the run-up to the 1919 constitutional reforms


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political fact’ of the present day was the increasing amount and power of group life: trade unions, professional societies, etc. Popular government, said Roy, could not be founded on representative or electoral methods but on vital modes of association such as the religious community. Paul countered this by saying that the religious community was only one of the ‘groupprocesses’ and that, therefore, there was room for considerable difference of opinion as to whether that ought to be the basis of political life, but nobody was ready to listen to this argument. The motion proposed and accepted immediately afterwards was: That the All-India Conference of Indian Christians is of firm belief that adequate communal representation by separate electorates in the Imperial and local legislative assemblies is absolutely necessary for safeguarding the interests and developing the welfare of the community under existing conditions, and earnestly requests the Imperial and Local Governments and the Secretary of State for India to grant this legitimate claim. A Committee was appointed to memorialise the Government and the Secretary of State and to represent the views of the Conference before the Joint Committee of the House of Lords and Commons; this of course did not include K. T. Paul.888 The petition was successful, and the Montague– Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 offered separate electorates to Indian Christians. Since Madras was the only province in British India where Christians were in a significant number, these reforms applied mostly to that province. Five seats were reserved for Christians in the Madras legislative council, which were to be contested on the basis of separate Indian Christian constituencies.

The AICIC in the 1920s: K. T. Paul’s concept of Christian citizenship Although nationalist Christians such as Alfred Nundy had expressed support for separate electorates in 1919, there was a clear change in temper in the 1920s, in the age of Gandhi-led mass nationalism. The AICIC meeting of 1920 opened with Prof. S. C. Mukerji on the defensive, denying that by asking for separate electorates the AICIC had done a disservice to the Christian community by alienating it from the rest of the Indians. Separate electorates, he said, were essential for making the community a political unit, which, in turn, was essential for its effective participation in national politics. The 1920 conference demanded adequate representation of Indian Christians in legislative bodies not only in proportion to their numbers but also in proportion to their high educational levels and for the service they rendered to the nation,889 adding the ‘special qualification’ argument to that of ‘special interests’ leading to a persistent demand for weighted special representation that mimicked that of the Muslim League.




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Political priorities changed rapidly in the next two years within the AICIC; in 1923, when the Conference was held for the first time in south India, many of the North Indian stalwarts did not attend. Those that did were of the YMCA group: the Rallia Ram brothers (B. L. Rallia Ram and K. L. Rallia Ram, of the Lahore YMCA), for example. K. T. Paul as President denied the existence of any grievances of the Indian Christians against their other countrymen. In doing so, he quoted Narayan Vaman Tilak, the Marathi Christian poet: Thrice blessed is thy womb, My Motherland, Whence mighty rishis, saints and sages spring! A Christian I, yet here none taunteth me, Nor buffeteth with angry questioning. I meet and greet them, and with love embrace: None saith: ‘Thou dost pollute us by thy sin’. My Guru they delight to venerate, They say, ‘He is our brother and our kin’. Let no man fancy that I idly prate; Such kindness greets me always, everywhere. Saith Dasa, ‘O thou peerless Mother mine, Thy generous sons thy generous heart declare.890 Paul urged Christians to undertake ‘Christian citizenship’, which according to him was not simply a matter of being Christian by confession. Reproducing feelings he had personally reported to Elmhirst in 1918,891 Paul said that Europe, which was Christian, had failed to demonstrate Christian statesmanship in the world war. Christian citizenship had to be based on responsibility and not rights, the responsibility of Indian Christians lying in the reconciliation of the warring communities of India. Christians in Paul’s opinion were best equipped for this job because of the uprightness of their character, disdain for loaves and fishes and dedication to nishkama karma. In addition to this peacemaking role, Christians should develop swarajya892 by serving in district and municipal boards, by participating in local governmental and developmental work and also by contributing to education in the country. All this would be possible only if the Christians improved themselves first: by getting rid of internal discord and social evils such as alcoholism, educating themselves, taking over responsibility for Christian institutions from missions, Indianizing themselves culturally and working unobtrusively in local positions. Paul’s use of the term nishkama karma was obviously derived from the Bhagavad Gita, a religious text that became the ‘gospel’ of Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century. Religious reformers such as Swami Vivekananda also privileged this text, especially its recommendation of dedication to duty without aspiration for returns or rewards.893 Like most




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Hindus of the period, Paul translated karma as social service, but his translation of reward/phal was distinctive: the rewards to be abjured were political rights, especially those specific to a community. As a living model for Christian citizenship, Paul pointed to Gandhi. B. L. Rallia Ram, the Secretary of the AICIC in 1923, who was himself opposed to separate electorates,894 completely supported K. T. Paul’s ideas.895 Dr Asirvada Nadar, who had supported separate electorates in an earlier session, was forced to read a speech in which he admitted that separate electorates for the five Madras legislative assembly seats had led to great competition with the Catholics, with the result of the Protestants losing out completely. A committee was appointed, which included K. T. Paul, to liaise with the Madras Indian Christian Association and to address this problem. Dr Nadar was soundly scolded by B. L. Rallia Ram for suggesting that one of the ways out of the problem could be to reach an understanding with the Catholics. Rallia Ram insisted that communal electorates were evil and a failure. He said that a Protestant candidate had failed to be elected in Punjab because of the elections being run on ‘tribal lines’. He asked whether the

Figure 11



K.T. Paul


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Figure 12

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K.T. Paul with his family

Conference, after a political alliance with Catholics, would then also need alliances between Anglicans, Presbyterians and so on, and where such ‘divisionalism’ ended.

The effect of realpolitik: politics in Madras presidency In spite of ideological changes in the AICIC’s top leadership, communal electorates gained a life of their own, especially in the Madras Presidency, where Indian Christians had five seats in the Legislative Council based on communal electorates, which were largely monopolized by Catholics of the Justice Party.896 This made for a strange combination of high noble political language and foot-shuffling following of Catholic political strategies, until the dominance of the Congress and the pressure of all-India politics was able to negate the regional effects of Madras politics, at least for Christians. In 1926, the AICIC discussed the problem of separate electorates, especially the fact that Catholics had taken four of the five Christian seats in Madras. The conference managed to attract a successful Catholic Congress (Swarajist) candidate, Arokiaswamy Mudaliar,897 who was opposed to




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the Justice Party but not to separate electorates. His suggestion was that Protestants reach an understanding with the Catholics to share the Christian constituencies.898 The conference was hideously divided, some suggesting separate electorates, some general electorates with reserved seats, and conveying the feeling that most did not feel any principled difference about these two methods any more. The Catholics’ success kept alive the hope that separate electorates could be an attractive strategy, but, on the other hand, the Catholic successes also made the Protestants wonder whether they would ever gain a toehold in competition with the Catholics. Even the Re-thinking group was divided, Chenchiah being alone in suggesting that Christians merge completely with the general electorate and align with some mainstream political party and Chakkarai being vehemently opposed to this. The matter was too fraught to be settled in one meeting, and in the second one, in a rather blunt message, the President of the United Provinces Indian Christian Association, J. M. David, expressed the hope that ‘YMCA views’ would not prevail at the conference. ‘Spectacular YMCA views are one thing’, he said, ‘and practical politics and preservation of one’s very existence another.’899 In the end, it was decided, in view of the upcoming Statutory Commission (famously boycotted by the Congress for not including any Indian members), that while separate electorates had given rise to grave problems in Madras, with an increase in the number of seats reserved for Christians (10 in Madras, four in all legislative councils and four each in the Imperial Legislative Council and Council of States), and an electorate consisting of Christians with ‘nonMuhammadans’, better results may follow. Obviously, Protestant politicians felt they could woo disinterested Hindu voters better than Catholics. Meanwhile, things continued in the YMCA direction at the national level. Dr S. K. Datta, educated in medicine at Edinburgh, lecturer in biology in Forman Christian College Lahore (later principal) and YMCA National Secretary, was in 1923–6 the only Indian Christian in the Imperial Legislative Assembly.900 From this period onwards, we can see two distinct sections of Christian political leadership who were successful at different political levels. At the national level, where Christians had little chance of pushing through any substantial demand for separate electorates, the ‘YMCA’ types like K. T. Paul and S. K. Datta were gaining more and more prominence by gaining the confidence of the nationalist leaders. At the provincial level, especially Madras, Catholic electoral success left Protestant leaders ambivalent, hoping that separate electorates could yet be strategically used to advantage.



The Simon Commission 1928: Christians as a community without caste On 28 November 1928, the AICIC made a deputation to give evidence in front of the Indian Statutory Commission chaired by Sir John Simon, set


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up to consider the possibility and practicability of further constitutional reforms in India. The members of this deputation included B. L. Rallia Ram; K. L. Rallia Ram; Revd J. C. Chatterji, Pastor of St Stephen’s Church Delhi (under the Cambridge Mission to Delhi) and nominated member of the Imperial Legislative Assembly; S. C. Mukerji, the old AICIC stalwart and nominated member of the Bengal Legislative Council; and Ahmad Shah, member of the United Provinces Legislative Council. Most of the evidence consisted of meticulous calculations about the size of the Christian community, its divisions, and what part of these the AICIC may be said to represent, and how many seats, therefore, should be granted to Indian Christians in various provincial assemblies and in the Imperial Legislative Assembly and Council of State.901 The deputation declared ‘Christians’ to be opposed to separate electorates and willing to take their chance in the general electorates when in the distant future this might be politically viable. For the present, however, given that separate electorates were likely to persist, they demanded that Christians should have separate electorates to elect members to a few reserved seats in every province and an indirect method of electing three members to the Imperial Legislative Assembly. They also claimed a greater proportion of seats than their proportion in the population, according to the principle of ‘weightage’ which had been accepted for Muslims. However, at Madras, a separate deputation was made by the Indian Christian Association, established in 1888, and the oldest provincial organization affiliated to the AICIC. The deputation, led by Paul Appaswamy (father of the Oxford theologian), and including Dr Nadar, repudiated its own memorandum, submitted earlier, in which it had asked for reserved seats in a general electorate. Revealing intense negotiations that must have preceded this volteface, Appaswamy said that he had been ‘instructed’ to ask for communal electorates, with a creative solution for the persistent Protestant humiliation before the Catholics: each Christian constituency in Madras should elect two Christian candidates, one Catholic and one Protestant.902 While this solution was approved by the commissioners, other claimants to special representation, especially the co- opted Muslim members, concerned about their own ‘weighted’ share in the face of such claims, expressed less than full respect for the Christian claim. During the AICIC’s deputation at Delhi, for example, Dr Abdulla Suhrawardy, member of the All India Muslim Conference, asked, ‘Is it out of jealousy and envy of the Mohamedans or because they have any special interest to protect that they are asking for special representation? If they have any special interests, what are they?’903 This was no more than mild bickering in the charged context we are talking about, but it showed that the claim of Christians to separate representation was not something that was automatically acceptable to other Indian politicians, including those convinced of the value of the device for themselves. It was




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on the issue of defining the ‘Christian’ constituency itself that the Christian deputation underwent the most serious questioning. At Delhi, the AICIC was asked whether the Catholics, who formed at least half the number of Indian Christians (the exact proportion was disputed), should not be designated as a separate constituency. Although the AICIC deputation strenuously opposed it, their opinion was somewhat devalued by the fact that the AICIC had very few Catholic members. On the other hand, the ICA’s pragmatic alliance with the Catholics was much appreciated, because it appeared to the British statesmen to represent social reality more accurately, one not obfuscated by liberal optimism. Here we definitely see at work a distinct twentieth-century imperial imagination, in which political representation was an extension of the classification and enumeration processes of imperial government. In the next section, we shall see how such a governmental imagination made the ‘YMCA’ views, even when present at the highest levels of negotiation, practically inaudible until political independence. On the other hand, not all social distinctions were deemed worthy of separate political representation. In a period when the ‘Non-Brahmins’ and ‘Depressed Classes’ were emphatically claiming separate political constituencies, the constitutional description of Christians remained a tricky issue. The question was framed thus: should members of the depressed classes, who had become Christian, be considered Christians or Depressed Classes for electoral purposes? Such a question deeply embarrassed all hues of the Christian leadership; Protestants in general alleged that the maintenance of caste distinctions within the Church was primarily a failing of the Roman Catholics, especially those of south India. Revd J. S. C. Chatterji, member of the AICIC Delhi deputation, struck the first jarring note by saying that although Christianity might not recognize caste, many people continued to view converts from lower castes in the same light as before, implying that their social position remained the same. Chatterji had sufficient experience to speak, having worked as pastor for the St Stephen’s parish in Delhi which had grown mostly out of the Chamar biradaris of Daryaganj. Dr Suhrawardy thought this was a devious argument; in his opinion, ‘The moment a depressed class Hindu becomes a Christian, he acquires the right of the Christian community and there is no doubt that he ceases to be a member of the depressed class.’ This was backed up by other AICIC delegates; both S. C. Mukerji (the supporter of separate electorates) and B. L. Rallia Ram (their opponent) asserted that there was no such thing as an Indian Christian depressed class.904 However, it appeared that there was, in so far as there was a delegation of Christian Depressed Classes that met the Commission in Madras, demanding separate representation.905 Their testimony was considerably undercut by the man who could have added a great deal of weight on their side – Bishop V. S. Azariah. Azariah, himself of dalit background and the bishop of an essentially dalit diocese, expressed doubt that political representation




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could ameliorate the very real deprivations that dalits continued to face as Christians. In his opinion, special administrative provisions for cheap or free education and access to jobs were likely to be a much more effective solution to such a problem. In another context he complained, in a spirit similar to that of J. S. C. Chatterji, about the inequity of depriving dalit Christians of special scholarships merely on grounds that they were Christian.906 Azariah was opposed to separate electorates for Christians as a political device; he felt that this would only exacerbate the existing divisions in Indian society.907 His recent biographer has demonstrated that his political views on representation emerged from his vision of Christianity as an expanding, universal church rather than a finite set of persons defined by birth.908 In the 1930s, then, the emerging consensus among Indian political leaders, Christian as well as non- Christian, as well as British statesmen, was that the separate political representation of dalit Christians was both impractical and unnecessary, as opposed to possible administrative arrangements for extending to them special resources granted to the Depressed Classes. As we shall see, the paternalist view on which the first decision was based was bound to cancel the possibility of the latter, even though there were many Indian Christian leaders (such as Azariah) who were themselves committed to social justice. The emergence of Christians as a ‘religious community’ was premised on the suppression of their demographic reality as a largely dalit group of people.

The Round Table Conferences 1930–2 and the Protestant–Catholic Divide In the meanwhile, the validity of separate electorates in general underwent further evaluation. Even though Catholic and Protestant leaders in Madras appeared to have produced a pragmatic solution for adequate and mutually amicable representation for both sects, the political ideology over which Paul had created such a fuss, viz. the ideology of the disinterested Christian citizen, undemanding of political privileges (or protection), was there to stay, especially since Paul represented the dominant trend among the panIndian Protestant leadership. Since the Simon Commission and its recommendations failed to resolve the political stalemate in India, a higher level of negotiations ensued in the form of the Round-Table Conferences. There were two Christian delegates to the first Round Table Conference: K. T. Paul for the Protestants and A. T. Pannirselvam for the Catholics. Pannirselvam was about as distant from K. T. Paul as one could be; a landowner in Tanjore, he was an active Justicite, opposed to the Congress and firmly in support of separate electorates.909 He was obviously also more successful in elections than Paul, having won a legislative council seat from the Madura-Ramnad Christian constituency. As opposed to this, Paul, true to his views about




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community and nation, had chosen to contest the university seat in the Madras Legislative Council from the Salem general constituency in July 1930 and lost,910 after which he was nominated to represent the Christians in the Round-Table Conference. The first conference was largely a failure given its boycott by the Congress as well as the Muslim League. K. T. Paul spoke briefly, asserting the value of his community to the Indian nation because of the educational and medical services it rendered. In return, he did not ask for anything more than protection against unmerited suffering by valuable individuals.911 Paul died from sudden illness, and his place was taken in the second session by Dr S. K. Datta. Datta was active in the negotiations that exploded on the sidelines of the conference in trying to break the deadlock created by Gandhi’s complete refusal to accept separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, as demanded by Dr B. R. Ambedkar, as well as most of the Muslim demands. Datta declared himself in sympathy with Gandhi most of the time: privately, he observed that Ambedkar was truculent and the Muslims scheming. It is not surprising then that Pannirselvam monopolized the role of claiming separate representation for Christians in the round-table conferences. In the vital informal meeting of all minority leaders with Gandhi on 2 October 1931, it was Pannirselvam (whom Datta nicknamed ‘Pennsylvania’) who claimed to represent the Indian Christian ‘minority’. Datta did not even bother to paraphrase the arguments in his notes but observed that he disagreed with all of them. Datta’s grounds were that as a ‘voluntary’ he would protest against being clubbed with and forced to vote in a religious community and that class, not community, was the basis of social interests: that the majority of Christians were labourers and had nothing to gain from electorates separate from other labourers. But he was forced to admit that in view of the Congress conceding the demands of the Muslims and the Sikhs, such arguments became difficult to sustain.912 During the Informal Sub- Committee of Minorities Meeting on 5 October, Pannirselvam had clearly worked out his demands: he wanted separate electorates, reservation of 7 per cent of the Madras legislative council seats for Indian Christians using ‘weightage’, and weightage worth three times the proportion of Christian population in India to secure adequate representation in the Indian Legislative Assembly. Datta did not say much but kept repeating that although he did not like such things in view of the unfairness of the Anglo-Indian and European community’s demands, similar demands by Indian Christians were inevitable.913 Datta started losing ground fast: although he received some encouraging cables from the Nationalist Christian Students of Bombay supporting his stand against communal electorates,914 he had failed to do much even for the liberal Protestants that he represented. J. D. Asirvatham wrote to him as a long-time member of the National Missionary Society, urging that he push the Prince of the Rewa state to remove restrictions on the NMS’s mission to


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Some of the statements made by the Congress representative and the attitude of the Indian National Congress towards the vital needs of the minority interests make it imperative that I should re-state my case on behalf of the Indian Christians ... The Christians are, after all, the third largest religious community in India, numerically much superior to the Sikhs. The social and economic condition of the Christians, and the fact that they are scattered about the country, make it essential that their representation should be through a separate electorate of their own. Reservation of seats in a joint electorate is impracticable in their case, and would hardly safeguard or serve their interests. I claim, therefore, on behalf of the Indian Christian community, that, in addition to the elemental right to profess, practice, and act up to the teachings of their religion, they should be given the right of representation through a separate electorate in the various legislative bodies of the new constitution, and that they should be given such other privileges and rights as may be conceded to the other minority communities in India.917 He knew his constituency, because, at the same time, Datta read in the Madras Weekly Mail articles titled ‘Indian Christians and “Swaraj” ’, ‘Not Disposed to Submit to Hindu Domination’ and ‘Britain’s Guarantee to Minorities’. George Thomas, President of the Catholic Indian Association, expressed full confidence in Rao Bahadur Pannirselvam and deplored Gandhi’s partiality towards Muslims and Sikhs and refusal to consider the Christians.918 Catholics and Justicites were far from Datta’s world in any case. Much more alarmingly, he started losing his toehold in the kind of high-flying international (mostly European) community with which he was most used to interacting. The Royal Institute of International Affairs, of which Datta was a long-time member, refused to let him speak at a meeting aimed at discussing the minorities problem, if he would not agree to speak as a representative of Indian Christians. An appalled Datta wrote to Stanley Reed, Chairman, that he could certainly address the issue of the minorities problem, but to ask him to speak as an Indian Christian was anathema to his views. He saw the invitation as symptomatic of British prejudice, exemplified by an Eton schoolboy who introduced Gandhi to a school meeting as representative of the ‘Hindu point of view’. In spite of all his protests in


tribals in the state.915 Datta wrote back saying that given the difficult situation he could not raise the matter.916 Pannirselvam, on the other hand, did not find it embarrassing to raise the issue of freedom to propagate one’s religion; to the Minorities Committee Second Report, he added a memorandum saying:


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against such compulsory ethnicization, Datta was dropped from the seminar’s programme, fuming.919 Addressing a conference of missionary societies on 26 October 1931, Datta insisted that the Indian Christian demand only consisted of protection against discrimination but had to mention that Pannirselvam had drawn up a charter in which he explicitly demanded the right to convert. One suspects that even to Protestant missionaries and their sympathizers, Pannirselvam made more sense than Datta.920 On the other hand, Datta engaged himself in high-level negotiations: meeting the British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald and the Chancellor and acting as an intermediary in alliance with the India Conciliation Group to arrange an informal meeting in Oxford at the home of the Master of Balliol College, A. Lindsay, between Gandhi, British statesmen and minority leaders. Although the meeting did take place, nothing came of it. Datta then learnt that Pannirselvam had done his own negotiations, and that a meeting of minority leaders had taken place on 1 November 1931, from which Datta had been excluded. He wrote a very angry letter to Pannirselvam (and took care to spell his name wrong), threatening him wildly of embarrassment in public. He ended on a pious note saying that they could work together even if they did not agree but obviously scotched all chances of this really happening by saying that a small minority such as theirs had the best chance of freedom and self- expression in not forgetting to cooperate with other communities.921 Pannirselvam responded civilly enough, saying that he was sorry if any action of his appeared as if he was not cooperating with Datta. He explained that since Datta had pronounced himself against making any special demands for any community, he saw no point in inviting him for a discussion in which he meant to find common ground with the Muslims. He invited Datta for another meeting,922 for which Datta forgot to turn up but wrote to Pannirselvam not to commit himself to any kind of agreement with the Muslims, because the groups Datta represented in India would be very resentful of this.923 Among those groups that Datta officially represented, there were detractors: H. D. David, Secretary of the United Provinces Provincial Christian Association and member of the United Provinces Legislative Council, wrote to him saying, ‘Your utterances as a member of the Minorities Committee as reported here has caused much anguish[?]924 to the community whose representative you profess to be.’ Christians, David went on to say, were crowded out of all the superior jobs, and Datta should know at least for the Punjab that they had no land rights either. Therefore, Christians needed their rights protected in the legislatures and the services. He finished off saying:



The AICIC after vacillating has firmly given its mandate for separate electorates ... in all justice you are bound to do the same. Allow me to appeal to you not to ruin the cause of Indian Christians by harping on the monotone of ‘nationalism’. SO long as you fullheartedly cooperate


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In spite of these criticisms, S. K. Datta, the YMCA man, pronounced himself opposed to separate electorates and in total support of Gandhi. In the tense negotiations during these conferences, his stance undermined his claim of representing a minority community and arguing on its behalf. His arguments of liberal status-neutral citizenship were simply inaudible to a British audience intent on refereeing the communal disputes of India. Even a sizable section of Indian Christians, including Protestants, felt that by insisting on impractical ideals, Datta had failed to bargain effectively for the community. The situation would be completely reversed in the next 15 years, with the rise of the Congress in India’s government and a total alteration of the political context, when it would emerge that Datta had placed the Protestant leaders in the winning camp.

The rise of the Congress and the rise of the ‘YMCA-types’, 1937–47 Things were turned around with the electoral landslide in favour of the Congress in 1937, allowing it to form ministries in eight of the 11 provinces, Punjab and Bengal being the significant exceptions.926 In Madras, thus so far a Justice Party stronghold, a Congress ministry was formed under C. Rajagopalachariar.927 Now the old Catholic strategy suddenly lost legitimacy, even among Indian Christians of Madras. The separate electorates for Christians continued, but one needed a Congress ticket to contest successfully. At this time, several important Catholic Justicites made their shift into the Congress, such as C. J. Varkey.928 Even if this were an attempt to make best use of the contemporary political institutions to pursue Catholic interests, as Mallampalli suggests, working under the Congress manifesto involved redefining such group interests to avoid conflict with the broader nationalist programme. The all-India Protestant leaders had much greater experience at such negotiations, which explains why they emerged as national leaders of Christians, immediately prior to independence. Studying the political careers of Protestant Congress party members, elected to the Constituent Assembly (1946–9), shows how long-standing interests and agendas of Protestant leaders fitted with those of the ruling party at a crucial time in India’s history. Three of the most politically successful Christians immediately after India’s independence were from three corners of India: John Matthai was an Anglican from Kerala, with close family ties with Syrian Christians,929 Harendra Coomar Mookerjee was a Bengali Christian of Brahman


with Rao Bahadur Pannir selvam and with Sir Gidney, Sir Carr ... we pretty [sic] believe that you cannot go far wrong and give us cause to complain of your marring the rights, privileges and aspirations of the Indian Christian community.925


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genealogy,930 and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was the daughter of the Christian prince of Kapurthala, Raja Sir Harnam Singh.931 The selection represented a wide range of cultural backgrounds, but there were also patterns of similarity in their careers. Two of them were academics: Harendra Coomar was lecturer in English at Calcutta University, and John Matthai an economist with a doctorate from the London School of Economics who later taught at the Madras University. Harendra Coomar contested elections in 1937 and won his seat as representative of Indian Christians to the Bengal Legislative Assembly.932 He was also elected president of the AICIC in that year and continued to hold the top offices in that organization in the following decade.933 In the election pamphlets he composed for the Congress in 1945–6 he underlined those programmes of the Congress which best accorded with the Christian social reform/uplift agenda. Prohibition, for instance, occupied a disproportionately large space in his description of the non-political achievements of the Congress and of its service to India’s ‘masses’. ‘Village uplift’, including uplift of Harijans,934also fitted comfortably with popular Protestant efforts at rural education and village improvement which were flourishing in the twentieth century.935 In both cases, he made no reference to Christian doctrines but presented them as issues of general relevance, supported by Muslim and Hindu principles. When the Constituent Assembly was formed in 1946 he was elected member of the Advisory Committee936 and Vice-President of the House without opposition.937 Matthai did not have to face the hurly-burly of politics to prove his commitment to the nationalist cause, but his future position as the first finance minister of independent India drew as much on his qualifications as his specialization: village development. His Ph.D. was on indigenous forms of local self-government in India, worked under the supervision of the Fabian historian Sidney Webb.938 On his return to India he worked as personal assistant to the Registrar of Co- operative Societies in Madras and then as Assistant Registrar, 1918–20, which was a period of phenomenal growth of cooperatives in Madras. His next job was that of Professor of Economics in the Madras University, when he became associated with the YMCA Madras, where his speeches won the attention of the Governor Lord Willingdon. Nominated to the Madras Legislative Council, from 1922 to 1925, he usually voted with the Government. In 1925 he shot to prominence for his skills, by being appointed member of the Indian Tariff Board. His concern for development, particularly rural development, and his economist’s expertise, won him an uncontested position as Finance Minister in the Interim Government in 1946, with the rare distinction of both the Congress and Muslim League supporting him. He also became member of the Constituent Assembly and, later, Finance Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet. Matthai’s career suggests that it was not necessarily a record of nationalist involvement that secured a Christian representative’s




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position in independent India: in fact, his bland political past secured him against controversy.939 Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was socially the highest placed of the three Indian Christian members, and she was also the closest to the Congress, having been Gandhi’s personal secretary for 14 years and a core worker since the days of the civil disobedience movement. It was her social rather than religious background that initially hindered her political interests: her brothers refused to let her join the Congress for several years, and even when they did she found wearing khadi940 too harsh a demand on her.941 From here she moved on to a close personal relationship with Gandhi942 and helped organize khadi-spinning associations in the Punjab. Her pet causes were women’s emancipation, health and education, all of which fitted under the rubric of ‘uplift’, and in that shape they had Gandhi’s support. Her political programme therefore represented all these issues as general national concerns. As President of the All India Women’s Conference, she denounced the Communal Award and separate electorates for women in 1932. Nehru later applauded her for moving on from the movement for women’s independence to national independence, since Indian women (said Nehru) could be free only when their country was. As for religion, co-workers at Sevagram did not always realize that Kaur was Christian.943 Underlining her concept of universal ethical religion, she urged in her convocation address at the Lady Irwin College, Delhi, which she had co-founded: ‘I would have you remember that women must be true to religion, not the religion of ritual and dogma but to the religion that warms the heart, that lights the faith and tempers justice with mercy in the affairs of man.’944 Her enthusiasm for a cooperative rather than conflictive social vision and her non-sectarian approach to religion, combined with her being a woman and a Christian, made her a suitable icon of Congress’s liberalism. A member of the Indian parliament for over a decade, she was also a minister holding the portfolio of health for 10 years.945 These Christian parliamentarians were all laypersons, unconnected with any church or mission organization, middle to upper class, highly educated and committed to programmes of social reform within the genre of the uplift of the poor. Such altruistic paternalism made them ideal Congress candidates, especially given their religion and their non-sectarian approach to politics. These Christian leaders had achieved their political prominence in alignment with the Congress, and even if they had utilized separate electorates themselves, they had done so with the Congress’s support. Immediately after independence, the culmination of the Congress’s longstanding policy and the removal of the Muslim League with the formation of Pakistan made the abolition of separate electorates inevitable. The prominent Protestant Christian leaders, assured of their position in public life, were willing to accede in their abolition in continuation of their own principles and in support of the Congress.




