The ample teaching of our improved European literature, philosophy and science, we knew, would shelter the huge fabric of popular Hindooism, and crumble it into tragments. But as it is certainly not good simply to destroy and then leave men idly to gaze over the ruins, nor wise to continue building on the walls of a tottering edifice, it has ever formed the grand and distinguishing glory of our institution, through the introduction and zealous pursuit of Christian evidence and doctrine, to strive to supply the noblest substitute in place of that which has been demolished, in the form of sound general knowledge and pure evangelical truth.
—Alexander Duff, Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53, 32:57.
THE 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck, which swiftly followed Macaulay’s minute of that same year, officially required the natives of India to submit to the study of English literature, irrevocably altering the direction of Indian education. But the momentous significance of Bentinck’s resolution ought not obscure the fact that English was in existence in India even before that time, for rudimentary instruction in the language had been introduced more than two decades earlier. Though based on literary material, the early British Indian curriculum in English was primarily devoted to language studies. Initially, English did not supersede Oriental studies but was taught alongside it. Yet it was clear that it enjoyed a different status, for there was a scrupulous attempt to establish separate colleges for its study. Even when English was taught within the same college, the English course of studies was kept separate from the course of Oriental study and was attended by a different set of students. The rationale was that if the English department drew students who were attached only to its department and to no other (that is, the Persian or the Arabic or the Sanskrit), the language might then be taught “classically,” in much the same way that Latin and Greek were taught in England.
From an administrative point of view, the demands of secularism dictated an educational policy that required a strictly disciplinary approach to fields of knowledge understood as objects of study in and for themselves. The pattern of studies in rhetoric and logic then current in England provided a convenient model for adaptation in India. As a legacy of the medieval school curriculum, the cultivation of classical languages for their own sake suited the prevailing temper of conservatism. Grammar was not taught separately but alongside the reading of texts, which consisted of parsing, memorization, and recitation. That this happened also to be a parallel mode of instruction in the Indian classical languages explains in part the alacrity with which the European model of classical humanism was taken up and refined for formal use in India. Unaffected by Baconian ideas of educational reform and indifferent to the “words” versus “things” controversy raging in England, the British administrators preceding Bentinck, specifically Minto, Holt Mackenzie, A. D. Campbell, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Thomas Munro, and John Malcolm, gravitated intuitively toward a classical approach to the study of language and literature as an end in itself, resisting implicitly utilitarian pressures to enlist literary study as a medium of modern knowledge.
The model was not without distinct political advantages. Translated into secular terms, classical humanism assured protection of the integrity of native learning, defusing potential protest by Indians against overtures of cultural domination, for quite independently of the actual sentiment of officials toward the native culture, the classical model in delineating disciplinary boundaries around subjects as independent areas of study permitted the assertion of the respective claims of both Oriental and Western learning to the status of true knowledge without necessarily invoking normative criteria.
The entry of missionaries into India, however, precipitated a new role for English literary study. By the 1820s the atmosphere of secularism in which English studies were conducted became a major cause for concern to the growing numbers of missionaries who had gained fresh access to India after 1813. Within England itself, there was a strong feeling that literary texts read as a form of secular knowledge were “a sea in which the voyager has to expect shipwreck”
1 and that they could not be relied on to exert a beneficial effect upon the moral condition of society in general. This sentiment was complemented by an equally strong one that for English works to be studied even for language purposes a high degree of mental and moral cultivation was first required which the bulk of people simply did not have. According to the missionary argument, to a man in a state of ignorance of moral law literature was patently indifferent to virtue. Far from cultivating moral feelings, a wide reading was more likely to cause him to question moral law more closely and perhaps even encourage him to deviate from its dictates.
The case of poetry offers an interesting example of how several important strands in English culture converged to cause a profound distrust of a literary mode that was at one point unequivocally called the “art of perverting words from their primitive meaning.”
2 The criticism of the corruption of language by poetry and its attendant deviation from truth when read without a context or purpose brought the Evangelicals and the Utilitarians on common ground to a point where they could reconcile their differing ideological positions. The Utilitarian hostility to poetry found its chief priest in Bentham, who categorically excluded all imaginative literature from his ideal republic because it did not serve any functional purpose and caused misrepresentations of things. To the Utilitarian denunciation of poetry as a falsification of the inherent reality of things the Evangelicals added the criticism that the ornamentation of poetry exalted sensibility over morality and self-indulgence over Christian humility. The Sunday School movement, which grew out of Evangelical involvement with the uplift of the lower classes, attempted to inspire devotional feelings in the young through tracts written in a language that emulated the simplicity and directness of the Bible. Originally written in the form of parables, these tracts (whose enormous influence established a literary reputation of sorts for Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, and Anna Barbauld) gave a new respectability to the novelistic genre whose growth in part they stimulated.
In missionary pamphlets greater sanction was given to literature wherever it supported a pedagogical emphasis on the “moral and intellectual improvement of mankind.” Literary devices such as alliteration, rhyme, and reduplication came to be seen as extremely harmful because they imposed “arbitrary fetters” on thought and resulted in an affected style. Many critics shared James Mill’s Utilitarian distrust of ingenuity and argued that it diverted minds from “the correct and dignified style of prose composition in which the Greek and Latin writers (and those of all Western nations) so much excel, and which to a nation is of far greater importance than all the embellishments of poetry.”
3 Furthermore, it was argued, the reader’s concentration is so much on discovering the division and meanings of the syllables in the alliteration that all unity of impression is lost, for the reader is unable to take in the whole and is ill prepared to receive the impression that the story was calculated to make on him.
