Christian missionaries in a Victorian age
Contemporary Christian literature, especially from an apologetic point of view, seeks to distance the current Christian approach to the Indic religious streams from earlier more belligerent attitudes. It is argued that the earlier characterisation of Hinduism as a bastion of superstitions which had to be dismantled has been replaced by more dialogical approaches where the attempt instead is to discern the presence of Christian values in Hindu worlds. However, it is important to start with a closer examination of precisely what these attitudes were, and to contextualise them in the Darwinian–liberal optimism of the Victorian age, to analyse the degrees of affinity that the missionaries had with the colonising mission of the British empire. This is especially the case because contemporary debates over conversions to Christianity are often overshadowed by the question of its alleged colonial connections – so much so that conversions are often viewed as a national apostasy from indigenous subjectivities to a foreign transplant.
Missionaries often believed that divine providence had entrusted India to Britain, and hoped that the secular body of the British administration, which was to be involved in ruling the natives, would also support the spiritual head of the churches in winning over Hindu souls for Christ. As we shall see, however, matters did not always run smoothly, and often the head was on a direct collision course with the body, which refused to allow the missionaries free rein to propagate the gospel, fearing a native backlash against colonial intervention in indigenous religious customs. Nevertheless, the liberal optimism of the empire infused many of the missionaries: India had been left behind on the scale of civilisation, and just as the utilitarian structure of rule of law, telegraph and posts, railways and electricity would propel it towards modernity, the Christianising enterprise would redeem it from the ‘savageries’ of the bastion of Hinduism. The enterprises of civilising the natives or redeeming the ‘heathen’ were, however, riddled with various dilemmas, and along with British administrators, Christian missionaries too often reflected the anxieties of having to negotiate a path through the affirmations of ‘identity’ and of ‘difference’. On the one hand, colonial administrators could not bestow on the colonised equal political rights with themselves for such a grant would be tantamount to accepting an identity between the two, but, on the other hand, neither could they regard the differences that they believed separated the two as insurmountable for this admission would imply that the civilising project was doomed to fail from the start. The complex range of attitudes of the Victorians to Hindustan has been ably summarised by B. Parry in these terms:
From the pedestal of a predominantly Protestant middle-class ethic, with its belief in work, restraint and order, the British looked down on the codes and habits of Indians as aberrations from a human norm which they defined in terms of their own standards … They saw in India vestiges of a primordial, dark and instinctual past which their own society had left behind in its evolution to civilization, as well as intimations of spiritual experiences more inclusive and transcendent than any known to the West, and which in their bewilderment they included as part of India’s mystery.
(Parry 1998: 31)
In actual practice, therefore, the colonisers seem to have alternated between a vision of eventual ‘sameness’ in the future and one of enduring ‘difference’ in the present (Metcalf 1994: 203–4). They either viewed the natives as mirror-images of themselves, thereby marking the ‘other’ as a duplicate copy of ‘self’, or regarded them as languishing on a lower plane of existence which was inherently degrading and devoid of any value.
Christian missionaries struggled in their own distinctive ways with this dialectic of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ which bore some similarities to the strategies of the administrators. For all their sharp divergences with the administrators at certain points, missionaries too developed complex patterns of this dialectic, sometimes assimilating the ‘heathen’, and at other times othering them. On the one hand, the ‘identity’ that they spoke of was couched not in racial, ethnic, or geographical but in theological terms – all human beings were children of the same God – but, on the other hand, their ‘difference’ from the natives was clearly marked – the latter had become thoroughly corrupted since they had not yet received the gospel. Further, until around the turn of the twentieth century, British missionaries often viewed the gospel through the spectacles of European civilisation, so that they ignored the crucial distinctions that later generations of missionary thinkers would draw between the gospel and the cultural traditions of their own European ‘Christendom’. Therefore they presented the gospel in specifically Victorian modes of expression, denominational divisions, and intellectual categories, which further accentuated the differences that they perceived in the natives whom they otherwise believed belonged to a common spiritual unity. Thus, for instance, at a meeting in 1898 of the Punjab Church Council, which was a forum of Indian Christians of the Church Missionary Society, the Reverend Wadhwa Mall commented: ‘Not only the Gospel but English ways and wealth have come with them into this country. Thus we have two Gospels here; that of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that of English customs … Which shall we choose?’ (Quoted in Cox 2002: 16). Given the close intermeshing between empire, Christianity, and European civilisation in some missionary circles, it is not surprising, as Jawaharlal Nehru (1941: 50–1) was later to put it, that in ‘the average Indian mind, the Christian missionary was almost indistinguishable from the alien official’.
Christian missionaries and colonialism
By and large, conversions in India have operated not through the blatant exercise of coercion but through the modalities of dialogue, resistance, rejection, and indigenous reform. Instances such as the Spanish massacres and forced assimilation of the Latin American natives to Roman Catholicism do not have extensive parallels in the Indian context. Nevertheless, there are some instances of conversions on Indian terrain which perhaps all sides in contemporary Hindu–Christian encounters would accept as ‘forced’, such as the conversions by the Portuguese colonisers under the Goa Inquisition (1560–1812). The nexus between ‘Caesar and Christ’ was particularly intimate in the early part of the sixteenth century in Goa when the four great missionary orders of Roman Catholicism, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Jesuits, cost the state 42,000 cruzados (Pearson 1987: 120). The spread of Christianity took place through the interlocking relationships between Church and state: a number of laws were enacted against the socio-economically dominant ‘higher’ castes who were banished if they did not convert to Christianity; Hindu religious festivals were banned; and the activities of Hindu priests were prohibited (Robinson 2003:44). The early European Christian confrontations with the life-worlds of the Hindus, which they found bewilderingly diverse, rich, and seemingly impenetrable, were therefore characterised mainly by the attempt at the regularisation of whatever could not be neatly contained within the bounds of European and Christian conceptual frameworks and socio-religious practices. A recurring criticism of some Hindu writers is that this failure to affirm the ‘otherness’ of the colonised continues even today on the part of Christian evangelists with regard to the Hindu traditions, though their methods have become subtler and more refined. As we shall see, the hostility of many forms of Christianity towards native cultures can be traced to certain specifically theological standpoints on issues such as the possibility of religious truth outside the Church, the relation between ‘culture’ and the gospel, and so on. However, from some Hindu perspectives, it is often alleged that this hostility should, in fact, be explained by appealing to Christianity’s colonial connections with the British empire.