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John Matthai, who was a minister in the Interim Government in 1946, was elected President of the AICIC in 1947. In his presidential speech he urged that the foremost responsibility of Christians, in pursuit of their religious ideal, was to lead in national service, especially in resolving communal conflicts and in alleviating poverty. Denying that Indian Christians had until then contributed inadequately to the nationalist movement, he pointed to their non-political nationalist activities, such as freeing the Indian church from foreign domination. In the independent Indian nation, he insisted, Christians had no cause for concern, since they did not demand any additional privileges, beyond protection from discrimination which was due to all citizens. With particular reference to the question of freedom to propagate one’s religion, he acknowledged with concern some movements to restrict this but hoped that the national leaders would not deny such a basic religious right to Christians.946 Matthai, Mookerjee and Kaur were three of the eight Christian members of the Constituent Assembly of India, formed under the Cabinet Mission plan in 1946, and they were undoubtedly the most prominent politically. Each of them was converted in favour of joint electorates long before 1946 and, hence, contributed little on this issue beyond urging their abolition in the name of the nation and secularism. This did not mean that all Indian Christians, or even all Indian Protestants unanimously supported such a position. The AICIC itself regretted that the Minorities Advisory Committee of the Constituent Assembly included very few Christians, and that those were all of the same point of view.947 Undoubtedly this was accurate criticism, but in the political context, the attitudes of these three Christian leaders were those most likely to receive broad political support and to secure sufficient moral and bargaining power to carry the vexed question of freedom to preach. The approach of the Constituent Assembly to separate electorates changed rapidly after the formation of Pakistan; communal politics was in disrepute after the tremendous dislocation and suffering incident upon Partition. In 1947–8, seats were still reserved in parliament for minority members, to be elected by separate electorates. In particular, the demands of the Sikhs had been conciliated, allegedly as compensation for their suffering during the partition of Punjab. In 1949, all this was rescinded, when Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel recommended the abolition of all separate electorates in the Report of the Advisory Committee on Minorities. There was practically no political opposition to this proposal, and the sole critic, a member of the rump Muslim League, was shouted down with accusations of having caused the partition of the country. As for the issue of reservation of seats in parliament, government offices and educational institutions, given the strength of the Depressed Classes


Christians in the Constituent Assembly, 1946–8


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movement, this was also inevitable. However, the liberal Hindu leadership, in continuation of Gandhi’s approach from the 1930s, did its best to depict such measures as part of the necessary reform of the Hindu community. Predating the Presidential Order of 1950 which declared that Scheduled Caste status would only be available to members of the Hindu community, all other religious groups were told by the Constituent Assembly that they could not claim such status. This was particularly relevant to Sikhs, who had so far been able to claim Scheduled Caste status, as an explicit political concession. For Christians, this was no news, since even during the proceedings of the Simon Commission the Indian Christian leaders had asserted that once a person became Christian he or she ceased to be of the Depressed Classes. During the Constituent Assembly debates, Christian members gloried in the fact that they asked for no special privileges, and from this basis even criticized compensatory discrimination as anti-national. H. C. Mookerjee said that the masses of India needed food, shelter, medical aid and good roads, not political reservations, such demands arising from the ambitious middle- to upper- class persons alone. He acquiesced in the House’s decision to reserve seats in Parliament for Scheduled Castes with reluctance, urging that this measure should be limited by time.948

Civil rights for political: the negotiation of a ‘deal’ in the Constituent Assembly Scholars and activists studying the legal history of Christians in postcolonial India often cite the animated and often vicious discussions that took place during the debates over what became Articles 25 to 30 of the Constitution, which guarantee to the Indian citizen the fundamental right to freedom of religion. Of these, Article 25 confers the right to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practise and propagate religion. This law was born without the provision ‘propagate’ in the report that the Advisory Committee, with its Sub- Committee on Fundamental Rights and on Minorities, submitted to the Assembly on 3 April 1947. At this stage, one of the Catholic members of the Assembly, Mariadas Rathnaswami, noted that Christianity and Islam were proselytizing religions and hence permission to propagate their faith according to their tenets should be added. During the debate on 21 and 22 April 1947, eminent Hindu politicians, including the veteran Congressman C. Rajagopalachari, expressed their objections. A Muslim Congressman, Tajamul Husain, proposed that the expression should be modified to ‘practise religion privately’ since religion was a ‘private affair’ not to be interfered with preaching or propagation. From a Hindu nationalist point of view, Lokanath Misra asserted that the propagation of religion had caused the partition of India into two nations and that the ancient faith of Hinduism had to be preserved from the hostile incursions of Islam and




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the devious ones of Christianity. On the other hand, liberal Hindus such as Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra from Bengal argued that it was unjust to associate a frenzy of proselytizing work with the Christian community in India and that every community in India should have the right to propagate its own religion. In the end, the vote was for retaining the phrase ‘propagate’, although the impression one gets is that of a pragmatic deal rather than a principled agreement. K. M. Munshi, also member of the Sub- Committee on Minorities, said that having been party from the beginning to the negotiations with the minorities, he knew that the Indian Christian community laid greatest emphasis on ‘propagation’, not because they wished to convert people aggressively but because it was a ‘fundamental part of their tenets’. Given that Christians had relinquished the demand for separate electorates, it was certainly their due that this harmless constitutional provision be granted them.949 Christians then, became a ‘minority’ community defined by its ‘religious tenets’ rather than its social reality, and this was the view of human association that resonated with the political culture of ‘Indian secularism’ which was being formally expressed in the new constitution.

Conclusion The attitudes of the Indian Christian leaders in the Constituent Assembly were not merely symptomatic of their toeing the Congress line but reflective of the manner in which the dominant section of the community’s leadership conceived of their social identity and their position within the larger Indian community. This section of the leadership, which was largely Protestant, and of upper- caste and upper- class background, was connected in an intellectual and familial genealogy to nineteenth-century personages who chose Christianity as the best form of reformed Indian religion and the best inspiration for an ideal social order. This ‘reformist’ ideology, shared across religious communities, especially with Hindu leaders, meshed with ideologies of national identity defined by a common racial, cultural and intellectual heritage. Culture and ideology of course shaded into religion; the fact that this section of Christians was able to comfortably fit itself into nationalist ideology has to be at least partly attributed to their theological efforts from the nineteenth century. Such doctrinal creativity has to be related, in turn, with the community’s internal conflicts of authority, especially the need of the Indian Christians to claim their religion and their church as their own, eliminating the tutelage of European and American missionaries. Given such views of religious and national identity, the political position taken by Indian Christian leaders in the Constituent Assembly makes perfect sense. Asking for political and economic concessions on the basis of communal identity was anathema to persons who saw themselves not as


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spokespersons of a limited social group alone but as pre- eminent servants of the nation. Demands for the unfettered right to preach Christianity, on the other hand, was not a lapse into communal politics; this section of liberal, public-minded Christians continued to believe that Christian faith, as conceived of by them, was their inspiration for national service, and that such faith could benefit the whole nation. These attitudes were not in the least universal among all Indian Christians, not even among all Protestants. As we have seen in the debates within the AICIC, right up to 1947, many Indian Christians subscribed to a different concept of social identity, one that emphasized a distinct and stable group, defined by confession and in need of political and economic protection as a minority. That such other sections of Christian leadership would prove unsuccessful in leading and representing the community was not inevitable, nor obvious to participants in the political dramas of the 1920s and 1930s. It was the broader political context, which included the ascendance of the Congress and the delegitimation of ‘ethnic’ politics with the formation of Pakistan that determined the rise of Christians who defined their community as disinterested servants of the nation.




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Conclusion

In 1977, India elected its first non- Congress government, a Janata Party-led coalition, which appointed as Prime Minister Morarji Desai, a long-time Congressman disenchanted with Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial regime. The Prime Minister appointed a new Cabinet Secretary (the senior-most civil servant of the country), a man called N. K. Mukarji. This man, as we know, was the son of the erstwhile principal of St Stephen’s College, S. N. Mukarji. In the month of December in the same year, Mukarji came to know that the annual meeting of governors of all the states had been arranged on the days of 25 and 26 December. On learning this, Mukarji approached the Prime Minister, attempting to dissuade him from holding the conference on Christmas Day. When the Prime Minister refused to alter plans, Mukarji suggested that the choice of day might send a ‘wrong signal to minorities’. The Prime Minister remained unconvinced, pointing out that a Cabinet meeting had been held on the day of Diwali (the most important festival among Hindus in north India). Mukarji pointed out that this event had been a mere informal gathering but when his technical arguments failed to work he was forced to reveal the personal angle, requesting to be excused from attending the conference, since he had to go to church with his family. Desai was completely taken aback, and, after asking ‘Are you a Christian?’ and learning that Mukarji was, hastily agreed to the request. The matter did not, however, end here. The next day, after official work, Desai asked Mukarji, ‘Why are you a Christian?’ Mukarji, by this time somewhat affronted, replied that he was Christian for the same reason that Desai was a Hindu. When an explanation was demanded, he elaborated, ‘I was born in a Christian home and was, therefore, brought up to be a Christian. You were born in a Hindu home and are, therefore, a devout Hindu. If it had been the other way round, I dare say, you would have been a believing Christian and I a devout Hindu.’ The next day, the Prime Minister was still dissatisfied, and decided to delve further, ‘Tell me, why were your parents Christian?’ Mukarji responded that they were Christian for the same reason that Desai’s parents were Hindu. Mukarji was due for further interrogation,


The ‘Crime’ of Conversion and Other Historical Curiosities

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10.1057/9780230298088 - The Making of Indian Secularism, Nandini Chatterjee 9780230_220058_11_con.indd 240

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for, on the fourth day the Prime Minister was determined to get to the root of the matter and asked why the ‘original converts’ in Mukarji’s ancestry had embraced Christianity. Finally running out of discretion, Mukarji said, ‘Morarjibhai, how do you expect me to know? I was not around then. On one side, I am at least a fourth, if not a fifth generation Christian. I believe that my parents became Christian out of deep conviction.’ Noting that the Prime Minister continued to look puzzled, Mukarji felt called upon to create a reason and a history for his faith: Please recall that there was a period before and after the year 1800 when Bengal’s intellectual intelligentsia was thrown in a ferment by the impact of western rationalism, and a little later by the introduction of Christian ideas. A disenchantment came about with the state of Hindu society at the time. This exhibited itself in the thinking of people like Rammohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen, who founded the Brahmo Samaj. Also, there was the reformist movement of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. Some of those caught up in this ferment, and the consequent disenchantment, turned to Christianity. The most well-known name amongst them was the poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt. I suppose my forefathers were also in this lot. But he also felt that he was entitled to ask, ‘Why, may I ask you, are you questioning me in this way? Has my being Christian affected our work relationship? Is it going to affect it now that you know that I am a Christian?’ To which the Prime Minister responded, to his credit, ‘No, no, not at all. We shall not discuss this matter any further.950

Secularism, ‘Indian secularism’ and the ideal religious self There is much about this exchange that is representative of the culture of ‘Indian secularism’ and also of the public persona of the kind of Indian Christians who acquired positions of eminence within the modern Indian public sphere, inflected by this culture. In his reluctance to claim ‘special privileges’, in his subscription to a history that explained religious change in terms of social reform and in his representation of his Christian ancestors as of a piece with leaders of mainstream (Hindu) society rather than as members a beleaguered minority, Mukarji revealed himself to be the kind of Indian Christian who successfully claimed a prominent position within the modern Indian polity. At the same time, as Mukarji found out as a senior civil servant, there were limits to the efficacy of this political idiom; his name, his demeanour and the ‘normalcy’ of which he was proud, appeared to many of his countrymen to be discordant with his religious self- description as Christian. He also found that the revelation of the very basics of a (non-Hindu) religious identity pushed him into the position of a


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member of a ‘minority’, forced to construct complex arguments in support of the ‘special’ privilege of spending time with his family at Christmas. And it is only a particular kind of explanation that was audible to people who asked such questions, for underlying the question, ‘Why are you a Christian?’ there was the expectation of only two possible answers: for faith, or for money, with overwhelming suspicion that the first was unlikely. All this is a commonly enough told story of India’s majoritarian leaning, with cultural expectations creating constraints that constitutional provisions attempted to remove in vain. To me, both sides of this exchange are significant and historically structured. Mukarji’s own effort to propose a third option, ‘For a new way of being in the world’ was inaudible to his interlocutor, who was historically trained to view the Indian Christian as the kind of creature that Mukarji the civil servant did not appear to be. Mukarji’s answer, on the other hand, was also socially conditioned: being well placed within the tradition of Indian Christian thought from the nineteenth century onwards, or, at least, within that strand of it which became dominant around the time when Mukarji entered his career as the last batch of the ‘heaven-born’ Indian Civil Service in 1943.951 In spite of their obvious differences of attitude towards issues of religious identity, social ethics and national belonging, Mukarji shared with his interlocutor the same model of the individuated, rationally deliberative religious self, even if to Desai the ‘choice’ of being Christian required special explanation. Following critiques of the liberal view of the self, I am led to look upon such a notion of the self as eminently ‘secular’ in the sense that it conceives of ‘faith’ as an affiliation which a pre- existing self deliberately acquires and which may therefore be isolated from other spheres of life, or even discarded.952 It is this model of subjectivity that lies at the base of arguably the most pervasive legal threat faced by Indian Christians today, the aspersion that they are either victims or perpetrators of forced or fraudulent religious conversions. While the constitution of India guarantees as a fundamental right the freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practise and propagate religion,953 this right is conditional upon the preservation of ‘public order, morality and health’, a premise that has allowed various states to create their own laws regulating conversion, all bearing euphemistic titles that declare their intent to protect the freedom of potential victims. The first such law was the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967, which made it a crime to convert, either directly or otherwise, any person from one religious faith to another by the use of force or by allurement or by any fraudulent means, or to abet such conversion (Section 3). The definitions provided in Section 2 make it clear that ‘force’ means, in the context of this law, not just physical injury but also threat of social excommunication and even ‘threat of divine displeasure’, which, if applied rigorously, could make religious preaching impossible. This is an obvious effort to use administrative harassment, actual or the threat of it, to prevent conversions without altering the


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constitutional provisions, a method that has striking parallels with methods used by the nineteenth- century Prussian state to prevent what it considered ill-advised conversions to Judaism.954 In this and other similar laws,955 the verb ‘convert’ is reoriented such that it assumes an active subject (the potential criminal) who works on a passive object (the potential victim), the latter being the eventual ‘convert’ to Christianity (although, technically, any religion). ‘No person shall convert ... any person from one religious faith to another’ (Section 3). It is indeed revealing that the penalties for the crime defined by this law are higher if the victim is a minor, a woman or a member of Scheduled Castes or Tribes (Section 4). The free-willed subject who can ‘convert’ of his own accord rather than be ‘converted’ by others, is certainly gendered, but is also located in a distinctively Indian matrix of social hierarchy.

Defending detail: the analytical importance of ‘Indian secularism’ Noting that even at its most discriminatory or interventionist in matters religious the Indian state, endorsed by Indian political culture, is ‘secular’ in the sense utilized by the scholars cited above, is not however to abandon the argument made throughout this book: that it is equally important to understand how such ‘secularism’ is specifically expressed in the laws, institutions and ethics of particular countries. The particular legal form utilized in India by obvious majoritarians to restrain conversions out of the ‘normal’ religious identity derives from a specific legal history: it is not a coincidence that with a history of imperial prohibition of ‘proselytizing’ Malays, Malaysia now makes it practically impossible for a Malay, who is by default defined as a Muslim, to become anything else, as a woman called Lina Joy found when she attempted to remove the designation ‘Muslim’ from her identity card.956 In my estimation, a protagonist such as Ms. Joy (an relatively affluent urban- dwelling individual pursuing a test case without active opposition from her family) is unlikely to meet serious hindrances to choosing her religious designation in India; protagonists of her sort are not the potential spiritual victim with which the legal imagination of Indian anticonversion legislations are concerned. There were of course large regions of India formerly under political arrangements very similar to the Federated Malay states, and it is no coincidence, again, that the only anti-conversion laws in colonial India were in the princely states, namely the Raigarh State Conversion Act 1936, the Patna Freedom of Religion Act 1942, the Sarguja State Apostasy Act 1945 and the Udaipur State Anti- Conversion Act 1946. It is certainly worth investigating the connection between these regional legal traditions and the postcolonial laws that emerged from these very places. But there is more to the construction of conversion as a crime that one person commits on another. Within Indian political ethics, ‘conversion’ is


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in itself a dirty word, just as, legally, ‘to convert’ is potentially to commit a crime. Therefore Arun Shourie’s ‘explanation’ of the murder of Graham Staines and his sons focused on the apparently non-revolutionary discovery that a missionary was interested in encouraging others to adopt his religion.957 An unhappy corroboration of my argument that such a politicolegal ethic is shared across the board is Gladys Staines’s deposition in court that her murdered husband and the organization he worked for did not indulge in the conversion of people to Christianity.958 So here is a matter of both definition and explanation: I have underlined the specificities of ‘Indian secularism’ and have held back from testing it and grading it against any given ideal-typical model, as a past generation of scholars had done. I have done so because such models were often defined on the basis of inaccurate empirical assumptions about other places where situations much closer to theory were believed to prevail, assumptions which appear less and less credible given the research that has since occurred. But then I move into trickier methodological ground because, of course, my definition of what counts as part of ‘Indian secularism’ derives not simply from observation (i.e. issues most commonly cited in connection with that term) but also from analytical models dealing with secularism. If I think that the ‘secular’ is a recognizable notion, ‘secularism’ an identifiable political approach and ‘secularization’ a widely applicable, if not universal model of sociological analysis, how am to I hope to escape ranking India’s specific experience against what are essentially models? And, as I indicated at the outset, my job has not been made any easier by the fact that leading scholars disagree entirely among themselves about whether ‘secular’, ‘secularism’ and ‘secularization’ are all conceptually valid tools; some of the most important scholarship that has inspired this work readily recognizes secularism as a political ideology that is premised on the imagination of the secular, but argues that to attempt to observe ‘secularization’ at work objectively is inevitably a normative project.959 I must confess to not having the answers. But I do hope that I have demonstrated both the need for and the difficulties of understanding empirically, as much as analytically, the connection between religion and modernity. Putting its weight towards the empirical end, this story has traced the complex, contradictory and often unintended trajectory of a bundle of laws, political ethics and institutional cultures of dealing with religion that are distinctively modern and distinctively Indian. I have called this bundle ‘Indian secularism’ firstly because I wished to appropriate the irony of that common pejorative, and second because by doing so I am hinting at my methodology. I am expressing doubt in the scholarly belief that an articulate ideology of secularism (perhaps preceded by the notion of the secular) is the reason, or source, for ‘secular’ governmental policies adopted in colonial and postcolonial India, and therefore also of oppositional response to those policies. From my research, I find myself adopting the position that Indian secularism,


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both as the articulated political ideology and as the practised public culture, is largely shaped by a specific historical context. In contemporary India, public education largely excludes religion, the state extends uneven patronage and policing to different religious institutions, and personal laws thrive in spite of a civil law being available. I have argued that to understand such state policies it does not help to embark upon an intellectual history of the concept of secularism in Europe. This is in no way an effort to replace the European source of secularism with an Indian one but an effort to explain imperial legislation through a model of political competition, between individuals and groups, inevitably positioned unequally in terms of power. Of course, there is more to state policy than contemporary political competition; as we are taught in basic political theory, states are distinct from governments, and a state structure can endure even when governments of different political or religious ideologies inhabit them, accumulating sediments of laws, policies and bureaucratic and financial patterns which even a revolution cannot totally annihilate. Part of the intention of this book is to point to those imperial sediments that continue to structure Indian policy and politics long after political independence. Of course, ideology structures politics as much as does state policy. But in the context I studied I discovered that ‘ideology’, for most actors, meant very specific interpretations of equally specific legal situations, institutional imperatives and social interests. For missionary opponents of the ‘conscience clause’ in the late nineteenth century, for example, their spirited defence of their political rights extended no higher than the lofty imperial principle of ‘neutrality’, which they chose to interpret as a particular application of a particular legislation passed a few decades earlier. Similarly, the ‘ideology’ of supplanting mission by church, or ‘indigenization’, came to mean to a large number of paternalist missionaries the designation of separate realms of mission and church and retaining control over the large number of higher-paid and more powerful positions classified as ‘mission’. Naturally, opposition to such ideologies also used a similarly parochial vocabulary. It is within such parochiality that I have sought to discover the historical persons who made the most outstanding contribution to the shaping of ‘Indian secularism’: the Christians.

Caesar’s dues: the Indian history of a Christian doctrine Jesus’s succinct advice to would-be tax evaders has remained the subject of unremitting debate among theologians and political scientists alike, seeking within it the Christian doctrine of church–state relations. Let me make it clear that I do not think that ‘Christianity’ has any such particular doctrine, or let me put it this way: I do not find it useful to trace an intellectual genealogy of binary conceptions of the sacred and the profane from any


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proximate historical moment back to the moment reported by the Apostles. On the other hand, protagonists in my story did often do exactly that; they referred back to Jesus’s statement to legitimize their conception of the citizen’s relative duty towards the state as opposed to the church (or it may be community), or the subject’s claim of autonomy against state encroachment, or whatever may be the particular matter of religion, law and politics that they may have been exercised about. I have heard them, but I have not accepted their ahistorical explanation at face value. My construction of the story proceeded differently. In studying the peculiarities of contemporary Indian law, political culture and social religiosity, I have traced back the skein of historical connection from the postcolonial present into the colonial past, defying a number of historical landmarks: not just the apparently mind-blocking one of 1947 but also the academic consensus around 1857. Refusing to believe either that the postcolonial Indian polity was born at the moment of promulgation of its written constitution, or similarly that the humiliation of the ‘reformist’ British political lobby in 1857 led to total policy reversal, I have tried to see ‘Indian secularism’ as a historically constructed whole, including its apparent peculiarities, and to trace how exactly that whole was created through a continuous process of legal competition, legislation and amendments over a century and a half. In tracing the formation of such a state policy, I discovered an unusual group of protagonists: a body of people so numerically insignificant and so socially complex that it is easy (for them then and for us now) to represent one section of them as the whole and to forget the rest. These people, in referring to themselves or to their ideas, used the label ‘Christian’, and I found that they abounded in the history of the formation of ‘Indian secularism’. In explaining what they argued for, I have once again not found my refuge in the Bible (although they often explicitly did) but in the tortuous history of religious organization, racial divide, theological disputes and political competition. I have described how the demands of the British Evangelical Christian lobby set in motion legal developments, which were seized by other entities, including non- Christian Indians, and how, in subsequent generations, other Christians, both European and Indian, had to contend with their legal situation and compete politically to modify it to their own (currently perceived) benefit. In pursuing the social roots of these perceptions, the attachments to particular politically articulated principles, I have found a complex and dynamic world, fraught with intense racial conflicts occasioned by issues of authority, competence, religious doctrine, cultural idiom and social hierarchy. It has been my contention that the outstanding ‘Christian’ contribution to the formation of ‘Indian secularism’ was shaped by particularities of this divided and yet historically united experience. On the one hand, Indian Christians, principally conceived of by the state, missionary organizations


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and even themselves as ‘converts’ from other religious communities, provoked intense debate about practically every major ‘religious’ issue that agitated Indian politics from the early nineteenth century onwards. Whether it be the right of converts to inherit or the claim of Christian schools to public funds, debates about the ‘rights’ of Christians turned into debates over the legitimacy and extent of the state’s connection with religion on the one hand and the limits of sovereignty on the other. The historically contingent conclusions reached in these matters continue to distinguish ‘Indian secularism’ even today. Given the significance and prominence of these debates over law and state policy, much that is distinct about the positioning of religion in modern Indian society is actually cultural. One might say that if the laws and the debates over them represent the formal and articulate side of Indian secularism, the cultural side is implicit but even more widespread. This culture enables Indians to access Christian schools and other forms of ‘public service’ without being constrained by doctrinal considerations, often not perceiving any such conflict at all while subscribing to a pejorative view of the ‘Indian Christian’ as a distant and dismal creature. That such immense obtuseness can be so successful functionally has much to do with the manner in which Indian Christianity, or, shall we say, a particular set of successful Indian Christian leaders, defined and presented their faith and their identity in the public sphere of modern India. This approach consisted of a deliberate renunciation of doctrinal confrontation, of theological syncretism and political non-sectarianism, all of which derived as much from the ‘internal’ imperative for Indian Christian leaders to overcome the extended tutelage of European and American missionaries as their urge to present a ‘nationalist’ image to their non- Christian countrymen. What dues then did Caesar extract? Some might say that the peculiarly modern form of imperial domination by Britain over India led to the forcible extraction of an overwhelmingly large secular sphere, amenable to imperial government, while the residual sphere of the religious, also fossilized by decontextualization, was left to serve legitimization purposes for this peculiarly colonial-liberal regime. I have chosen to tell a different story. That Caesar could be Christian, and, as such, an equally extractive ruler, is not after all, much of a surprise for historians. Neither should it be a shock to learn that to be Christian can mean an awful lot of different things to different people, who may disagree violently with each other. What I have told here is the story of such diverse ways converging into a political identity, interacting with a regime that was the largest of the modern empires and whose complex legacy has been left to the post-colonial polity of India as ‘Indian secularism’.


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Christians* per 10,000 of population in India, 1881–1941

India (British India and Princely States) Provinces of British India Madras Bombay Bengal U.P. Punjab C.P. & Berar Princely States Cochin Tranvancore

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921

1931

1941

73

79

99

124

150

179

163

58

68

82

102

123

142

119

227 84 20 11 16 11

243 86 21 13 26 11

268 112 25 22 33 23

288 119 29 38 99 25

322 137 31 44 159 30

380 167 36 42 176 33

415 180 28 29 178 35

2,272 2,076

2,404 2,060

2,441 2,362

2,539 2,636

2,682 2,928

2,779 3,149

2,879 3,229

*Including Europeans and Anglo-Indians. Sources: Report on the Census of India, 1911 (Calcutta, 1913), pp. 142–3 (produces statistics 1881–1911). Report on the Census of India, 1941 (Delhi, 1943), pp. 102–3 (produces statistics 1901–41).


Appendix

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Notes

1. Report of the Justice D.P. Wadhwa Commission of Inquiry (1999), p. 124. 2. 94 per cent of the inhabitants of the district of Dangs are classified in the census as ‘Scheduled Tribes’, which is a constitutional category referring to those covered by the Schedule 5 of the Indian Constitution. 3. On the Dangs conflicts, see Paresh Choudhary, Satyakam Joshi et al., ‘Attacks on Christian community in Dangs’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34: 3/4 (16–29 January 1999), p. 66; Satyakam Joshi, ‘Tribals, missionaries and sadhus: understanding violence in the Dangs’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34: 37 (11–17 September 1999), pp. 2667–75. 4. Milind Ghatwai, ‘PM for debate on conversions’, Indian Express, 11 January 1999, o n l i n e e d i t i o n h t t p : // w w w. i n d i a n e x p r e s s . c o m / r e s / w e b / p I e / i e / daily/19990111/01150385.html last accessed 1 January 2009; Sukumar Muralidharan and Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, ‘Undermining India’, Frontline, 16: 3 (30 January–12 September 1999), online edition, http://www.hinduonnet.com/ fline/fl1603/16030040.htm, last accessed 1 January 2009. 5. Donald Eugene Smith, India as a secular state (Princeton, 1963). 6. In particular, Marc Galanter, ‘Secularism, East and West’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 7: 2 (1965), pp. 133–59. 7. Ashish Nandy, ‘The politics of secularism and the recovery of religious tolerance’, Alternatives, XIII (1988) in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its critics (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 321–44. A similar, but less nuanced argument was later made by T.N. Madan, ‘Secularism in its place’, Journal of Asian Studies, 46: 4 (1987), pp. 747–59. 8. I am referring to the Subaltern Studies series, begun in 1982; see Gyan Pandey, ‘In defense of the fragment: writing about Hindu-Muslim riots in India today’, Representations, 37 (Winter, 1992), pp. 27–55, for the ubiquity as well as opacity of such narratives. 9. Max Weber, Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, translated Talcott Parsons (London, 1930); for a recent history of secularization theory, see William H. Swatos Jr. and Kevin Christiano, ‘Secularization theory: the course of a concept’, Sociology of Religion, 60: 3 (1999), pp. 209–228. 10. Ernest Gellner, ‘The uniqueness of truth’ in his Anthropology and politics: revolutions in the sacred grove (Oxford, 1995), pp. 1–10. 11. Owen Chadwick, The secularization of the European mind in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 1–20. 12. Talcott Parsons, ‘Christianity and modern industrial society’ in Edward A. Tiryakian (ed.), Sociological theory, values and socio- cultural change: essays in honour of Pitirm A. Sorokin (New York, 1967), pp. 33–70. 13. Swatos Jr. and Christiano, ‘Secularization theory’, p. 213. 14. Talcott Parsons, ‘Some comments on the pattern of religious organization in the United States’ in Talcott Parsons, Structure and process in modern societies (New York, 1960), pp. 295–31. This view is expanded in more recent works, such as


Introduction

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15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

Notes R. Stephen Warner, ‘Work in progress towards a new paradigm for the sociological study of religion in the United States’, The American Journal of Sociology, 98: 5 (March, 1993), pp. 1044–93; Jeffrey K. Hadden, ‘Toward desacralizing secularization theory’, Social Forces, 65: 3 (March, 1987), pp. 587–611. Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization and the impotence of individualized religion’, Hedgehog Review, 8: 1–2 (Spring & Summer, 2006), pp. 35–45. Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and modernization: sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis (Oxford, 1992). For example, Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, London, 1992); Christopher Clark, The politics of conversion: missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995). Christopher Clark, ‘The limits of the confessional state: conversions to Judaism in Prussia 1814–1843’, Past and Present, 147 (May 1995), pp. 159–79; Christopher Clark, ‘Confessional policy and the limits of state action: Frederick William III and the Prussian Church Union 1817–1840’, The Historical Journal, 39: 4 (1996), pp. 985–1004. Joan L. Coffey, ‘The Aix Affair of 1891: The turning-point in Church- State relations before the separation?’ French Historical Studies, 21: 4 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 543–59. Hadden, ‘Toward desacralizing secularization theory.’ José Casanova, ‘Rethinking secularization’, The Hedgehog Review, 8: 1–2 (Spring &Summer 2006), pp. 7–22, at p. 7. Here Casanova summarizes his larger and massively influential work, Public religions in the modern world (1997). Talal Asad, Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity (Stanford 2003), pp. 181–201. The first historian to so argue was T.G. P. Spear, ‘Bentinck and education’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, 6: 1 (1938), pp. 78–101. Kenneth Ballhatchet contested Spear’s emphasis on British ideological developments, suggesting that Indian policy changed because of local decisions. However, he did not question the periodization. K.A. Ballhatchet, ‘The Home government and Bentinck’s educational policy’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, 10: 2 (1950), pp. 224–9. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of conquest: literary studies and colonial rule in India (New York, 1989); a similar argument is made about the teaching of history by Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj: imperial mission and missionary imperialism (New Delhi, 1998). Peter van der Veer, Imperial encounters: religion and modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, 2001), pp. 21–4. Shabnum Tejani, Indian secularism: a social and intellectual history, 1890–1950 (Bloomington, 2008). Ibid., p. 3. Partha Chatterjee famously proposed that nationalism itself was a derivative discourse, at least in the external sphere of state and politics, although creative and authentic in the inner sphere of religion and domesticity. Partha Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories (2nd edition, New Delhi, 1995), pp. 3–13. Chatterjee’s idea appears to have some genealogical connection with the explosion of interest in alternative modernities, a formulation that not all scholars have found equally convincing. See, in particular, the protracted exchange between Peter Van der Veer and David Washbrook in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, in the issues 40: 4 (1997), pp. 410–43; 41: 3 (1998), pp. 285–311; 42: 4 (1999), pp. 569–74.