The emphasis on sound rather than meaning in secular pedagogical practice in British India was a frequent complaint of missionaries. Likewise, some British administrators involved with Indian education, among them A. D. Campbell, were equally vehement in deploring the current practice in the schools that converted the teaching of texts that had the potential to offer instruction in morals, even Indian texts like the
Bhagavad Gita, into exercises in sound and memory.
4 The Evangelical antagonism to a literature that depended for its effect on sound patterns converged with Utilitarian convictions that pure sound is totally divorced from meaning and therefore emptied of all intellectual and spiritual content, without which the mind is led astray. There emerged a strong belief that texts read without any religious or cultural associations literally left readers adrift like drowning sailors in a shipwreck.
Ironically, much the same argument was made even by staunch Orientalists like Horace Wilson, who criticized prevailing pedagogical practices on the grounds that “the mere language cannot work any material change.” Only when “we initiate them into our literature, particularly at an early age, and get them to adopt feelings and sentiments from our standard writers, [can] we make an impression upon them, and effect any considerable alteration in their feelings and notions.”
5ONE OF the most relentless critics of British secular pedagogy was the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff. Along with other missionaries, Duff was greatly alarmed about the potentially lethal implications of a secular emphasis in Indian education. The climate of skepticism and intellectual defiance that had become the hallmark of Hindu College in Calcutta, where Duff also ran his own school, confirmed his worst fears. What benign officials regarded as a spirit of free intellectual inquiry fostered by English education Duff interpreted as a descent into moral anarchy. And yet, though Duff was opposed on almost every count to the official British position on Indian education (with an acrimony that ought to have alienated him permanently from administrative circles), no missionary was as successful as he in impressing upon government administrators the urgency of moral and religious instruction. Indeed, the influence he exerted on the direction of English education was staggering. Though his views are by no means a definitive assessment of British policy, his critique of secularism can be taken as fairly representative of missionary arguments for reorienting English instruction in a religious direction. This chapter will thus be devoted to an examination of his educational theory and practice.
Alexander Duff’s career spanned three continents: as moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and later professor of evangelistic theology at St. Andrew’s he was keenly involved in the struggle between secular and spiritual authority that was ripping apart the Established Church at its seams. Though he eventually joined the Secession, he continued to think of his role as one of arbitration between “Unionists” and “Separatists” on the integration of the Free Church with the United Presbyterian. Though his longest years abroad were spent in India and his most enduring contributions were to Indian education, as convenor of the Foreign Missions Committee of his church he was instrumental in establishing missions in, among other places, South Mrica, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. News of the success of his work abroad, combined with legendary accounts of the fiery eloquence of his oratory and the fervor of his evangelical passion, reached interested Scottish Presbyterians on the other side of the Atlantic. In the winter of 1854 he was invited for an extensive lecture tour of the United States and Canada, which by all accounts left such a powerful impression that a New York reporter wrote: “Never did any man leave our shores so encircled with Christian sympathy and affection.”
6To a greater degree than other missionaries Duff had developed a systematic and theoretical approach to the issue of secular education, which he expounded in numerous pamphlets and publications and most fully in
India and India Missions, published in 1839. Born in Scotland in 1806, Duff was educated at St. Andrew’s University, where he studied moral philosophy under Thomas Chalmers, whose influence over him was incalculable. It was Chalmers, in fact, who encouraged Duff’s decision to become a missionary.
7 In 1829 Duff was invited by the Committee of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on Foreign Missions to become their first missionary to India. Following ordination that same year, Duff set out for Calcutta. It was not a pleasant voyage, to say the least. His apprehensions in taking up a strange new life in India were dramatically intensified when he found himself shipwrecked not once, but twice. In the first instance his ship struck a sandbank near the cape. Most of the people on board managed to scramble out of the boat and took refuge on a desolate island nearby. But Dufflost his entire library of eight hundred books, “representing every department of knowledge,” which he had carefully chosen for the college he planned to set up in India. One book, however, did happen to get washed ashore; when the sailor who had spotted it went to retrieve it, it turned out (not surprisingly) to be Duff’s copy of the Bible. The loss of all his books save this one had a profound effect on Duff’s attitude toward the sum of human learning. Henceforth he saw the value of modem knowledge only as a means to truth and not an end in itself. “They are gone,” he wrote, “and, blessed be God, I can say, gone without a murmur. So perish all earthly things: the treasure that is laid up in heaven alone is unassailable.”
8After several weeks of being stranded in Capetown, arrangements were made for another ship to continue the journey to India. But just about a hundred miles outside Calcutta, in the confluence of the Ganga (the Ganges river) with the ocean, the ship fell victim to the fury of the monsoon rains and was hurled onto a mud bank, where it lay hopelessly crippled. Through a daring that is often born of sheer desperation, the people on board fought the swirling currents and managed to swim to a nearby island. Once on land, they took refuge in a village temple, where they remained until word of their plight reached Calcutta and rescue efforts got under way. But despite the succession of disasters on a voyage that took over eight months to complete, one blessing did emerge. According to his biographer, George Smith, the villagers who heard of the travails surmounted by Duffwere so struck by awe and wonderment that many came to believe that “surely this man is a favourite of the gods who must have some notable work for him to do in India.”
