Christian Missionary Activities in India
- A missionary movement presupposes a group of people who consider it their religious duty to spread their faith to other parts of the world, so as to make others conform to the same belief system.
- The British Government in India played three overlapping roles over time — first that of a trader, then that of a ruler, and eventually that of a Christian propagandist.
- Since British rulers themselves professed Christianity, British rule came to be equated with Christian domination in the popular imagination.
Early Years of British Rule (Up to 1813)
- In the early years of its rule, the East India Company maintained a position of neutrality in the religious and social affairs of its subjects, deliberately avoiding interference with traditional Indian culture by withholding support for missionary work.
- The Company’s policy was one of non-interference in Indian education, favouring traditional oriental learning instead.
- This non-interference was rooted in the fear that missionaries, through English education aimed at aiding conversions, might offend Hindu subjects and provoke unrest.
- The Company also worried that encouraging religious sentiments among Indians could adversely affect its business policy and diplomatic role.
- (This policy of non-interference and lack of support for missionary work was reviewed only after the Company’s Charter came up for renewal in 1813.)
Charles Grant and the Early Push for Missions
- During the 1770s and 1780s, Englishmen such as Edmund Burke argued that the East India Company’s power could not be justified unless exercised with morality and subjected to Parliament’s control — but these efforts went unheeded.
- Charles Grant, a junior officer in the East India Company, drafted the original proposal for missions in 1786–87 in his personal capacity and campaigned for it for decades at his own expense.
- Grant sought only an official endorsement from the Company for his proposal — neither its money nor its manpower — and personally supported one missionary out of his own pocket.
- He was granted only a hearing with Lord Cornwallis, who assured him he would not oppose the move but, as Governor-General, could not actively support it either.
- Grant was consequently forced to turn to Christian leaders in England who were influential enough to sway the Government or challenge the Company.
- In 1792, Grant argued that the principal problem of India was the religious ideas that perpetuated the ignorance of its people, and that this could be remedied through the dissemination of Christian light — which he framed as the noble mission of British rule in India.
- To win over his critics, Grant drew a complementarity between the civilising process and material prosperity, without any accompanying risk of dissent or a desire for English liberty.
- Grant’s advocacy for introducing English education in India fell on deaf ears before the Charter Act of 1793, owing to fears of political unrest; his larger concern, however, was the misrule of Company officials.
- He believed real British hegemony in India could be established through a display of the superior moral and ethical values of the West, as manifested in its Christian heritage — Christian instruction being the best guarantee against rebellion, since it would rescue natives from “polytheistic” Hinduism and draw them into the assimilative project of colonialism.
- Grant’s ideas were given wider publicity by William Wilberforce in Parliament ahead of the Charter Act of 1813, which eventually allowed Christian missionaries to enter India without restriction.
Wilberforce’s Resolution on Missions (1793)
- At the time, John Wesley was the only missionary-minded Christian figure in England with the stature to bypass the East India Company and influence the Government directly — refusing him permission to open a mission would have been politically untenable for the British.
- William Wilberforce was the other Christian politician with the resolve to fight for this cause.
- In 1793, Wilberforce studied Grant’s writings and moved the famous Resolution on Missions, drafted by Grant himself.
- Three days later, the “missionary clauses” were accepted by the Committee, seeking to empower the Company to send out schoolmasters and other approved persons for the religious and moral improvement of the inhabitants of British India.
- However, on the third reading of the Bill, the Clauses were rejected, and the Court of Proprietors of East India Stock passed a special resolution against the Missionary Clause.
- This episode reveals a counter-force to the common narrative: while missionaries are often opposed for having come to spread Christianity, the Company and several influential figures in England actively resisted the missionary movement, fearing it would “awaken” Indians and ultimately harm the Company’s own interests.
- This resistance, in turn, fuelled an agitation against the East India Company, accusing it of opposing Christ’s teachings and neglecting Indian education.