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29. Forcefully argued in Jon Wilson, The domination of strangers: modern governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, 2008). 30. Ritu Birla, Stages of capital: law, culture and market governance in late colonial India (Durham, NC, 2009), p. 14. Although it will be clear from my discussion of her excellent work, especially in Chapter 2, that I accord much greater agency to Indian actors in shaping of this genealogy. 31. See, for example, the survey undertaken by Rev. James Massey (Church of North India or CNI) as member of the National Commission for Minorities, Minorities in a democracy: the Indian experience (New Delhi, 1999); for the views of Catholic activist-scholar, John Dayal, A matter of equity: freedom of faith in secular India (New Delhi, 2007). 32. Arun Shourie, ‘Who killed Australian missionary Graham Staines? Findings of the Justice Wadhwa Commission of Inquiry’, http://arunshourie.voiceofdharma. com/articles/wadhwa.htm, last accessed 1 January 2009, in which Shourie defends the Wadhwa Commission’s failure to connect Dara Singh with the BJP and roundly attributes Staines’ murder to his missionary activities, besides condemning the alleged hypocrisy of the ‘secularists’. 33. The notion of civil religion as the moral binding force of an essentially secular polity was Rousseau’s concept, which continues to be relevant to scholars studying religion and the modern state. One such seminal work is R. N. Bellah, ‘Civil religion in America,’ Daedalus 96 (1967), pp. 1–21. 34. During the primaries leading up to the selection of the Democratic candidate for the American presidential elections in 2008, I was shocked to find that Barack Hussein Obama had to distance himself from ‘allegations’ that he was Muslim, and even more on finding that nobody appeared to find such allegations and refutations anomalous for a supposedly secular country. 35. St. Patrick’s at Karachi. Sheela Reddy’s interview with L.K. Advani, MP, discussing his recently published memoirs (My country, my life) Outlook, 14 April 2008, http://www.mycountrymylife.com/interviews/sheela-reddy.html, last accessed 1 January 2009. 36. Donald Eugene Smith, ‘India as a secular state’ in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its critics (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 206–9; J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, law and the state in India (London, 1968), pp. 437–81. 37. Birla, Stages of capital, p. 14. 38. For instance in the context of Africa and colonial rule. For a map of these debates see Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Religion in the British Empire’ in Sarah Stockwell (ed.) The British Empire: themes and perspectives (London: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 131–56. 39. Andrew Porter has led the field with his studies of British missionaries and their involvement in humanitarian advocacy. See Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, antislavery, and humanitarianism’, in Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 198–221. 40. For some outstanding examples, see J.D.Y. Peel, Religious encounter and the making of the Yoruba (Bloomington 2000); Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood ground: colonialism, missions and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal & Kingston, 2002). 41. R.E. Frykenberg, ‘The impact of conversion and social reform upon society in south India during the late Company period: questions concerning Hindu– Christian encounters, with special reference to Tinnevelly’ in C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright (eds), Indian society and the beginnings of modernisation c. 1830– 1850 (London, 1976), pp. 187–243, at p. 210. Frykenberg specifically refers to


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42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

Notes the Company government’s involvement in the management of Hindu religious institutions, as well as its support, through omission and commission for differential entitlements and obligations based on caste and religious status. In the article referred to above, it appears that the ‘Hindu Raj’ ended with the formal transfer of India’s government to the British Crown, which is rather a simplistic view of the legal complexities surrounding the concept of freedom of religion, and which continued to produce novel conundrums for the British government, and for the Indian republic that followed. This book is largely inspired by the need to analyse and historicize such legal, ideological and historical problems which are all too inadequately subsumed under the rubric of secularism. In the Federated Malay states, with a somewhat similar political arrangement as the Indian princely states, it missionaries were prohibited from preaching to Malays. William Roff, Origins of Malay nationalism (2nd edn., Kuala Lumpur, 1994, 1st published 1967), p. 29. See for an indication of the complexity of the subject, Nathan J. Brown, ‘Retrospective: law and imperialism: Egypt in comparative perspective’, Law and Society Review, 29: 1 (1995), pp. 103–26. P.J. Marshall, ‘Introduction’ in Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), especially pp. 15–16. Robert Travers, Ideology and empire in eighteenthcentury India: the British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007). Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire?: British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004), pp. 15–38. For an overview of these events, see P.J. Marshall, Bengal: the British bridgehead: eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 70–92. For a recent appraisal of the period, Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the age of reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003). Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments, pp. 220–39 David Washbrook, ‘Law, state and agrarian society in colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 15: 3 (1981), pp. 649–721 E.P. Thompson, Whigs and hunters (London, 1975), p. 264; see discussion in pp. 258–69 Ibid., p. 266. Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and empire’, in Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume V, Historiography, pp. 303–14; Brian Stanley traced the history of the scholarly argument that missions were complicit in imperial domination against the post World War II context of decolonization, especially in Africa, as well as the ethnic reorientation of the international churches. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the flag: Protestant missions and British imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Leicester, 1990), pp. 11–31. Among others, Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil society: social and religious change in South India (1840–1900) (Richmond, 1994); Geoffrey A. Oddie (ed.) Religion in South Asia: religious conversopm and revival movements in South Asia in medieval and modern times (Delhi, 1991); David Mosse, ‘Idioms of subordination and styles of protest among Christian and Hindu Harijan castes in Tamil Nadu’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 28: 1 (1994), pp. 67–106; Geoffrey A. Oddie (ed.) Religious conversion movements in South Asia: continuities and change, 1800–1990 (Richmond, 1996). From the early twentieth century, Christian missionaries sympathetic to the emergence of a moderate form of nationalism represented themselves as having


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56.

57.

58.

59.

caused the social and intellectual changes that nationalism was premised on. See. C.F. Andrews, North India (Handbooks of English Church Expansion) (London, 1908); and also his The Renaissance in India: its missionary aspects (Colombo, 1913). Andrews was not of course not your run- of-the-mill missionary, as this book will discuss later. That even he took such an approach says something for the general ‘moderate’ Christian tendency towards the patronizing approval of ‘moderate’ nationalisms in European-ruled colonies. As Etherington argued, the need to make such claims became more pressing in the context of decolonization and the emergence of relatively successful postcolonial nation states such as India, which may have been the inspiration behind the following studies: Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India: 1793–1833, an account of the work of Christian missionaries on behalf of social reform (Cambridge, 1956); R.E. Frykenberg, ‘The impact of conversion’; Geoffrey Oddie, Social protest in India: British Protestant missionaries and social reform 1850–1900, (Manohar: Delhi, 1979). See David Mosse, ‘Roman Catholicism and Hindu village society in Tamil Nadu, India’ in Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw (eds) Syncretism/anti-syncretism: the politics of religious synthesis (London, 1994), pp. 85–107. With the outstanding exceptions of Susan Bayly, Saints, goddesses and kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge, 1989), whose work ends c. 1900 and sees in the coming of Evangelical Protestant missions the end of religious creativity that characterized the ancient community of Orthodox Christians of presentday Kerala and the Tamil Roman Catholic communities, formed following the efforts of Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century. Saurabh Dube’s study of the relations between German Evangelical Lutheran missionaries and their central Indian ‘converts’ suggests that struggles over meaning did not end when European Protestantism took a more fundamentalist turn, but the complete incomprehension he proposes between the European missionary and the Indian Christian, appears less credible to me. Saurabh Dube, ‘Paternalism and freedom: the evangelical encounter in colonial Chattisgarh, Central India’ Modern Asian Studies, 29: 1 (1995), pp. 171–201. For an interesting collection of essays on the diverse forms of popular Christianity in India, but with little attention paid to the internal politics, see Selva Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (eds) Popular Christianity in India: riting between the lines (New York, 2002). On the other hand, for a successful recent effort at recovering the points of view of Punjabi church leaders and mission employees, and tracing their divergence from missionary ideas, see Christopher Harding, Religious transformation in South Asia: the meanings of conversion in colonial Punjab (Oxford, 2008), especially chapters 3–5. See Peel, Religious encounter. Peel’s analysis does not confront the context of unequal power relations between the missionaries and their African converts and assistants, such that Samuel Crowther appears to be the new religious hero, freely using African elements to create a Christianity comprehensible to his countrymen. In reality, his career was constantly dogged by frustrations and disappointments and backstabbing by jealous missionaries who found it difficult to accept his elevation in rank. A study more located in the realities of power is Elbourne, Blood ground. The multi-volume project of Christianity in India undertaken by the ecumenical Church History Association of India is an outstanding effort of this kind, along with the journal Indian Church History Review (started in 1963 as the Bulletin of the Church History Association of India).


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Notes

60. In north India, the American Presbyterian and Methodist Episcopal missions were particularly large recipients of such converts, but the Anglican societies, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), also encountered conversion movements in Meerut, Delhi and the Punjab. A huge movement among the Chuhras (a low-status caste, traditionally sweepers) in the Punjab from the 1870s to the 1920s, towards all the major missions in the Punjab, raised the province’s Indian Christian population from 3,912 in 1881 to 395,629 in 1931. By the end of this period, almost a quarter of the Chuhra population in the Punjab had become Christians, giving the Punjabi church a distinctly dalit character. This was also true of the United Provinces: Mazhabi Sikhs converted en masse to Methodism in the years after 1859, and between 1880s to the 1920s, large numbers of Bhangis (low-status caste, traditionally sweepers) and Chamars (low-status caste, traditionally leather workers) became Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians. In 1931, there were only 173,077 Indian Christians in the U.P., but the vast majority of these were dalits. John Webster, The dalit Christians: a history (4th edn., Delhi, 2000), pp. 39–40; James P. Alter, In the Doab and Rohilkhand: north Indian Christianity, 1815–1915 (Delhi, 1986), pp. 78–89, 137–47, 178–85, 196–204; W.L. Allison, One hundred years of Christian work of the north Indian mission of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Mysore, n.d. [1938]), pp. 117–29. Also see Appendix for a statistical survey reflecting nation-wide demographic changes in the Christian community, compiled by myself, based on census reports. 61. Literally (Hindi) downtrodden; descriptive term preferred by people earlier referred to as Untouchables, Harijans. 62. Webster, The dalit Christians. 63. Harding, Religious transformation in South Asia; David Hardiman, Missionaries and their medicine: a Christian modernity for tribal India (Manchester, 2008). For a study of ‘popular’ Christian culture which is intellectually allied to such an analytical approach, see Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (eds) Popular Christianity in India. 64. Edward Bailey, ‘ “Implicit religion” What might that be?’, Implicit Religion, 1 (1998), pp. 9–22, quoted in Swatos Jr. and Christiano, ‘Secularization theory’, p. 213. 65. This is brilliantly captured by Jon Wilson, ‘ “The seat of a national personality”: identity, the nation and religion in mid-nineteenth century Britain and colonial India’ (unpublished MSS in the author’s possession), which traces the transformation of the Anglican Protestantism into a species of national ethics. 66. Vasudha Dalmia, The nationalization of Hindu traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and nineteenth- Century Banaras (Delhi, 1997). ‘Nationalization’ in such analysis means two things: the refashioning of religious traditions, as well as the special connection asserted between one such refashioned religion and the nation by nationalist ideology. 67. Arthur Burns, ‘English “church reform” revisited, 1780–1840’in Burns and Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform, pp. 136–62; William Law Mathieson, English church reform, 1815–1840 (London, 1923). 68. Owen Chadwick, The spirit of the Oxford movement: Tractarian essays (Cambridge, 1990). I would argue that Cardinal Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism has to be seen as a continuation of this anti- democratic trend, rather than antisecular protest, as Gauri Viswanathan has argued in Outside the fold: conversion, modernity, belief (Princeton, 1998), pp. 44–72.


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69. Some scholars would say, with several legal conundrums being left unsolved, such as the constitutional implications for the episcopal seats in the Parliament, or the nature of monarchy. See Charlotte Smith, ‘The Church of England: some historical reflections on a constitutional conundrum’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 56: 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 394–420. 70. I am referring here to the Brahmo Samaj. See David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of the modern Indian mind (Princeton, 1979). 71. Qazis were Muslim judicial officers, in most cases associated with Muslim kingship and the administration of Islamic law. However, Qazis functioned in several nonMuslim states in post-Mughal India, including in the Punjab under Ranjit Singh. 72. This description of pre-modern Indian religion is derived from Richard Eaton, Essays in Islam and Indian history (New Delhi, 2000), the discussion of ‘PersoIslamicate’ administrative and literary culture in Francis Robinson, The ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic culture in south Asia (New Delhi, 2001), J.R.I. Cole, Roots of north Indian Shī‛ism in Iran and Iraq: religion and state in Awadh, 1722–1859 (Berkeley, 1988); Ancharlott Eschmann, Gayacharan Tripathi and Herman Kulke (eds), The cult of Jagannath and the regional tradition of Orissa (New Delhi, 1978). 73. The Jagannath temple of Puri was the centre of one such important regional tradition, but with all-India significance. 74. Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (New Delhi,1982), pp. 35–43. 75. To speak of laity or priesthood within Islam is of course technically incorrect, but there were religious specialists, whose authorities derived from learning, or from being a mystic, in many cases combined with descent from and discipleship of the adepts. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s family had many Sufis and he was influenced in early life by religious scholars, but his own prominence in later life did not derive from traditional religious authority. 76. Christian W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: a reinterpretation of Muslim theology (New Delhi, 1978). 77. ‘The trust deed of the Brahma Samaj’ and ‘Religious instructions founded on sacred authorities’ in Bruce Carlisle Robertson (ed.), The essential writings of Raja Rammohan Ray (Delhi, 1999), pp. 105–10. Robertson discusses Rammohan’s use of the Vedanta Sutras as Scripture in his introduction to the book, pp. xxi–xxxix. Kopf’s Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of the modern Indian mind remains the authoritative monograph on this reformist organization. 78. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, conflict and ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and low caste protest movement in western India (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 50–102. 79. Susan Stiles Maneck, The death of Ahriman: culture, identity and theological change among the Parsis of India (Bombay, 1997), pp. 182–252.

1 Religion and Public Education: The Politics of Secularizing Knowledge 80. Broadly by S. 1 & 2 which envisaged exemption for certain bodies from some of the usual criteria of qualification for establishing and running schools, taking into consideration the likely (positive) effect of the project on all the children who may be affected by it. 81. See the admissions policy of the Krishna-Avanti Primary School, Harrow, which began functioning in 2008 as the first Hindu voluntary-aided faith school in the UK. In particular see the Supplementary Information Form which parents


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82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

applying on ‘faith criteria’ are advised to complete. http://www.krishna-avanti. org.uk/index.php?id=6 last accessed 6 January 2009. According to a Guardian survey, there were 7,376 ‘faith schools’ financed by the state in England, of which 6,384 were primary schools, and 589 secondary schools; divided religion-wise, 4,716 were Church of England, 2,108 Roman Catholic, 32 Jewish, four Muslim, two Sikh, one Greek Orthodox and one Seventh Day Adventist. Until Labour was elected in 1997, all state faith schools were Christian or Jewish. ‘Facts about faith schools’, The Guardian, 14 November 2001, http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,593365,00.html, last accessed 2 July 2008. In communion with the Church of England. Created by the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions Act, 2004. On the NCMEI, see its website: http://ncmei.gov.in/ last accessed 27 October 2010. St. Stephen’s College v. Delhi University (1992) AIR SC 1630. Ramachandra Guha, ‘St Stephen’s: murder in the cathedral?’, Outlook, 25 June 2007, http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234958 last accessed 27 October 2010. Valson Thampu, ‘St. Stephen’s Hails the National Debate’, Hindustan Times, 4 July 2007. ‘Cloud over St. Stephen’s appointments’ The Hindu, 6 February 2008, http:// www.hindu.com/2008/02/06/stories/2008020657390100.htm, last accessed 27 October 2010. The Constitution of India, updated up to the 94th Amendment Act, http://india code.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html last accessed 27 October 2010. This information is downloaded from the website of the Ministry of Law and Justice (Legislative Department). Education Act, 2002, c. 32, s. 80, s. 101 (1) and School Standards and Framework Act, 1998 c. 31, s. 71. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Religious education and the rhetoric of reform: the madrasa in British India and Pakistan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41: 2, (April, 1999), pp. 294–323. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of conquest; Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj. Studdert-Kennedy is however far less sanguine that this policy actually worked. Dipesh Chakrabarty points out that it was also historically precocious, and unparalleled in Britain itself. But predictably, he quotes the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff, and the latter’s view that secular education would undermine Hinduism. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Radical histories and question of enlightenment rationalism: some recent critiques of Subaltern Studies’ in V. Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial (London, 2000), pp. 259–60. ‘Minute recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of the Governor- General’s Council, 2 February 1835’, Document 14 in Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (eds), The great Indian education debate (London, 1999), pp. 161–73. Especially the bit where he declaimed that all the knowledge of India and Arabia did not equal the wisdom contained in a single shelf of a European library. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of conquest, p. 45. Ibid., pp. 45–93. ‘Resolution of the Governor- General of India in council in the General Department, dated 7 March 1835’, Document 15 in Zastoupil and Moir (eds), The great Indian education debate, pp. 194–6.


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99. ‘Minute by Warren Hastings, Governor- General of Fort William (Calcutta) in Bengal, recorded in the Public department, 17 April 1781 in Zastoupil and Moir (eds), The great Indian education debate, Document 1, pp. 73–6; ‘Part of a letter from Jonathan Duncan, Resident at Benares, to Earl Cornwallis, Governor– General in Council of Fort William in Bengal, dated 1 January, 1792’ Document 2 in Ibid., pp. 77–80. 100. Charles Grant, Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain (first published 1797) reprinted as General Appendix to Report of the Select Committee on State of Affairs of East India Company, PPHC, 1831–32 (734), Vol. I, General Appendix, pp. 3–92; especially 59–92. 101. S.C. Sanial, ‘History of the Calcutta Madrassa’, Part I, pp. 92–93, with reference to: Government of Bengal-Resolution-Revenue Department-Fort William, 17 July 1823. 102. On British Orientalism in the Indian context, see Peter Marshall, The British discovery of Hinduism in the eighteenth century (London, 1970); David Kopf, British orientalism and the Bengal renaissance: the dynamics of Indian modernization, 1773– 1835 (Berkeley, 1969). 103. Nina Dey Gupta, The halcyon yesteryears of Delhi College: a chequered history’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed.) Knowledge, power and politics: educational institutions in India (Delhi, 1998), p. 122. 104. ‘Address to His Excellency the Right Honourable William Pitt, Lord Amherst, December 11 1823’ in Robertson (ed.), The essential works of Raja Rammohan Roy, pp. 260–3. 105. It was conceived of as a pathshala or primary school, combined with a maha pathshala or college, the latter to be established as funds became available. The curriculum above therefore was that of a school. Benjamin Zachariah, Subhas Ranjan Chakraborti and Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Presidency College, Calcutta: an unfinished history’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed.) Knowledge, power and politics: educational institutions in India (New Delhi 1998), pp. 304–88, at 308–9. 106. Ibid., pp. 309–10 107. R.E. Frykenberg, ‘Modern education in south India, 1784–1854: its roots and its role as a vehicle of integration under Company Raj’, The American Historical Review, 91: 1 (February, 1986), pp. 37–65. 108. Parashuram Mahadev Limaye, The Deccan education society (Poona, 1936). 109. Court of Directors’ Revenue despatch to the Governor- General in Council of Fort William in Bengal, 18 February 1824, paragraphs 79–86, Document 9 in Zastoupil and Moir, (eds), The great Indian education debate, pp. 115–117. 110. James Mill himself was convinced that political despotism and the caste system, sustained by a system of superstitions taught by Hinduism, was the cause for the degenerate state of Indian society. Eric Stokes, The English utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), p. 54. 111. P.J. Marshall, The impeachment of Warren Hastings (London, 1965). 112. Katherine Prior, Lance Brennan, and Robin Haines, ‘Bad language: the role of English, Persian and other esoteric tongues in the dismissal of Sir Edward Colebrooke as Resident of Delhi in 1829’, Modern Asian Studies, 35: 1 (2001), pp. 75–112. 113. The Serampore missionaries’ quest for establishing Bengali as the official language in Bengal, and Gilchrist’s advocacy of ‘Hindustani’ as the official language for northern India stood on similar principles. See Bernard Cohn, ‘The command of language and language of command’ in Ranajit Guha (ed.),


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114.

115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Notes Subaltern studies IV: writings on South Asian history and society (Delhi, 1985), pp. 276–329. The idea that a single language could be used by everybody and in all kinds of social situations was novel. For the bewilderment of the Brahman scholars of the Benares Sanskrit College with this linguistic concept, see C.A. Bayly, ‘Orientalists, informants and critics in Benares, 1790–1860’ in Malik, (ed.) Perspectives of mutual encounters in south Asian history 1760–1860 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 97–127. And of course, in keeping with the idea of uniformity, each language was to be associated with one script only. Such vernacular language movements, engendered by British officials and missionaries, were indigenized and represented as part of Indian sectarian politics from the 1880s. The Hindi– Urdu conflict in north India, the Hindi–Punjabi conflict of Punjab, and Tamil linguistic nationalism, derived arguments from the official vernacular language movement, obtuse to their considerable Christian genealogy. Christopher King, One language, two scripts: the Hindi movement in nineteenth- century northern India, (Bombay, 1994). Trevelyan to Bentinck, 9 April 1834, Portland MSS, Nottingham University Library, quoted in Ballhatchet, ‘The Home government and Bentinck’s educational policy’, p. 228; on his educational ideas: Charles Edward Trevelyan, On the education of the people of India (London, 1838). Letter from J.C.C. Sutherland, secretary to the GCPI, to H.T. Prinsep, secretary to the GOI in the General Department, 21 January 1835, Document 13 in Zastoupil and Moir (eds), The great Indian education debate, pp. 147–60; Letter from J.C.C. Sutherland, secretary to the GCPI to H.T Prinsep, 22 January 1835, Document 12 in ibid. ‘Minute recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of the Governor- General’s Council, 2 February 1835’. Jon Wilson shows how the idea of a British nation as a finite human collective was distinctly novel, and if religious identity was said to be one of the defining characteristic of this collective, the notion of religion utilized was itself was equally innovative. Wilson, ‘The seat of a national personality’. G.M. Young, Speeches by Lord Macaulay (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 220–77. See Proceedings of the Anti-Maynooth Conference of 1845, ed. A.S. Thelwall (London, 1845). A speech delivered in the House of Commons, 14 April 1845 in Young, Speeches by Lord Macaulay, pp. 237–53. ‘Resolution of the Governor- General of India in council in the General Department, dated 7 March 1835’. A.F. Salahuddin Ahmed, Social ideas and social change in Bengal, 1818–1835 (Calcutta, 1976), p. 175. Documents 16, 18, 23, 24 in Zastoupil and Moir (eds), The great Indian education debate. ‘Petition of the Muslim inhabitants of Calcutta, replied to on 24 August 1836’, Document 24 in ibid. Minute in General Department, Lord Auckland, 24 August 1836, Document 25 in ibid., pp. 257–9. Adam’s reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, ed. James Long (Calcutta, 1868). Minute in General Department, Lord Auckland, 24 November 1839, Document 29 in Zastoupil and Moir (eds), The great Indian education debate, pp. 304–31.


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128. Jeffrey M. Diamond, ‘Developing indigenous and European knowledge: the vernacular education movement and neo- orientalism in the Punjab’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2002), pp. 119–22. 129. W. Muir to John Lawrence, 30 March 1868, with ‘Note upon the Educational cess, as levied in the North-Western Provinces, 25 March 1868’ and ‘Memo on the Educational Cess 30 June 1859’, John Lawrence Papers Mss Eur F/90/55, fols. 174–8, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (henceforth APAC), British Library. 130. Minute by Lt. Governor of Bengal, 19 November 1858, on education in India, PPHC 1860 (35), lii, pp. 27–54. 131. W.B. Stephens, Education in Britain, 1750–1914 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 1–20. 132. ‘Note by Holt Mackenzie, Secretary to the Bengal Government in the Territorial Department, 17 July 1823’ Document 6 in Zastoupil and Moir (eds), The Great Indian Education Debate, pp. 98–107. 133. Report on Public Instruction in the North-Western Provinces 1843–44, Appendix K, pp. xxv–xl, V/24/905, APAC, British Library. 134. Copy of a despatch to the Government of India, on the subject of general education in India, PPHC 1854 (393) xlvii, pp. 155–74. 135. For a summary of these conditions, as well as a survey of educational codes in operation in all British Indian provinces, see J. A. Richey (ed.), Grants-inaid to schools in British India Bureau of Education, Occasional Reports, No. 12 (Calcutta, 1923). 136. R.J. Moore, Sir Charles Wood’s Indian policy (Manchester, 1966) p. 113. 137. Ibid., pp. 109–23. 138. When the Duke of Marlborough raised a motion in the House of Lords for compulsory Bible classes, it caused great embarrassment and the discussion was quickly stopped. House of Lords Debates, 2 July 1860, Vol. clix, cols. 1237–53. 139. Copy of a despatch to the Government of India, on the subject of general education in India, pp. 159–61. 140. On British differences of opinion regarding the causes of the Mutiny, see Thomas Metcalf, The aftermath of revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, 1964), pp. 72–9. 141. David Steele, ‘Law, Edward, first earl of Ellenborough (1790–1871)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography, [last accessed 16 Dec 2005]. 142. Minute of the Lt. Governor of Bengal, 19 November 1858 on education in India. 143. Ibid. 144. Diamond, ‘Developing indigenous and European knowledge’. 145. Gupta, ‘The halcyon yesteryears of Delhi College: a chequered history’, p. 127. 146. Mushirul Hasan, ‘Sharif culture and colonial rule: a “maulvi”-missionary encounter’, Introduction to C.F. Andrews, Zaka Ullah of Delhi, (eds) Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau (2nd edn., Delhi, 2003), pp. vii–xlvi; Gail Minault, ‘Qiran al-Sa‘adain: the dialogue between Eastern and Western learning at the Delhi College’ in Malik (ed.) Perspectives of mutual encounters, pp. 260–77; Diamond, ‘Developing indigenous and European knowledge’, pp. 108–10. 147. Gupta, ‘The halcyon yesteryears of Delhi College’, p. 124. 148. G.W. Leitner, ‘Papers connected with the history of the University of Punjab’ in Indigenous elements of self-government in India , with special reference to the Panjaub [sic] and more particularly in matters of education. (London, 1884), p. 65.


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149. Katherine Prior, ‘McLeod, Sir Donald Friell (1810–1872)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, [last accessed 22 April 2007]. 150. While historians have noted the Evangelical and paternalist ideologies informing the ‘Punjab school’ of governance, the ‘neo- Orientalist’ aspect of this governing ideology has received less attention. Metcalf, The aftermath of revolt, pp. 101–7; Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes: the mind of the Indian civil service (London, 1993); P.H.M. van den Dungen, The Punjab tradition: influence and authority in nineteenth- Century India (London, 1972). 151. This is the orthography used by Leitner, present academic pratice is to spell these words Anjuman- e Punjab. 152. Sic, usually spelt rais or raiz. 153. Leitner, Indigenous elements of self-government in India, pp. 65–81. 154. Ibid., pp. 1–88. 155. Punjab Home ‘A’ Proceedings 15 February 1877, no. 567, pp. 106–8, P/862, APAC, British Library. 156. ‘Memorial regarding abolition of the Delhi College’ in Punjab Home ‘A’ Proceedings May 1877, no. 28, P/862, pp. 426–32. The government was referring to the Nawab of Awadh’s substantial endowment which we have mentioned above, note 103. 157. G.W. Leitner to Officiating Secretary Government of Punjab, 17 March 1877, Punjab Home ‘A’ Proceedings October 1877, no. 5, P/862, pp. 952–3. 158. Major W.R.M. Holroyd, Director of Public Instruction Punjab to Officiating Secretary Government of Punjab, 30 May 1877, P/862, pp. 953–5. 159. Gupta, ‘The halcyon yesteryears of Delhi College’, p. 133. 160. Dr. Leitner, Registrar Punjab University College to Officiating secretary, Government of Punjab, 15 March 1878, Punjab Home ‘A’ Proceedings April 1878, no. 7, pp. 386–7; Dr. Leitner to Officiating Secretary Government of Punjab, 3 April 1878, Punjab Home ‘A’ Proceedings April 1878, no. 17, pp. 407–11; Punjab Home B Proceedings 18 July 1878 no. 140; ‘Charge of libel by Dr. Leitner against Lala Piari Lal’, Punjab Home A Proceedings no. 6b, pp. 619–23, P/1148, APAC, British Library. 161. Report of the Indian Education Commission, 1882, (12 vols., Calcutta, 1883), I, 506. 162. Ibid., pp. 496–507; Report of the Muhammadan educational endowments committee (Calcutta, 1888). 163. Enamul Haque, Nawab Bahadur Abdul Latif: his writings and related documents (Dhaka, 1968), pp. 226–30. 164. ‘A Minute on Hughly Madrassa, 1861’ in Ibid., pp. 20–42; Amir Ali was alumnus of this college. Syed Razi Wasti, Memoirs and other writings of Syed Ameer Ali (Lahore, 1968), pp. 9–10. 165. Basanta Kr. Samanta, Origin and development of an institution of higher education: a history of the Hooghly Mohsin College (Calcutta, 1991) pp. 94–5. 166. Haque, Nawab Bahadur Abdul Latif, pp. 187–240. 167. Report of the committee appointed by the Bengal Government to consider questions connected with Muhammadan education (Calcutta, 1915). 168. In a novel depicting the regressive influence of religion in poverty-stricken rural Bengal and its cynical use by opportunists, Syed Waliullah spoke of young hopefuls who went to the Calcutta (renamed) Aliya madrasa to study huge moth- eaten books. But the knowledge in these books was stuck in a past age


260 Notes


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169. 170.

171. 172.

173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178.

179. 180.

181.

182. 183. 184.

185.

186.

without anybody to connect it with modern times. Syed Waliullah, Lalshalu (2nd edn., Calcutta, 2002), p. 11. Barbara Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (2nd edn., New Delhi, 2002), p. 97. Nonica Datta, ‘The “Subalternity” of education: gurukuls in rural southeast Punjab’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Knowledge, power and politics: educational institutions in India (Delhi, 1998), pp. 27–65. J.C. Ingleby, Missionaries, education and India: issues in Protestant missionary education in the long nineteenth century (Delhi, 2000), pp. 130–200. Rev. James Johnston, Our educational policy in India (Edinburgh, 1880); Rev. James Johnston, The higher education, and the education of the masses in India: a reply to a letter addressed by His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore, to His Excellency the Right Honourable M.E. Grant Duff (London, 1882). V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, A conscience clause for Indians in Indian education codes: with a reply to certain criticism (Poona, 1921), pp. 22–7. Tirunal Visakham, A cursory notice of certain statements in the Rev. J. Johnston’s reply (Madras, 1882). Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu state: Travancore 1858–1936 (Delhi, 1998), pp. 82–101. ‘Minute recorded by Kashinath Trimbak Telang’, Report of the Indian Education Commission 1882, I, pp. 606–19. Ibid., pp. 452–4; Syed Nurullah and J.P. Naik, A students’ history of education in India, 1800–1965 (2nd edn., London, 1964), pp. 134–40. ‘Bharatendu’ Harishchandra, the Hindi poet and activist for educational and administrative use of Hindi was all for government education in his evidence before the Education Commission. Ram Gopal, Svatantrata-purva Hindi ke sangharsh ka itihas (Allahabad, 1964), Appendix. Gail Minault and David Lelyveld, ‘The campaign for a Muslim University, 1898–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, 8: 2 (1974), pp. 145–89. Jürgen Lütt, The movement for the foundation of the Benares Hindu University (South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, reprints of publications of staff members, 185 (1976), pp. 160–95. A bill to incorporate a teaching and residential Hindu University at Benares, Enclosure 1 accompanying letter of Governor- General to Secretary of State for India, 8 October 1915, L/PJ/6/1094, APAC, British Library. Note by Madan Mohan Malaviya, in Enclosure 3, Ibid. Benares Hindu University Calendar, 1916–21, pp. 29–30, 92, 126, 148, 191, 224, 272, 300, 339, 364–5. The non-Brahman in question was the Theosophist Sanskrit scholar Bhagavan Das, co-founder of the Central Hindu College with Annie Besant. Das complained in 1917 to the Vice- Chancellor that the university had failed to fulfil its purpose. In 1920 he responded to Gandhi’s call to abandon governmentsupported educational institutions, and became associated instead with the independent Kashi Vidyapith. Lütt, The movement for the foundation of the Benares Hindu University, pp. 186–93. David Lelyveld, ‘Disenchantment at Aligarh: Islam and the realm of the secular in late nineteenth century India’, Die Welt des Islams, New Series, 22: 1/4 (1982), pp. 85–102. Mohammadan Anglo- Oriental College Aligarh Calendar 1911, pp. 61, 64; Aligarh Muslim University Calendar 1921, pp. 344–5.