To respond to this charge, we need to make a conceptual distinction between two questions which are sometimes conflated: (a) to what extent did the British colonial administrators actively support and promote the activities of the Christian missionaries? and (b) to what extent did the missionaries fail, operating in fields opened up to them by British imperialism, to attain an empathetic grasp of the Hindu traditions and instead sought to squeeze the latter into their own cultural paradigms? As we deal with these questions, in this and subsequent chapters, we shall note that, first, Christian missionaries had often imbibed many of the values of Victorian England which coloured their views of the natives as caught in perfidious forms of degradation, but, second, they often also entered into various kinds of confrontation with the British government both back at home and on Indian soil over the natives whom they regarded as their spiritually immature ‘children’.
Though the administrators usually took a rather dim view of Christian missionaries, both groups did share certain assumptions and beliefs about the empire, its role in the colony, the status of European civilisation and so on. Consequently, both of them often failed to affirm the distinctiveness of the life-worlds that they encountered in colonial India. Therefore, it would be simplistic to write off the connections between the compulsions of British colonialism and the missionary movements as mere coincidence, and there is some bite in S. R. Goel’s complaint that ‘[t]he wrongs heaped on Hindu society, religion and culture by the Christian mission in alliance with Western imperialism, are being explained away as “aberrations” arising out of Christianity’s “accidental association with colonialism”’ (Goel 1988: xiii). On the other hand, however, the relationships between the Christian missionaries, the British administrators, and the Hindus cannot be reduced to a unidirectional imposition of the world-views of the former on the latter – rather they were characterised by various conflicts, contestations, dislocations, and tensions. Many Hindus (both those who remained rooted to their traditions and those who tried to offer creative interpretations of these in the light of their personal affirmation of the lordship of Christ) were actively engaged, under the shadow of empire, to vigorously resist the attempts of the European Christian missionaries to incorporate them within their systems of representation. The identities of the colonised Hindus were therefore constantly forged in a relational manner, and such native voices were not merely repeating the colonial master-discourse. As a matter of fact, however, it is the alliances – and not the disjunctions – between coloniser and missionary that have sometimes been underlined so that the missionary endeavour continues to be read as an appendage of the colonialist enterprise, either blatantly as its spiritual arm or in a somewhat more sinister manner as its covert mask. R. E. Frykenberg (2003: 7–8) complains that the term ‘colonial’ has become in several circles of south Asian scholarship the pejorative epithet applied rather indiscriminately for the demonisation of everything western and that missionaries themselves are often brought under this umbrella-term. He points out that the view that Christians in India are the products of an alien intrusion, more specifically, Christian ‘colonialism’, has led to a complacent attitude among several historians that the careful study of missionary organisations need not detain them too long, for the movements initiated by them are regarded as having exercised no significant influence on the contemporary strands of Indian history. Consequently, to challenge this conflation of colonisation and Christianisation, we need to examine the complex nature of the alliances, adaptations, and accommodations, as well as the challenges, oppositions, and rejections across the boundaries of the Christian missionaries, the British administrators, and the Hindus.
The shape of the missionary world: the Christian message in a British form
The dialectics of liberalism and orientalism
One of the reasons why Christian missionaries are perceived in certain quarters to have been merely the spiritual extension of the colonial administrators is because on some occasions their stated goals would seem to converge, for both of them were influenced, to different degrees, by the ruling ideas of their times, especially liberalism, utilitarianism, and Darwinism, with a fair amount of racialism added to this heady dose. The guiding metaphor in the writings of both father and son, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, on Indian matters was that of a hierarchical ‘scale of civilisations’, which in the very moment of implicating the British and the Indian natives in the commonalities of an antiquarian origin also rigidly distantiated the former’s progressive culture from the latter’s stationary desuetude (Mill 1975: 192–3). Because of India’s ‘exceeding difference’, it was to be marked off from the present occupied by Britain, but it was not a complete aberration either, for it was located at the distant end of a scheme of civilisational progress occupied by groups such as the primitive Druids (Mehta 1999: 75). The younger Mill (1994: 198–234) elaborated the details of this civilisation ladder in which some societies, mostly the Europeans and the British dominions, had attained the state of maturity of faculties, whereas the non-European ones were in the condition of infancy and needed the help of foreign government to make them capable of a higher civilisation characterised by liberty and individuality.
These two Millian themes – that countries such as India were stuck in the ‘infancy’ of humanity and that their codes and conventions were utterly distinct from European ones – often appear in the writings of other commentators on the colonial scene in India. A common notion was that the natives were disciples or patients, and so they should not regard British rule in any sense humiliating, for its aim was to make them enlightened and autonomous. For instance, John Morley, a champion of the views of John Stuart Mill, believed that the reason for the British intervention in India was to ‘implant – slowly, prudently, judiciously – those ideas of justice, law, humanity, which are the foundation of our own civilization’ (Quoted in Koss 1969: 128). At the same time, the British were exhorted to keep in mind the wide gulf that separated the parent from the child. The errors of judgement that they might have made were to be attributed to an unreflective faith that all British things could be replicated in a land that was so distinct from the homeland, for this was a faith that ‘paid too little heed to differences of tradition and of race, and to the stage of civilization which the recipients of such unquestionable benefits had reached’ (Marriott 1932: 196). Therefore, in the process of raising India to modern times, there was to be no doubt that it was the British who would remain at the commanding heights without any dilution of their superiority. Though Britain and India were said to have emerged from a common origin in the archaic past, this affirmation of similarity was ruptured by a sharp bifurcation between the ‘Aryan’ customs, beliefs, and practices of India which had fallen into decrepitude and whose development had been arrested, and the civilising influence of British institutions which would direct the former towards progress (Maine 1875).