Missionary Work Despite Restrictions
- Despite the ban, missionaries used various ingenious means to enter the country and continue disseminating Western education, which they believed would eventually lead to proselytisation.
- Protestant missionaries began working from the Danish station at Madras from the early eighteenth century, while the Srirampur (Serampore) Danish settlement near Calcutta became, by the century’s end, the refuge of three Baptist missionaries — Dr. William Carey, Ward, and Joshua Marshman.
- Apart from running a printery and translating the Bible into local languages, they also ran schools for both boys and girls.
- The Company’s government tolerated such missionary activity as long as it did not directly offend local religious sensibilities — though the number of missionaries active before 1813 remained very small.
Charter Act of 1813
- The battle over missions resurfaced in 1813, when the Company’s Charter came up for renewal, and the situation had changed considerably:
- Grant had grown in stature and influence, having won himself a seat in Parliament.
- William Carey’s work had earned immense respect for missions, both in Bengal and in England, including his well-known struggle against the practice of sati and the Company’s reluctance to ban it.
- It had thus become harder to argue that Indians should not be encouraged to critically examine their beliefs, or that missionaries should not be allowed to help Indians distinguish true faith from superstition.
- There was considerable unrest in the British Parliament in 1813 over the question of permitting missionary activity in India.
- The chief ammunition for opponents of the missionary cause was the Vellore Mutiny, which began on 10 July 1806, instigated by the sons of Tipu Sultan who had been allowed to live at Vellore following his defeat.
- Its immediate cause was resentment over changes to the sepoy dress code introduced in November 1805 — Hindus were barred from wearing religious marks on their foreheads, while Muslims were required to shave their beards and trim their moustaches.
- The unrest that followed eventually led to the Governor-General of Madras Presidency, William Bentinck, being recalled to London.
- Several Company officials argued that restrictions on missionaries should continue, contending that Indians were civilised enough and did not need missionaries.
- The missionaries and their political supporters countered with a formidable case of their own — arguing that Indians were in “the darkest plight,” that converting India to Christianity would bring temporal benefits to “heathens,” and that such conversion would consolidate rather than unsettle the empire.
- A missionary clause was finally attached to the Charter Act of 1813.
- It permitted persons wishing to go to India for “promoting moral and religious improvements” — i.e., Christian missionaries — to propagate English education and preach their religion.
- Missionaries could henceforth enter India, subject only to obtaining a licence from the Court of Directors or the Board of Control.
- The Act also allotted Rs. 1,00,000 to promote education among the Indian masses.
Charter Act of 1833
- The Charter Act of 1833 regulated the permanent presence of missionaries in India, raising the number of Bishops to three and making provision for an Anglican hierarchy at Calcutta.
- With this Act, Company policy changed decisively under pressure from the Evangelicals in England — marking the first decisive step of missionary work in India.
- A spokesman of the Evangelicals declared: “The true cure of darkness is the introduction of light. The Hindus err because they were ignorant and their errors have never fairly been laid before them. The communication of our light and knowledge to them would prove the best remedy for their disorders.”
- With the expansion of the British Empire, missionaries began arriving in greater numbers, and Christianity spread further with the establishment of dioceses at Madras and Bombay, marking the start of a renewed cooperation between the missionaries and the colonial power.
Charter of 1853
- The Charter of 1853 declared a renewed commitment to the Company’s educational responsibility.
- This led to the famous Educational Dispatch of 1854, drafted by a committee chaired by Sir Charles Wood — a devout Evangelical who was also, in effect, an “undercover” missionary.
- This spirit was later summed up in the 1858 Proclamation of the Queen, which stated that governance “should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence and religious feelings,” pointing out the privileges Indians would receive by being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown.
Missionaries’ Views on Indian Culture
- The defining feature of nineteenth-century missions was an enthusiasm for the multiplication of missionary efforts, with the conversion of individual souls treated as the sole end of mission.