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Notes

187. United Provinces Legislative Council Proceedings, 13 November 1916, pp. 821–42, V/9/1731, APAC, British Library. 188. U.P. Legislative Council Proceedings, 13 November 1916, pp. 821–42, V/9/1732, APAC, British Library. 189. Ibid., p. 842. 190. U.P. Legislative Proceedings, 29 January 1917, p. 18, V/9/1733, APAC, British Library. 191. Prem Kirpal, ‘Foreword’ in Central Advisory Board of Education (1935–1960) Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Delhi, 1960), pp. i–v. 192. Report of the Religious Education Committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education in India, 1945, together with decisions of the Board thereon, (Delhi, 1946), especially Annexure II ‘Extract of the Education Act, 1944 (England and Wales)’ pp. 28–9. 193. Terence Copley, Teaching religion: fifty years of Religious Education in England and Wales (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp. 29–32. 194. Ibid. pp. 33–4. 195. Ibid. pp. 22–6. 196. Ibid. pp. 37–8. 197. ‘Report of the first meeting of the Religious Education Committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education, 1944’, Annexure I in Report of the Religious Education Committee, pp. 9–13. 198. Ibid., Preface [no page number], and pp. 1–8. 199. 30 August 1947, Constituent Assembly debates: official report (12 vols., New Delhi, 1950), V, p. 361. 200. ‘Religious Instruction in educational institutions in the provinces – rules prescribed in the Educational Codes’, in Report of the Religious Education Committee, pp. 19–26. 201. 30 August 1947, Constituent Assembly Debates, V, pp. 361–93. 202. 7 December 1948, Constituent Assembly Debates, VII, pp. 866–87. 203. Ibid. 204. http://www.ststephens.edu/ last accessed 27 October 2010.

2 Regulating Trust: Law and Policy of Religious Endowments in India 205. ‘Taj Mahal: Unnecessary Controversy’, in Mili Gazette Online, 16–30 April 2005, http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/2005/16-30Apr05-Print-Edition/ 163004200509.htm, last accessed 27 October 2010. 206. Burns, ‘English “church reform” revisited, 1780–1840’, pp. 136–162; Mathieson, English church reform. 207. Rammohan Roy, ‘A second defence of monotheistical system of the Veds; in response to an apology for the present state of Hindoo Worship’ (1817) in J.C. Ghose (ed.), The English works of Raja Ram Mohun Roy (2 vols., Calcutta, 1887), I, pp. 131–2. 208. On the confrontations over the status of the ecclesiastical courts following the reform of the judiciary in Britain in 1873, see Charlotte Smith, ‘Martin v Mackonochie/Mackonochie v Penzance: A Crisis of Character and Identity in the Court of Arches?’ Legal History, 24 (2003), pp. 250–72. 209. ‘Church of England Legislation’, http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/church lawlegis/legislation/, last accessed 3 June 2010.


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210. For a history of the formation and working of the Charity Commission, see David Owen, English philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). 211. A.S. Oppé (ed.), Wharton’s Law Lexicon (14th edn., London, 1938), p. 369. 212. According to the Oxford English Dictionary. 213. Such as a university. 214. Such as a professorship in a particular university. 215. A.S. Oppé, ‘Trust’ in Oppé (ed.), Wharton’s Law Lexicon, pp. 1014–18; Arthur Underhill, Law relating to trusts and trustees, ed. David J. Hayton (15th edn., London, 1995), pp. 3–51, 767–79. The definition of religious and charitable purposes remained surprisingly stable over a long period of time, such that the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act 1888 (51 & 52 Vic. c. 52) repeated the definition offered in a Tudor law, 43 Eliz. c. 4. Oppé (ed.), Wharton’s law lexicon, p. 182. 216. ‘Charity Commissioners’ in Ibid., pp. 182–3. 217. I stress the adjective effective, because although there were a number of Elizabethan laws intended to prevent the ‘ mis- employment of lands, goods and stocks of money ... given to certain charitable uses’, such as the 43 Eliz.1 c. 1 (1601), as well as the earlier 13 Eliz. 1. c. 10 (1571), intended specifically for ecclesiastical properties, the intervention of the monarch’s prerogative permitted blatant subversion of such aims. For a description of the famous stand- off in 1616 between James I and the Chief Justice Coke over illegal sales of college property made by the Master of Magdalene College, Oxford, and Coke’s dismissal, see Mark Fortier, ‘Equity and ideas: Coke, Ellesmere and James I’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), pp. 1255–81. 218. Hindu personal law applies to Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists in addition to those defined as Hindus. 219. Personal laws apply to individual to persons according to their religious affiliation, as opposed to laws generally applicable in a territory. The next chapter will contain a detailed discussion of personal laws; here we are dealing with what is one aspect of those laws. 220. B.K. Mukerjea, The Hindu law of religious and charitable trust (Calcutta, 1952), p. 185; M. Krishnamachariar, The law of private trusts in British India (Madras, 1920); Asaf A.A. Fyzee, Outlines of Muhammadan law, (4th edn., New Delhi, 1999), pp. 299–304 221. The issue of (Hindu) monastic succession was a particularly complex one, with the colonial law failing to comprehend the status of persons associated sexually and filially to the heads of religious institutions conceptualized as monasteries. See Malavika Kasturi, ‘Asceticising Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 43: 5 (2009), pp. 1039–83 222. Eyre Chatterton, A history of the Church of England in India since the early days of the East India Company (London, 1924). 223. Mildred E. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, 1600–1970 (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 9–10. 224. Ibid., p. 47; John William Kaye, Christianity in India: an historical narrative (London, 1859), pp. 259–64. 225. Sydney Smith, ‘Indian Missions’, in The Works of Rev. Sydney Smith including his contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2 Vols., (London, 1859), pp. 102–21. 226. With respect to Hindu temples, Arjun Appadurai, Worship and conflict under colonial rule: a South Indian case (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 63–104; H. Kulke, ‘Early royal


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227.

228. 229. 230.

231. 232. 233.

234. 235.

236.

237. 238. 239. 240.

Notes patronage of the Jagannatha cult’ and ‘Jagannatha as the state deity under the Gajapatis of Orissa’ in Eschmann, Tripathi and Kulke (eds), The cult of Jagannath, pp. 139–56, 199–208. The transactional aspect of Muslim kingship could be seen in their patronage of dargahs or tombs of saints, khanqahs or religious hospices, madrasas or schools of Islamic law and philosophy, and imambarahs in the case of Shia rulers. Richard Eaton, ‘The political and religious authority of the shrine of Baba Farid’ in Eaton, Essays in Islam, pp. 203–24; Richard Eaton, ‘The court and the dargah in the seventeenthcentury Deccan’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 10: 1 (March 1973), 50–4; Cole, Roots of north Indian Shī‛ism in Iran and Iraq, pp. 42ff. Arjun Appadurai and Geoffrey Oddie both offer descriptions of the activities of South Indian temples and the range and number of specialists they employed, ranging from ritual functionaries, accountants, cooks, musicians and dancers. Appadurai, Worship and conflict under colonial rule, pp. 20–33; Geoffrey Oddie, Hindu and Christian in southeast India (London: Curzon, 1991), pp. 20–23. Irfan Habib, The agrarian system of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (Bombay, 1963), pp. 313–14. Imambarahs are Shia religious buildings where ceremonies mourning the martyrdom of Imams Ali, Hasan and Hussein are held during Muharram. The prince of Tanjore, tutored by the German missionary Frederick Schwartz, continued to patronize immense Hindu religious festivities, which in addition, he expected the British officials to attend. Oddie, Hindu and Christian in SouthEast India, pp. 40–3. A revenue officer. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, A history of Tirupati (2 vols., Madras, 1940), II, pp. 512–53. H. Kulke, ‘ “Juggernaut” under British supremacy and the resurgence of the Khurda Rajas as “Rajas of Puri” ’, in Eschmann, Tripathi and Kulke (eds) The cult of Jagannath, pp. 346–7. Claudius Buchanan, The works of Rev. Claudius Buchanan (New York, 1912), pp. 33–4. Appadurai, Worship and conflict under colonial rule, pp. 111–14. Appadurai’s work and my own research suggests a longer chronology for this legal reformulation of Indian religious and charitable practice than the one Ritu Birla suggests in her book on mercantile groups and their encounter with colonial law. The religious endowment was being cast as a ‘trust’ in administrative law long before the leading cases and trust legislations she cites, from the late 1860s onwards. Birla, Stages of capital, pp. 67–102. Prabhat Mukherjee, Pilgrim tax and temple scandals, ed. Nancy Gardner Cassels (Bangkok, 2000), pp. 14–15; H. Kulke, ‘ “Juggernaut” under British supremacy and the Resurgence of the Khurda Rajas as “Rajas of Puri” ’; Nancy Gardner Cassels, Religion and pilgrim tax under the Company Raj (Delhi, 1987), pp. 38–74. Appadurai, Worship and conflict under colonial rule, pp. 109–10. Narayana Rau, The Tirupathi temple (its history past and present) (Cocanada, 1913), pp. 18–19. Chandra Mudaliar, State and religious endowments in Madras (Madras, 1976), pp. 22–3. So Sayyid Ahmad complained in explaining the causes of the Indian Mutiny in his Asbab-i baghavat-i Hind [The causes of the Indian Mutiny], translated G. Graham and A. Colvin, (Benares, 1873), p. 25.


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241. Stokes, The English utilitarians and India, pp. 75–139. 242. Claudius Buchanan, Christian researches in Asia, in The works of Rev. Claudius Buchanan, (New York, 1812), pp. 24–34. 243. Memoirs of Right Rev. Daniel Corrie (London, 1847), pp. 606–12. 244. Oddie, Hindu and Christian in southeast India, pp. 50–4. 245. Cassels, Religion and pilgrim tax, pp. 100–46. 246. Minute of Lord Auckland 17 November 1838, Document 21 in Mukherjee, Pilgrim tax and temple scandals, pp. 119–22. 247. Rev. James Peggs, The present state of British connection with idolatry and Mahomedanism, particularly the government grant to the temple of juggernaut, and numerous other temples of India (London, 1847). 248. Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Divine affairs (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001), pp. 58–60. 249. Sarah F.D. Ansari, Sufi saints and state power: the pirs of Sind, 1843–1947 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 36–45. 250. Hindu monasteries. 251. The head of a matha, usually also the head of an ascetic order. 252. Temple managers. 253. Mudaliar, State and religious endowments in Madras, pp. 36–40. 254. Act XX of 1863, An Act to enable the Government to divest itself of the management of Religious Endowments, India Bills Objects and Reasons 1863–4, L/ PJ/5/4, APAC, British Library. 255. Legislative Dispatch to India, 24 February 1859, L/PJ/3/1214, pp. 87–108, APAC, British Library. 256. India Legislative Council Proceedings, 1860, Vol. VII, cols. 324–326, 462–483, 509, APAC, British Library. 257. Ibid., cols. 466–7. 258. Ibid., col. 469–71. 259. Act XX of 1863, An Act to enable the Government to divest itself of the management of Religious Endowments, India Bills Objects and Reasons, 1863–4, and associated papers, L/PJ/5/4, APAC, British Library. 260. As for private religious trusts, these were governed by the personal laws, and were not for that reason, entirely excluded from government supervision. Ritu Birla has convincingly discussed how private Hindu religious endowments, were reconstituted as private property of the idols to which they was dedicated. This curious Anglo-Indian legal fiction allowed the state to regulate obligations that being a trustee of such property entailed. Birla, Stages of capital, pp. 67–102. And yet, British legislators were not omnipotent. Even though they repeatedly expressed the desire to abolish private religious endowments altogether, since they saw these as devices to avoid ordinary succession laws, taxation and contractual obligations under the cover of religion, they failed to do so due to Indian political resistance. In their estimation of Indian motivation, British legislators and judges were correct to a certain extent. Religious trust property was non-transferable, and hence could not be claimed in compensation, even if they had been offered as security for a loan by their trustees. This was the case until the Privy Council prohibited private Muslim religious endowments, or Waqfs , with Abul Fata Mahommed Ishak (and others) v. Russomoy Dhur Chowdhry (and others) Moore’s India Appeals, 23 (1894–5), pp. 76–89. Under pressure modern Indian religious/community leaders, such attempts had to be reversed. M.A. Jinnah himself led the campaign for family waqfs. Gregory C. Kozlowski, Muslim


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261. 262. 263. 264. 265.

266.

267.

268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. 278. 279. 280. 281. 282. 283.

284. 285.

Notes endowments and society in British India (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 156–91. Hindus had even earlier claimed that private religious endowments was an inviolable religious right for themselves, an invaluable tool for disciplining errant heirs. Government of India Legislative Proceedings August 1870 No.s 93, 95, P/436/58, APAC, British Library. Mudaliar, State and religious endowments in Madras, pp. 44–51. Appadurai, Worship and conflict under colonial rule, p. 170. Mukherjee, Pilgrim Tax and temple scandals, pp. 368–70, 383, 391, 395–8. Mudaliar, State and religious endowments in Madras, p. 49. Hindu Religious Endowments, Reports from Collectors, etc., of proposed alteration of existing law in regard to, submitted to Government, with remarks, Madras Board of Revenue Proceedings,18 July 1874 No. 1,861, pp. 4991–5330, P/383, APAC, British Library. Muhammadan Educational Endowments Committee to the Secretary Government of Bengal, 28 February 1888, in Report of the Muhammadan educational endowments committee (Calcutta, 1888), p. 1. Peter Robb, ‘The challenge of Gau Mata: British policy and religious change in India 1880–1916’, Modern Asian Studies, 20: 2 (1986), pp. 285–319, item referred to in p. 289. Ibid., p. 2. S. Khalid Rashid, Wakf administration in India: a socio-legal study (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978), pp. 17–18. Sankaralinga Nadan and others v. Rajeshwara Dorai and others, 31 ILR Madras (1908), pp. 236–50. Eleanor Zelliott, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and the untouchable movement (New Delhi, 2004), pp. 74–7. Narhari Damodar Vaidya v. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar AIR Bombay (1938) 146. P. Hari Rao, The Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act (Act I of 1925) (Madras, 1925), p. 36. Mudaliar, State and religious endowments in Madras, pp. 71–2. Fifth administration report of the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Board, July 1929–June 1930, V/24/3612, APAC, British Library. Manager of waqf. S. Athar Husain and S. Khalid Rashid, Wakf laws and administration in India (Lucknow, 1968), p. 27. Jürgen Litt, ‘The Sankaracarya of Puri’ in Eschmann, Tripathi and Kulke (eds) The cult of Jagannath, pp. 411–20. The Constitution of India, updated up to the 94th Amendment Act. Literally, one who sits on the prayer carpet; head of a family of Muslim pirs in charge of a shrine. Ritual guides, often with hereditary relationship with the shrine. Husain and Rashid, Wakf laws and administration in India, pp. 33–7. Sixth report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the functioning of the Wakf Boards, on Durgah Khwaja Saheb (December 2002), http://164.100.24.167/book2/ reports/wakf/6threport.htm last accessed 28 October 2010. Appadurai, Worship and conflict under colonial rule, pp. 52–62. Commissioner of Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras, v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar, Shrirur AIR (1954) S.C. 282, discussed in J.D.M. Derrett, ‘Religious endowments, public and private’, especially pp. 494–6, and Mudaliar, State and religious endowments in Madras, pp. 250–77.


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286. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, p. 47. 287. Claudius Buchanan, Memoir of the expediency of an ecclesiastical establishment for British India; both as the means of perpetuating the Christian religion among our own countrymen; and as a foundation for the ultimate civilization of the natives (Cambridge, 1811). 288. Kaye, Christianity in India, p. 269. 289. Ibid., pp. 294–6. 290. Ibid., p. 401. 291. Ibid., p. 403; C.J. Grimes, Towards an Indian church: the growth of the church of India in constitution and life (London, 1946), pp. 74–5. 292. Bengal Ecclesiastical Proceedings 12 April 1843, No.s 1–3, ANG E/173/162, APAC, British Library. 293. A late Resident in Bengal (Lord Teignmouth), Considerations on the policy of communicating the knowledge of Christianity to the natives in India (London, 1807). 294. Catholic seminary in Ireland. See Chapter 1, pp. 30–31. 295. Minutes of evidence, taken before the whole house and the Select committee on the affairs of the East India Company, PPHC, 1812–13 (122), pp. 5–6, 8. 296. Ibid., 12–13. 297. See for example, Charles Grant, Observations on the state of society, which was reprinted for a parliamentary report on the East India Company prior to the abolition of its Charter in 1833. 298. Substantive law in British-ruled India was never formally racial, the effective racial distinctions being maintained through the prejudice of the judges and the juries, and procedural law, which controlled the composition of the juries. 299. Josiah Bateman, The life of Rt. Rev. Daniel Wilson (2 vols., London 1860), pp. 430–58. 300. Michael Pillai v. Rt. Rev. Bartle 39 ILR Madras (1915) 1056 301. Susan Billington-Harper, In the shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the travails of Christianity in British India (Michigan, 2000), pp. 93–107, and pp. 122–33. For a fuller discussion of Azariah’s appointment, see Chapter 6. 302. Parliamentary Debates, (Lords) 1927, 5th series, Vol. 67, pp. 134, 270–88; Vol. 68, 950–4; Vol. 69, 228. See Chapter 6. 303. Derrett felt that the HRCE Commission was trying to mould Hindu religious institutions into Christian churches, seminaries and charities. Derrett, ‘Religious endowments, public and private’, pp. 498–502.

3 Universality in Difference: The Emergence of Christian Personal Law in Colonial India 304. This chapter was previously published as ‘Religious change, legal conflict and political competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 44: 6 (2010), pp. 1147–1195. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. 305. The Indian Divorce (Amendment) Act 2001 modified the Special Marriage Act 1954, Hindu Marriage Act 1955, the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act 1936 and the Indian Divorce Act 1869, the last being relevant to Christians. ‘Marriage law reforms’, Government of India, Press Information Bureau. Visit http://pib.nic. in/feature/feyr2001/fnov2001/f221120011.html, last accessed 3 June 2010. On criticism by Christian activists see Dayal, A matter of equity, pp. 222–30.


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306. Flavia Agnes, Law and gender inequality: the politcs of women’s rights in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 153. 307. See Religion and Society, Special issue on the Uniform Civil Code, 43: 3 (September 1996), which brought together the opinions of the most committed Christian advocates of reform, including Jyotsna Chatterji, as well as more critical views. 308. David Lieberman, The province of legislation determined: legal theory in eighteenthcentury Britain (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 88–98. 309. Viswanathan, Outside the fold, pp. 75–117. 310. Chandra Mallampalli, Christians and public life in colonial South India 1863–1937: contending with marginality (London, 2004), pp. 21–80, especially with regard to inheritance laws, pp. 38–58. 311. Frykenberg, ‘The impact of conversion and social reform upon society in south India during the late Company period’. 312. David Washbrook encapsulated the dynamic tension produced by this division by referring to the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of the colonial legal system, which, by embedding ascribed status in personal/private law, hobbled the possibility of a homogenous rule of law even in the public realm, particularly with regard to property rights. Washbrook’s analysis of the Indian personal laws is much more historically situated than that of most legal scholars, including Derrett, whose work he relied upon. David Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 15: 3 (1981), pp. 649–721; J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, law and the state in India (New Delhi, 1999, 1st pubd. 1968). This chapter highlights issues that Washbrook did not contend with, firstly, the ubiquity of status in public law, not simply as a spill over from the personal law, but inherently, through the implication of racial difference. Elizabeth Kolsky has pointed to the claim made by white supremacists that they were entitled to a distinct criminal procedure as a ‘personal law’. Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India’, Law and History Review, 23: 3 (September 2005), pp. 631–83. The present chapter discusses how simultaneous claims premised on racial as well as religious status, such as Indian Christians argued for, complicates the notion of the public–private divide further. In attempting to arbitrate such claims, British jurists and legislators repeatedly evaluated the relative claims of particularity and universality. See Lauren Benton, Law and colonial cultures: legal regimes in world history, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 127–166; Travers, Ideology and empire in eighteenth-century India, pp. 191–200. 313. The last applying to Zoroastrians of Persian origin, known in India as Parsis. 314. G.C. Rankin, ‘The personal Law in British India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 89 (May, 1941), pp. 426–42. 315. With the Hindus, the label includes those that are heterodox in their beliefs, support non-Hindu religious groups or are socially and ritually ostracized from a Hindu caste/sect/group. As Marc Galanter explains, the definition of religious identity is in reality a description of civil status, not of religious belief or social behaviour. Marc Galanter, ‘Hinduism, Secularism and the Judiciary’, in Marc Galanter (ed.), Law and Society in Modern India (New Delhi, 1997), pp. 237–58, at p. 241. Similarly, a person is assumed to be Muslim if his or her father is Muslim, unless he or she explicitly renounces the faith. Fyzee, Outlines of Muhammadan Law, pp. 60–4. 316. Eugene Smith, ‘India as a secular state’, pp. 206–9. 317. See Kumkum Sangari, ‘Gender lines: personal laws, uniform laws, conversion’, Social Scientist, 27: 5/6 (May–June, 1999), pp. 17–61. 318. For the argument that statecentred legal pluralism was distinctly modern, and that it did not consist of ‘stacked’ laws with clearly distinguished spheres, see


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319. 320.

321.

322.

323.

324.

325. 326.

327.

Benton, Law and colonial cultures, pp. 1–30, and her discussion of cases from different parts of the world, including a case from Bihar, India, that Robert Travers also refers to, in his Ideology and Empire, pp. 118–23. Kolsky, ‘Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference’, pp. 633–5. For James and John Stuart Mill’s comments, see Karuna Mantena, ‘The crisis of liberal imperialism’, in Duncan Bell (ed.) Victorian visions of global order: empire and international relations in nineteenth- century political thought (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 113–66, especially pp. 116–22. For instance, when occasion arose for determining which of two rival British East India Companies was the genuine article. For a cynical account of such arbitration by a mid-nineteenth century British clergyman, see Philip Anderson, The English in Western India: being the early history of the factory at Surat, of Bombay, ,and the subordinate factories on the western coast (Bombay: Smith and Taylor, 1854), p. 154. C.J.B. Larby, ‘The centenary of the High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 12: 3 (July, 1963), pp. 1044 –8. It would be foolish to define the status of the zamindar (lit. Persian: landholder) given the animated disputes over such definition from among British officials of the eighteenth century up to scholars of today. For a summary of British debates see Travers, Ideology and Empire, pp. 141–80; for an indication of the variety of entitlements and powerholding involved among Mughal zamindars, see Nurul Hasan, ‘Zamindars under the Mughals,’ in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Land control and social structure in Indian history (Madison, 1969), pp. 17–31 . In all cases however, the zamindar’s duties involved collection and payment of revenues to state officials, and the maintenance of local order; whether his entitlement is best defined as the office of a revenue collector or a landholder is of the subject of the debates referred to above. The sale deed executed between the Mughal provincial government and the Company during the transfer of the zamindari of Calcutta in 1694 did not explicitly mention judicial powers, except perhaps with reference to the Company being accorded talluqdar status. Farhat Hasan, ‘Indigenous cooperation and the birth of a colonial city: Calcutta, c. 1698–1750’, Modern Asian Studies, 26: 1, (Feb. 1992), pp. 65–82, at p. 69. This revealed a certain Mughal approach to legal authority: the police and judicial powers which all Mughal zamindars exercised, were implicitly acknowledged rather than formally delegated to these ‘little kings’. On zamindars under Mughal rule, and their legal powers, see Radhika Singha, A despotism of law: crime and justice in early colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–6. At the same time, such informal legal delegation proved to be the source of jurisdictional conflict. As part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, on her marriage to Charles II. The recognition of custom depended on stringent criteria; for customs to become customary law, they had to be ancient, continuous, collective, and moral. On the application of such criteria in various Indian and other colonial situations, see, among others, Kunal Parker, ‘ “A corporation of superior prostitutes” Anglo-Indian legal conceptions of temple dancing girls’, Modern Asian Studies, 32: 3 (July, 1998), pp. 559–633. For a detailed discussion of this case, as well as the one that follows below, see Nandini Chatterjee, ‘Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 44: 3 (2010), pp. 1147–95.


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Notes

328. Anthony Pagden, ‘Human Rights, Natural Rights and Europe’s Imperial Legacy’, Political Theory, 31: 2 (April 2003), pp. 171–199. 329. And thereby having created that cognitive explosion, which made doubt a possibility, which defines, according to a leading philosopher, the secular age. Charles Taylor, ‘Modes of secularism’, in Rajiv Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its critics (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 31–53. On Grotius, and his junior contemporary, Samuel Pufendorf, see Knud Haakonsen, Natural law and moral philosophy: from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996). On the course of this debate in France and Germany, see T.J. Hochstrasser, Natural law theories in the early Enlightenment (Ideas in Context 58, Cambridge, 2000). 330. Court Book, April 1730–March 1732, B/61, pp. 483, 509–10, APAC. 331. Charles Fawcett, The first century of British justice in India (Oxford, 1934), pp. 222–4. 332. With the renewal of the Charter of the Mayors’ Courts in that year. Courtenay Ilbert, ‘Application of European Law to the Natives of India’, Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, 1 (1896–97), pp. 212–26, at p. 213. 333. mustee: corruption of Portuguese ‘mestiço’ or mixed, according to the compiler, W.K. Firminger. Fringy or feringhee was of course an older term, derived from ‘Frank’ and implying European, but often also, Christian. See Victor Cronin, A Pearl to India: the life of Roberto de Nobili (London, 1959), for the seventeenthcentury Jesuit missionary Roberto de Nobili’s efforts to convince people around the south Indian town of Madurai that Christians were not necessarily feringhee. In this particular case, other officials would use it to mean Eurasian. 334. W.K. Firminger, ‘Some records illustrative of the Mayor’s Court – II’, Bengal: Past and Present, VIII, pp. 123–45, at pp. 124–6. For a more detailed account of the case, see Chatterjee, ‘Religious change, social conflict and legal competition’. 335. So that a Bengali Hindu could sue in a English court, even though he could not swear the necessary oath. Lieberman, The province of legislation determined, pp. 88–98. 336. Pagden, ‘Human rights, natural rights’, pp. 177–91. 337. Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments, pp. 1–13. 338. See Derrett’s comments on the ‘peculiar’ provisions of Hastings’ plan, the limited set of topics on which shastra was supposed to provide sources of law, and his speculations on why this particular set of topics was chosen over others. Derrett, Religion, law and the state in India, pp. 233–4. 339. Marshall, Bengal: the British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740-1828 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 93. 340. On Reza Khan’s career, see Abdul Majed Khan, The transition in Bengal 1756– 1775: a study of Muhammad Reza Khan (Cambridge, 1969). 341. Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India (London, 1947), pp. 70–85. 342. Since nizamat (involving military rule as well as criminal jurisdiction) was in theory, not the province of the Company as diwan, but the Nawab, whose capital remained at Murshidabad. Very soon, the Company did take over complete political power, as well as control over the nizamat adalats such that Muslim law officers were relegated to advisory capacity in 1791. See M.P. Jain, Outlines of Indian legal history, (4th edn., Bombay: N.M. Tripathi, 1981) pp. 58–66, 118–44. For change in the substance of criminal law, see Singha, A despotism of law, pp. 1–32. 343. For diagrammatic representations of the (changing) hierarchy, see Stokes, The English utilitarians and India, pp. 142–3.


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344. Fort William Letter of 13 April 1772, quoted in Majed Khan, The transition in Bengal, pp. 270–1. 345. Reza Khan’s statement, 4 May 1772, quoted in ibid., p. 271. 346. Chris Bayly has argued that the Mughal administrative elite attempted, in the early days of British colonial rule in India, to not only transfer their skills to the new rulers, but also ‘to instruct the British in good government,’ referring in particular to Muhammad Reza Khan, and his protégé, Ali Ibrahim Khan, who later became the chief judge of Banaras. C.A. Bayly, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 80–3. 347. Benton, Law and colonial cultures, p. 80–1. 348. If Mughal practice was at all similar to the Ottoman, Mughal qazis would have applied Islamic law to all who chose to submit their matrimonial and inheritance disputes to their courts, otherwise not interfering in intra- community resolution of disputes. Najwa al- Qattan, ‘Dhimmīs in the Muslim court: legal autonomy and religious discrimination,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31: 3 (August, 1999), pp. 429–44. 349. Travers, Ideology and empire, pp. 118–23. 350. The above is an argument regarding the nature of the personal laws as a legal principle and practice, which is distinct from, but based on knowledge of the massive colonial codification projects aimed at providing substantive Hindu and Muslim, or ‘Anglo-Hindu’ and ‘Anglo-Muhammadan’ laws, displacing traditional Indian legal specialists. See Derrett, Religion, law and the state in India, pp. 225–320; Michael R. Anderson, ‘Islamic law and the colonial encounter’ in Peter Robb and David Arnold (eds) Institutions and ideologies: a SOAS South Asia reader (London, 1993), pp. 165–85. 351. Anderson, ‘Islamic law and the colonial encounter’. 352. Travers, Ideology and Empire, pp. 181–206. The disputed case discussed was one of a Muslim widow who claimed entire possession of her husband’s estate on the basis of a will, as opposed to the claims of his nephew as the principal male successor. Defeated in the provincial diwani adalat when the qazi and mufti, the Muslim law officers, decreed against her and even evicted her, she proceeded to Calcutta to file her case in the Supreme Court in 1778, which found in her favour in 1779 and indicted the provincial administration for illegitimately delegating their judicial duties to the Muslim law officers, and for victimizing a helpless Asiatic woman. 353. One of these imperatives was more summary methods for dealing with ‘law and order’ problems, such as ‘Thagi’, which led to framing homicide as murder rather than as a negotiable civil cause, as in Islamic law. See Singha, A Despotism of Law, pp. 1–32. 354. This being true of India, as well as the Straits Settlements (Malaya). 355. In fact, the English law of marriage was canon law, as modified by certain statutes, such as Lord Hardwicke’s Act of 1753. R.H. Helmholz, Marriage litigation in medieval England (London, 1974), p. 3; J.H. Baker, An introduction to English legal history (3rd edn., London, 1990), pp. 567–8; Lawrence Stone, Road to divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 353–90. On the changing jurisdiction over inheritance causes, Lloyd Bonfield, ‘Testamentary Causes in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1660–96’ in Christopher Brooks and Michel Lobban (eds), Communities and courts in Britain, 1150–1900 (London, 1997), pp. 133–54.