In contrast, the ‘Orientalists’ were more sympathetic than those of a Millian temperament to native wisdom and were often guided by a humane desire to understand and respect the customs of the natives. However, drawing on the pervasive Victorian motif of ‘evolution’, they created their own set of differences through the postulated temporal alterity between the glorious past and the decadent present of Hindustan (Inden 1990: 41–3). While for the Millians, the east was a passive, non-autonomous object that inhabited an area of darkness governed by radically different principles, and required British intervention to raise it to self-autonomy in the future, in the Orientalist imagination the present condition of the country was thoroughly degenerate but its past contained treasures of ancient wisdom, frozen for all time. The ‘comparative method’ that scholars following Sir William Jones, the first President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, extended into areas such as philology, jurisprudence, religion, and society was an expression of the hankering for the ‘origins’ from which the linguistic and the socio-cultural complexities of Europe, the Middle East, and India could be shown to have emerged. This search led to a series of images of the Orient’s timelessness, bizarreness, feminity, degeneracy, and passivity, and these were assimilated by the institutional apparatus of the empire and projected onto the Orient, so that they became established as factual and objective knowledge (Cohn 1996: 21). As the British gained stronger footholds in the land, this notion of an ‘essential India’ which was an object for careful scrutiny continued to operate through the indefatigable officials associated with census compilations, cartographical projects, antiquarian collections, archaeological findings, official commissions, and ethnographic surveys which amassed a wealth of information on the people through classificatory schemes and social categories such as caste, religion, place of birth, and occupation. The process of implanting this liberal modernism on Indian soil was, however, not a smooth one: if liberalism back at home possessed strong universalist implications, it had to be accommodated to the legitimisations of British rule as a civilising force that would extricate the Indians from their depths of depravity. The British construction of ‘Indian otherness’ was therefore ridden with inner tensions: on the one hand, by rigidly fixing the natives in their volatility, passivity, and backwardness, the British sought to justify their civilising commission, but this very ascription of primitive irrationality was also an expression of the British disquietude that the natives would continue to lurk at the peripheries of civilisation as an ever-present source of sinister forces. Therefore, the affirmation that the natives could be raised by the British to the status of civilisation went hand in hand with the denial that the differences between the two could be removed, for the abolition of such differences would signal in effect the termination of British rule (Metcalf 1994: x).
The uneasy tension between fulfilling Indian aspirations and postulating a lasting difference between the modernising British and the natives often appears, with some distinctive twists, in missionary writing. In common with liberals and Orientalists, Christian missionaries too reported the Hindus to be morally and civilisationally ‘degraded’. However, since this representation of a depraved otherness jarred with the presumption that there was a fundamental unity running through humanity, various explanations were proffered to mitigate the perceived alienness. For British scholars and administrators, the basic reason was usually located in racial or environmental influences, or the temporal lag on the evolutionary scale; while Christian writers sometimes accepted these reasons, for them the radical alterity of the natives was to be explained primarily in terms of their ‘heathenish’ systems of thought and practice. Thus around the middle of the nineteenth century, William Clarkson, reflecting some liberal and Orientalist themes, wrote that ‘Indian civilization is original and independent because of its antiquity’ (Clarkson 1850: 24). Regarding the natives he believed that ‘their language is the voice of antiquity. Their dress, their manners, their religions, their institutions, their social habits, the produce of their soil … are but the exemplars of past ages’ (Clarskon 1850: 32–3). Further, he believed that ‘[m]odern European civilization is the result of a long continued process … It is the highest point of a scale, whose lowest degree is to be found in ages not long since remote’ (Clarkson 1850: 25). While missionaries usually agreed with the administrators that India had been stagnating in an age of ‘barbarism’, they couched their solution to this primitivism in terms not so much of the signifiers of modernity such as railways or the telegraph but of the gospel and salvation. Towards the mid-nineteenth century, a form of an ‘argument from progress’ was utilised by Christian writers such as Murray Mitchell who sought to link the truth of Christianity with the ‘objective’ fact that European nations, pervaded by a Christian ethos, had achieved greater social progress than lands steeped in Hinduism and Islam. Such writers believed that once the Hindu intelligentsia experienced the evidential force of this argument, they would also begin to accept the cognitive and fiduciary framework within which it was located, as well as specific doctrinal claims about the atoning death of Christ and the providential designs of God (O’Hanlon 1985: 56). Christian observers also often reflected the Orientalist motif of a passive, irrational, feminine east which needed the regenerative touch of a masculine, rational, dynamic west. Around the turn of the twentieth century, John Jones wrote that the native Indian Christians, like their Hindu neighbours, possessed the ‘feminine passive graces’ of meekness and patience, and western Christians, with their predominantly active virtues, should learn from their Christian brethren in India instead of hastily seeking to Occidentalise them. At the same time, he could sternly criticise the Bhagavad-gītā as a mess of mutually contradictory teachings, on the grounds that ‘the Oriental mind works on different lines from the Occidental, and is never hampered by logical inconsistency’ (Jones 1908: 159).
Christianity at the peak of the evolutionary summit
The commonalities between the British colonial administrators and the Christian missionaries in their perceptions of the antique land of Hindustan stem from another major influence on them in addition to liberalism and Orientalism, namely, the idea of ‘evolution’ through which they tried to comprehend the religious diversity of the subcontinent. One can view liberals and Orientalists as two types of observers of the Indian scene branching out from a shared acceptance of evolution: if present-day forms of life have emerged from rudimentary stages, one can argue either that these elementary phases, which have been superseded by European forms, have to be rejected as vestigial remnants – thus the liberals – or that they contain pristine truths which have to be recuperated by breaking through the crust of latter-day accretions – which was the Orientalist view. We will see how Victorian Christian missionaries often adopted the liberal path – Hindu paganism was simply a bundle of outdated ‘heathenish’ superstitions which had to be uprooted – but increasingly around the beginning of the twentieth century also often walked down the Orientalist way – Hindu thought was now regarded as containing some primordial truths of humanity. While missionaries in their ‘evangelical’ moments could launch liberal-styled diatribes against the monstrosities of Hinduism, many missionaries such as Robert Caldwell were also Orientalists and many Orientalists such as Sir William Jones had Christian beliefs. Indeed, through the package of these three influences, missionaries tried to develop distinctive types of interweaving between identity and difference in relation to Christianity and the other religions. In subsequent sections in this and the next chapter, we will point out some of the parallels between the liberal-Orientalist attempt to normalise difference without conceding complete identity and the Christian negotiations of the same dialectic. Missionaries, picking up various threads from liberalism and Orientalism, viewed the natives alternatively as sunk in barbaric superstitions at a lower rung of the civilisational scale or as possessing some inchoate glimmerings of Christian truth, but in both cases they usually rejected the argument that the native converts, whom they regarded as their ‘children’, had sufficient autonomy to run their own churches without remaining under the tutelage of a foreign supervisor.