9Once settled in India, Duff quickly set his attention on the business that had brought him there in the first place. On arriving in Calcutta, he was appalled to find that the other denominations spent most of their energies teaching and preaching in the native languages to the masses, a practice that appeared to him to have minimal impact on religious and caste sentiment and seemed utterly to vitiate the efficacy of missionary labor. The practice seemed even more ludicrous in light of the fact that among the more respectable classes of the community there was a growing desire for acquiring knowledge of the English language, even if it was solely for purposes of securing government positions. Blessed with an uncanny instinct for turning opportunity to his advantage, Duff set out to reap spiritual benefits from prevailing material interests by opening a school in which nearly all studies, literary, theological, and scientific, were conducted in English. Admission to his General Assembly Institution in Calcutta was at first free. Duff reported that when the school opened on July 12, 1830, three hundred applicants turned up in three days in a hall that held only 120 people. Hordes of young Indians came begging to be taken in, crying, “Me want read your good books; oh, take me,” “Me good boy,” “Me poor boy,” “Me know your commandments, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’; oh, take me,” “Oh, take me, and I pray for you.” These pleas were topped off by ingratiations to Duff as “the great and fathomless ocean of all imaginable excellencies.” Unfortunately, as Duff himself was all too aware, it may have been the anticipation of free books rather than the attractions of Christianity that drove poor children to the school. It was not uncommon for huge numbers to flock to new schools and, once the free books were distributed, run away with them and never turn up again. And as Duff sadly remarked, book pages were often converted not into stores for the intellect but wastepaper for petty retailers in the bazaar.
Duff ran the General Assembly Institution for thirteen years, from 1830 to 1843. The enrollments swelled each passing year, making it one of the most successful institutions in the city. But in 1843 he was caught in a bitter struggle taking place in Scotland between secular and religious authority. The conflict led to the disruption of the Established Church of Scotland and the creation of the Free Church of Scotland. The matter of realigning his loyalties was a difficult one for Duff. Some of his oldest and closest ties were with the Establishment, and the most sacred associations of his life were linked with this ancient bulwark of his native land. Moreover, severing those ties meant a surrender of the results of his thirteen years of hard and patient labor in India. The fine college buildings with their complete equipment, in which he had taken such pleasure and pride, had to pass into the hands of the Established Church, which had put up the money for it, and he would be forced to begin anew and rebuild from the foundation. But Duff arrived at his decision quickly and responded to the overtures of the Free Church by joining the Secession. In time, with the help of sympathetic friends and church associates both in India and abroad, he raised enough money to establish a new institution under the patronage of the Free Church of Scotland that soon surpassed the other school in numbers of pupils and also in Conversions.
Both the original General Assembly Institution and the later Free Church Institution were set up in response to what Duff considered the secular abuses of government institutions, in particular the excesses committed at Hindu College in Calcutta, later known as Presidency College, which regularly churned out what he called “gentlemen outlaws” and “privileged desperadoes.” Though Duff conceded that the students at institutions like these scorned forms of Hindu worship, lived like Europeans, and conducted themselves well as public officers, he remained convinced that while their immersion in Western ideas caused them to turn their backs on their own religion, they had grown increasingly hostile to all religions, as well, including Christianity.
Duff voiced a complaint made by many missionaries in India that the most vituperative critics of Christianity they encountered in their labors were not traditional caste Hindus or Muslims as conventionally believed, but the young men who had been trained in what they termed the godless colleges of the government. The recalcitrant behavior of the students at Hindu College convinced Duff that the exposure of error did not necessarily result in the immediate embracing of truth. Ironically for British policy, the more successfully English education turned the Indians against their own religion through the exercise of right reason and judgment, the more insidiously it induced a violent rejection of the premises of all religion. Insofar as government education gave Indians receiving Western training a disposition for rational argument and scientific proofs and through it an attitude of skepticism and contempt toward their own belief systems, it could be adjudged successful. But the assertion that “as soon as [the natives] become good English scholars, they must cease to be Hindoos”
l0 blandly assumed that Western knowledge had an inherently destructive effect on contrary systems, which even a staunch Anglicist like Duff realized was a gross self-deception. Critical of attempts to set intellectual liberation as the sole goal of education, he projected the policy of knowledge without religion as no less pernicious to the stability of British rule than idolatry and superstition. He attributed the Mutiny of 1857, for instance, to the secular policies of the government. In a series of letters to a friend, Dr. Tweedie, that became one of the most frequently quoted accounts of the rebellion, Duff directly linked the newfound political consciousness among Western-educated Indians to the official position of neutrality toward religion.
11 Government policy foolishly placed the Indians in a position where they were able to say, in Duff’s ironic scenario of the future, that “we are very much obliged to our foreign rulers who have let us into the secret of their weakness and our own strength—the knowledge which must quality us speedily to get quit of them, and undertake the management of our own civil and military affairs without their help.”
12 Knowledge without religion produced infidels, who were the spiritual equivalent of political rebels imbued with contempt for constitutional authority. In Duff’s aphoristic formula: “As Christianity has never taught rulers to oppress, so will it never teach subjects to rebel.”
13Yet while Duff and others expressed serious reservations about the secular education given at government colleges and went ahead with plans to set up alternative Christian schools, claiming that these served the government’s interests more rigorously in principle than their own schools, neither he nor other critics were prepared at the same time to dispense with literary instruction in their institutions. In both of his institutions Duff divided his classes to cover a wide range of literary instruction, beginning with the alphabet and extending to the most advanced courses of literature. Working from the simple definition of Christian education as the drawing out of all capacities that characterize the soul as spiritual being, Duff set out to identity those works that best met that definition. The works of authors such as Bacon, Locke, Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown were named as the most exemplary sources, but the Bible remained of course the single most important text.
14 The reading of the Bible was followed by comment, illustratlve example, and amplification. The Bible was used as a classbook exclusively for religious instruction, never for parsing or syntactical and other grammatical exercises of linguistic acquisition—practices that necessarily reduced the Bible from its deserved status as “the Book of Books” to merely one among many books. More important, to avoid the error of committing what Duff contemptuously referred to as “Pharisaic idolatry,” the Bible was never established as the final authority. Duff’s dictum was not “Behold the Book, fall ye down before it, and worship it,” but “Behold your God revealing himself through the medium of his written word; fall ye down and worship before Him.”