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Notes

356. Given the articulation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with the British legal system, the reform of the ecclesiastical courts in the late nineteenth century raised numerous tricky issues of religious versus secular authority. See Smith, ‘Martin v Mackonochie/Mackonochie v Penzance’, pp. 250–72. 357. ‘Letters Patent establishing the Supreme Court at Fort William, 1774’, in Anil Chandra Banerjee, Indian Constitutional Documents 1757–1947 (4th edn., 4 vols., Calcutta, 1974), pp. 36–43. Similar courts were set up in Madras in 1800 and Bombay in 1823. 358. Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to India in the 7th century, and settled in rural Gujarat, later moving into Bombay as commercial entrepreneurs. 359. On grounds that, at 16, when most Parsis were married, he should be considered an adult. ‘Conversion of two Parsis, and prosecution of the Rev. John Wilson, D.D., on a writ of habeas corpus, before the Supreme Court of Judicature at Bombay. Crown side,’ Oriental Christian Spectator (June, 1939), pp. 209–91. Other, younger converts were however returned to their guardians in the same year. 360. Veena Das has used the judgement in this case to underline the political construction of paternity, which was presented as a natural state. Janaki’s earlier case should encourage us to reconsider the total conflation of parental right with paternity in British legal thought. Veena Das, ‘Secularism and the Argument from Nature’, in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors (Stanford, 2006), pp. 93–112. 361. The Queen v. Shapurji Bezonji and Bezanji Edalji, 28 February 1843, Indian Decisions (Old Series), IV, pp. 84–94. 362. On the creation of the Parsi panchayat as a ‘traditional’ judicial body under British patronage, see Maneck, The Death of Ahriman, pp. 160–81. The panchayat was opposed to bigamy, but a nouveau-riche faction within the community, represented by young men such a Ardasir, were defiant of this rule because they wished to establish a more companionate second marriage for themselves, being dissatisfied with their uneducated first wives, usually married in childhood. On the Ardasir case, Ibid., pp. 173–5. 363. Ardaseer Cursetjee v. Perozeboye, (1856) 6 Moore’s Indian Appeals, pp. 348–92. 364. ‘Conversion of two Parsis, and prosecution of the Rev. John Wilson, D.D.’ pp. 255–6. Mitra Sharafi’s thesis ‘Bella’s case: Parsi identity and the law in colonial Rangoon, Bombay and London, 1887–1925’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Princeton, 2006), brought this case to my attention. 365. For a comprehensive documentation of this project, see Sorabjee Shapoorjee Bengalee, The Parsi marriage and divorce act 1865 (Bombay: Duftur Ashkara Press, 1868). I am grateful to Mitra Sharafi for this reference, and for alerting me to the dynamic legal history of Parsis in India. 366. The draft prepared by the Parsi Law Association, consisting of modern, legally active Parsi leaders, demanded dissolution of marriage following out- conversion, but this was vetoed by the Select Committee of the Governor- General’s Council, presided over by Henry Maine. See papers connected with an Act to define and amend the law relating to marriage and divorce among the Parsees, XV of 1865, Government of India, Bills and Acts, L/PJ/5/7, APAC. In the amended Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, III of 1936, religious change was reinserted as a ground for seeking divorce, although not for automatic dissolution, since Parsi activists were also concerned with preventing the avoidance of marital duties (including monogamy) by conversion to Hinduism or Islam. Pestanji


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367.

368. 369.

370. 371.

372. 373. 374. 375. 376. 377.

378. 379.

380.

381. 382.

383. 384. 385. 386.

Phirozshah Balsara (ed.), The Parsi marriage and divorce act, (Bombay: Jehangir B. Karani’s Sons, 1936). As for inheritance, Parsi activists appear to have concentrated their energies on barring access to Parsi charitable trust funds (rather than on private estates) for those who did not in their opinion qualify as Parsi. For a path-breaking study of Parsi self- definition in and through the AngloIndian legal system, and the rise of race in the early twentieth century, see Mitra June Sharafi, ‘Bella’s case’. Jain, Outlines of Indian legal history, pp. 405–14. There still needs to be written a sufficiently nuanced and comprehensive ideological and institutional history of the Law Commissions. For a useful discussion focussed on criminal law, see Kolsky, ‘Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference’. Anglo-Indians, or people similar to those in Phoebe and Sarah’s families. Copies of the Special Reports of the Indian Law Commissioners, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons (henceforth PP) 1842, (585) XXX, pp. 227–866, V ‘Power of a master over his slave’. ‘On the petitions of the East Indians and Armenians, B VIII, ibid. The Vice-President in Council to the Court of Directors, Letter 393, 3 January 1832, in C.H. Philips (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, II, pp. 748–51. ‘Regulations passed by Governments of Bengal, Fort- St.- George and Bombay, 1832’, PP, 1833 (755) XXV, pp. 352–3. Letter Bishop of Bombay to Governor of Bombay, 28 March 1849, India Legislative Consultations, 11 April 1850, no. 57 (unpaginated), P/207/59, APAC. Minutes of members of Council, Ibid., no. 59. Highest civil ‘Company’ court in a province. India Legislative Consultations, 11 April 1850, No.s 61–4. The Memorial of the Hindoo Inhabitants of Bengal, Behar and Orissa to the Governor- General of India in Council against the Proposed Act for altering the Hindoo Law of Inheritance (Calcutta, 1850), printed pamphlet, Ibid., no. 80. India Legislative Consultations, 9 April 1850, No. 86. K.M. Banerjea, Remarks on the speech of the Earl of Ellenborough in the House of Lords, on the Bengal Petition against Act XXI of 1850 of the Government of India (Calcutta, 1853). Banerjea summarized Ellenborough’s speech before making his comments. Ramachandra Ghosha, A biographical sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea: missionary, scholar, patriot (2nd edn., Calcutta, 1980), pp. 14–22. For detailed discussion of Banerjea’s ecclesiastical and theological career, see Chapter 6 and 7. Banerjea, Remarks on the speech of the Earl of Ellenborough. A Reply to K.M. Banerjea’s Remarks on the Speech of the Earl of Ellenborough in the House of Lords delivered on the 26th of May 1853 against the Act XXI of 1850 of the Government of India. By a Member of the Committee appointed by the Hindu inhabitants of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, for Petitioning Parliament against the aforesaid Act. (Calcutta, 1853). Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, pp. 27–8. Even if these statuses were themselves the product of evolving political and social relations, as Washbrook argued in his ‘Law, state and Agrarian society’. Mallampalli, Christians and public life, pp. 21–37. After much petitioning, and several reversals, rather than through a simple assumption of racial similarity. The Vice-President in Council to the Court of Directors, Letter 393, 3 January 1832, in C.H. Philips (ed.), The correspondence


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387. 388. 389. 390. 391. 392.

393.

394.

395. 396. 397.

398.

399.

400. 401. 402. 403.

404.

Notes of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, pp. 748–51; Memorial of the undersigned Christian inhabitants of the presidencies of Bengal and Agra, chiefly descended from British-born subjects of the crown on the father’s side and on the mother’s from natives of India; also of the Christian foreigners, and their descendants, settled in the British possessions in India, now governed by the East India Company (Calcutta, 1850). Abraham v. Abraham, (1863) 9 Moore’s India Appeals 195. Mallampalli, Christians and public life, pp. 38–58. Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, pp. 111–17. Report of the Indian Law Commission, 1879, pp. 9–18. Act X of 1865 Indian Succession Act, and connected papers, in India Bills, Objects and Reasons, Part 3, 1865, L/PJ/5/7, APAC. I do not agree with Mallampalli that the application of this law to Indian Christians revealed the misguided British belief that those who shared their religion would be apt recipients of British law. The process worked in the reverse; the Indian Succession Act aimed to be a universal law, applied to those for whom specific exemptions had not been made. Government of India Legislative Proceedings 22 August 1865 No. 41 pp. 924–6, P/208/11; Government of India Legislative Proceedings 1866, 8 February No. 8 pp. 49–50, 19 April No. 6 pp. 118–43, P/436/53, APAC. William Griffith, The Indian succession act: Hindu Wills Act, Parsi succession Act, Mahometan succession and probate and administration Act, with the other acts and rules regulating the disposition and devolution of property of death and with commentaries thereon and forms used in practice (Madras, 1898). Government of India Legislative Proceedings 1866, 19 April No. 6, pp. 126–8, P/436/53, APAC. Government of India Legislative Proceedings August 1870 No. 56, pp. 79–80, No.s 82–95 P/436/58, APAC; Griffith, The Indian Succession Act. Many Christians continued to claim access to Hindu inheritance law, as in Tellis v. Saldanha, Indian Law Reports, (1886) 10 Mad. 69, where it was denied, and in Francis Ghosal v. Gabri Ghosal, Indian Law Reports 31 (1907) Bombay, pp. 25–31, where it was accepted. But it remained applicable for Indian Christians who could not secure express exemption, on the basis of customary practices, such as the Christians of Coorg, and Punjab, among others. Agnes, Law and gender inequality, pp. 148–9; A.C. Ghose, The Indian succession act (Act XXXIX of 1925) (Calcutta, 1926), pp. 11–12. S.C. Mukerji, ‘Law regarding Indian Christians’ in The Report of the Third Session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, held in Madras, December 1916, (Madras, 1917), pp. 40–7, United Theological College Archives, Bangalore. This caused certain problems for Jews and Quakers, whose religious tenets did not admit of priests. H.S.Q. Henriques ‘Jewish Marriages and the English Law’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 20: 3 (April, 1908), pp. 391–449. Clauses providing the exceptions were 6, 17, 18. Although the law in question did not actually apply to Scotland. An Act to remove doubts as to the validity of certain marriages had and solemnized within the British territories in India, 1818 58 Geo. III c. 84. For his support of missions to India, in particular the Church Missionary Society, and his personal enthusiasm for the conversion of Indians, see Josiah Bateman, The life of the Rt. Rev. Daniel Wilson. Lord Bishop of Calcutta to the Governor- General, 21 August 1833, in Royal Commission to inquire into State and Operation of Law of Marriages, PP 1850 (1203) XX.363–430, at pp. 391–5.


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405. Legislative Council, Calcutta, to the Court of Directors, 3 December 1838, forwarding the petition of the Dissenting Ministers, No. s 6–7, in ibid., pp. 400–1. 406. Letter of the Bishop of Calcutta to the President in Council, 30 January 1839 No. 15 in ibid., pp. 405–10. 407. Marriage Act 1836, 6 & 7 Will. IV c. 85. For some indication of Nonconformist politics and Anglican clerical opposition preceding this legislation, see Olive Anderson, ‘The Incidence of Civil Marriage in Victorian England and Wales’, Past and Present, 69 (Nov. 1975), pp. 50–87. 408. Report of the Royal Commission to inquire into State and Operation of Law of Marriages, pp. 367–70. 409. Judicial Letters from India, 1852, pp. 171–3, L/PJ/3/291, APAC. 410. Act XXV of 1864 and the related papers have proved untraceable in the India Office Records so far; it appears that they were lent to the Colonial Office for reference. The present account is based on the papers relating to Act V of 1865, which described the failings of the previous law. 411. Government of Fort St. George to Government of India, 17 January 1865, in Indian Marriage Act V of 1865 and connected papers, Government of India, Bills and Acts, 1865, Part 3, L/PJ/5/7, APAC. 412. Although subsequent discussion over divorce would reveal that their exemption was of unsure implication. 413. ‘Indian Marriage Act, 1872 and related papers’ in Government of India, Bills and Acts, 1872 Part III, L/PJ/5/16, APAC. 414. These debates spilled over into a number of widely divergent ideological concerns, in which, as scholars as shown, the real experiences of women were treated as no more than the turf for male contests. See Tanika Sarkar, ‘Conjugality and Hindu Nationalism: Resisting Colonial Reason and the Death of a ChildWife’ in Tanika Sarkar(ed.) Hindu wife, Hindu nation: community, religion and cultural nationalism (London: Hurst & Co., 2001), pp. 191–225; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity: the ‘Manly’ Englishman and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Sudhir Chandra, Enslaved daughters: colonialism, law and women’s rights (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 415. Minutes of Evidence given by David Hill, of the Judicial Department of the East India Company, in Report of the Royal Commission to inquire into State and Operation of Law of Marriages, pp. 379–81. 416. Except Parsis after 1865. 417. Among the earliest petitioners was the Scottish Missionary John Wilson, who worked in Bombay, and who referred to the experience of with Parsi pupils who converted to Christianity. Report of the Select Committee on the Bill to legalize, under certain circumstances, the re-marriage of native converts to Christianity, and associated papers, pp. 18–42, Government of India, Bills and Acts, 1866, L/ PJ/5/8, APAC. 418. Section 18 of the Act as it was passed in 1866 required establishing facts regarding consummation, which determined subsequent procedure. 419. Government of India Legislative Proceedings 18 August 1865 No. 39–40, pp. 918–23, P/208/11, APAC. As the case of re Millard showed, the Catholic church did insist on going its own way, with occasional adverse results for its members. A Catholic priest was convicted for abetting bigamy when he performed the marriage of a paraiyan (dalit or formerly untouchable caste) woman, converted to Christianity in childhood, married to a non- Christian paraiyan man, and subsequently abandoned by him. re Millard Indian Law Reports, (1868) 10


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420.

421. 422.

423. 424.

425.

426.

427.

428.

429.

Notes Madras, pp. 218–22. The case underlined forcefully the modern state’s refusal to recognize alternative laws and tribunals with jurisdiction over marriage and its dissolution. From the Lord Bishop of Calcutta to the Viceroy of India, forwarding Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s printed pamphlet, as well as letters from Tara Chand and Rev. R. Winter of the S.P.G. mission to Delhi, in Report of the Select Committee on the Bill to legalize, under certain circumstances, the remarriage of native converts to Christianity, and associated papers, pp. 18–42. Ibid., pp. 43–5. Ibid., pp. 51–4. On Satthianadhan and the history of this illustrious Tamil Christian family, see E.M. Jackson, ‘Glimpses of a Prominent Indian Christian Family of Tirunelveli and Madras, 1863–1906: Perspectives on Caste, Culture, and Conversion’ in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Christians and missionaries in India: cross- cultural communication since 1500 (Michigan: W.B. Ferdmans, 2003), pp. 315–35. ‘Petition of the Mahomedan inhabitants of the town and suburbs of Calcutta’, in Ibid., pp. 137–41. This was pointed out by a judge from Dhaka, referring to case where the deserting wife of a Christian convert had, subsequent to leading a ‘dissolute’ life, had disappeared without trace. Under Secretary to Government of India to Officiating Secretary Government of Bengal, 9 September 1868, acknowledging receipt of the letter with enclosure, Government of India Legislative Proceedings 1868, 12 September, No. 6, p. 274, P/436/55, APAC. On the British divorce law, see Baker, An introduction to English legal history, pp. 567–8; Stone, Road to divorce, pp. 353–90; Olive Anderson, ‘Hansard’s Hazards: an Illustration from Recent Interpretations of Married Women’s Property Law and the 1857 Divorce Act’, The English Historical Review, 112: 449 (November 1997), pp. 1202–15. Henry Rattigan, The law of divorce applicable to Christians in India (the Indian Divorce Act) (2nd edn., Lahore: Unniversal Book Agency, 1936), p. 105. This provision was specific to the Indian law, with no counterpart in British law, since under British law a second marriage was necessarily a criminal offence. The notion of ‘potentially polygamous’ marriage, invalid under British law, was a description that applied even when parties were in fact monogamous. The concept remained operative in Britain as late as 1995, until by the Private International Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1995 (1995 c 42) s. 5, marriages of persons domiciled in England and Wales performed abroad under laws that permitted polygamy, became valid, provided that polygamy was not actually committed. Halsbury’s notes on the law referred to Muslim marriages, performed under Muslim personal law abroad, and the case of Hussein v. Hussein (1983) Fam. 26 in particular. Halsbury’s Statutes of England and Wales, (4th edn., London: Butterworths, 2006), Vol. 27, pp. 640–1. The consequences of this legal doctrine were very different for Christians in Britain and in India, as this article will show. British Indian courts had Muslim and Hindu law specialists attached to them, in consultative capacity, until such offices were abolished by the Act XI of 1864. However consultation of ‘expert witnesses’, especially where Muslim law was concerned, continued into the early twentieth century. M.P. Jain, Outlines of Indian legal history, p. 467. Zaburdust Khan v. his wife (1870) 2 N.W. 370–379.


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430. Unlike all other Indian males, except Parsis, after the passing of the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, XV of 1865. 431. M.P. Duraisamy Aiyar, Memories of Sir T. Muthusami Ayyar: first Indian judge of the High Court of Madras (Tanjore, n.d. [1912]). 432. Thapitha Peter v. Thapitha Lakshmi, Indian Law Reports (1894) 17 Madras 235–246. 433. Rattigan, The law of divorce, pp. 34–5. 434. B.N. Athavale, ‘The present law regarding Indian Christians – is legislation necessary?’, The Report of the First Session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, held in Calcutta, December 1914, (Madras, 1915), Appendix I, United Theological College Archives, Bangalore. Athavale was not aware of the recent Calcutta judgement; it was pointed out in subsequent meetings of the A.I.C.I.C. 435. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton, 2000).

4 Creating a Public Presence: The Missionary College of St Stephen’s, Delhi 436. Viswanathan, Masks of conquest; Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj, pp. 87–124. 437. On the government’s effort to claim legitimacy not with reference to superior European civilization, but its privileged access to authentic Indian culture and interests, see the next chapter. 438. Hayden Bellenoit, Missionary education and empire in late colonial India, 1860– 1920 (London, 2007). 439. Brooke Foss Westcott, On some points in the religious office of universities (London, Cambridge, 1873). 440. C.M. Millington, Whether we be many or few: a history of the Cambridge/Delhi Brotherhood (Bangalore, 1999), pp. 1–23. 441. There was a Universities’ Mission to Africa formed in the 1859. A.E.M. AndersonMorshead, The history of the universities’ mission to Central Africa (6th edn., 3 vols., London, 1955–62). 442. Thomas Valpy French, who was the first missionary bishop in India supported by the C.M.S., and who had mellowed from the time when he engaged in spectacular public debates with north Indian Muslim leaders in the 1850s, had experimented with a seminary at Lahore, the St. Paul’s Divinity College, which taught theology in Urdu, other Indian languages, and insisted upon an Indian ethos. H.A. Birks, The life and correspondence of Thomas Valpy French (2 vols., London, 1895), II, pp. 222–71. 443. Rama Chandra studied and then taught at the Delhi College in the decades preceding the Mutiny, using the College’s Urdu journal to ‘scientifically’ criticize Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy. The pattern of his career therefore was similar to that of Krishna Mohan Banerjea, also in the fact that Rama Chandra decided to become Christian in 1852 following a long period of intellectual and social rebellion. As result he suffered much greater deprivations than Krishna Mohan, nearly dying during the Mutiny at the hands of the rebels. F.J. Western, The Early History of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, (n.p., 1950), Typescript, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, pp. 18–24, 30–2. 444. Millington, Whether we be many or few, p. 27; F.J. Western, The early history of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi typescript, (n.p., 1950), pp. 43–9, 62, Rhodes House Library, Oxford.


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Notes

445. The zenana mission was started by Rev. Robert Winter’s wife, Priscilla. It was carried on as the Community of St Stephen, the ‘sister’ organization to the Cambridge Brotherhood; the sisters also ran a highly successful maternity hospital in Delhi. Ibid., pp., 53–4. 446. Millington, Whether we be many or few, pp. 41–6. 447. On the Cambridge Mission’s condescension towards chamar or traditional leather-worker Christians, see J. Cox, ‘George Alfred Lefroy, 1854–1919: a bishop in search of a church’ in S. Pederson and P. Mandler (eds), After the Victorians: private conscience and public duty. Essays in memory of John Clive (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 55–76, esp. 61–67. 448. ‘Letter by Edward Bickersteth 16 October 1878’ CMD Occasional Paper 1, USPG archives, Bodelian Library, Oxford. 449. ‘Dissent recorded by Kashinath Trimbak Telang’, Report of the Indian Education Commission (12 vols., Calcutta, 1883), I, pp. 606–11. 450. F.F. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi (Calcutta, 1935), p. 7. 451. David Baker, ‘St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, 1881–1997: “An Alexandria on the banks of the Jamuna?” ’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Knowledge and politics: educational institutions in India (Delhi 1998), p. 69. 452. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, p. 12. 453. A Hindu scribal caste, prominent within the Mughal administrative elite. 454. Ibid., 16–17. 455. Advocates of Sanatana or eternal dharma were Hindus unconvinced of the reformist efforts of the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, inclined towards retaining customary ritual practices. 456. Named in the list of the earliest teaching staff. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, p. 37. 457. Rev. S.S. Allnutt, ‘Educational Work in 1885’, CMD Occasional Paper 10, USPG Archives. 458. Ibid. 459. CMD Occasional Paper 15 G.A. Lefroy, ‘Christ the goal of India’, USPG Archives. 460. ‘Letter of C.F. Andrews’, Report of the S.P. G. and Cambridge Mission in Delhi and the South Punjab, (1908–9), pp. 24–8, USPG Archives. The students’ ‘belief’ appears well in line with developments in Hindu thought that appropriated the logic of ‘Christian rationality’ for its own ends. For a close description of such reformulation in the context of the Benares Sanskrit College, see M.A. Dodson, Orientalism, empire and national culture: India, 1770–1880 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 144–83. 461. Gauri Viswanathan mentions that a Bengali father in mid-nineteenth century Bengal planned to send his son, Lal Behari Day, to Alexander Duff’s Scottish Mission school, but remove him before the boy learnt sufficient English to appreciate Christianity. No doubt because Day himself became Christian, Viswanathan feels that his father had failed to appreciate the craftiness of missionary pedagogy. But surely it is important to keep in mind that Day represented the exception rather than the rule, and for most students, the strategy appeared to work very well. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of conquest, pp. 13, 58–9. 462. Henry Whitehead, ‘The progress of Christianity in India and mission strategy’, The East and the West, 5 (1907), pp. 21–8. 463. ‘Letter from Mr. S.K. Rudra, acting head of St. Stephen’s College’, Report of the S.P.G. and Cambridge Mission in Delhi and the South Punjab (1906–7), pp. 21–5, USPG Archives.


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464. Jeffrey Cox, ‘Whitehead, Henry (1853–1947)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, May 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/48980, accessed 4 September 2008]; also Billington-Harper, In the Shadow of the Mahatma, pp. 118–19. 465. ‘Principal Rudra: a sketch of his life’, St. Stephen’s College Magazine, 77, Principal Rudra Farewell Number (Easter 1923). 466. Hugh Tinker, The ordeal of love: C.F. Andrews and India (Delhi, 1979), pp. 27–30. 467. His biographies include ibid., and Benarsidas Chaturvedi and Marjorie Sykes, Charles Freer Andrews: a narrative (London, 1949); Daniel O’Connor, Gospel, Raj and Swaraj: the missionary years of C.F. Andrews (Frankfurt a.m. Main, 1990). 468. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, p. 37. 469. C.F. Andrews, Letter (untitled), St. Stephen’s College Magazine, 77, Principal Rudra Farewell Number (Easter 1923), pp. 36–9. 470. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, pp. 72–3. 471. Report of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and the south Punjab (1905–6), pp. 30–4, USPG Archives. 472. Report of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and the south Punjab (1906–7), pp. 21–3, USPG Archives. 473. Letter SS Allnutt to V.H. Stanton, from Cambridge Mission Delhi, January 1907, File ‘Correspondence re appointment of Prof. Rudra as Principal 1907’, in CMD 34, USPG Archives. 474. Ibid. 475. Letter V.H. Stanton to Allnutt from Trinity College Feb 7 1907, in same file. 476. Letter Stanton to Allnutt from Trinity College March 18 1907, in same file. 477. G.A. Lefroy, ‘Note on the principalship of St. Stephen’s College’ in same file. 478. Millington, Whether we be many or few, pp. 98–9. 479. Letter 6 April 1911 V.H. Stanton to G.A. Lefroy; Letter 18 April 1911 H.H. Montgomery to S.S. Allnutt. Folder: SPG Delhi, Sub-folder: SPG Correspondence 1911, St. Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 480. Letter 6 February 1911 F. Hort to S.S. Allnutt, Folder: SPG Delhi, Sub-folder: SPG Correspondence 1911, St Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 481. Minutes of meeting 11 May 1911, and attachments, Cambridge Committee Minute Book, 1904–1925, CMD 3, USPG Archives. The document aimed at forming a legal association called to St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, whose rules of association included provisions for the appointment of a managing committee. 482. Letter Stanton to Montgomery 14 June 1911. Folder: SPG Delhi, Sub-Folder: Constitution of the College Original Draft 1911–12, St. Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 483. Tinker, The Ordeal of Love, p. 360. 484. Letter Stanton to Allnutt, 20 June 1911, Folder: SPG Delhi, Sub-folder: SPG Correspondence 1911, St. Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 485. Advisory group on the question of a Constitution for the St. Stephen’s College Delhi 6 July 1911, Folder: SPG Delhi, sub-folder: Constitution of the College Original Draft 1911–12, St. Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 486. Minutes and attachments, 11 October and 7 December 1911, Cambridge Committee Minute Book, 1904–1925, CMD 3, USPG Archives. 487. Minutes and attachments, 13 May 1912, in Ibid. 488. Letter Montgomery to Lefroy, 7 October 1912, Folder: SPG Delhi, Sub-folder: SPG Correspondence 1911–12, St. Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 489. Minutes of meeting, 12 December 1912, Cambridge Committee Minute Book, 1904–1925, CMD 3, USPG Archives.


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490. Constitution of the St. Stephen’s College Delhi, 1913, Folder: College Constitution Original Draft, 1904–1925, St. Stephen’s College Archives. 491. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, p. 18. 492. ‘Mr. Andrews’ Letter, St. Stephen’s College’, Report of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and the south Punjab (1910–11), pp. 21–5, USPG Archives. 493. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, pp. 130–1. 494. Ibid; Folder: Societies, St. Stephen’s College Archives, Delhi. 495. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, 29 September 1922, p. 629, V/9/2825, APAC, British Library. 496. Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, Resolution re Insertion of time-table conscience clause in the education codes of the different provinces, The Gazette of India, 3 March 1917, p. 236, clipping in File Conscience Clause, 1917–22, CMD 43, USPG Archives. 497. Extract from Gandhi’s letter, 7 February 1917, accompanying Rudra’s letter, below. 498. Rudra to Cambridge Committee, 10 February 1917, File Conscience Clause, 1917–22, CMD 43, USPG Archives. 499. Letter F.J. Western Chairman Governing Body to Mr. Dolphin Cambridge Committee, 12 June 1922; S.P.G. questionnaire attached, in Ibid.. 500. Ibid. 501. An old boy, ‘Appreciation’, St. Stephen’s College Magazine, 77, Principal Rudra Farewell Number (Easter 1923), pp. 34–5. 502. Ibid. 503. Baker, ‘St. Stephen’s College, Delhi’, p. 83. 504. Tinker, The ordeal of love, pp. 63, 75, 95–98. Indian teachers of St Stephen’s College who took an openly nationalist stance in 1900s were forced to resign, p. 42. 505. Several letters from Tagore and some from Gandhi to Rudra, in Folder ‘Notes and Diaries’, St. Stephen’s College Archives 506. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, p. 180. 507. With the intervening period of three years when F.F. Monk took that post. 508. Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, in The Stephanian, College centenary issue (1 February 1981), pp. 9–10. 509. Oral history interview with N.K. Mukarji, interviewer S.L. Manchanda, 1994, Oral History and Transcripts, Accession no. 633, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Vol. 1, pp. 103–6. 510. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, p. 191. 511. Ibid., pp. 192–99. 512. Ibid., p. 219. 513. Ibid., pp. 233–4. 514. A. Lindsay, Report of the Commission on Christian Higher Education in India: an enquiry into the place of the Christian college in modern India (London, 1931). 515. Memorandum on the application of the Lindsay report to St Stephen’s College, Document in File ‘Lindsay Report’, St. Stephen’s College Archives. 516. Monk, A history of the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, pp. 16–29. 517. Khuswant Singh, ‘Foreword’ in Aditya Bhattacharya and Lola Chatterji (eds), The fiction of St. Stephen’s (Delhi, 2000), pp. v–viii. 518. Baker, ‘St. Stephen’s College’, p. 95. 519. And a greatly entertaining discussion is produced in Bhattacharya and Chatterji (eds), The fiction of St. Stephen’s which analyses the phenomenon of an


280 Notes


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Notes 281

5 Education for ‘Uplift’: Christian Agricultural Colleges in India 522. See Chapter 1, note 60. 523. The ‘social gospel’ was a theological trend that developed in early twentiethcentury America, uniting Christian ministers and lay activists who believed that Christianity was meant for the salvation of society as much as of the individual, and interpreting salvation to mean social justice in this world before spiritual redemption in the next. Ronald C. White and C. Howard Hopkins, The social gospel: religion and reform in changing America (Philadelphia, 1976). 524. This chapter borrows the concept of national service from Carey Anthony Watt, Serving the nation: cultures of service, association, and citizenship in colonial India (Delhi, 2005). Watt highlights the ideological and political dimensions of charitable and philanthropic initiatives, which formed the wide penumbra of nation-building activities surrounding and overlapping with formal nationalist politics. The present chapter will explore a specific genre of social service with reference to its political context, but unlike Watt, who focuses on Hindu organizations, underline the cross- community networks that sustained such projects. 525. The only study of Agricultural science as a curriculum that I have found is in Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, 1857–1905 (Delhi 1997), pp. 125–31. There is no indication of the complex politics around the selection or advocacy of such a curriculum, and the book stops short of the time when agricultural science entered the most exciting stage of its career in India. 526. R.A. Buchanan, ‘Institutional proliferation in the British engineering profession, 1847–1914’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 38: 1 (February 1985), pp. 42–60. 527. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Civil Engineers, professional organizations formed in the early nineteenth century, provided apprenticeship for large fees, and had a vested interest in thwarting alternative modes of training for engineers. Colin Divall, ‘A measure of agreement: employers and engineering studies in the universities of England and Wales, 1897–1939’, Social Studies of Science, 20: 1. (February, 1990), pp. 65–112. There was also a great deal of opposition from within the traditional universities; Cambridge created a Chair of ‘Mechanism and Applied Mechanics’ in 1875, but the first professor, James Stuart had to spend a lot of time and his own money creating a sustaining a laboratory for his students. Cambridge University Engineering Department (2000) , [last accessed 4 November 2010]. Europe was more advanced in developing formal engineering studies, as was America. France established the École Polytechnique to train the military engineering corps in 1794, the corresponding American institution being the U.S. Military Academy, established in 1804. America set up the first nonmilitary engineering college at Troy, New York, in 1825. By 1900, U.S.A. had


extraordinary number of Indian writers in English language being produced by this one institution. 520. Baker, ‘St. Stephen’s College’, p. 103. 521. Harish Trivedi, ‘The St. Stephen’s factor’ in Aditya Bhattacharjea and Lola Chatterjee (eds) The fiction of St. Stephen’s (Delhi, 2000), pp. 3–7.