Though the idea of ‘evolution’ is usually connected with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it had been articulated in somewhat different forms by other influential figures. As Paul Hedges has noted, Hegel had talked about a world-spirit and Herbert Spencer about the ‘progress’ of humanity. Hedges argues that ‘[i]t would probably not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the Victorians had a penchant for labelling everything into some order from higher to lower’ (Hedges 2008: 57). Religion itself now began to be viewed as a developing organism which had passed through several stages, so that under disciplines such as anthropology the growth of the religions of the world became a subject of proper study. Before the emergence of Darwin, there had been haphazard attempts to compile and tabulate reports about the distant ‘savage’ lands, but in the Darwinian perspective, the primitive races could be seen as human by European anthropologists, even if they were, on this hypothesis, the infantile survivals of a long drawn-out process through which their European students had emerged into maturity.
Late nineteenth-century commentators on the Indian scene often claimed to have uncovered such survivals in the practices of the natives. Thus R. N. Cust wrote: ‘We are living in the midst of an idolatrous people … for some great and mysterious purpose of God [Graeco-Roman] Idolatry has been caught alive, and preserved until the nineteenth Century’ (Cust 1891: 304). Similarly, Alfred Lyall confessed that he was baffled by the ancient religion which he compared to ‘the entangled confusion of a primeval forest’, and believed that he could ‘catch a reflection of classic polytheism’ in the practices of the Hindus which had never progressed beyond the stage of the Biblical prophet Micah with his house of gods and images of silver (Lyall 1882: 293). Not all such figures, however, condemned the Hindus to the darkest ages of pre-Christian paganism; some at least claimed to discern within Hinduism a steady evolution from the most rudimentary beliefs to more sophisticated ones. Missionaries therefore adopted somewhat conflicting attitudes to this religious pageant: broadly speaking, until around 1900 they focused on the ‘crudest superstitions’ of Hinduism, which they vehemently denounced as diabolic perversions, while from sometime around the turn of the century, they gradually began to focus more on the ‘higher aspects’. The former group was vigorously iconoclastic and their condemnations of Hinduism were motivated by their repudiation of the idolatry which they claimed to see everywhere in the ‘heathenish’ practices. This is how William Clarkson, writing in 1850, expressed his indignant horror: ‘Indian idolatry is, in a pre-eminent degree, productive of disease, misery, and death. It brings in its train God’s heavy judgements’ (Clarkson 1850: 148). However, G. A. Grierson’s comment in 1906 on Indian religions as the seat of native wisdom which was a pointer towards Christianity is representative of a change, in some missionary quarters, in perceptions of Hinduism. Thus, Grierson believed that one should not talk of these religions ‘as blank heathenism to be conquered and beaten down by a victorious army marching under the banner of the Cross. Let us ever remember that in some, at least, of them there are many grains of truth – ay, of Christian truth …’ (Grierson 1906: 157).
The notion that there were higher elements in Hinduism which could be perfected by Christianity, which itself stood at the summit of the evolutionary development of religion, was incorporated by Christian figures into what came to be known as fulfilment theology. Theologies of fulfilment began to emphasise that the multiplicity of Hindu beliefs and practices reveals a complex of needs, which are fulfilled not within Hinduism itself but by the reality of Christ who alone can truly satisfy them. Exponents of this theology such as Max Mueller (1823–1900) and perhaps most famously J. N. Farquhar (1861–1929) claimed, in their somewhat different ways, that all religions flow into the Christian revelation which perfects and completes the former. Christianity could truly satisfy the aspirations of all human beings who are by nature Christians. As Hedges has shown, one of the crucial elements of fulfilment theologies was the belief that divine providence had been ‘educating’ human beings from lower to higher forms of religiosity which can be placed on a continuum, the highest point of which is Christianity (Hedges 2008). In an early version, Monier Monier-Williams (1887: 233) argued that missionaries must undertake a close study of the beliefs of Hindus and Muslims, and indeed study the Vedas and the Quran as closely as they would their own Bible for these too contain sparks of the true light. Around the same time, T. E. Slater (1882: 112) argued that non-Christian religions, encompassed within divine providence, are incomplete unless they are fulfilled by Christianity which stands at the apex of the evolutionary scale of religions. Similarly, J. N. Farquhar quoted Matthew 5.17, ‘I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’, in defence of his claim that Christianity was the crown and the fullness of the truth of the partial revelations of God that were present in the religions of the world (Farquhar 1913). Therefore, it is clear that figures such as Monier-Williams (1819–99), Slater and Farquhar had to deal with a theological version of the dialectic that engaged liberals who spoke, on the one hand, of a common ‘scale of civilisations’ encompassing the Europeans and the natives but underlined, on the other, the immense temporal gap between the two. Similarly, if the ‘higher religions’ were to be placed on the continuous scale of development whose commanding heights were represented by Christianity, one nevertheless had to speak of a distinct break between them and Christianity. Monier-Williams, for instance, argued that there was no natural or automatic progression from the other religions to Christianity, for though the non-Christian scriptures have occasional sparks of lightning, they are ultimately erroneous. Indeed, he believed that between Christianity and other faiths lay ‘a bridgeless chasm which no theory of evolution can ever span’ (Quoted in Sharpe 1965: 53).