In 1852 the curriculum at Duff’s Free Church Institution prescribed the following books in its course on English literature:
Poetical Reader, Cowper’s
Poems, Milton’s
Paradise Lost, with
Minor Poems, Pollock’s
Course of Time, Selections from Southey, Montgomery, Campbell and Words-worth, Macaulay’s
Lays of Ancient Rome, Akenside’s
Pleasures of Imagination, Young’s
Night Thoughts, Bacon’s
Moral and Civil Essays and
Advancement of Learning, Whately’s
Rhetoric, Schlegel’s
History of Literature, Hallam’s
Literary History of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Foster’s
Essays, Select Essays from the North British and Other Reviews, and various works of the London Tract and Book Society. Amort{; texts taught in the course on natural and revealed religion were the Bible, Paley’s
Natural Theology, and Bunyan’s
Pilgrim)s Progress (which was taught as a religious, not a literary text) and among those taught in philosophy John Stuart Mill’s
Logic, Reid’s
Inquiry and Essays, Thomas Brown’s
Lectures, Abercrombie’s
Intellectual and Moral Powers, Whewall’s
Moral Philosophy, Bacon’s
Novum Or;ganon, Plato’s
Dialogues, and Butler’s
Dissertation on Human Nature.15In contrast, the books prescribed in government schools reveal a different focus. There were variations from institution to institution, but the following books remained standard fare in the literature curriculum of government schools in midnineteenth century India: Richardson’s
Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare), Otway’s
Venice Preserved, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Othello, and
Macbeth, Pope’s
Iliad by Homer, Milton’s
Paradise Lost (the first four books), Addison’s
Essays, Johnson’s
Rasselas and
Lives of the Poets, Paley’s
Moral Philosophy, Goldsmith’s
History of England, Bacon’s
Essays, Novum Organon, and
Advancement of Learning, Malkins’
History of Greece, Pinnock’s
History of Greece, Horace Wilson’s
Universal History, Adam Smith’s
Moral Sentiments, Abercrombie’s
Intellectual Powers, and Whewall’s
Moral Philosophy. In addition, specially compiled prose readers were brought out in several volumes for each class, some of which were prepared by Macaulay when he was president of the Council on Education in India.
16Of special interest is the preponderance of eighteenth-century neoclassical writers in the government curriculum, as opposed to the Romantic writers in the missionary curriculum. The range of texts represented in Duff’s curriculum gave the lie to the missionary charge that works of the imagination were harmful to morals. Of course, poets like Pollock and Cowper are known to be favorite reading of the Evangelicals,
17 and it is not surprising that they were prescribed in the missionary curriculum. But given the claims for Christianity in Johnson, Addison, and Pope, we might well ask why Duff did not represent these writers in his course of literary studies. But this is to assume that the intention of teaching literature was to impart Christianity indirectly, when in fact we know that the Bible was openly taught as an authoritative exposition of religion in the missionary schools. Obviously, then, there was no need to get around an injunction against religious teaching as was the case in government schools, which chose the path of teaching literature to convey the message of the Bible. Literary study plainly served some other purpose in Duff’s school, which must be established before the difference between the curricula in the two institutions can be explained.
The clue to the difference would appear to lie in Duff’s concern that the Bible make an appropriate impact on its readers, both logically and emotionally. As various missionary publications point out endlessly, the power of the Bible lies in its imagery. If images could be regarded as arguments, reasons, and demonstrations that illustrate and reinforce the truth, the best means to conversion was, accordingly, through an appeal to the imagination. The horrors of sin and damnation were not to be understood through reasons but through images that give the reader a “shocking spectre of his own deformity and haunt him, even in his sleep.”
18 The truth of Christianity was presented in vain unless it was
seen, unless it was
felt. To read the Bible well, to be moved by its imagery, to be instructed by its “dark and ambiguous style, figurative and hyperbolical manner,” the imagination first had to be fully trained and equipped.
19 The highly imagistic poetry of Cowper, Wordsworth, Akenside, and Young clearly served this objective more immediately than did the more formal poetry of the Augustan neoclassicists.
At a glance it appears that government and missionary schools adopted two mutually exclusive curricula, one heavily classical and the other predominantly Romantic. By contrast, in English public schools of the same period the classical and the Romantic strains converged in a single curriculum bearing the impress of the nineteenth century’s most famous educator, Thomas Arnold. The Arnoldian curriculum was a course of studies with a heavy stress on classical languages and literatures and classical history, and it was geared to instruct learners in the principles of law, government, and society. This content was balanced with readings in the poetry of the Romantics to teach lessons in the deeper relations between nature and the human soul. The classical-humanist and the Romantic strains in the Arnoldian curriculum together formed the Victorian ideal of what David Newsome has pithily described as “godliness and good learning.”
20 The alliance between education and religion was basic to Arnold’s philosophy of the curriculum, and its goal was the inculcation of a code of Christian values by which men of culture were to live.
But at the same time, this curriculum was entirely suited to the vocation of ruling. The strong emphasis on historical and philosophical texts in the literature curriculum correlated with the need for better-trained and better-informed administrators. The new demands of industrialization and an expanding empire required a specialized ruling class, “cultivated, steeped in philosophy and history, aware of its world politically and intellectually, and
interested, in a deeper sense than either the scholar or the aristocratic amateur could claim to be.”