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528. 529. 530. 531.

532. 533. 534. 535.

536.

537.

538. 539. 540. 541. 542.

543. 544. 545. 546. 547. 548. 549.

Notes 89 institutions teaching Engineering. Ira O. Baker, ‘Engineering education in America at the end of the century’, Science, New Series, 12: 305 (2 November 1905), pp. 666–74. J.B. Morrell, ‘The University of Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century: its eminence and academic structure’, Isis, 62: 2 (Summer, 1971), pp. 158–71. Gladys L. Baker, ‘Discussion: Farm Fundamentalism: past and future’, Journal of Farm Economics, 44: 5 (December, 1962), pp. 1237–40. Roger Sayce, The history of the Royal Agricultural College: Cirencester (Stroud, 1992), pp. 1–4. Charles Daubeny, A lecture on institutions for the better education of the farming classes, especially with reference to the proposed agricultural college near Cirencester, with some remarks on experimental farms, and on the class of inquiries for which they are more particularly designed (Oxford, 1844), pp. 5–13. Sayce, The history of the Royal Agricultural College, pp. 10–11. Alfred Charles True, A history of agricultural education in the United States, 1785– 1925 (Washington, 1929), pp. 59–111. Ibid., pp. 116–26. T.D. Acland, Agricultural education: what it is, and how to improve it. Considered in two letters to Sir Edward C. Kerrison, M.P., President of the Royal Agricultural Society of England (London, 1864). The old universities of Oxford and Cambridge initiated the University extension movement, which consisted of courses taught by itinerant lecturers, with a few weeks of evening lectures, combined with reading and exercises to be done at home, and the possibility of a final examination conducted by the University. The activities were sustained by local committees of altruists, supplemented by University delegates. Richard G. Moulton, The university extension movement (London, n.d. [1887]). Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Ideologies of the end of the Raj: Burma, India and the world, 1940–50’ in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds), Decentring empire: Britain, India and the transcolonial world (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), pp. 351–73. Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth Earl of Mayo (1822–72). John Augustus Voelcker, Report on the improvement of Indian agriculture (London, n.d. [1893]), pp. 1–5. Ibid., pp. 336–77. Ibid., p. 379. F.H. Brown, ‘Mackenzie, Sir Alexander (1842–1902)’, rev. Rajat Kanta Ray, Oxford dictionary of national biograohy, [last accessed 31 January 2007]. Voelcker, Report on the improvement of Indian agriculture, pp. 1–5. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 10–19. Ibid., pp. 379–89. The Agricultural College, Pusa: ceremony connected with the laying of the foundation stone (Pusa, 1905). Ibid., pp. 3–6, 10–18. Walter C. Neale, ‘Land is to Rule’ and Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Permanent Settlement in operation: Bakarganj district, East Bengal’ in Robert Eric Frykenberg (ed.), Land control and social structure in Indian history (Madison, 1969), pp. 3–15, 163–74.


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550. Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first woman lawyer, held an official post of legal representative of pardanashin (secluded) women of landed aristocratic families. Acting as the government deputy in estates that came under the Encumbered Estates Act, she was responsible in many cases for arranging the education of minor heirs. She claimed that her efforts to secure a sound agricultural education for such boys were thwarted by Indian ‘England-returned’ bureaucrats, who insisted on the usual University education. Sorabji was an unusual person, daughter of a Parsi converted to Christianity, educated in Britain, and holding her own in this entirely male legal profession. She chose to identify with the extreme British conservatives in her quest for an identity. Therefore she was a rather good representation of British official conservative ideas, even a caricature of them in her enthusiasm for the Indian feudal landlords, agricultural education, and hatred of Indians educated in Britain, just like herself. Chandani Lokugé (ed.), India calling: the memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first woman barrister (2nd edn., New Delhi 2001). 551. I.J. Catanach, Rural credit in western India, 1875–1930: rural credit and the cooperative movement in the Bombay Presidency (Berkeley, 1970). 552. This measure, aimed at preventing officially identified agricultural classes from losing land used as debt security, ignored the money lending activities of large landlords. Norman G. Barrier, The Punjab Alienation of Land Bill of 1900 (Durham, 1966). Incidentally, this law left the lowest rung of agricultural workers, mostly dalits, without any legal protection. Harding, Religious transformation in South Asia, pp. 35–36. 553. Martin Channock, Chapter 15 ‘Land’ in Chanock, The making of south African legal culture, pp. 361–405. 554. Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes. 555. The official analysis did reflect some political realities, especially in the Punjab, where the rural–urban, agriculturist–moneylender dichotomies corresponded at least partly to the religious divide of Muslim and Hindu. The Congress’s failure to attract the Punjabi Muslim landowners did not immediately lead to communalization of politics; in fact it led to the dominance of non- communal, pro-landlord and pro-government conservative politics under the Unionist party until 1946. Barrier, The Punjab Alienation of Land Bill of 1900. 556. His uncle, Lord Frederick Lugard (1848–1945), Governor- General of Nigeria, saw that country’s colonization as essential for civilizing it. Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes, pp. 19–43. 557. Frank L. Brayne, The re-making of village India (2nd edn., London, 1929). 558. Malcolm Darling, The Punjab peasant in prosperity and debt (London, 1925). 559. Harold H. Mann, The social framework of agriculture: India, Middle East, England, ed. Daniel Thorner (Bombay, 1967). 560. Frank L. Brayne, The peasant’s home and its place in national planning (London, 1949), p. 16. 561. The title of one English pamphlet in a collection called Winning the peace (Oxford Pamphlets on Indian Affairs series, 25, Bombay, 1944), pp. 30–2. 562. Sample posters in Brayne, The remaking of village India, pp. 28–9. These contained contrasting images of scrawny children born to under-age mothers, and the healthy progeny born of marriage at a scientifically appropriate age. 563. Frank L. Brayne, Better villages (Bombay, 1937), p. 209. 564. Ibid., p.3. 565. Village record-keeper.


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Notes

566. Holder of rent-free land. 567. Frank L. Brayne, ‘A paper read at the Lahore Educational Conference, December 1926’ in Brayne, The remaking of village India, pp. 139–40. 568. Ibid., p. 76 569. Ibid., p. 88. 570. ‘Prospectus for 1928–29, the School of Rural Economy, Gurgaon’ Appendix II in Ibid., pp. 197–201. 571. Ibid., pp. 77–83. 572. Brayne, Better villages, pp. 172–8. 573. Ibid. 181–8. 574. ‘Uplift at Palwal’, The Civil and Military Gazette, 31 March 1928, clipping in Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/46, fol. 9, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library. I owe most of the references in this paragraph to Harding, ‘The dynamics of low- caste conversion movements’, pp. 50–2. 575. Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/46, fol. 5: Clipping from The Lahore Tribune, 1 February 1928. 576. Secretary Government of Punjab, Transferred Departments to Commissioner Ambala Division 23 May 1928, Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/32, fols. 5–7. 577. Copy of confidential D.O. letter no. 35013, 30 October 1929, from Secretary Government of Punjab to Commissioner Rawalpindi Division, Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/32, fol. 10. 578. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Is it village uplift?’, Young India, 17 October–14 November 1929, clippings in Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/48, fol. 29. 579. Letter from M.K. Gandhi to Brayne, 25 December 1934; (Draft) Brayne to Gandhi, Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/36. [Small file of letters, not foliated] 580. Letter E. Stanley Jones to Brayne, 5 February 1935; Brayne to E. Stanley Jones, 5 February 1935, Brayne Papers, MSS Eur/F152/36. 581. In his opinion, Gandhi had the gift of magnetism but ‘the body of a vain, crooked, pettifogging bania lawyer’, and wasted his gift in ‘seeking power for its own sake.’ As for Gandhi’s followers, they were the ‘scum of the mental and physical degenerates of the country.’ Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes, pp. 58–9. 582. Ibid., p. 60. 583. Webster, The dalit Christians, p. 76. 584. Ibid., p. 61. 585. For example, K.T. Paul whose career I will discuss later in this chapter and in Chapter 8. 586. Rev. C.E. Abraham, The founders of the National Missionary Society of India (Madras, 1947). 587. Cover of National Missionary Intelligencer, 25: 1 (January, 1931), with map showing centres of N.M.S. work. 588. The following narrative derives entirely from his autobiography, Sam Higginbottom: farmer, an autobiography (New York, 1949). 589. Moody’s campaigns in Victorian Britain were extremely successful, with packed prayer meetings greeting his tours. The implications of such mass religious enthusiasm have been variously interpreted by historians; some have suggested that his anti-intellectual, emotional religion was not necessarily a socially conservative pietism, but a form of religion that resonated with popular aspirations. John Coffey, ‘Democracy and popular religion: Moody and Sankey’s mission to Britain, 1873–1875’ in Eugenio Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and community: liberals,


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590. 591.

592. 593. 594. 595.

596. 597. 598.

599.

600. 601. 602.

603. 604. 605. 606.

radicals and collective identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 93–119. Sherwood Eddy, A century with youth: a history of the YMCA from 1844 to 1944 (New York, 1944), pp. 75–7. Reny Jacob and Carolyne John (eds), Directory of church-related colleges in India, published by the All Indian Association for Christian Higher Education (New Delhi, 2001) gives the date as 1910, but Higginbottom reveals that it was only in 1912 that they could take possession of the lands and start functioning. Higginbottom, Sam Higginbottom: farmer, p. 115. Ibid., pp. 129–33. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., pp. 113–36. Later other Christian schools in India adopted such methods, and in 1928 Alice Van Doren, educational secretary of the National Christian Council produced an approving survey. Alice Van Doren, Fourteen experiments in rural education: some Indian schools where new methods are being tested (Calcutta, 1928). On Christian settlements in the ‘canal colonies’ see Harding, ‘The dynamics of low- caste conversion movements’, Chapters 6–8. Bret Wallach, Losing Asia: modernization and the culture of development (Baltimore, 1996), p. 123. Results in order of merit: Sardar Singh Bhatia, S. Narinjan Singh, K.N. Srivastava, A.K. Chatterji, P.J. Patel, S.S. Sharma, D.L. Paul, S.K. Bose, T.R. Sen, T. Ahmed, T.J. Thomas, K.S.B. Singh, C.G.R.C. Rao, Ujagar Singh, S.K. Banerjee, K.A. Urs, Surjan Singh Deol, Bishan Sarup. Allahabad Farmer, 5: 1 (January 1931), p. 32. The ‘criminal tribes’ were legally designated as such by the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, although official and ethnographic suspicion of such people dated from earlier. These tribes and castes were of a wide variety, including nomadic traders resistant to sedentary agriculture, such as the Banjaras, and dislocated tribal agriculturists such as the Lodhs, who turned to banditry for livelihood. The legislation referred to above legalized supposedly pre- emptive police measures, restricting their residence and movement and providing for regular surveillance. They were taken off the schedule or ‘denotified’ after independence. Anand A. Yang (ed.), Crime and criminality in British India (The Association for Asian Studies Monograph, 42, Tucson, 1985); Andrew J. Major, ‘State and criminal tribes in colonial Punjab: surveillance, control and reclamation of the “dangerous classes” ’, Modern Asian Studies, 33: 3 (July, 1999), pp. 657–88. Higginbottom, Sam Higginbottom: farmer, pp. 137–68. Ibid., p. 180. The first being Charles Andrews, discussed in the previous chapter, and the other Verrier Elwin, another Anglican priest, who had to leave his ministry as a result. Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India (Chicago, 1999). Higginbottom, Sam Higginbottom: Farmer, pp. 214–16. Ethel Cody Higginbottom, Bells of India: stories of life in the great peninsula (New York, 1931). ‘YMCA India’ http://www.ymca.net/worldservice/ymca_india.html last accessed 9 June 2010. The interest of the rulers of Travancore in developing a modern education system, and their use of Christian missionaries for this purpose, has already been


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607. 608. 609. 610. 611.

612.

613. 614. 615. 616. 617. 618. 619. 620.

621.

622. 623.

624. 625. 626. 627. 628. 629. 630.

Notes noted in Chapter 1, pages 15–16, based on Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu state, pp. 83–112. See Appendix. D. Spencer Hatch, Toward freedom from want from India to Mexico (Oxford, 1949), pp. 13–14. Dick Kooiman, ‘Mass movement, famine and epidemic: a study in interrelationship’, Modern Asian Studies, 25: 2 (1991), pp. 281–301. Hatch, Toward freedom from want, pp. 45–6. Ibid., p. 62. The Bhagavad Gita is a didactic section of the epic Mahabharata, in which the lord Krishna dispels the hero Arjuna’s doubts regarding creation, existence, action and morality. The Bhagavad Gita, translated J.A.B. van Buitenen (Shaftesbury, 1997). This text acquired privileged status among Hindus during the nationalist movement. Basil Matthews, Flaming milestone: being an interpretation and the official report of the twenty-first world’s alliance of YMCA’s held in January 1937, in Mysore, South India (Geneva, 1937), pp. 42–9. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., pp. 42–8. H.A. Popley, K.T. Paul: Christian leader (Calcutta, 1938), pp. 19–25. Ibid., pp. 29–34. Sherwood Eddy (1871–1963) had worked with the YMCA since 1891. ‘Foreword’ in Sherwood Eddy, A century with youth, p. vii. Popley, K.T. Paul, pp. 37–9. Ibid., p. 128. K.T. Paul, ‘The presidential speech’, Report of the tenth session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, Bangalore (Cover missing, 1923), pp. 10–27, UTC Archives, Bangalore. C.F. Andrews, ‘Kanakarayan T. Paul: a great Christian leader’, a review of Popley, K.T. Paul: Christian leader, newspaper clipping, K.T. Paul papers, United Theological College Archives, Bangalore. K.T. Paul, ‘Twelve years of rural work: some lessons and warnings’, The Indian Review (June & July 1926), Offprint in K.T. Paul Papers, UTC, Bangalore. K.T. Paul, Indian leadership in mission and church, Offprint in K.T. Paul papers, File 1, United Theological College Archives (UTC), Bangalore. On the division between the ‘mission’ and the ‘church’ and the variety of arguments regarding this division, see the next chapter. Printed leaflet in K.T. Paul papers, File 1, UTC. Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj, p. 75. K.T. Paul, The missionary spirit and the Indian church: how to create and foster it (Madras: YMCA, 1909), K.T. Paul papers, File 1, UTC. K.T. Paul to Leonard K. Elmhirst, Bangalore, 16 June 1916, Dartington Hall Archives (DHA), LKE/IN/13/G/5. He insisted that as a child, he found the study of English most terrifying. Rabindranath Tagore, Chelebela (Calcutta, 1940), p. 41. William Cenkner, The Hindu personality in education (Delhi, 1976), p. 44. This included the conservative wing of the Arya Samaj, led by Swami Shraddhanand, who warned against the inevitable secularization of curricula consequent upon official endorsement. ‘Sarkari school aur mazhabi talim’ [On religious instruction in government schools], Saddharm Pracharak, 24 August 1906 and ‘Mister Gokhale ka shiksha sambandhi prastav pratham yukti’


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631. 632. 633. 634. 635. 636. 637. 638.

639.

640. 641. 642.

643. 644.

645. 646.

647. 648. 649. 650. 651. 652. 653. 654. 655. 656. 657.

[Mr. Gokhale’s education proposal: first argument], Saddharm Pracharak, 31 May 1911, in Vishnudatt Rakesh et al., Swami Shraddhanand ki sampadakiya tippaniyan (Haridwar, 1999), pp. 45–6, 207–9. Rabindranath Tagore, Visva-Bharati, quoted in Uma Das Gupta, Santiniketan and Sriniketan (Calcutta, 1993), p. 17. Ibid., p. 9. Rabindranath Tagore, Asramer rup o bikash (Visva-Bharati, 1967), quoted in Das Gupta, Santiniketan and Sriniketan, pp. 10–11. Tagore, Visva-Bharati quoted in Ibid., pp. 12–13. Rabindranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal: selected from the letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore from 1885 to 1895 (London, 1921). Cenkner, The Hindu personality in education, pp. 20–21. Das Gupta, Santiniketan and Sriniketan, p. 13. Discussing the motto for the crest of Lady Irwin College, New Delhi, Gandhi considered between Vidya hi seva (education in itself is service) and Seva hi vidya (service in itself is education) and finally settled on Vidya sevayai (knowledge for service). Letter from Gandhi to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, 9 June 1936, in M.K. Gandhi, Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (Ahmedabad, 1961), pp. 77–8. Voelcker met such people in their demonstration farms in the U.P., Central provinces and Baroda, finding them fanciful and of little practical purpose. Voelcker, Report on the improvement of Indian agriculture, pp. 359–77. Das Gupta, Santiniketan and Sriniketan, p. 21. Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington (Dartington, 1996), pp. 9–32. Leonard K. Elmhirst, ‘Personal reminiscences’ in Elmhirst, Poet and plowman (Calcutta, 1975), pp. 79–80. This book includes the diary he kept when at Sriniketan, and a lecture, ‘Robbery of the soil’ delivered to Calcutta University students in 1922 in which he outlined his ideas of rural reconstruction. Ibid., pp. 79–80. The importance of rural reconstruction projects was pointed out to him by a certain Mr. Swamidoss, a YMCA worker from South India, at a Christian students’ conference at the end of that year. Ibid., p. 17. Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington, p. 65. Elmhirst, Poet and plowman, pp. 14–17. The same story is repeated in L.K. Elmhirst, ‘The foundation of Sriniketan’ in Rabindranath Tagore: pioneer in education. Essays and exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and L.K. Elmhirst (VisvaBharati, 1961). Elmhirst, Poet and plowman, pp. 17–18. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., pp. 19–31. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., pp. 76–8, 133. His use of the address ‘gurudev’ for Rabindranath was seen as an attempt at deification, which irritated certain ‘missionary folk’, he reported. Ibid., p. 54. Bishop Pakenham-Walsh, of Assam. Ibid., pp. 71–4. Ibid., p. 118. A place where education is distributed as charity; derived from the traditional annasatra, which distributed food. Poet and plowman, pp. 149–50. Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani, (3rd edn., 4 vols., Calcutta, 1995), pp. 4, 125.


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288

Notes

658. Elmhirst, Poet and plowman, p. 30. 659. Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington, pp. 130–92. 660. Sudhir Sen, Rabindranath Tagore on rural reconstruction and community development in India (2nd edn., Calcutta, 1991), pp. 8–24.

Race, Authority and Conflict in the Indian Church

661. George Thomas, Christian Indians and Indian nationalism, 1885–1950: an interpretation in historical and theological perspectives (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), pp. 132–6. 662. C.A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world,1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 330–43. 663. For discussions of such issues with relation to Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, see Kenneth W. Jones, Socio- religious reform movements in British India (New Cambridge History India, III: 3, Cambridge, 1989); Dalmia, The nationalization of Hindu traditions; Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu consciousness in nineteenth- century Punjab (Berkeley, 1976); Kopf, Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of the modern Indian mind; Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (London, 1972); Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: the politics of United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (London, 1974); Barbara Metcalf, Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 1982); Harjot Oberoi, The construction of religious boundaries: culture, identity and diversity in the Sikh tradition (Delhi, 1994); Chris Bayly, indicating the links among eminent merchant houses, ascetic sects and nationalist political leaders in his The local roots of Indian politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1975); N.G. Barrier, ‘The Arya Samaj and Congress politics in the Punjab, 1894– 1908’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 26: 3. (May, 1967), pp. 363–79; P.G. Robb, ‘Muslim identity and separatism in India: the significance of M.A. Ansari’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 54: 1 (1991), pp. 104–25, in which he reviews Mushirul Hasan, A nationalist conscience: M.A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj (New Delhi, 1987). Although Susan Bayly notes the organizational change affecting Syrian Christian churches of Kerala in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she sees this change as a collapse ensuing partly from the imposition of European Protestant ideas by European missionaries, rather than a coherent new religious conception. Bayly, Saints, goddesses and kings. 664. John Webster, who has done the greatest volume of historical work on Christians in North India, initially assumed the existence of the Christian community simply on the basis of Christian confession, treating denominational, social, and even racial differences merely as cleavages present in any community. John Webster, Christian community and change in nineteenth- century north India (Delhi, 1976) While he has persistently argued that Indians adopted Christianity because of their own social aspirations, the religion so adopted appears definite and fixed. John Webster, The dalit Christians: a history (New Delhi, 1992). More recently, he has argued for a history of dalit Christians, as part of the larger history of dalits in India. This approach appears to suggest that the so- called Christian community was irreconcilably fractured along caste lines. 665. Mallampalli, Christians and public life. 666. Chris Harding, ‘The dynamics of low- caste conversion movements’, p. 3.


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667. James Chiriyankandath, ‘Communities at the polls: electoral politics and the mobilization of communal groups in Travancore’, Modern Asian Studies 27: 3 (1993), pp. 643–65. 668. For example Saurabh Dube’s study of the interface between Chattisgrahi Christians and German Evangelical Lutheran missionaries, in his ‘Paternalism and Freedom’. 669. Bengt Sundkler, Church of South India: the movement towards union, 1900–1947 (London 1954). 670. Grimes, Towards an Indian church. Such older works replicated liberal imperialist historiography, suggesting that the intention of the missionaries to liberate the Indian churches in due time was indisputable. 671. Formed 1701. 672. Formed 1799. 673. Report on the Census of India, 1941 (Delhi, 1943), pp. 102–3; Report of the Indian Statutory Commission (London, 1930), Vol. XVI, pp. 327–33. 674. Steve Bruce, Religion in the modern world: from cathedrals to cults (Oxford, 1996), pp. 75–89. 675. David Hempton, The religion of the people: Methodism and popular religion c. 1750–1900 (Curzon, 1996), p. 29–48 on Ireland, and 103–105 on missions to the colonies. 676. See Porter, Religion versus empire?. From Porter’s analysis, it might appear that it was the imperial experience in North America that helped Anglicans, or at least the SPG, to turn the corner. 677. Maugham, Steven, ‘ “Mighty England do Good”: The major English Denominations and Organisation for the support of Foreign missions in the Nineteenth Century’. in R.A. Bickers and R.Seton ed., Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues (Curzon Press: Richmond, Surrey, 1996), pp. 11-37; Eugene Stock, The history of the Church Missionary Society: its environment, its men and its work (4 vols., London, 1899–1916), I, pp. 68–80. 678. Stock, The history of the Church Missionary Society, pp. 69, 73, 191. 679. ‘Charter granted to the English Company, trading to the East Indies, 1698’, reprinted in Charters relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761 (Madras, 1887), pp. 124–156, at pp. 143–144. 680. Chatterton, A history of the Church of England in India, p. 6. 681. Ibid., p. 13 682. Ibid., p. 16. 683. Ibid., pp. 108–22. 684. Porter, Religion versus empire?, pp. 68–70. 685. Ibid., 68–69; Daniel E. Potts, British Baptist missionaries in India, 1793–1837: the story of the Serampore Mission (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 174–6, 203–4. 686. See Chapter 1. 687. Bishop T.F. Middleton’s argument was that this would encourage the British government to use the missionaries as priests for European congregations and spend less money on chaplains. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, pp. 71–4. His biographer explained that Middleton looked upon his position as that of the head of an established Christian church, which would remain unchanged even if all missions to Hindus were completely abandoned. As a result Middleton was eager to separate the work of the clergy and the missionaries. Quoted in George Smith, Bishop Heber: poet and chief missionary to the East, second Lord Bishop of Calcutta, 1783–1826 (London, 1895), pp. 154–5. Writing at the end of


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688.

689. 690.

691. 692. 693.

694. 695. 696.

697.

698. 699. 700.

701. 702. 703. 704. 705. 706. 707. 708. 709.

Notes the century, George Smith, the biographer of a number of well-known missionaries, felt that Bishop Middleton’s understanding was flawed. Bishop Middleton felt that Anglican ministry was reserved for subjects of the British Crown, and he was unsure about the status of Indians. His doubts were legally resolved by an Act of the British Parliament permitting the ordination of the natives of India. 5 & 6 Geo. IV. c. 71 of 1824–1825. Referred to in Ibid., p. 155. Catechist generally implying a more advanced assistant. Letter from Thomason to Pratt: Calcutta: 5 February 1813, C I E/4, CMS Archives, University of Birmingham Library. On Masih’s career see, Avril Powell, ‘Processes of conversion to Christianity in nineteenth- century north-western India’ in Oddie, Religious conversion movements in south Asia, pp. 15–55. Smith, Bishop Heber, pp. 295–9. See Chapter 2. This extended to the creation and upkeep of cemeteries and churches: the Government of India created and maintained these for European British-born subjects, and for people of part-European ancestry, but not for ‘native Christians’. ‘Ecclesiastical Administration, giving rules regarding government cemeteries, fees for burial and marriage, and grants for building churches.’ Bengal General (Ecclesiastical) Proceedings, 11 July 1885, File 4, 1–3, P 2480, IOR, APAC. Mahesh Chandra Ghose, whose baptism preceded Banerjea’s by two months, did not live long. Ghosha, A biographical sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea. See for example, the biography of another Bengali convert, Golaknath Chatterjee, written by an admiring grandchild, based on Golaknath’s own account. In this story, Golaknath emulates an Indian spiritual seeker, akin to a Hindu Yogi or a Muslim Sufi, undertaking perilous journeys, undergoing much suffering, preaching to ordinary people on the way and finally seeking baptism in Christianity on his own initiative, immediately proceeding to preach it to others. H.G., Golak: the hero (Bombay, 1932), pp. 56–87. Krishna Mohan Banerjea to Henry Chapman, Secretary, Calcutta Corresponding Committee, 23 November 1836, in File: Correspondence with K.M. Banerjea, C I1/ O66/15, CMS Archives. Krishna Mohan Banerjea to Henry Chapman, 5 December 1836, in Ibid. Krishna Mohan Banerjea to Henry Chapman, 3 January 1837, in Ibid. Calcutta Corresponding Committee to Secretaries, Church Missionary Society, London, 20 March 1837, and 3 August 1837, in File: Reports of the Calcutta Corresponding Committee, 1823–1878, C I1/ O2/8-9, CMS Archives. Ghosha, A biographical sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea, pp. 22–4. Bateman, The life of the Rt. Rev. Daniel Wilson, Vol. II, p. 285. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, p. 180. Ghosha, A biographical Sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea, p. 36. Ghulam Murshid, Ashar cholone bhuli: Michael jiboni (Calcutta, 1995), pp. 75–85. Ibid. pp. 348–51. G. Macpherson, Life of Lal Behari Day: convert, pastor, professor and author (Edinburgh, 1900), p. 29. Ibid., Introduction by Dr. Thomas Smith. Calcutta Corresponding Committee reports 1823- 1878 CI1/02 CMS Archives; nor did the meetings of all the missionaries in an area, as in the Agra CMS Conference, C I1/04/1, CMS Archives.


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710. H.G., Golak. 711. A collection of papers connected with the movement of the National Church of India (Madras, 1893). 712. B.R. Barber, Kali Charan Banurji: Brahmin, Christian, saint (London, 1912), p. 47. 713. J.W., ‘Native Christianity in India’, Church Missionary Intelligencer, New Series, 7 (1871), pp 257–63, esp. pp. 262–3. 714. 15th meeting of the Agra district mission conference, 10 and 11 Sept 1866, CI 1/O4/1/14, CMS Archives. 715. North-India salaries: memorandum for use of sub- committee, 1867, CI 1/L7, pp. 123–4, CMS Archives. 716. Paper 14 Meetings of the Agra District Mission Conference, 10–11 September 1866 and Paper 15, 29–30 October [no year, probably 1867], CI 1/04/1, CMS Archives. 717. Ibid., Paper 17, 27–30 December 1870. 718. Bishop’s rules regarding the ordination of native priests and deacons, with particular reference to Imad-ud- din 1868, Robert Clark papers, CI 1/O69, Paper 84, CMS Archives. Imad-ud- din, 1833–1899, baptized 1866, ordained deacon in 1868 and priest in 1872, D.D. 1884. Imad-ud- din came of a family of impoverished ashraf Sunni religious teachers, and after a long spiritual crisis accepted Christianity, personally encouraged by Robert Clark, proceeding to a career of Christian polemicist in the Punjab. Nilakantha Nehemiah Goreh, 1825–85, was his exact counterpart from the Hindu side, being a Maratha Brahman from Banaras, who after conversion wrote copiously against Hinduism. Powell, ‘Processes of conversion to Christianity’, pp. 15–55. 719. Extract from Indian Church Gazetteer 25 May 1872 re duties of sub- deacon and readers 1872, Robert Milman papers, CI 1/08/6/14, CMS Archives. 720. Bishop’s rules regarding the ordination of native priests and deacons, with particular reference to Imad-ud- din 1868, Robert Clark papers, CI 1/O69, Paper 84, CMS Archives. 721. On the Punjab school of governance, see Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes. 722. Letter Rev. Albert Henry Arden to Secretary, CMS, 15 January 1879, Arden Papers, Paper 30, C I2 025/30, CMS Archives. 723. Meetings of the Agra District Mission Conference, Paper 17, 27–30 December 1870. 724. John Webster has studied the role of such indigenous agency among dalit groups in the late nineteenth century in his The dalit Christians: a history, pp. 46–60; his findings are corroborated by Chris Harding’s study of Punjabi dalit Christians, who sought connections with the CMS or the Belgian Capuchin mission. Harding, Religious transformation in South Asia, pp. 133–138. 725. Contemporary documents spelt this place-name Krishnagur, at present both Krishnagar and Krishnanagar are used. 726. Papers on the outbreak at Krishnagur, 1878, CI 1/O2/19, CMS Archives. The Krishnagar congregation was formed in the late 1830s when a multi- caste and multi- creed group of people belonging to the Kartabhaja sect responded to CMS missions. G.A. Oddie, ‘ “Old wine in new bottles”? Kartabhaja (Vaishnava) converts to Christianity in Bengal, 1835–1845’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 32: 3 (1995), pp. 327–43. The early group of Kartabhaja converts who were baptized between 1836–38, were joined by converts of other castes during the famine of 1839. 727. Regulations for Native Church Councils for North India ... published by the Church Missionary Society in London, on the 20 July 1876, I. Constitution


Notes 291


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728. 729. 730. 731.

732. 733. 734.

735.

736. 737. 738. 739. 740. 741. 742. 743. 744.

745.

746. 747.