The notion of fulfilment was nevertheless strongly criticised by some missionary figures because they believed that it closed the gap between Hinduism and Christianity, which would render unnecessary missionary preaching to the Hindus. These concerns were expressed, among others, by writers who were unhappy with Max Mueller’s talk of an ‘Aryan reunion’ which would imply that Indians were at par with the British and should therefore be granted political independence. For Mueller, the British connection with India was more than a mere imperialist encounter: through this intervention the ancient Aryan tribe, which had moved into Asia and Europe, was being spiritually reconstituted, with its two halves separated in the distant past now coming together as members of one great family. Samuel Laing, speaking after the revolt of 1857, echoed many of Mueller’s themes when he spoke of two long-separated groups which were coming together, but he emphasised that the British were in India on a sacred mission to help their weaker brothers who had fallen behind in the race. As Martin Maw points out, while such figures were willing to refer to the natives of Hindustan as their brethren they ‘refused to follow the notion to its logical conclusion: that consanguinity entitled contemporary India to a moral parity with Great Britain, and ultimately, to national independence’ (Maw 1990: 36). This simultaneous affirmation of a deep racial identity and a temporal gulf was expressed also by some Protestant Christian missionaries at the centenary conference in 1888. They claimed that while the Aryan families in the east had remained trapped in the past with only the ‘light of nature’, the Aryan families in the west had moved ahead, not least because they had received the light of the Christian revelation (Johnston 1888: vol. 1, 168).
Therefore, just as colonial administrators, breathing the air of liberalism, racial imageries, and Oriental motifs, alternatively struggled to underline continuities between themselves and the natives and to emphasise their mutual differences, missionary figures too often, even when stressing the need for a sympathetic study of Hindu religious literature, maintained that the power of the gospel does not supplement but supplants the spiritual achievements of Hinduism. The Baptist Reverend Arthur Jewson regarded Farquhar’s thesis that the religious instincts of human beings could be satisfied, however imperfectly, in religions other than Christianity as a massive error, and argued that Farquhar’s statement was a defence of the ‘idolatry’ that dethrones God and degrades humanity (Sharpe 1965: 314–18). In fact, Farquhar believed that although Christianity was at the summit of the evolutionary scale, this did not imply that Hindus would be dragged along towards this goal through some sort of ‘natural’ evolution without any creative response of their part. Rather, they would have to turn consciously towards God with utter sincerity and enter into a personal fellowship with the divine, so that a necessary concomitant of this fulfilment was the rejection of their older beliefs and practices. Consequently, he believed that though Hinduism possessed many valuable truths, it too ‘must die in order to live. It must die into Christianity’ (Farquhar 1913: 51). In short, these missionary debates over fulfilment reveal a distinctively Christian version of a fundamental problem that many Victorian liberals faced in their Indian affairs: they and the natives were, at present, separated by a wide (racial or temporal) gulf, but, this gulf was not so impassable that all hopes of bridging it, sometime in the distant future, had to be given up from the start.
Missionary waves and British Christian theology
If the missionaries sometimes accepted the assumptions of liberalism, utilitarianism, and Darwin-inspired evolutionary schemes with racial flavourings, their specifically theological beliefs added a distinct colouration to this package which was undergirded by a Victorian faith in ‘progressivism’. This was the faith that Sir Richard Temple expressed when he calculated that ‘[i]f the ratio of progress in the generation between 1847 and 1881 shall, under Providence, be maintained during the coming and again in the succeeding generation, then an illimitable vista will open itself before the mind’ (Temple 1882: 16). Missionary figures often believed that the Christian faith was not only the culminating point on the scheme of religious evolution but also a marker of their advanced state of civilisation, and their zeal to Christianise the natives was usually at one with their zeal to Europeanise them as well. For some missionaries at least, Europe had progressed on the scale of civilisation specifically because of its Christian inheritance, and the degradations that they perceived in other cultural systems were attributed by them to satanic perversions. Missionary reports from this time – the ones that have given them a particularly bad press in contemporary literature – are therefore filled with the militant metaphors of the soldiers of Christ zealously dismantling the gigantic apparatus of ‘heathenism’.
At the same time, it is crucial to note that although Christianity is usually classified as a missionary religion, missionary enthusiasm has not been a characteristic of all stages of Christendom. Indeed the British missionary waves to India were a new historical development at the turn of the eighteenth century, and were propelled by specific theological formulations of providential sovereignty over history. As David Bebbington notes, one of the defining features of the different strands of Protestantism that spread through England from the 1730s was the strong emphasis given to mission for the ‘conversion of the nations’. In contrast, during the seventeenth century, English Protestants usually took the ‘great commission’ in Matthew’s gospel (28: 16–20) as a reference not to their times but to the era of the early Church. Indeed, latter activists for mission such as Cotton Mather were to complain that the Reformation churches had exhibited very little interest in missionary enterprises (Bebbington 1989: 40–1). Such interest was arguably stifled by a ‘hyper-Calvinism’ which holds that some people are saved and others condemned not because of any ‘merits’ of the former but entirely through the divine mercy. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century theologians such as the Baptist Andrew Fuller put forward a less stringent version of this Calvinism. He argued that the apparent inconsistency between divine grace and human response is a mark of our lack of understanding and that human beings remain fully responsible for their failure to turn towards God (Fuller 1801). In turn, Fuller inspired William Carey whose An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians in 1792 soon led to the formation of a number of missionary societies such as the London Missionary Society (1795) and the Glasgow Missionary Society (1796). From the beginning of the nineteenth century, a growing number of preachers and theologians began to express the view that the missionary vocation in foreign lands would breathe new life into the home churches, and by 1830 the primacy of the missionary enterprise had established itself in British churches. Thus the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff (1806–78) wrote in 1839 that ‘instead of going forth in a progress of outward extension …. the Church [after the European Reformation] seemed mainly intent on turning the whole of her energies inward on herself’ (Duff 1839: 21–2). As a matter of fact, however, he believed that ‘the chief end for which the Christian Church is constituted … is … unceasingly, to act the part of an evangelist to all the world’ (Duff 1839: 13).