21 The course of studies in English public schools was designed to foster those leadership qualities required of a governing elite: independent thinking, a strong sense of personal identity, and an ability to make decisions on one’s own authority. Making men leaders also meant that they had to be marked of f from the rest of society, and in British education this was achieved through social discrimination and a markedly stratified schooling system. As the educational historian T. W. Bamford observes, it is not generally realized how effective social or hierarchical gulfs can be in promoting leadership and the acceptance of decisions.
22Though the Arnoldian curriculum was meant for a ruling elite, the texts that were a part of it were also taught in India. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Indians could not occupy government posts higher than those of clerks and lower-level subordinates, and even when they were admitted to higher positions it was obviously not to give them a role in governing, but only to carry out the work of bureaucracy. But the authors they were reading in school—Bacon, Butler, and John Stuart Mill—were not addressed to men who would be clerks and subordinates, but to those who would lead and assume responsibility for their actions. Indians receiving Western education were reading texts that taught them to be independent thinkers and leaders, but they had neither the independence nor the opportunity to lead. It would seem, then, that the political consequences of the Arnoldian curriculum in the Indian context could only be frustration and possibly rebellion, raising questions about why Indians were being given the same kind of literary education as the English elite.
In her case study of late nineteenth-century Indian education Ellen McDonald notes the involvement in religious and social reform of many Indians educated in the Arnoldian curriculum. She cites the influence of Butlerian philosophy on well-known Bombay reformers like M. G. Ranade, a renowned lawyer, and Chandavarkar, the vice-chancellor of Bombay University, for both of whom social change was inseparable from moral reform of the individual.
23 On the basis of her finding, there is ground to believe that the Arnoldian curriculum was adapted in India in such a way that the goal of self-improvement in this context no longer meant training a ruling elite but setting educated Indians’ attention on reform of their own society, a goal repeatedly articulated by Duff in his own educational writings.
The range of texts represented in Duff’s curriculum belied the missionary charge that works of the imagination were harmful to morals. The more than nominal importance ascribed to literature in the education of Indian youth attending Duff’s institution appears to reveal a basic contradiction in missionary practice, which becomes more apparent in light of the fact that missionary institutions were set up as alternative schools to the existing government colleges and were thus relatively free of centralized influence.
But considered in pedagogical terms, Duff’s strong emphasis on a literary curriculum in his own school is less a reversal of his earlier objectives to its presence in government schools than a relocation of moral value and meaning from individual texts to the contexts in which they were taught and read. In Duff’s view it was not theoretically impossible for literature to be a source of religious skepticism in one situation and a source of religious belief in another. If it were true that morality lay in texts, then selected texts could readily be singled out as more “moral” than others. Instead, Duff believed that morality lay in intention, context, purpose, and overall structure of the educational system.
Duff’s determination to hold on to a literary curriculum was also shaped in large part by a perception of resistance to direct Christian instruction by Indian students who regarded the Bible as a necessary evil and barely tolerated its presence in their instruction. Though the
Calcutta Monthly Journal castigated Duff for serving interests other than those he claimed to serve (he was accused, for instance, of being motivated by antipathy toward Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Socinians, and other Christian sects whose religious opinions were as hateful to him as those of the Hindus), the assessment that “Dr. Duff will never be a fair reasoner until he is able in imagation [sic] to put himself in the position of the party whose wishes and interests are at stake” was not wholly true. So sensitive was Duff to native resistance that he invited parents to witness for themselves the kind of instruction their children were receiving at his school, by way of reassurance that there was no proselytizing going on there. Admittedly, many of the parents he encountered were overly consumed by suspicion of missionary intentions in forcing Bible instruction on their children. It was not uncommon for parents to withdraw their children immediately from Duff’s school wherever they sensed what they saw as the “tyranny of the Bible.” Some parents negotiated their needs in a more sanguine manner. Duff’s biographer and former student, Lal Behari Day, records the plan his father had worked out: he would wait for the moment when his son had learned enough English to obtain a decent situation outside but was not yet intellectually advanced to understand lectures on Christianity—as soon as that moment arrived, he would instantly be withdrawn from school and placed in an office. “Let Duff Saheb do what he can,” was the father’s defiant challenge to the threat of proselytism.
24But Duff Saheb was a little more devious than even Day’s father imagined. Duff had developed an elaborate system for inculcating Christian concepts through close questioning, careful relation of concepts, and association of ideas with their precise linguistic equivalent. The same associative technique was used for undermining reverence for Brahminical concepts. Day recounts his first class of instruction by Duff, in which the subject was a catechism on the cow. Duff asked his students to supply the Bengali word for cow, which
isgorn. He next asked whether they knew another Bengali word resembling it in sound, which happened, of course, to be
gurn, or Brahmin teacher. Dwelling at ample length on the patterns of similarity in form and sound between the two words, Duff quietly built up to his solemn query about what purpose was served by
agurn and whether
gorn was not more useful than
gurn. “He then left our class,” writes his student, “and went into another, leaving in our minds seeds of future thought and reflection.”
25Duff insisted that in all the years he ran the school only three or four students ever left in protest over teaching of the Bible. A young Brahmin student who had earlier shown great hostility to Duff’s comparative allusions to Christianity and Hinduism became so emotional and enraptured after reading the Lord’s Prayer, the story of the Prodigal Son, and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians that he burst out in the middle of Duff’s lecture to exclaim, “Oh sir, that is too good for us. Who can act up to that? Who can act up to that?”
26But Duff was never so extravagant in his claims for conversion as some of his fellow missionaries at times tended to be, drawing as they often did on the most dubious evidence bordering on the ludicrous, as with this little item from the Missionary Register:
S., a little boy, came for the first time to speak concerning his soul. In our half-yearly repot of the examination of the seminarists, we were obliged to characterize him as a quarrelsome little fellow. He now complained to me, that whenever others offend him in any wise, he is always inclined to BEAT THEM: such a free confession of a fault is doubtless a token for good, a proof that the Holy Spirit is active in the Soul.