Notes of the Council, II. Duties and powers of the Council, in A native church for the natives of India, giving an account of the formation of a native church council for the Punjab mission of the Church Missionary Society and of the proceedings at their first meeting at Umritsur, 31st March to 2nd April 1877 (Lahore, 1877), pp. 3–5. ‘Circular issued by Chairman, 23 February 1877’, in Ibid., pp. 8–10. ‘A native church in North India, how far this is possible for desirable’, in Ibid., p. 36 Ibid., pp. 53–63. Robert Clark, A brief account of thirty years of missionary work of the Church Missionary Society in the Punjab and Sindh, 1852 to 1882 (Lahore, 1883), pp. 55–6. List of resolutions passed at the first meeting of the Punjab Church Council, Resolution II.3, III, X, XI, A native church for the natives of India, pp. 108–11. C. Fenn to R. Clark, 11 October 1877, CI 1/L9, pp. 92–100, CMS Archives. W.G. Peel, ‘The Native Church Council in western India, 1892–99’, forwarded by G.B. Durrant, Secretary, CMS to H.G. Grey, Secretary, Punjab Corresponding Committee, 16 June 1899, G2 I4 L6, pp. 207–8, CMS Archives. ‘Decentralization in the Indian Missions, report and recommendations of the Procedure Sub- Committee, received and adopted by the General Committee on 11 November 1889. Printed pamphlet, G2 I4 L3, attached between pages 121–2, CMS Archives. Revised prospectus re training and pay of ordained Indian graduates 1918, G2 I7 L9, pp. 285–8, CMS Archives. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, p. 362. ‘Payment of Indian workers’ in Report of the Church Missionary Society’s delegation to India, 1921–22 (London, 1922), pp. 105–7. CMS Committee’s recommendation of Lucknow’s diocesanisation proposals June 1933, G2 I7 L12 pp. 52–4, CMS Archives. Proceedings of the fifth meeting of the National Missionary Council, held at Benares, 1918, pp. 13–19. Stephen Neill, Annals of an Indian parish (London, 1934), pp. 4–7. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, p. 377. Ibid., 364. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, p. 252. John Thomas’s biographer did not mention the incident. A.H. Grey Edwards, The life of a great missionary: memoir of the Rev. John Thomas, CMS missionary at Megnanapuram, 1836–1870 (London, 1904). And later assistant bishop of Tinnevelly. Robert Eric Frykenberg, ‘Caldwell, Robert (1814–1891)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography [accessed 2 March 2007]. Gibbs, Ibid., 252–3. One of the candidates proposed was W.T. Satthianadhan, who was related by marriage to a long line of Indian Christian church workers, and who, with his wife ran a congeries of church and educational activities in Madras. Jackson, ‘Glimpses of a prominent Indian Christian family of Tirunelveli and Madras, 1863–1906’, pp. 315–35. The Madras Corresponding Committee urged the Parent Committee that haste was not advisable in appointing a native bishop. Rev. A.H. Arden, Secretary, Madras Corresponding Committee to Rev. W. Gray, Secretary, CMS, 31 July 1878, C I2 O25/28. Soon it was discovered that Satthianadhan’s


292


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748. 749. 750. 751.

752. 753. 754. 755. 756. 757. 758.

759. 760. 761. 762. 763. 764.

765.

7

attitude to missionaries was disrespectful, and that he had, in a well- circulated Tamil journal edited by himself, accused missions of keeping Indians on low pay. Rev. A.H. Arden to Rev. W. Gray, 26 September 1878, C I2 O 25/32; Rev. A.H. Arden to the secretaries, CMS, 25 Novemeber 1878 C I2 O 25/37. Madras Ecclesiastical Proceedings, 4 October 1909, No. 68, pp. 2–3, P/8256, APAC, British Library. Billington-Harper, In the shadow of the Mahatma, pp. 93–107, pp. 122–33. Parliamentary Debates, (Lords) 1927, 5th series, Vol. 67, pp. 134, 270–88; Vol. 68, pp. 950–4; Vol. 69, p. 228. Parliamentary Debates, (Commons) 1927, Vol. 210, pp. 635, 1284–7; Vol. 212, pp. 531–3. Charles Oman was the son of a British planter, born in India, later a military historian and politician. The conference report did not give his surname. Report of the Punjab missionary conference held at Lahore December–January 1862–3 (Ludhiana, 1863), pp. 128–58. H.D., Golak: the hero, pp. 115–18. Report of the Punjab missionary conference, p. 165. Rev. Vaughan was obviously on a collision course with his congregation, precipitating in a showdown in 1878, which we shall discuss in the next chapter. K. Baago, A history of the National Christian Council of India 1914–64 (Nagpur, 1965), pp. 1–12. List of members 1917; Constitution of the National Missionary Council, I.4 [membership rules] in Proceedings of the third meeting of the National Missionary Council, Jubbulpore, 1916, Inside cover, p. 6, UTC Archives. Ibid., pp. 22–4. K.T.Paul, ‘The missionary for modern India’, The Christian Patriot (13 March 1920), p. 5. Rev. J.H. Maclean, ‘The Madras meeting of the National Christian Council’, National Christian Council Review, 49: 2 (February 1929), pp. 63–73. Quoted in Baago, A history of the National Christian Council, p. 73. Ibid., 76–7. Bishop Azariah stated that he felt embarrassed in front of Hindus to admit that Christians had to seek the help of the British King to ‘appoint chief ministers and directors’ of their religious sect. V.S. Azariah, ‘Self Government for the Church of England in India’, Harvest Field, New Series 43: 12 (Dec 1923), pp. 446–52. Korula Jacob, ‘The Government of India and the entry of missionaries’, The International Review of Missions, 47 (October, 1958), pp. 410–16. Jacob, while deploring restrictions on freedom on religion, felt at the same time that the Indian government was right in insisting that Indian Christians manage their own religious institutions.

Rethinking Christianity: Formulating Their Faith


Notes 293

766. For example E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (London, 1963), for the weaving of Methodism into working class consciousness. 767. Elbourne, Blood ground. 768. The most important ‘turn’ being in the 1970s, when A.P. Nirmal announced an agenda as editor of Towards a common dalit ideology (Madras, 1990). It appears


12/14/2010 1:11:30 PM

769.

770.

771.

772. 773.

Notes to me that the dilemmas faced by those attempting to craft a theology genuinely in tune with dalit religiosity but also identifiably Christian, are similar to their predecessors, who attempted to articulate a theology that was Christian as well as Indian. For some important efforts in recent times, see Satthianadhan Clarke, Dalits and Christianity: subaltern religion and liberation theology in India (New Delhi, 1998). It has been a general complaint voiced in the last two decades that the earlier Indian Christian theologians were unresponsive to the religious and social aspirations of the majority of Indian Christians, who were of dalit or tribal background. James Massey, ‘Need for a dalit theological expression (with a fresh understanding of Christian faith)’ in James Massey, Dalits in India: religion as a source of bondage or liberation with special reference to Christians (Delhi, 1995), pp. 169–76. Two theologians condemned this by saying that Indian Christian theology had moved out of a ‘Western captivity’ to a ‘Sanskritic captivity’. See R.S. Sugirtharajah and Cecil Hargreaves (eds), Readings in Indian Christian theology (Delhi, 1993), pp. 1–2. For examples of both, see Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit sources on anti- Christian apologetics in early nineteenth- century India (Vienna, 1981), and his ‘Enabling Encounters: Transformative Encounters on the Edges between Hinduism and Christianity, Case Studies from Nineteenth- Century Mission history’ paper presented at Westminster College, University of Cambridge, 4, 5, 7 November 2002, http://www.martynmission.cam.ac.uk/ pages/hmc-lectures.php?searchresult=1&sstring=enabling+encounters [last accessed 17 May 2010] I was surprised to find how common such ‘internal’ disputes were, and how little attention they have attracted from scholars of Christianity in India. Practically every major Indian Christian writer had serious disputes with European missionaries and clergymen over dogmatics, ecclesiology, and moral/social theology. One of the richest works that does address such disputes is D. Dennis Hudson, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706–1835 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Ferdmans, 2000). But while Hudson posits a coherent Tamil culture borne by Tamil Christians confronting a Western Protestant faith, this book does not attempt to isolate any singular construct of Indian culture and in fact has problems with the juxtaposition of non- equivalents: Indian culture and Christian faith, as if the Europeans who ‘brought’ Christianity to Indians did not also bring their baggage of social and cultural practices and prejudices. As this chapter will show, an important line of debate within Christian theology in and about India was the method of separating the essentials of faith from their contingent historical associations. Lydia Liu, Translingual practice: literature, national culture, and translated modernityChina 1900–1937 (Stanford, 1995), pp. 1–44. See for example, Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian impact (Cambridge, 1987; first published as Chine et Christianisme, 1982). Gernet analyses the efforts of the first Jesuit missionaries in China to adapt their doctrinal message to Chinese classical traditions through the establishment of common philosophical ground, and their failure. We will discuss this work in more detail further down. Debates about cultural commensurability have also occurred in connection with two completely separate episodes in the history of China and India; over the evaluation of two (failed) British embassies to two Asian sovereigns, one the eighteenthcentury Macartney embassy to the


294


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774.

775.

776. 777.

778.

779. 780.

781. 782.

Qing emperor and the other, Thomas Roe’s seventeenthcentury embassy to the Mughal emperor. See James Hevia, Cherishing men from Afar: Qing guest ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, 1995), whose work was criticized for its use and interpretation of sources by James Esherick, ‘Cherishing Sources from Afar’, Modern China, xxiv (1998), pp. 135–61. At a more general level, Esherick pointed out the pitfalls of cultural relativism, which closed the possibility of inter- cultural communication, a criticism also made of Gernet’s work. Esherick also condemned such exoticization of China as leads scholars such as Hevia to be contemptuous of contemporary Chinese scholars who fail to take a similarly appreciative view of the Qing court. To this James Hevia responded with ‘Postpolemical historiography’, Modern China xxiv (1998), pp. 319–27. On the Roe’s embassy, see Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton, 1996), pp. 17–19, 112–15. Cohn suggested that Roe’s lack of diplomatic success owed to the different ways in which Indians and Europeans viewed the world, but William Pinch, in a historiographical- cum-historical essay countered that Roe’s world and the Mughal world were not so different as to make conversation impossible. William Pinch, ‘Same difference in Europe and India’, History and Theory, 38: 3 (October, 1999), pp. 389–419. For example Benjamin Schwartz, ‘Culture, modernity, nationalism – further reflections’, Daedalus, no. 122 (Summer 1993), pp. 207–26; also Fa-Ti Fan, ‘Hybrid discourse and textual practice: Sinology and Natural history in the nineteenth century’, Hist. Sci. XXXVIII (2000), pp. 25–56. Sanjay Subramaniam, ‘Frank Submission: the Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris’ in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds) The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: Bowdell Press, 2002), pp. 69–96. Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, Vol I, p. 197. The common language of north India, before an active linguistic politics, overlapping with sectarian mobilization, identified two distinct languages, Hindi and Urdu, still very similar, but one written in the Nagri script and the other, the Persian script. On language politics in north India, see King, One language, two scripts. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Dehli, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, 12: 1, “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Autumn, 1985), pp. 144–165. Religious fair. Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’ in The Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 2004, first published 1994), pp.145–174. Ibid., p. 146 By the Bull Romanae sedis antistes (31 January 1623), referred to in K. Latourette, History of the Expansion of Christianity (London, 1943), Vol. III, p. 261. For the details of Nobili’s troubles with the church hierarchy, see Vincent Cronin, A pearl to India, for an analysis of intellectual differences between Nobili and his chief detractor in the same mission, Gonçalo Fernandes and Ines G. Zupanov, ‘Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth Century Madurai Mission’ Representations, No. 41. (Winter, 1993), pp. 123–48, and also her Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in SeventeenthCentury India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).


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783. Patrick Healy, ‘Pope Benedict XIV,’ The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 (1907), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02432a.htm, last accessed 20 May 2010. 784. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, pp. 66–7. 785. Ludo Rocher, Ezourvedam: a French Veda of the eighteenth century (Amsterdam, 1984). 786. Francis Whyte Ellis, ‘An account of a discovery of a modern imitation of the Vedas with remarks on the genuine works’ in Asiatic Researches (1822), pp. 141–59, cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam, pp. 18–22. 787. Hosten Collection, Box Ezour Veda, II, in the archives of Vidya Jyoti, the major seminary of north India, Delhi. For an account of this repository of papers, collected by a Jesuit Belgian priest and historian, curated by myself, see Nandini Chatterjee, ‘Fr. Henry Hosten, S.J.: an unacknowledged historian of India and his legacy’ Indian Church History Review, 37: 2 (December, 2003), pp. 77–90. 788. Bayly, ‘Orientalists, Informants and Critics in Benares, 1790–1860’, pp. 97–127. 789. Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, 1983). 790. Stuart Blackburn, ‘Corruption and redemption: Tamil literary history, Modern Asian Studies, 34: 2 (May, 2000), pp. 449–82, at pp. 458, 468. 791. Benedict Guldner, ‘Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907), Vol. II, http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/02526c.htm last accessed 26 May 2010. 792. Bugge, Mission and Tamil society, pp. 56–7. 793. Hudson, Protestant origins in India, pp. 142–4. 794. Ibid., pp. 110–39. 795. Vedanayagam Sastri, ‘Humble address’, dated 18 January, 1829, first in the six essays collectively titled ‘Sadeterattoo’ (Explaining Caste), which themselves form an English introduction to the Tamil manuscript ‘The foolishness of amending caste’, OR.11,742, f.3, APAC, British Library. For identification as well as analysis of this source, I am reliant on Denis Hudson’s work. 796. Ibid., ff. 2–4 797. Ibid., f. 4. It appears however that these complaints did lead to Rhenius having to defend himself before the SPG. Denis Hudson, Protestant origins in India, pp. 146–8. C.T. Rhenius eventually ran foul of the CMS and the Anglican church hierarchy in India with his insistence on non- episcopal ordination of Indian catechists, and was dismissed in 1834. A.N. Groves, A brief account of the present circumstances of the Tinnevelly mission (London, 1835). For a very different evaluation of his linguistic abilities (from Pillai’s) see John T. Paul and R.E. Frykenberg, ‘A research note on the discovery of writings by Savariraya Pillai, A Tamil diarist of mid-nineteenth century Tinnevelly’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 44: 3 (May, 1985), pp. 521–8, footnote 11. 798. Vedanayagam Sastri, ‘Foolishness of amending caste’, ff. 8–15. 799. Ibid., ff. 8–9; Hudson, Protestant origins in India, pp. 148–157 800. Ibid. p. 132. 801. ‘Foolishness of amending caste’ ff. 28–62; Hudson, Protestant origins in India, pp. 162–172. 802. All the incidents during which the upper- caste section of the congregation directly confronted the missionary’s authority, involved the end of segregation during church service, or deputation of paraiyan catechists to conduct sacraments for upper caste members. These episodes of conflict often raised issues of the arraignment of sacred space, and the right to do so. Excluded from


296 Notes


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803. 804. 805. 806.

807.

808.

809. 810. 811.

812. 813.

814. 815.

the church, the Vellalars performed their sacraments in the churchyard, and when excluded from therein, appealed to the Resident of Tanjore and through him the Governor of Madras against the missionaries. Bishop Daniel Wilson clinched the matter for the missionaries by insisting to the government that it was a matter internal to the church, a religious organisation, whose representative were its (European) ministers. J. Bateman, The life of Rt. Rev. Daniel Wilson, pp. 429–58. Bayly, ‘Orientalists, Informants and Critics in Benares, 1790–1860’, pp. 97–127; M.A. Dodson, ‘Re-presented for the pandits. Ghosha, A biographical sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea, pp. 21–2. K.M. Banerjea, The relation between Christianity and Hinduism (London, 1882). On fulfilment theology and the context of its rise in Indian missions see Eric Sharpe, Not to destroy but to fulfil: the contribution of J.N. Farquhar to Protestant missionary thought in India before 1914 (Uppsala, 1965). Also see the writings of the founder of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, Westcott, such as On some points in the religious office of universities. ‘Purusa- Sukta’ Book 10, hymn 90, in Ralph T.H. Griffith (ed.), The hymns of the Rigveda: translated with a popular commentary (2nd edn., 2 vols., Benares, 1897), pp. 517–20. The example he offers is from Mill’s Fidei Christianoe (Pratitivakya): ‘They are born again (dvija) who desire to be in union with Christ’s Church (krishtashrama), repent of their sins, submit themselves to Christ’s authority and Christ’s commands, who receive baptism as instituted by Christ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ Dvija in Sanskrit does mean twice-born, but it refers to Brahmans, who are born the second time with the investiture of the sacred thread. It is obvious that such authorial effort to hollow well-known terms of their accepted meaning and replace them with novel meaning is bound to run into difficulties with the audience. Richard Fox Young, ‘Enabling encounters: transformative encounters on the edges between Hinduism and Christianity, case studies from nineteenth- century mission history. Case one: William Hodge Mill, Cambridge divine’, Paper presented at the Henry Martyn Centre, University of Cambridge, 4 November 2002, http://www.martynmission.cam. ac.uk/CRFoxYoung.pre.htm Pulney Andy, A critic criticised, or a reply to Master Kahan Chand Shaiq’s yellow pamphlet by the author of the treatise entitled “Are not Hindus Christians?” (Madras, 1898). Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology, pp. 63–85. Mukhopadhyay, Rabindra jibani, II, pp. 50–1. Tagore’s biographer found these arrangements ‘medieval’ and regretted Tagore’s obsession with resurrecting ancient India in this phase of his life. Rituals of penance to redeem the wrongdoer. B. Animananda, The blade: life and work of Brahmabandhav Upadhyaya (Calcutta, 1947), p. 123, cited in Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology, p. 81. Ashis Nandy, The illegitimacy of nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the politics of the self (Delhi, 1994). The equivalence of Jewish and Indian religious traditions was a repeated theme among Indian Christians; Vedanayagam Pillai asserted that Hindu customs were valid because they corresponded to those of Jewish Christians in the first century. Dhanjibhai Naoroji,the first Parsi convert, later accepted among Parsi friends and family, was said to bear the attitude of St. Paul


Notes 297


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816.

817. 818.

819.

820.

821.

822. 823. 824. 825. 826. 827. 828. 829. 830. 831.

to Jews. D. Mackichan, ‘Epilogue’ in Dhanjibhai Nauroji, From Zoroaster to Christ: an autobiographical sketch of the Rev. Dhanjibhai Nauroji (Edinburgh, 1909), p. 90. ‘The one- centredness of the Hindu race (Hindujatir Ekanishtha)’ in Bangadarshan April-May 1901, and ‘Europeanism versus Christianity’ The Twentieth Century July 1901, excerpted in Julius Lipner and George Gispert- Sauch (eds), The writings of Brahmabandhav Upadhyay (2 vols., Bangalore, 2002), II, pp. 114–26, 225–9. Quoted in Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology, p. 158. On Vedanta philosophy and its different schools, with particular emphasis on early Advaita Vedanta, Karl H. Potter (ed.), Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies (11 vols., Delhi, 1981–2006), III, Advaita Vedānta up to Śamkara and his pupils. In fact, another Bengali Christian actually called himself a Sanatani Christian, defining Sanatana Dharma as the eternal religion of the Vedas. Rev. Rajendra Chandra Das was Convenor of the Christian Society for the Study of Hinduism, formed in Banaras in 1941. The pilgrim: the quarterly bulletin of the Christian Society for the study of Hinduism, 1: 1 (April, 1941), title page. Rev. R.C. Das argued that one who believed in the Vedas was led naturally to the Bible, unlike an Arya Samajist or a Brahmo. Reproducing K.M. Banerjea’s arguments, he wrote that the most important link between the Vedas and the Bible was the concept of sacrifice, the mahayajna of Prajapati and Christ on the Cross being comparable. Rev. Rajendra Chandra Das, ‘Experience of a Sanatani Christian’, an excerpt from his 1966 publication Convictions of an Indian disciple, in Sugirtharajah and Hargreaves (eds), Readings in Indian Christian theology, pp. 128–31. Church of South India, which is the major Protestant church in the south of India, a union of Anglican, Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches, formed in 1947. Its counterpart in the north of the country is the Church of North India, formed in 1970. The allegation was made, according to Appasamy, by another Oxford don, and the future President of India, S. Radhakrishnan. A.J. Appasamy, The gospel and India’s heritage (London, 1942), pp. 16–18. Ibid., pp. 30–9. A.J. Appasamy, ‘Recent books on Hinduism’, The Pilgrim, 2: 2 (July, 1942), pp. 37–46. W. Crooke, ‘Review of Indian Theism from the Vedas to the Muhammadan Period’, Man, Vol. 16 (July, 1916), pp. 109–10. Psalms of Maratha saints: one hundred and eight translated from the Marathi, ed. Nicol Macnicol (Calcutta, 1919). Nicol Macnicol, Pandita Ramabai (Calcutta, 1926); C.F. Andrews: friend of India (London, 1946). Nicol Macnicol, The making of modern India (London, 1924). Eli Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian road (London, 1925), p. 16. Ibid., p. 101. C.F. Andrews, Sadhu Sundar Singh: a personal memoir (London, 1934), pp. 94–5. Andrews thought the Bishop’s decision narrow and ‘unlooked-for’. Stokes was joined for a short period by F.J. Western of the Cambridge Brotherhood. Stokes’s early ideas had the support of the Anglican church, and the Brotherhood of the Imitation of Jesus was inaugurated by Bishop Lefroy in the Lahore Cathedral in 1910. Western, who had only recently arrived in Delhi, joined this new Brotherhood, but returned to the Cambridge Brotherhood the next year,


298 Notes


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832. 833. 834. 835.

836. 837.

838. 839. 840. 841. 842. 843. 844.

845. 846. 847. 848. 849. 850. 851.

852. 853. 854. 855.

856. 857.

when Stokes moved on to marrying an Indian Christian woman, and converting with her to Hinduism. Millington, Whether we be many or few, pp. 122–6. C.F. Andrews, Sadhu Sundar Singh, pp. 19–23, 105–14. B.H. Streeter and A.J. Appasamy, The sadhu: a study in mysticism and practical religion (London, 1921). Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology, pp. 92–109. F. Heiler, The gospel of Sundar Singh (London, 1927, translated Olive Wyon), pp. 9–12. This was first published in German as Sadhu Sundar Singh: ein Apostel des Ostens und Westens (Munich, 1926). On Hosten and the collection of documents he compiled, see Chatterjee, ‘Fr. Henry Hosten, S.J.’, pp. 77–90. A.J. Appasamy, ‘Sadhu Sundar Singh’, National Christian Council Review, 49: 3 (March, 1929), pp. 120–8; T.E. Riddle, The vision and the call: a life of Sadhu Sundar Singh (Delhi, 1987), pp. 69–71. Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: attitudes and policies of Anglo-Saxon Protestant missions in India (Oxford, 1980), p. 175. Preface in Hendrik Kraemer, The Christian message in a non- Christian world (London, 1938). G.V. Job et. al., Rethinking Christianity in India (Madras, 1938). Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology, pp. 159–63. Abhang no. 160, J.C. Winslow, Narayan Vaman Tilak, the Christian poet of Maharashtra (Calcutta, 1930), p. 58. Denis Hudson, Protestant origins in India, p. 160. Judging by the rude remarks he had made about converts being like leeches, at the Allahabad Missionary Conference in 1872–73. Rev. J. Vaughan, ‘The Native Church in Bengal’ in Report of the General Missionary Conference held at Allahabad 1872–3 (London, 1873), pp. 260–75. ‘Krishnagar, 1878’ CI 1/02/19 C.M.S. Archives. Lloyd and Susan Rudolph, The modernity of tradition: political change in India (Chicago, 1967), Part I. Krishnamohan Banerjea, Hindu caste: an essay reprinted from the Calcutta Review (Calcutta, 1851). Murshid, Ashar cholone bhuli, pp. 53–9. H.G., Golak: the hero, pp. 1–55. Dhanjibhai Nauroji, From Zoroaster to Christ, pp. 43–54. Day was of the Swarna Banik caste, traditionally jewellers, who ranked lower than the three highest-ranking jatis of Bengali society: Brahman, Kayastha and Vaidya, but far above the dalit jatis. Macpherson, Life of Lal Behari Day, pp. 76–85. ‘Principal Rudra, a Sketch of his life’ in St. Stephen’s College Magazine, 77, Principal Rudra Farewell Number (Easter 1923), pp. 24–34, especially p. 29. Conversation with Mrs. Deepa Varkey, daughter of Sudhir and Rajmohini, Allahabad December 2003. Nirmal Kumar Mukarji interviewed by S.L. Manchanda, pp. 1–2, Oral History and transcripts, Accession number 633, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. H.G., Golak: the hero, Dedication, and pp. 98, 111. James Massey, a contemporary dalit activist, and director of the Centre for Dalit Studies, Delhi, regretted that such upper- caste Christians would have their children marry a Hindu rather than a dalit Christian. In fact such marriages were not


Notes 299


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858. 859.

860. 861. 862.

863.

Notes ‘arranged’ by parents in the traditional sense, but the individual choices made reinforced the social distinction that Dr. Massey referred to. Conversations with James Massey, Delhi, 2003. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, ‘Hindujatir ekanishtha’. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, ‘Hindujatir adhapatan (The Downfall of the Hindu race)’ in Bangadarshan January-February 1901, excerpted in J. Lippner and G. Gispert- Sauch (eds), The writings of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, pp. 145–53. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, ‘Varnashrama dharma’ in Bangadarshan FebruaryMarch 1901, in Ibid., pp. 153–71. Lal Behari Day, Folktales of Bengal (Macmillan, 1883), Introduction. Eugene Irschick, Politics and social conflict in South India: the Non-Brahman movement and Tamil separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley, 1969); K. Kailasapathy, ‘The Tamil purist movement: a re-Evaluation’ in Social Scientist, 7: 10. (May, 1979), pp. 23–51. See Chapter 5 on agricultural education.

8 Representing Christians: Community Interests vs. Christian Citizenship 864. J.H. Proctor, ‘Scottish missionaries in India: an inquiry into motivation’, South Asia, 13: 1 (1990), pp. 43–61; Porter, Religion versus empire?; Jeffrey Cox, Imperial fault lines: christianity and colonial power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, 2002). 865. With the notable exception of Dick Kooiman, Communities and electorates: a comparative discussion of communalism in colonial India (Amsterdam, 1995); James Chiriyankandath, ‘Communities at the polls: electoral politics and the mobilization of communal groups in Travancore’, Modern Asian Studies 27: 3 (1993), 643–65 and Mallampalli, Christians and public life. 866. Thomas, Christian Indians and Indian nationalism, 1885–1950, pp. 132–6. 867. P.O. Philip, ‘An Oriental looks at foreign missions’, Christendom (Winter, 1942), cited in Ibid., p. 129. 868. W. Hinkley, ‘The unbridgeable gulf’, Harvest Field (September 1907), p. 330, cited in Ibid., p. 130. 869. Eli Stanley Jones, pp. 53, 126–39. 870. See for example, David Lelyveld’s discussion of Muslim leaders’ intepretation of statistics from the first all-India census 1881–82 in his Aligarh’s first generation: Muslim solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978), pp. 83–92. 871. The three works that deal with Christian separate electorates are regional in scope. Two of them deal with Travancore, a princely state where a quarter of the population were Christians. Dick Kooiman, Communities and electorates; James Chiriyankandath, ‘Communities at the polls’. The third deals mostly with Madras presidency, although it offers some comments on the national context. Mallampalli, Christians and public life. 872. This was true of Conservatives such a Lord Curzon, speaking in Parliament in 1892, as well as the Liberals, such as Viscount of Blackburn Morley, Secretary of State for India 1905–1910, speaking to the House of Commons regarding the Indian Councils Act 1909. A. Berriedale Keith (ed.), Speeches and documents on Indian policy, 1750–1921 (2 vols., London, 1922), II, pp. 46–75, 81–98. 873. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi, 1983) pp. 139–41.


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874. K.B. Krishna, The problem of minorities or communal representation in India (London, 1939). 875. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 137–41; Bipan Chandra, Communalism in modern India (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 263–78. 876. Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: the politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (2nd edn., Delhi, 1997), pp. 133–74. 877. Anil Seal and Ayesha Jalal, ‘Alternative to partition: Muslim politics between the Wars’, Modern Asian Studies, 15: 3 (1981), pp. 415–54. 878. Kooiman, Communities and electorates. 879. Mallampalli, Christians and public life, pp. 108–66. 880. In spite of periodic efforts to recruit Catholics, it never succeeded in doing so to any significant extent. 881. Other than founder members, it drew delegates from provincial Indian Christian Associations, unrelated to church councils. It also offered membership to other Indian Christian organizations that wished to affiliate themselves. ‘The constitution of the AICIC’, Report of the second session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, held at Allahabad 28th, 29th, & 30th December 1915, (Cover missing, 1916), pp. 12–17, UTC Archives, Bangalore. 882. For example the skepticism expressed by Stephen Neill of the C.M.S., later Bishop of Tinnevelly. Stephen Neill, ‘The Indian Church and the political situation’, The Church Overseas, 4: 14 (1931), pp. 122–8. 883. Report of the second session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, 1915, Appendix C, pp. 42–9. 884. K.T. Paul’s career has been briefly discussed in Chapter 5. 885. ‘Annual report of the secretary’ in Report of the sixth session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, held in Cuttack, on December 29th, 30th and 31st, 1919 (Madras, 1920), p. 29, UTC Archives. 886. In the previous session he had condemned the military action of the government in the Punjab, although the majority of the conference felt that the attack on a C.M.S. school and an Indian Christian church justified such measures. He was also opposed to missionary dominance of the Indian church, arguing that only Indian Christians sympathetic to the national cause could influence the educated and upper classes of Indians and prevent Christianity becoming a religion of the people of the lowest grade. One of the best examples of this, he said, was K.C. Banerjee, esteemed Congress member, to whose public orations on Christianity many thronged, all because he was known to be at one with nationalist aspirations. Alfred Nundy, ‘The present position of Christian missions in India’, Asiatic Quarterly Review, Ser. 3, 14: 27 & 28, (July–October 1902), pp. 324–40. 887. As the authors of Rethinking Christianity in India came to be known. 888. Report of the sixth session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, pp. 14–17. 889. Report of the seventh session of the All-India Conference of Indian Christians held in Calcutta, December 28th, 29th, 30th & 31st, 1920 ( Cover missing, [1921]), pp. 5–8, 16–17, UTC Archives. 890. ‘My motherland’ in Narayan Vaman Tilak, Susila and other poems, translated J.C. Winslow (Calcutta, 1930), p. 29. 891. K.T. Paul to Leonard K. Elmhirst, Bangalore, 16 June 1916, Dartington Hall Archives (DHA), LKE/IN/13/G/5, discussed in Chapter 5. 892. A term used by nationalists to indicate self-government.