The complex of views that broadly tied together such missionary societies is often labelled as ‘Evangelicalism’. Though it should not be equated with any specific Christian denomination, Bebbington identifies four central themes which he argues lie at its heart. Firstly, there is the belief that the individual must undergo a decisive conversion, through divine grace, from sinfulness and guilt into Christian life, a change that often brings about a tremendous sense of relief and the ‘faith of assurance’ that the individual is now Christ’s; and secondly, that this transformation must manifest itself in an active life of preaching and spreading the gospel in foreign lands. Thirdly, Evangelicals constantly went back with fervent devotion to the word of the Bible whose divine inspiration was usually accepted; and fourthly, Evangelical theology was rooted in a certain understanding of the atonement in terms of the cross of Christ who had borne the penalty for the sins of the world by becoming our substitute (Bebbington 1989: 1–17). Consequently, the goals and assumptions that Christian missionary activity, based on Evangelical theology, shared with liberal and utilitarian thought became even clearer: both believed that human beings could become autonomous individuals by a long and often painful process of ‘education’ during which they would learn to dutifully follow certain laws. Victorian utilitarians were united in their desire to shake off the burden of the past which they associated with priestcraft and aristocracy, and in place of these they emphasised the virtues of self-reliance and self-determination, insisting that all human beings enjoy an equal footing in their capacity as autonomous rational beings. The vital difference between the missionaries and the utilitarians was that the former believed themselves to be governed ultimately by the Mosaic law which punished sinners and brought them to a fearful recognition of the divine judge, whereas the latter replaced human legal systems and their sanctions for the divine justice of the former (Stokes 1959: 54–5). Nevertheless, many of these early Christian missionaries, like their Victorian contemporaries, were ‘inner-directed’ men, whose gospel, as Duncan Forrester points out, ‘was highly tinged with individualism … Their theology put a premium on individual conversion, and social structures which demanded spiritual and intellectual conformity and forced the individual always to act and think in terms of the group were anathema to them’ (Forrester 1980: 25). Forrester’s observation is borne out by Stuart Piggin’s survey of 550 missionaries who served in India between 1789 and 1858. Piggin writes that there were a number of affinities between these men who came from a variety of occupational backgrounds such as teachers, lawyers, physicians, artisans, booksellers, and printers. Most of them had received a good education, with some acquainted with Greek and Latin, they were upwardly mobile with high social aspirations, and they were strongly independent individuals influenced by the notions of self-respectability and vocation (Piggin 1984: 28–47).
In other words, although British missionaries, given their convictions of the sinfulness of all humanity, were less prone to the racialised flourishes of ‘evolutionary’ thinkers, they too sometimes felt the attraction of the latter’s views circulating in the intellectual atmosphere. In particular, some of the mission-churches of British India were the locales of the ‘scientific racism’ which was an aspect of the collective consciousness of many Europeans who accepted taxonomies of races with distinct physical and mental attributes. Such notions of racial superiority ordered the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the churches where Indian assistants were often placed in subordinate positions as catechists, and even after ordination did not gain equality with European clergymen (Chatterjee 2011: 173–80). In 1864, when John Thomas of the Church Missionary Society proposed that an Indian bishop be appointed, he was opposed by Robert Caldwell, who argued that the Indian congregations would rather remain under the protection of an European missionary; indeed, in his opinion, the time was about as ripe for an Indian bishop as an Indian governor. Later in 1913, V. S. Azariah was ordained as the first Indian bishop only after the Bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead, convinced the government that it would not have to pay for Azariah’s salary and further that Azariah would not exercise authority over European chaplains (Chatterjee 2011: 184–5).
Providence and the rise of empire
Providing a Christian tinge to this complex mix of liberalism, racism, and belief in progress, missionaries often claimed that while the ‘heathenish’ societies had remained submerged in primitive ‘idolatry’, centuries of Christian influence on British life had been successful in countervailing the effects of sin in Protestant Britain (Stanley 1990: 161–2). Such readings were not based solely on the liberal and the Orientalist motifs of a ‘degenerate’ India, but were sometimes the product of viewing the various events that led to the gradual rise of the British empire in India through the theological perspective of a providential understanding of history. Nineteenth-century British Christians often discerned the ‘signs of the times’ as indicating that India had been placed under their trust and that it was now their solemn responsibility to enlighten its masses with the gospel. As Andrew Porter has noted, ‘Interpreters of providential design were inclined to view empire as a source of obligation. Possession entailed the duty to Christianise; failure to do so risked incurring divine displeasure and loss of the opportunity for atonement or national redemption’ (Porter 2004: 65). Given their understanding of a divine providence under whose guidance Christian civilisation had evolved into its current state of maturity, missionaries sometimes failed to distinguish between ‘Church’ and ‘state’, and distance themselves from the secular enterprises of the raj. J. C. Ingleby writes that while this was particularly true of missionaries of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, even nonconformist groups were usually pro-government in India, ‘perhaps because of the solidarity which they felt with their fellow countrymen in an alien environment’ (Ingleby 2000: 311–12). Therefore, even while missionaries argued that the true reason why an empire had been given to Britain was not so much to change the customs and usages of the natives but to produce a spiritual transformation in their hearts, they tended to view the ‘coincidence’ between imperial gains and opportunities for mission as providentially ordered. Claudius Buchanan minced no words when he declared: ‘No Christian nation ever possessed such an extensive field for the propagation of the Christian faith, as that afforded to us by our influence over the hundred million natives of Hindostan’ (Buchanan 1805: 39). Such themes were often articulated at the highest levels of the missionary apparatus. Several speakers at the centenary conference in 1888 expressed the view that God had given England great power in India and England should therefore support missions to it. For instance, the Reverend Phraner declared: ‘India is given to Britain. For what? That she may be taught the truth, which is unto life and eternal salvation. Here is Britain’s opportunity; here is Britain’s responsibility, for which she will have to answer in the sight of God …’ (Johnston 1888: vol. 1, 201).
Given their belief that the destinies of India and England had been providentially tied together, missionaries often opposed the view that the natives should try to put an end to the British empire. Rather they should recognise the ‘guardianship’ that Britain was exercising over India while introducing it to western principles and institutions and gradually enabling it to become capable of self-government (Matthew 1988: 144–9). When speaking to the students of Madras University regarding the demand that examinations to the Indian Civil Service be held simultaneously in India and in England, the Reverend William Miller expressed the conviction in 1887 that the administration of the country would remain in British hands for ‘a long time to come, say a couple of generations at all events’ (Matthew 1988: 122–4). The belief in the providentially ordained union between the two countries was often expressed by missionaries throughout the early decades of the twentieth century as well. In the wake of the rise of nationalist politics, the Harvest Field declared in an editorial in January 1909 that the raj would be necessary for several more years to sustain peaceful progress, and the next year it added the specifically theological comment that Indian Christians were taught by the New Testament to affirm their allegiance to the powers that be, in this case the British government (Thomas 1979: 127).