27
THE FACT that literary study won an honored place in Duff’s curriculum suggests that though the secular study of literature might have been associated in his mind with moral degeneracy, this was by no means to say that he imputed to literature a natural tendency to corrupt the individual and blur his moral sense. Quite the contrary, the power of literature to inculcate virtue was less an issue than the fact that its moralities were accessible only to those who were suitably trained to read literature or had reached an advanced stage of mental development. By claiming that the force of truth rested on the moral state of the heart, Duff restricted the investigation of truth to a morally qualified inquirer whose mind had first been purged of all the prejudices, errors, and misconceptions that obstructed its advancement in true knowledge and then adequately replenished with “true” moral principles. For literature to be read as morality, a high degree of mental and moral cultivation was first required, which in Duff’s view the mass of people simply did not have. For those who were ignorant of moral law there were no lessons in virtue to be gleaned from literature. Far from being a cultivator of moral feelings, a wide reading in literature was more likely to cause sharper questioning of moral law and perhaps even encourage active defiance of its commands. Duff’s objections to English literary instruction at the government colleges were based on the fear that the students were inadequately equipped to read for edification. To his mind, no amount of literary study could possibly contribute toward the moral improvement of the Indians where there was no prior moral instruction. Literature could only shape and enlighten to the degree that the reader was already inherently predisposed to such enlightenment. But to expect literature to perform the work of raising the moral and intellectual level of the reader was to assume that all readers were on a comparable plane of moral development. Duff’s critique raised larger theoretical questions about the nature of literary texts and their relationship to behavior and action. How useful, for instance, is literary instruction when readers have no prior sense of moral principles? Can the text succeed where nature has failed? Assuming that human nature is deficient and society fails to provide adequate models of behavior and action, can texts step into the vacuum and function as a surrogate for nature and shape moral and intellectual development? And if so, which works are the most appropriate ones for that purpose?
Duff’s argument against secular uses of literature rested on a peculiarly grim Hobbesian theory of human nature as dark, proud, and selfish. If human nature were inherently good, it was perfectly reasonable to expect that the teaching of literature could proceed outside religious foundations without causing undue harm. But the predisposition of human nature for evil decisively established that nothing less than the triumph over innate depravity could legitimately be the goal of instruction. Duff’s insistence on this point, drawn from a deeply felt Calvinism, highlighted by contrast the idealistic conception of human nature that informed a secular policy of education—of a concept of man as still unfallen, tainted neitl1er by depravity nor sin, who lived in accordance to natural moral law, protecting him like a coat of armor against the actual (or potential) undermining effect of worldly knowledge. Duff’s response to the secular conception was that “were human nature in a state of innocence and holiness, all true knowledge, literary or scientific, would be not merely negatively harmless—it might be positively beneficial. But as long as human nature is guilty and depraved, such knowledge may become not merely negatively useless—it may prove positively injurious.”
28 Flatly rejecting the theory that the text is independent of the moral state of the reader, autonomous in its own morality and truth, Duff sought to refocus attention on the reader as fallen, depraved, and sinful in order to reclaim his moral regeneration as an obligatory social and political goal.
The belief that virtue is an abstract quality removed from, unshaped by, and therefore anterior to worldliness led Duff to conclude that the pursuit of moral good rather than intelligence was the true object of education. He saw the struggle between good and evil, virtue and vice, order and anarchy as fraught with so much uncertainty and tension that the mere exercise of intellect was not sufficient for its resolution. From such observations he came to believe that the efforts of intelligence to create institutions like representative government could not by themselves emancipate people enslaved by religion from the tyranny of its yoke.
On the point of social utility Duff was in little disagreement with the secularists. But the issue that wrenched them apart concerned the power and authority of texts to regenerate individual souls. Morality for Duff was unquestionably a quality of the reader rather than of literature itself. But in presuming a homogeneous readership located at a comparable level of mental and moral development and moral receptivity, the secularists in Duff’s view took up a position that established natural moral law as part of man’s innate knowledge. The description of human nature in these terms made it more feasible for secularists to entertain a moral theory of literature—a theory of texts whose morality existed independently of the reader. The dependence of secularism on these two assumptionsy—that is, of a homogeneous readership and of moral law as part of man’s innate knowledge—became a prime object of Duff’s attack, which turned on a sharp questioning of the secularist belief in a common development of minds. Undaunted by the oversimplifications inherent in such an attack, to the extent that it meant restating in an absurdly naive way that minds developed at various paces, some more morally fortified than others, Duff plunged headlong into a line of attack that argued the inevitable emergence of a differentiated readership, so affecting interpretation of literature as to produce distortion, error, and falsehoods. The variability of the reader from individual to individual necessitated a program of instruction aimed at parity and standardization. If it was true to characterize secularism as based on the concept of an innately good human nature, then it was equally true to suggest that its ideal of perfection precluded a moral system because prescriptions are essential to ethics and superfluous when all behavior contributes to the ideal. To Duff’s understanding, the conviction of innate depravity and the hope of regeneration provided the mechanism for regulation of behavior and therefore legitimized an ethical system. Such a system could not be apprehended by untutored intuition, but required the intervention of the educational process.