Notes 301


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Notes

893. ‘Your entitlement is only to the rite, not ever at all to its fruits. Be not motivated by the fruits of acts, but also do not purposely avoid acts. Abandon self-interest, Dhanamjaya, and perform the acts while applying this singlemindedness. Remain equable in success and failure – this equableness is called the application; for the act as such is far inferior to the application of singleness of purpose to it, Dhanamjaya. Seek shelter in this single-mindedness – pitiful are those who are motivated by fruits!’ The Bhagavad Gita, translated by J.A.B. van Buitenen (Shaftesbury, 1997), pp. 31–2. 894. In 1931, he lamented in an international journal that ‘primitive religiosity’ was standing in the way of nationalism. In this he depicted the Christians to be as bad as the rest, and the proof was their demand for separate electorates. Out of this moral torpor, he suggested the lead of the ‘Sage of Sabarmati’. B.L. Rallia Ram, ‘Indian students and the present situation’, Vox Studentium, 8 (July– September, 1931), pp. 97–9. 895. B.L. Rallia Ram was a graduate of Lahore University, secretary of YMCA Punjab, later National General Secretary of the YMCA of India, Burma and Ceylon, and Chairman of the Students’ Christian Association of India, Burma and Ceylon, and also Secretary of the Punjab Indian Christian Association. The Rallia Ram brothers became closely associated with the Gandhian Congress in the Punjab. Mrs. K.L. Rallia Ram was an important Punjabi helper of the Gandhian Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, daughter of Raja Sir Harnam Singh of Kapurthala, and Golak Nath Chatterjee’s granddaughter. Mrs. Rallia Ram helped her organize Spinners’ Associations in the Punjab and also the sale of khadi. She published a pamphlet in 1940, collecting documents regarding the negotiations for India’s independence in the World War II years, with the clear intention of showing the justice of the nationalist cause and the unfairness, oppressiveness, and racism of the British. The Sage of Sabarmati, she said, was leading the country to peace based on moral order and justice. Mrs. K.L. Rallia Ram, Why civil disobedience? (Lahore, 1940). 896. On the Justice party and its politics see, C.J. Baker, Politics of south India, 1920– 1937 (Cambridge, 1976). 897. Arokiaswamy was of the non-Brahman caste of Mudaliars, Catholic by faith, Madras Christian College by training, and an engineer by profession. His political career lasted a brief five years from 1926–31. He joined the Swarajist party of the Congress in 1926 and held office in the Dr. Subbaroyan ministry, resigning when Dr. Subbaroyan adopted a pro-British stand. K. Rajayyan, ‘R.N. Arokiaswamy Mudaliar’ in S.P. Sen, Dictionary of national biography (4 vols., Calcutta, 1972–74), III, pp. 145–6; Christopher Baker, Politics of south India, pp. 76–7. 898. Report of the thirteenth session of the All India Conference of Indian Christians held at Madras , December 28th, 29th & 30th 1926 (Madras, 1926), pp. 5–14, UTC Archives. 899. Ibid., p. 47. 900. S.K. Datta was graduate of Forman Christian College, Lahore; M.B. Ch.B. from Edinburgh University, Secretary Students’ Christian Movement of Great Britain and Ireland 1906–8, lecturer in Biology Forman Christian College 1908–14, Member the Faculties of Arts, Science and Medicine, the University Syndicate, and the Senate of Punjab University, Punjab Government advisor to students proceedings abroad, and between 1914–18 YMCA welfare officer with the Indian army in France. After World War I, he was one of National general secretaries of


302


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901.

902. 903.

904. 905. 906.

907. 908. 909.

910.

911. 912. 913. 914. 915. 916. 917.

918.

YMCA India, in 1921–22 member of Lord Lytton’s committee, 1922–23 president of All-India Christian Conference, and 1923–6 representative of Christians in the Imperial Legislative Assembly. In 1932 he was Vice-President of the World’s Committees of YMCAs in Geneva. In 1929 he was member of a delegation sent by the Royal Institute of International Affairs to a conference organized by the Institute of Pacific Research at Kyoto. During his varied and brilliant career, he travelled across most European countries, Australia, Fiji islands, New Zealand, United States and Canada and the Far East. S.K. Datta Private Papers, ‘Papers relating to the Round Table Conference 2nd session July 1931–January 1932’, MssEur/F178/29, fol. 4, APAC, British Library, London. Report of the Indian Statutory Commission (18 vols., London, H.M.S.O., 1930), XVI, ‘Memorandum submitted by the All-India Conference of Indian Christians’ pp. 318–27 and ‘Deputation of Indian Christians’, pp. 327–33. Deputation from the Indian Christian Association, Madras, in Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. XVII, Part II, pp. 325–8. Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, XVI, p. 331. Dr. A. Suhrawardy and Zulfiqar Ali Khan, were Muslim members of the Indian Central Committee, which along with the Statutory Commission was hearing evidence. On their political role see K.K. Aziz, The All-India Muslim Conference 1928–35: a documentary record (2nd edn., Delhi, 2000). Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, XVI, p. 328. ‘Deputation from Christian Depressed Classes’, Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. XVII, Part II, pp. 334–7. V.S. Azariah, ‘Fee concessions for Harijans’, Guardian, XVII, pp. 36–7 (14 and 21 September, 1939), p. 567, cited in Billington-Harper, In the shadow of the Mahatma, p. 299. Evidence of Right Rev. Bishop Azariah, of Dornakal, Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. XVII, Part II, pp. 340–2. Billington-Harper, In the shadow of the Mahatma, pp. 302–5. A.T. Pannirselvam was President of the District Board, Tanjore, 1924–30; President, Secondary Education Board, Tanjore; Chairman, Municipal Council, 1918–20; President, District Educational Council, 1922–24, all with Justice Party support, obviously. He was a lawyer who had studied in Gray’s Inn London and Peterhouse, Cambridge. The who’s who in Madras, 1934: a pictorial who’s who of distinguished personages, princes, zemindars and noblemen in the Madras Presidency (Cochin, 1934), pp. 52–3; C.J. Baker, Politics of south India, pp. 68, 220. K.T. Paul, To the voters of the university seat in the Madras Legislative Council, Election manifesto, (Salem, 1930). K.T. Paul Private Papers, File 1, UTC Archives, Bangalore. Indian Round Table Conference, 1st session, 12th November, 1930-19th January, 1931, proceedings (London, 1931), pp. 137–41. S.K. Datta Private Papers, MssEur/F178/29, fols. 47–50, APAC, British Library. Ibid., fol. 54. Ibid., fol. 66 Ibid., fol. 12 Ibid., fol. 78. Rao Bahadur A.T. Pannir Selvam, ‘Memorandum on the Claims of Indian Christians’ in Minorities Commiteee, Second Report, Appendix 8, Indian Round Table Conference, Second Session 1931,Proceedings (London, 1932), pp. 86–8. S.K. Datta Private Papers, MssEur/F178/29, fol. 80, APAC, British Library.


Notes 303


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Notes

919. 920. 921. 922. 923. 924. 925. 926. 927. 928. 929. 930.

Ibid., fols. 95, 104, 110. Ibid., fols. 107–9. Ibid., fol. 126. Ibid., fol. 137. Ibid., fol. 161. Unclear in manuscript. David to Datta, dated 15 October 1931 in Ibid., fols. 244–7. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 349–50. Baker, Politics of south India, p. 314. Mallampalli, Christians and public life, pp. 154–6. V. Haridasan, Dr. John Matthai 1886–1959: a biography (Kottayam, 1986). Pramathanatha Banerjee (ed.), Harendra Coomar Mookerjee memorial volume (Calcutta, 1962), pp. xiii–xl. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, (Eminent Parliamentarians Monograph Series, New Delhi, 1993), p.1. Banerjee (ed.), Harendra Coomar Mookerjee Memorial Volume, p. xxi. H.C. Mookerjee, Congress and the masses (Calcutta, 1946), Preface, p. i. People of God; Gandhi’s term for the Untouchables or Depressed Classes. Ibid., and H.C. Mookerjee, Some non-political achievements of the Congress (Bombay, 1946). See Chapter 5. Constituent Assembly debates, Official Report, (2nd edn., 12 vols., New Delhi, 1999), I, pp. 320–49. Ibid., p. 351. Later published as Village government in British India (London, 1915). Haridasan, Dr. John Matthai, pp. 12–74. (Matthai was never a member of the Indian National Congress.) Hand-spun and hand-woven cloth of rough texture, adopted by nationalists in boycott of British mill-made imported cloth, and a symbol of national pride. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, pp. 2–4. Gandhi, Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. Dr. Sushila Naiyar, ‘Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’ in Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, p. 28. Ibid., p. 9 Ibid., p. 7. Report of the All Indian Conference of Indian Christians, twenty-seventh session, Bombay, 1947, in Supplement to The Light (1947), clipping preserved in UTC Archives, pp. 2–4. Resolution no. 20 ‘Minorities Advisory Committee’, Ibid., p. 8. Constituent Assembly Debates, Official Report, VIII, pp. 269–355. Constituent Assembly Debates, Official Report, III, pp. 458–509.

931. 932. 933. 934.

935. 936. 937. 938. 939. 940. 941. 942. 943. 944. 945. 946.

947. 948. 949.

Conclusion: The ‘Crime’ of Conversion and Other Historical Curiosities


304

950. Oral history interview with N.K. Mukarji, interviewer S.L. Manchanda, 1994, Oral History and Transcripts, Accession no. 633, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Vol. 1, pp. 1–4. 951. Jonathan Hollow, ‘Nirmal Kumar Mukarji: principled Indian Civil Service Officer’, Obituaries, The Independent, 7 September 2002.


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952. I have been inspired by the works of Talal Asad, as well as Saba Mahmood, Politics of piety (Princeton, 2008), especially ‘The subject of freedom’, pp. 2–40. 953. Article 25 (1). 954. Clark, ‘The limits of the confessional state’, pp. 159–79. 955. The other states with similar laws are Madhya Pradesh, Rajashthan, Arunachal Pradesh and Chattisgarh, with similar legislations having been passed but repealed in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. 956. On the Lina Joy case, see Joshua Neoh, ‘Islamic state and the common law in Malaysia: a case study of Lina Joy’, Global Jurist, 8: 2 (2008), Article 4. 957. Shourie, ‘Who killed Australian missionary Graham Staines?’ 958. Press Trust of India, ‘Staines’ wife deposes before court, denies conversion charges’, expressindia.com, 12 June 2002, http://www.expressindia.com/news/ fullstory.php?newsid=11513 last accessed, 2 January 2009. 959. And such scholars also disagree as to the extent they disagree with each other! See Talal Asad’s response to Partha Chatterjee in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors (Stanford, 2006), pp. 216–20.


Notes 305


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Amaldar Ashraf

Ayurveda Avatara Babu Baid/Vaid Brahman Brati-balak Bhakti

Chamar Dalit Dana Dargah Dayabhaga Dharmakarta Dharmashastra Diwan Haji Hakim Halkabandi Imambarah

Inamdar

An Indian Revenue Department officer Plural of Sharif; Noblemen, well-born, among Muslims, referring to those who claim to be descended from the Prophet Hindu traditional medicine Incarnation of one of the principal Hindu gods: usually that of Shiva or Vishnu Originally respectful form of address, later pejorative reference to westernized persons, clerks Practitioner of Ayurveda The priestly caste in the four-grade varna system, ranked the highest Boys who had taken a vow (brata); an Indian interpretation of the Boy Scouts Devotion to god; a mode of worship recommended by a school of Hindu teachers, privileging devotion over rituals and knowledge A low-ranking caste, traditionally leather-workers, also agricultural labourers Lit. (Hindi) downtrodden; descriptive term preferred by people earlier referred to as Untouchables, Harijans. Charitable giving Tomb of Muslim saint Hindu inheritance laws, applicable principally to Bengal The manager of a south Indian temple Sanskrit works dealing with upholding dharma or righteousness, seen as legal codes by British officials Chief revenue official under the Mughals; chief minister of a princely state; manager of an estate A Muslim who has performed the Haj, or pilgrimage to Mecca Practitioner of Unani medicine Village circle Building in which celebration of Muharram, involving service mourning the deaths of Ali, Hasan and Hussein is held, sometimes includes the tomb of the founder or his family Holder of rent-free land


Glossary

329

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330

Glossary

Operational unit of caste, endogamous social groups Last of the four eras in Hindu cosmogony; age of decline and unrighteousness Khadi Hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, popularized during the Indian nationalist movement in boycott of British mill-made cloth Khadim Servant or attendant of a mosque Kshatriya Warrior or kingly caste in the four-grade varna system, ranked second Khanqah Building for Sufi activities, where one or more pirs live, teaching disciples and offering hospitality to travelling Sufis Khuteeb Reader of prayers in a mosque Lambardar Substantial farmer, who is registered in the Collector’s roll (therefore ‘number’- dar) as responsible for paying the revenues for himself and/or other members of the village Madad-i-mash Endowments of land or land revenue, supporting religious or charitable activities (under pre-British regimes, Muslim and Sikh, in India) Madrasa College of Islamic law, theology and associated disciplines Mahant Head of a matha, usually ascetic Maktab Primary school, often taught by a maulvi Manu Smriti One of the earliest Dharmasastras Matha Hindu monastic institutions Maulvi Title used by a scholar of Islamic theology and law Mitakshara Hindu inheritance laws, applicable to most parts of Indian except Bengal Mleccha Barbarian; Sanskrit term for foreign persons outside the varna system Munshi Secretary, teachers and interpreters of Persian to Europeans Munsif Indian judge of the lowest rank Mutawalli The manager of a waqf Nadar Low-status Tamil toddy-tapper caste Nishkama karma The philosophical principle recommended in the Bhagavad Gita: righteous action without expectation of or attachment to rewards Panchayat Caste or village council Pandit Learned man; Brahman teacher or expounder of law Paraiyan Tamil dalit caste Pathshala Primary village school, usually taught by a Hindu teacher Patwari Village record keeper


Jati Kaliyuga


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Glossary

331

Sufi saint Hindu rituals of penance for wrong- doing Muslim judge Corruption of raiyat, peasant Hindu ascetic Highest-ranking Indian civil judge (until 1861), with some criminal jurisdiction Sajjadanashin Lit. One who sits on the prayer carpet; head of a family of Muslim pirs in charge of a shrine Sanatana Lit. (Sanskrit) eternal; conservative Hindu religious groups that rejected efforts to reform religious and social doctrines and practices Serishtadar Accountant Siddhanta Lit. (Sanskrit) decision; Sanskrit astronomical texts Shanar Alternative term for Nadar Sharia Muslim law and jurisprudence Shastri A person knowledgeable in the Hindu Shastras; a Brahman legal specialist Shia Muslim sect that rejects the first three Khalifs, and revere the Prophet’s son-in-law as the first true Khalif. Siksha Satra A place where education is distributed as charity; derived from traditional annasatra, which distributed food Sadr Diwani Adalat Chief civil court of a province of British India, before the Indian High Courts Act, 1861 Sudra Menial caste in the four-grade varna system, lowest in rank Sufi Muslim mystic Swadeshi Of one’s own country, Indian nationalist slogan for buying locally-made goods Tol Higher institution of Sanskrit learning Towliatnamah Legal document establishing a waqf Ulama Plural for alim, Muslim theologican, jurist, religious teacher Unani Traditional Greco-Arab medicine Upanishads Body of Sanskrit philosophical works, purporting to explain the Vedas Varnasamkara The mixing of castes, deplored by Brahman compilers of the Dharmasastras Vaishnava Worshippers of the Hindu god Vishnu Varnashramadharma The ideal social order according to Hindu codes, with the hierarchy of four castes or varnas, Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, each doing their svadharma or specific duty; and the three upper varnas


Pir Prayaschitta Qazi/Kazi Ryot Sadhu Sadr Amin


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Glossary

Veda

Vedanta

Vellalar Waqf Yogi Zenana zilla

going through the four ashramas or stages of life: brahmacharya, garhasthya, vanaprastha, sanyas. Collective term for the earliest and most revered set of Sanskrit works: consisting of four Samhitas: the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda Lit. (Sanskrit) the essence of the Vedas, another term for the Upanishads, and those philosophical works which expound further on the Upanishads. Landowning Tamil caste, technically Shudra Muslim religious or charitable endowment Practitioner of Yoga, physical and spiritual exercises Women’s quarters District


332


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Abdul Latif, Nawab, government official, Muslim leader, 39, 64–5 Abdul Masih, also known as Sheikh Salih, 173 Agra, 28, 30, 173, 178–9 Aligarh Muslim University, see Universities Allahabad, 24, 60, 120, 159, 187 High Court of, 103 Allahabad Agricultural Institute (now University), 24, 147–50 All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC), 220–39 Allnutt, Samuel, 115–18, 122–5, 130 Ambedkar, Bhimrao, Dalit leader, politician, constitutional lawyer, 66, 230 Amir Ali, Saiyyid, judge, jurist, historian, Muslim leader, 33, 38–9, 64–5 Anand Masih, 194–5 Andrews, Charles Freer, Anglican missionary, British supporter of Indian nationalism, 118, 121–5, 127–8, 130, 159–62, 169, 206–8 Anglican, see Church, of England Anglo-Hindu law, see Law, Hindu law Anglo-Indians, 83, 91–2, 94–5, 99, 176, 218, 221, 230, 248 Anglo-Muhammadan law, see Law, Islamic law Anjaman-i-Punjab, 37 see also Leitner, Gottlieb Wilhelm Appadurai, Arjun, 58–9, 68 Arokiaswamy, A.N., 225–6 Aryan race theory, 213 Arya Samaj, 39, 117, 156, n630 Asad, Talal, 4, 7 Ashram, 157, 209, n808 Azariah, Bishop V.S., 73, 78, 120–1, 183, 185, 188 on separate electorates for Christians, 228–9

Banaras Hindu University, see Universities Banerjea, Kali Charan, lawyer, Indian Christian, member of the Congress, 178 Banerjea, Krishna Mohan, Indian Christian leader, Sanskrit scholar, professor of Bishop’s College Calcutta, 93–4, 100–2, 122, 174–7 Bayly, Christopher Alan, 139, 168, n346 Besant, Annie, Indian nationalist of British-Irish origin, Theosophist, 42 Beschi, Joseph Constantine, Jesuit missionary, linguist, 199 Bhagavad Gita, 151, 223, n611 Bhakti, 204 and Indian Christianity, 205, 207 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 1, 6–7, 75, 79 Bhatty, E.C., Indian Christian leader, 188 Bishops A.S. Appasamy, 204–5, 207 Daniel Wilson, 71, 98, 175–6, 201 Henry Whitehead, 73, 120–1, 185 Reginald Heber, 173, 201 Robert Milman, 112 Stephen Neill, 184 Thomas Middleton, 172–3, n687, n688 Thomas Valpy French, 206 V.S. Azariah, see Azariah, Bishop V.S. Bombay, 17, 29, 35, 66, 92, 125, 141–2, 150, 159, 178, 182, 230, 248 Mayor’s Court in, 69, 81–4 Supreme Court of, 89–91 Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, also known as Bhavani Charan Banerji, theologian, educationist, Indian nationalist, 157, 203, 217 Brahmo Samaj, 17, 203, 241 Brayne, Frank, L., British civil servant, village uplift enthusiast, 142–6 Buchanan, Rev. Claudius, see Chaplains


Index

333

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Calcutta, 27–8, 32, 35–6, 39, 69, 93, 102, 112, 120, 140, 158, 160, 172–3, 175–6, 180–1, 187, 202, 204, 210, 234 High Court of, 63, 104 Mayor’s Court of, 81–3 Sadr Diwani Adalat, 93 Supreme Court of, 88–9 Zamindar’s court, 82–3 Cambridge Mission to Delhi, 112–34 Cases Abraham v. Abraham, 94–5 St. Stephen’s College v. Delhi University, 23–4 Thapitha Peter v. Thapitha Lakshmi, 103–4 Zabardast Khan v. his wife, 102–3 Caste Caste and political representation, 226–8, 237–8 and Christian churches, 71–2, 114, 118–19, 135–6, 146, 148, 174–5, 192, 195, 199–201, 204, 209–14 Jati, Varna, Varnashramadharma, 117, 195, 205, 210–13 see also Legislation, Caste Disabilities Removal Act XXI of 1850; Dalit Catholics British prejudice against, 31 and Caste, see Caste, and Christian churches and competition with Protestants, 224–8 Irish soldiers in India, 70 Missions, 16, 99, 102, 195–9 and politics, 219, 224–33, 237 Chakkarai, V., Indian Christian leader, member of ‘Rethinking Christianity’ group, 226 Chaplains Claudius Buchanan, 59–60, 69, 172 Henry Martyn, 172 ‘pious’ chaplains, 172 Charity Commission, 54–5 Chatterjee, Golaknath, Indian Christian missionary, 186–7, 211 Chatterji, J.C., Indian Christian leader, pastor of St. Stephen’s church, Delhi, 227–9

Christians and imperial policy, 26, 29–31, 34–6, 40–1, 51, 56–7, 59–62, 69–70, 74, 83–4, 91–5, 97–9 Indian Christian leaders, see Azariah, Bishop V.S.; Banerjea, Kali Charan; Banerjea, Krishna Mohan; Bhatty, E.C.; Brahmabandhab Upadhyay; Chakkarai, V.; Chatterjee, Golaknath; Chatterji, J.C.; Datta, S. K.; Naoroji, Dhanjibhai; Dutt, Michael Madhusudan; Day, Lal Behari; Mudaliar, Arokiasamy; Pannirselvam, Rao Bahadur Sir A.T.; Paul, Kanakarayan Thiruselvam; Sorabji, Cornelia Indian Christian women, Dhanjibhai, 75, 104, 212, n550 and separatism, separate electorates, 214, 218–33, 236–7 and theology, 56–7, 110–12, 117–19, 121, 135–6, 143, 151–3, 155, 191–215, 202–4, 223 see also Dalit Christians Church Church-mission division, 171–2, 180, 182–3, 188 of England, 11, 15–16, 52–3, 124 of England in India, 73, 171–4, 184–5 Independent Indian, 178, 187 Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment, 69–70, 73 and racial divisions, 52, 70–3, 154, 171–2, 174, 176–9, 183–90, 198, 216 Church Missionary Society, 33, 112, 120, 169, 171–3, 175–85, 187, 194, 200, 203, 210, n60 Constitution, Indian Constituent Assembly Debates, 46–8, 237–8 Fundamental Rights in, 24, 46–8, 68–9, 237–8 Conversion to Christianity, 1, 14, 70, 73, 76–8, 90–1, 113–14, 151, 153, 171, 173–4, 176–8, 186, 194, 203, 205–6, 211–12, 241 and education, 35–6, 110, 113, 119–20, 135


334 Index


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Conversion – continued and law, 76, 92–5, 97, 99–104, 171–2, 232, 238, 242–3 mass movements, 14, 135, 146–7, 187 opposition to, 17, 76, 85, 147 Cooperative societies and British officials, 141–4 and Christians, 136, 154, 157, 234 at Santiniketan, 157, 161–2 Dalhousie, Lord, Governor-General of India, 34, 93 Dalit Christians, 14, 50, 135–6, 146, 163, 212, 214, 218, 228–9, n60, n419, n552, n664, 291, n728, 293–4, n768, n769, 299–300, n857 see also Paraiyan Christians Dartington College, 161–2 Datta, S.K., Indian Christian leader, 206, 226, 230–33 Day, Lal Behari Indian Christian missionary, journalist, 177, 212–13, n461 Delhi, 28, 149 Christians in, 102, 112–14, 120, 181, 194, 212, 227–8, 235 Delhi College, 28, 36–8, 114–15 see also St. Stephen’s College, Delhi De Nobili, Roberto, 196–8 Deoband, 39, 42 Depressed Classes, Dalit, see Ambedkar, Bhimrao Desai, Morarji, politician, Prime Minister of India (1977–1979), 240–1 see also Parsis Dornakal diocese, see Azariah, Bishop V.S. Dravidian, 213 Duff, Alexander, Scottish missionary, 34, 111, 120, 177 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, Bengali Christian poet, dramatist, 176–7, 241 East India Company Charter of 1600, 56 Charter of 1793, 56 Charter of 1813, 69–70 and Christian missionaries, 59–60, 70 educational policy of, 27–33 and Indian religions, 8, 57–61

335

East Indians, see Anglo-Indians Education Agricultural, 134–64 British, 23, 26, 30–1, 45–6, 136–7, 161 Commission of 1882, 38–41 Conscience clause, 25, 33, 40–8 Despatch of 1854, 34–6, 38 Orientalist, Anglicist and neoOrientalist, 27, 29–32, 36–9 Religious, 45–6 Vernacular, 30, 33 see also Universities Elmhirst, Dorothy (née Straight), 159, 161 Elmhirst, Leonard K., educationist, 158–63 Evangelicals, see Christians, and imperial policy Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand And Christian missions, 151 And Sushil Rudra, 126–7 And Tagore, 160 And village uplift, 145, 149 Gaya, 60 Harijans, see Dalit Hastings, Warren, Governor-General of India, 29, 70, 85–6 Higginbottom, Sam, American Presbyterian missionary, educationist, 147–50, 159 Indian National Congress, 41, 46, 142, 149, 157, 159, 178, 214, 220, 225–6, 229–31, 233–5, 237–8 Jagannath Temple, 57–8, 60, 62–3 Jones, Eli Stanley, American Methodist missionary, theologian, 145, 206, 217 Kaur, Rajkumari Amrit, Indian Christian nationalist, parliamentarian, health minister, 234–6 Kerala, see Travancore Krishnagar, 180, 187, 210–11


Index

Law Christian personal law, 11–12, 18, 75–80, 94, 97–105


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Law – continued Hindu law, 54, 66–8, 79, 87–95 Islamic law or Muslim law or Anglo-Muhammadan law, 54, 66–8, 75, 79, 88–9, 91–5, 102–3 Parsi law, 90–1 Personal laws, 6–7, 11–12, 78–80, 85 Of trusts, 52, 54–5, 58–9, 61–3 Legislation Caste Disabilities Removal Act XXI of 1850, 92–4, 97 Indian Church Act, 1927, 73, 185 Indian Divorce Act, 102–4; see also Legislation, Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Act Indian Marriage Acts, 1852, 1864, 1865, 1872, 97–101 Indian Succession Act 1865, 95–7 Lex Loci Act 1850, see Legislation, Caste Disabilities Removal Act XXI of 1850 Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Act, 1866, 101–2 Religious Endowments Act XX of 1863, 61–5 Leitner, Gottlieb Wilhelm, 37–8, 114–15 Macaulay, Lord, Thomas Babington, 10, 26, 30–1 Madrasa at Calcutta, 27, 32, 36, 39 at Hugli, 39 at Rajshahi, 39 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, Hindu politician, educationist, 42 Marriage Among Indian Christians, 90, 212 see also Law, Christian personal law; Legislation: Indian Divorce Act, Indian Marriage Acts, Native Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Act Missions Missionary Conferences, 135, 151, 186–9 Missionary societies Cambridge Mission to Delhi, 112–19, 122–3, 125–6, 207, 227 Church Missionary Society, 112, 120, 169–87, 194, 200, 203, 210–11, n60

London Missionary Society, 71, 151, 171 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 9, 71, 102, 112–14, 120, 123–4, 126, 130, 169, 171–2, 176–7, 184, 200, n60 Mohammadan Literary Society, see Abdul Latif Montague-Chelmsford Reforms 1919, 46, 66, 159, 160, 222 Mudaliar, Arokiasamy, Indian Christian politician, 225–6 Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, see Universities, Aligarh Muslim Mukarji, N.K., Indian Christian, civil servant, 128, 240–1 Mukarji, S.N., Indian Christian educationist, principal of St. Stephen’s College, 128–9, 212 Mutiny, Indian, 1857, 34–5, 37, 55–6, 62, 112 Naoroji, Dhanjibhai, 90–1, 178, 211 Naoroji, Dhanjibhai, Indian Christian leader, convert from Zoroastrianism, 90–1, 178, 211 National Mahomedan Association, see Amir Ali, Saiyyid National Missionary Council, later National Christian Council of India, 170, 186–8, 220 National Missionary Society, 147, 153, 230 Oxford Mission to Calcutta, 120–1 Pannirselvam, Rao Bahadur Sir A.T., Indian Christian landlord, lawyer, politician, 229, 230–3 Paraiyan Christians, 71, n419 Parsis, 17, 36, 40 see also Law: Parsi law; Personal laws Paul, Kanakarayan Thiruselvam, Indian Christian politician, social worker, 153–5, 160, 188, 206, 221–5 Pilgrim tax, 57–8 and missionary campaign against it, 60–1 Punjab Native Christian Council, 180–2


336 Index


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Index 337

Sadhu Sundar Singh, Indian Christian theologian, mystic, 206–8 St. John’s Divinity College, Lahore, 206–7 St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, 23–26, 50–51, 109–133, 159, 189, 207, 212, 240 Santiniketan and Sriniketan, 156–63 Secularism, 4–14 Secularization theory, 2–4, 6, 15, 127, 170, 244 Sharia, see Law, Islamic law Simon Commission, 226–9 Sorabji, Cornelia, First Indian woman lawyer, n553 Tagore, Rabindranath, Bengali poet and educationist, 127–8, 153, 156–63 Telang, Kashinath Trimbak, lawyer, member of Indian National Congress, 41, 49, 115 Tilak, Narayan Vaman, Marathi Christian poet, theologian, 206, 209, 223

Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli), 72, 200, 209 Travancore, 40–1, 135, 150–1, 153, 219 Universities Aligarh Muslim, 41–3, 47, 49, 149–50 Benares Hindu, 41–3, 47, 49, 149–50 Bombay, 35 Calcutta, 35, 116, 160, 174, 234 Delhi, 24, 128–9 Dhaka, 46 Madras, 35, 234 Punjab, 37, 115 Viswabharati, 162; see also Santiniketan see also Allahabad Agricultural Institute Untouchables, see Dalit Upanishads, 17, 203 see also Christians, and theology Vedanayagam Sastri, Tamil Christian poet, 199–201, 210 Vedanta, see Upanishads Viswanathan, Gauri, 76 Waqfs, 39, 65–7 Western, Frederick James, Anglican missionary, educationist, 126 Wilberforce, William, Abolitionist, British politicians and M.P., 56 Wood, Sir Charles (1800–1885), Secretary of State for India, 10, 34–5 YMCA, 144–5, 150–6, 158–9, 223, 226, 228, 233–4 Zoroastrians, see Parsis


Rallia Ram, B.L., 223–4, 227–8, 302, n896, n897 Rallia Ram, K.L., 223, 227 Rallia Ram, Mrs. K.L., 302, n897 Ramachandra, Professor, Indian Christian mathematician, educationist, 36–7 Rathnaswami, Mariadas, Indian Christian politician, diplomat, 237 Round Table Conferences, 229–33 Minorities Sub-Committee of, 230 Rudra, Sushil Kumar, First Indian Christian principal of St. Stephen’s College Delhi, 120–34, 207, 211–12


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