Missions and empire: instabilities in the nexus
While missionary views often converged with the official colonial policy of civilising the natives while postponing into the indefinite future the fulfilment of this process, the two did not always run parallel to each other. In fact, the Christian missionary view of the empire’s ‘spiritualising’ goal produced a series of dialectical interplays between them and the British colonialists, whatever be the latter’s degree of Christian commitment. The former often accepted British rule in India by incorporating it within the divine plan for the spread of the gospel, but precisely for this reason chastised the government for its lack of enthusiasm for the eradication of ‘heathenism’. Therefore, in recent decades scholars have begun to interrogate the ‘colonial paradigm’ through which some historians have viewed the missionary centuries in monolithic terms as the unilinear imposition of European domination on the native converts, and instead developed ‘thick’ narratives of the missionary as a concrete actor involved in specific historical situations which were criss-crossed by various relations of power. As we will see, missionaries sometimes ‘converted’ colonialism, sharply opposing versions which conflicted with their own goals and attempting to co-opt others which were compatible with the values of the gospel (Robert 1996: 4).
An early advocate of Christian missions was Charles Grant who sought, in 1787, the patronage of the government for missionary activity in India on the grounds that the propagation of the gospel would rescue the natives from their state of ‘depravity’, as well as facilitate the growth of conditions for better administration by creating common principles between the British and the natives (Embree 1962: 118–19). While he noted that British attempts to help the natives would go in vain unless the British had first raised their moral state by making them acquainted with the Christian revelation, nothing much, however, came of his proposal. Grant was not the only missionary voice who charged the British administrators with not doing enough to impart knowledge of Christianity among the natives. A few years later, Buchanan was to complain bitterly: ‘Providence hath been pleased to grant to us this great empire … But what do we give in return? What acknowledgement to Providence for its goodness has our [English] nation ever made?’ (Buchanan 1805: 38). Buchanan had correctly perceived the apathy of the officials of the East India Company towards the Christianisation of the natives with whose beliefs and practices they did not want to interfere. When in 1792 William Wilberforce appealed to the Directors of the Company for missionaries and schoolteachers to be sent to India, he received the reply that ‘the Hindus had as good a system of faith and morals as most people, and that it would be madness to attempt their conversion or to give them any more learning or any other description of learning than that which they already possessed’ (Quoted in Mayhew 1926: 10). Consequently, the interests of empire and mission often conflicted throughout the colonial period, with administrators at the helm of control viewing the missionaries with suspicion. In fact, until 1813 missionaries had a particularly uneasy relationship with the Company which required that they obtain licenses to remain within its territories. As Eric Stokes has pointed out, ‘[t]he Evangelical view stood in complete contrast to the East India Company’s traditional attitude. From motives of expediency the Company had always manifested the most scrupulous regard for Indian religions, laws, institutions, and customs’. Not only Governor General Warren Hastings (1774–85) with his ‘Orientalist’ predilections but even the more vigorously ‘Anglicising’ Lord Cornwallis (1786–93) maintained a largely non-interfering attitude, and the latter in fact ‘had no sympathy with Evangelical hopes for the conversion of the people, considering such hopes utterly visionary’ (Stokes 1959: 35–6). Even when in 1813 the Company’s charter was revised to include a clause stating that provisions should be made to help people wishing to go to India for ‘religious and moral improvement’, any explicit reference to ‘missionaries’ was avoided. However, this implicit move to legalise the entry of missionaries into India was greeted with hostility by administrators such as Thomas Grenville who declared, ‘We are conquerors in India, and I do not like to see a regiment of missionaries acting under and with the authority of unrestricted power’ (Quoted in Embree 1962: 271). The British Indian government’s official attitude to Christian missionaries was summarised by Sir W. M. Young who was the secretary to the Punjab government in the 1880s. While accepting the view that the Pax Britannica had ushered in a realm of peace and freedom in India, he tried to caution missionaries that they should not expect government officials to take too great an interest in their activities: ‘It is not lawful for us as officials to employ the organization of the State for influencing the consciences of those over whom for specific purposes we have received authority’ (Quoted in Cox 2002: 36).
Closer to the ground, however, the relationships between the missionaries and the British authorities in some parts of India underwent various types of fluctuations, depending on social and political factors such as Hindu revivalism, the nationalist movement, and ‘lower’ caste assertion. One instance of these unstable relationships comes from the Travancore state in the south of the country: until the 1870s, the British government did not hesitate to intervene actively against various types of caste discrimination, and had a favourable attitude towards the missionaries who were also engaged in similar efforts. However, after the 1880s, the colonial administration began to take seriously the principle of ‘religious neutrality’ declared by Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, and did not wish to be associated with any intervention which might be regarded as supporting the missionaries. Meanwhile, the state of Travancore itself seems to have perceived in the missionaries a possible threat to the social structure and from the 1890s initiated certain anti-missionary policies as well as measures for the uplift of the ‘lower’ castes. However, in a further twist, the state enlisted the support of some missionaries in the 1910s and the 1920s to persuade their ‘lower’ caste converts to remain obedient to the prevailing socio-economic order, and the relationships between the state and the missionaries remained relatively favourable during these decades. In the 1930s, with the rise of the nationalist movement under Gandhi and the work of Christian missionaries among the ‘lower’ castes, the attitude of the state towards the missionaries again took a hostile turn – it adopted a series of anti-Christian policies such as prohibiting public worship in aided schools without the approval of the Education Department and banning Christian preaching in public (Kawashima 1998).