Duff interpreted secularism as a claim on behalf of a common development of minds that dispensed with first principles for comprehension of the world of matter. His attack fell on a derivative premise of this claim that established the formation of moral perceptions in the intellectual faculties and viewed the development of the intellect as a prelude to the cultivation of the moral sense. His own argument reversed the sequence of development in order to restore primacy to moral perceptions in intellectual formation. And though this emphasis certainly did not imply a rejection of the concept of Western literature as a product of Christian experience and history, embodying its best conscience, it did suggest that the guiding power of conscience was activated only when the reader had been shaped through prior formative influences for the reception of moral truths. In short, truth was self-evident only to those equipped both mentally and morally to receive it.
A curious contradiction characterizes this argument. However consistent, indeed predictable, belief in the priority of moral perceptions in intellectual formation might be with Evangelical convictions, that belief conflicted with the actual practice of many missionaries, including Duff himself, in the institutions they conducted. The practice rested on the premise that the force of modem knowledge (by which Duff meant both literary and scientific knowledge) was so great as to cause those exposed to it to turn away in revulsion from the errors of their own native systems. The subjects that were condemned for their secular character when taught in government institutions were included in the missionary curriculum as central subjects of study, so that while it was claimed on the one hand that truth is not self-evident, that its apprehension is possible only under certain conditions (one of which is a cultivated moral sense), it was maintained on the other that Western learning had a direct and immediate destructive effect on native superstitions, myths, and legends. Looked at objectively, there was a compelling logic to this process. If the young learner was made aware that all the facts regarding geography and history given in the Hindu scriptures were entirely fictitious, the shaking of his faith in one part of the system (the intellectual) would surely have the effect of shaking his faith in others. The destruction of that belief through instruction in scientific and literary truth was seen as the first stage in opening minds to the “purer” truths of revealed religion, and Alexander Duff, along with other missionaries, was attracted to the idea of an intellectual revolution that would lead toward a universal Christianity. The belief that Hinduism would surely fall from its foundation and the Gospel rise on its ruins—that through science and modem learning “we must all come to one religion”—was quite clearly an ideology that directed missionary labor in India.
But on two crucial points this practice was inconsistent with the avowed commitment to moral training: first, if modem knowledge had an inherent power to demolish an entrenched religious system, then it was tantamount to suggesting that its truths were self-evident; and second, if the destruction of Hinduism were able to occur so systematically and with the simplicity and elegance ascribed to it, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Indians were at an acceptable level of mental and moral development to be able to participate in its demolition in the first place. Assuming the truth of both premises, the outcry over secular education appears even more perplexing and inexplicable, for if it were true that Western thought possessed the sort of self-evident, irreducible power attributed to it to cause Hinduism to come crashing down, then the educational process that Duff advocated as a form of preliminary “mind training” was simply redundant.
But this apparent inconsistency is less of a contradiction than it seems, and Duff coined a new phrase, secular convergency, to resolve it. The dilemma for Duff of course was to reconcile the conviction that only those who were morally prepared or trained could derive moral value from literature, with the view that Western literary knowledge had an intrinsic power to expose the falsity of existing superstitions and, by so doing, lay claims to moral authority and moral value. But he saw this dilemma as one that necessarily involved arbitrating between two basically untenable extremes. If Duff’s whole argument against secularism was that it failed to replace destroyed beliefs with other, more positive values, the potential of secular learning to produce an intellectual revolution culminating in a universal Christianity then became entirely suspect.
But by a sleight of hand Duff accommodated secularism to evangelizing aims with the claim that modem studies acquired the force of religious instruction
after the fact, that is, by virtue of its impact on destroying false religious systems. He wrote: “We must disown the bigotry of unwise pietism by patronizing the cause of sound literature and science lest by negligence we help to revive the fatal dogma of the dark ages, that what is philosophically true may yet be allowed to be theologically false.”
29 When missionary institutions were first set up in India, the original plan was to introduce the higher branches of literature and science as an indispensable part of liberal education, separate from and unrelated to religious instruction, as a concession to the demand for modem studies by Indians. Duff himself raised the question whether by urging “secular convergency” he was denying the “self evidencing power” of the Bible. But his answer was that in proportion to their demonstrated effects on eroding the grip of Hinduism, subjects that were seemingly remote from religion, like geography, general history, and natural philosophy, became divested of their secularity and stamped with the impress of sacredness. As Duff observed: “The teaching of these branches seemed no longer an indirect, secondary, ambiguous part of missionary labour,—but, in one sense, as direct, primary, and indubitable as the teaching of religion itself.”
30 In short, the effect modern studies had on shaking native systems of learning contributed quite literally to the sacralization of its content. And so in achieving what religious teaching aimed at all along—the destruction of the “errors” of Hinduism—British secularism firmly and irrevocably aligned itself with Christianity. The motto outside Duff’s General Assembly Institution expresses that conviction, albeit rather inelegantly: “He who enters here must moralize and religionize, as well as geometrize.”
31 By redefining secularism as a handmaiden of religion in its positive aspects, Duff virtually reduced secular knowledge, as a category existing independently of religion, to the status of a non-concept. For this reason he was able to say: “Let us thus hail true literature and science as our very best auxiliaries … But in receiving these, as friendly allies, into our sacred territory, let us resolutely determine that they shall never, never, be allowed to usurp the throne, and wield a tyrant’s sceptre over it.”
32Duff often pointed to the example of one of his students, Guru Das Maitra, who later converted and became pastor of the Bengali Presbyterian Church of Calcutta. Guru Das was led to conversion by a curious chain of events. For two years, while studying at Duff’s college, the young man had been deeply impressed by the daily readings of the Bible, and at last his disturbance of mind became apparent to his family. Alarmed by his interest in the religion they dreaded, family members attempted to divert Guru Das with the writings of Thomas Paine. But alas, the effect was quite different from what they had anticipated: the arguments of the skeptic only assured Guru Das more firmly than ever of the truth of Christianity. His decision to convert followed soon after.
POSSIBLY THE most provocative contribution of Alexander Duff is his interpretation of the East India Company’s secularist policy as a conscious reaction to a cultural situation in England that worked against secularism in education. As Duff explains it, no child brought up in England could remain untouched by the all-pervasive influence of Christian culture, regardless of the attempts to subsume scriptural teaching under worldly instruction in certain institutions. The ultimate failure of secular education in England to disengage itself from religious influence demonstrated conclusively, as far as Duff could see, the powerful influence of an enveloping Christian culture in the formation of moral structures in society. It is clear that Duff virtually accepted as axiomatic a unitary theory of English civil society based on religion, influencing all forms of knowledge produced in that society.
As a rationale for evangelizing intent, Duff’s argument was unambiguous and straightforward enough to warrant consideration strictly on those terms. But when a statement of intent attempts to pass itself off as cultural analysis as well, then it is obviously quite a different matter and premises that might have been accepted earlier as enabling premises for a program of action now acquired the character of a priori assumptions, whose effect was to reduce the persuasiveness or usefulness of the analysis. One such assumption was that a state of perfect symmetry existed between English civil society and Christian doctrine. To define advanced societies in terms of the closeness of fit between civil and sacred institutions on the one hand and literary and religious knowledge on the other was to render logically true and eternally valid a set of propositions whose verity was otherwise undemonstrable: first, that the concept of secular knowledge in a Christian culture is manifestly an artificial construction; and second, that in a Christian culture like the English the study and teaching of literature in purely secular terms is not merely a contradiction in terms but an unrealizable and implausible event.
The sheer governmental arrogance of insisting on literature’s autonomy from the influence of religious culture led Duff to suspect that the official policy of secularism in India had been instituted in a spirit of experimentation and that India was merely being used as “a fair and open field for testing the non-religion theory of education.”
33 There is no question that India had indeed become an experimental laboratory for testing educational ideas that had either been aborted in England or fallen victim to stiff opposition from entrenched traditions and orthodoxies. The official perception of the colonized culture as lacking in counteractive influences (by which was meant direct church control) caused India to be viewed as fertile ground for experimentation with untried or unfavorable ideas and for observing and recording their effects under controlled conditions.
But while Duff’s criticism was at many points incisive and trenchant, the analysis remained trapped at the level of polemics. His explanation for the British experiment in secularism discounted crucial factors such as shifting class structures, the institutionalization of science, and bureaucratization of state machinery in favor of a narrowly exclusive explanation centered on the special nature of the relation between church and state in England. The characterization of Western society as a harmonious integration of civil and sacred institutions with literary and religious knowledge had profound implications for subsequent delineations of non-Western societies. If the representation of Christian society as a unitary composition were to hold true, then non-Christian society could be discussed in no other but antithetical terms, that is, as a society marked by asymmetry and dissonance and where knowledge ran counter to established institutions and structures. Cultural analysis that began with an explanation of a specific cultural situation in England thus shifted to more generalized descriptions of the nature of Indian society as somehow only arbitrarily or loosely related to prevailing forms of knowledge.
But what is particularly significant, because it reveals Duff’s incessantly shifting focus and consequent equivocation, is his use of the word knowledge, by which he meant not knowledge indigenous to Indian society, but knowledge introduced through Western cultural expansion. Of course, from the missionary point of view cultural analysis of this sort, which ostensibly aimed at exposing government motives, had a productive value as well, in that it simultaneously made a strong case for the introduction of Christianity in India. (And much the same sort of thing characterizes Duff’s reports in The Indian Rebellion, where the objects of attack in British secularism were then reconstructed as helpful to the missionary cause.) For if Western scientific and literary knowledge ran counter to Hinduism, which was allegedly based on superstition, ritual, and dogma, the minimum condition for an integrated Indian civil society was a religious culture that supported the new knowledge structure. Therefore, though Duff’s analysis may have been outwardly critical of official representations of India as fertile soil for the engrafting of new social formations based on exclusively secular principles, the critique was expansive enough to accommodate evangelical aims as well.
Duff’s exposure of the experimental motives of British secularism in India is perhaps his chief contribution to intellectual history. Not surprisingly, the kind of project he proposes is akin to what Eric Stokes, for example, has more recently attempted in
The English Utilitarians and India which describes the uses to which India was put by the new middle-class mind for the translation of its political and moral ideas. Stokes offers a truly remarkable record of how many of the movements of English life tested their strength and fought their early battles on Indian soil. Only an enormous amount of cross-referencing no doubt can prove Duff’s thesis, but at the same time it is useful to remember that a major pitfall might be to get drawn into the reductive form of analysis employed by colonial rulers that sought out neat correspondences between English social structure and the structure of colonial relationships, such that the multiple religious and ethnic groups of lndia are loosely combined to form an amorphous whole corresponding to the English working class. Part of Duff’s self-appointed task was to explode some of those assumptions, but in the long run he was able to do no more than substitute his own set of equally skewed assumptions for those he felt were taking colonial India in the direction of anarchy, political discontent, and perfidy. In some respects his arguments anticipated the Anglican defense of John Henry Newman and Thomas Arnold, particularly with respect to issues concerning the accommodation of the secular to the spiritual and the intellectual to the moral, though Duff, who chose to join the splinter movement of the Established Church of Scotland on grounds of preserving freedom of the church from state intervention, would have never accepted Arnold’s ecumenism or his view of church-state as an embodiment of the unity between religious morality and secular philosophy. Also, Duff’s selfconscious efforts to deploy scientific and literary education for support of the truths of Christianity would have seemed unnecessary to Arnold, who rather than have his son preoccupied with science “would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.”
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