In short, the relationship between the colonial government and the British missionaries was by no means a mutually symbiotic one, so that although ‘[t]he British colonial state … was popularly associated by its subjects with Christianity … the British period did not witness an unambiguous bond between religion and power. The association between missionary activity and British colonialism was complex and intricate’ (Robinson and Clarke 2003: 16). The colonial government’s antipathy to the missionaries is correctly picked out by Girilal Jain who writes that ‘the British did not come to India – and did not rule over India – as part of a proselytizing enterprise in the religious realm’ (Jain 1994: 7). As we have seen, though the missionaries were often associated with the institutions and the beliefs of the British imperialists, their shifting relationships with the latter were characterised by various strains and tensions. However, notwithstanding the efforts of various scholars directed at highlighting the fissures between missionaries and propagandists of empire, their occasional collusions, as Swami Abhishiktananda noted some forty years ago, led to ‘such a feeling of distrust that a long time must pass before it is eradicated’ (Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 12). Given that British Christianity was introduced in a context of imperial power, which set in process movements which raised issues of religious truth and social identity, it became involved with various cultural encounters and the role of the missionaries became ambiguous and threatening (Brown 2002: 3). To some extent, the continuing distrust in postcolonial times of Christianity as a foreign imposition in India can be traced to the observation that the missionaries were part of a movement of imperial expansion and often shared its sense of western superiority. In the perception of many Hindus, the missionaries were associated with the ruling class, not least because they often dressed as Europeans, earned an income higher than them, and lived not in their midst but with fellow-Europeans in enclosed compounds. However, the distrust continues even after the official dissolution of imperial connections for a more significant reason: it is often charged that nothing has essentially changed in the Christian attitude to Hinduism, which is still regarded as somehow incomplete or imperfect until its elements are redeemed by the salvific light of Christ. For instance, Goel argues that over the last two hundred years or so, Christian theologians have adopted numerous approaches to Hinduism, sometimes denouncing it as a nest of satanic perversions, at other times instead viewing it as an appropriate vehicle for communicating Christian truth, and at yet other times focusing on its subalterns such as women and the ‘lower’ castes. Though this internal diversity of theological stratagems might give the impression that the Christian camp was riddled with inner dissensions, Goel puts in a strong word of caution: ‘The controllers of the missions, however, had everything under control … Different strategies could be employed simultaneously on different flanks of the missionary phalanx’ (Goel 1989: 328).
In the long history of Hindu–Christian encounters over ‘conversion’, Goel was not the first polemicist to use such belligerent metaphors: as we shall note in the next chapter, the image of Hinduism as a monstrous edifice which Christians must systematically destabilise is one that was often invoked by the early missionaries. As for the missionaries, their shifting locations in the liberal–Orientalist–Darwinian ethos that we have outlined would decisively shape their responses to the questions, firstly, of whether Hinduism could be regarded as containing intimations, albeit imperfect, of Christian wisdom, and, secondly, whether a native Indian Church could be raised independently of British supervision.
References
Bebbington, D. W. (1989) Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, London: Unwin Hyman.
Brown, Judith (2002) ‘Introduction’, in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 1–8.
Buchanan, Claudius (1805) Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies.
Chatterjee, Nandini (2011) The Making of Indian Secularism, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clarkson, William (1850) India and the Gospel, London.
Cohn, B. S. (1996) Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cox, Jeffrey (2002) Imperial Fault Lines, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Cust, R. N. ([1891], 1988) Orientation of Early Christian Missionaries in Asia and Africa, Delhi: Daya Publishing House.
Duff, Alexander (1839) Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church, Edinburgh: John Johnstone.
Embree, A. T. (1962) Charles Grant and British Rule in India, London: George Allen and Unwin.
Farquhar, J. N. (1913) The Crown of Hinduism, London: Oxford University Press.
Forrester, D. B. (1980) Caste and Christianity, London: Curzon Press.
Frykenberg, R. E. (2003) ‘Introduction: Dealing with Contested Definitions and Controversial Perspectives’, in Christians and Missionaries in India, ed. R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 1–32.
Fuller, Andrew (1801) The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, New York.
Goel, S. R. (1988) Catholic Ashrams, New Delhi: Voice of India.
Goel, S. R. (1989) History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, New Delhi: Voice of India.
Grierson, G. A. (1906) ‘Hinduism and Early Christianity’, The East and the West, 4, 135–57.
Hedges, Paul (2008) ‘Postcolonialism, Orientalism and Understanding: Religious Studies and the Christian Missionary Imperative’, Journal of Religious History, 32, 55–75.
Inden, Ronald (1990) Imagining India, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Ingleby, J. C. (2000) Missionaries, Education and India, Delhi: ISPCK.
Jain, Girilal (1994) The Hindu Phenomenon, New Delhi: UBSPD.
Johnston, James (ed.) (1888) Report of the Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World, London: James Nisbet.
Jones, J. P. (1903) India’s Problem, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company.
Jones, J. P. (1908) India: Its Life and Thought, New York: The Macmillan Company.
Kawashima, K. (1998) Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858–1936, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Koss, S. E. (1969) John Morley at the India Office, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lyall, A. C. (1882) Asiatic Studies, London: John Murray.
Maine, H. S. (1875) The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought, London: John Murray.
Marriott, J. A. R. (1932) The English in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mathew, A. (1988) Christian Missions, Education and Nationalism, Delhi: Anamika Prakashan.
Maw, Martin (1990) Visions of India, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang.
Mayhew, Arthur (1926) The Education of India, London: Faber and Gwyer.
Mehta, U. S. (1999) Liberalism and Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Metcalf, T. R. (1994) Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mill, James (1975) The History of British India, ed. William Thomas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mill, John Stuart (1994) Utilitarianism, ed. G. Williams, London: Dent.
Monier-Williams, M. (1887) Modern India and the Indians, London.
Nehru, Jawaharlal (1941) The Unity of India, London: Lindsay Drummond.
O’Hanlon, Rosalind (1985) Caste, Conflict and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parry, Benita (1998) Delusions and Discoveries, London: Verso.
Pearson, M. N. (1987) The Portuguese in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Piggin, Stuart (1984) Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858, Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press.
Porter, Andrew (2004) Religion versus Empire? Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Robert, D. L. (1996) Converting Colonialism, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Robinson, Rowena (2003) Christians of India, New Delhi: 2003.
Robinson, R. and S. Clarke (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Religious Conversion in India, ed. R. Robinson and S. Clarke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–21.
Sharpe, E. J. (1965) Not to Destroy but to Fulfil, Lund: Gleerup.
Sharpe, E. J. (1975) Comparative Religion, London: Duckworth.
Slater, T. E. (1882) The Philosophy of Missions, London.
Stanley, Brian (1990) The Bible and the Flag, Leicester: Apollos.
Stokes, Eric (1959) The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Swami Abhishiktananda (1971) The Church In India, Madras: CLS.
Thomas, George (1979) Christian Indians and Indian Nationalism 1885–1950, Frankfurt a. M.: Lang.
Temple, Richard (1882) Men and Events of My Time in India, London.