- British rule provided a favourable atmosphere and the necessary infrastructure for missions to work even in the remotest mountain villages, largely without opposition.
- Julius Richter observed that it would be hard to find any land possessing so great an attraction for missionary societies.
The New Breed of Missionaries After 1833
- Once the Charter of 1833 allowed missionaries to come to India freely, missionary teams grew more powerful and their style of work changed.
- A new set of missionaries, rooted in the “iconoclastic zeal of extreme Protestantism,” began to arrive.
- Through letters, reports, and stories, they created a highly distorted image of Indian people and culture abroad.
- These missionaries were imbued with Western “imperial sentiments” and a sense of cultural superiority, agreeing with Charles Grant that Hindu degeneration stemmed not from any inborn weakness but from the very nature of the religion itself.
- For the Evangelicals, India was a land in “darkness” that needed the “light” of the Western world.
- Claudius Buchanan, another Evangelical spokesman and former missionary in India, argued: “The missionaries asserted that since God laid upon Britain the solemn duty of evangelizing India, the Government should not hesitate to throw its weight into the struggle. They demanded above all open Government patronage of Christian education and vigorous warfare upon the abuses associated with Hindu religion.”
Push for English Education and Social Reform
- The Evangelicals and other mission societies combined their efforts to change British Government policy, demanding legal and social reforms in India.
- This culminated in William Bentinck’s resolution of March 1835, intended mainly to promote European literature and science and to direct funds primarily towards English education.
- Indian literature and oriental works were dismissed as being of little intrinsic value, and were even seen as inculcating serious errors in their readers.
- The customs, traditions, and religious beliefs of the subject population were viewed by missionary educators and their societies in England as signs of depravity and futility — the prescribed remedy being the introduction of English education.
- Alexander Duff, the Scottish missionary and leading educator, believed that while Hindu philosophical discourse used lofty terms, these conveyed only “vain, foolish and wicked” conceptions.
- According to Duff, Hinduism spread like a “dark universe where all life dies and death lives,” and the Christian task was to do everything possible to demolish this “gigantic fabric of idolatry and superstition.”
- Such attitudes prevented any genuine, positive encounter between Christianity and Indian culture.
- Duff, Buchanan, Trevelyan, and Macaulay together exerted great influence on missionary thinking; the missionaries and civil servants who came to India were often so prejudiced that they failed to see anything of value in Indian society.
- Missions subscribed to the belief that “civilizing” Indians would prepare these “primitive religious people” to embrace Christianity, and were largely unwilling to engage with the complexities of India’s cultural diversity.
- A deep-seated sense of European civilisational superiority coloured their approach to other cultures and faiths, with English education serving as the means to facilitate a shift “from exterior to interior, from trade to religion” — a cultural revolution meant to disseminate Christian knowledge and secure the natives’ loyalty to the British.
- Evangelical supporters of the Anglican mission were, in fact, more invested in Bible dissemination and baptismal statistics than in the general enlightenment of India.
Mutual Dependence Between the Raj and the Missions
- While the primary interest of the Raj was to retain control over India, the dominant interest of the missions was the conversion of Indians to Christianity — yet in the colonial situation, both found themselves in need of one another, making their mutual support only natural.
- Although missionaries worked hard, and often suffered, to bring education and social awareness to rural India, the genuine, selfless nature of their service was frequently overlooked or misunderstood precisely because of their close association with colonial-imperial power.
Positive Outcomes of Missionary Activities in India
- Christian missionary activity functioned as a socio-religious movement that indirectly gave birth to neo-Hindu reformist movements led by educated Indians.
- Gandhiji held the view that missionary efforts to convert Hindus by highlighting the social evils of Hinduism quickened the task of Hindu reformers to “set their own house in order.”
- The missionaries’ zeal to convert Hindus, their criticism of evils like untouchability, and their targeting of the most downtrodden sections lent urgency to reformers’ efforts to uplift and integrate these sections into mainstream Hindu society.
- The flow of Western knowledge and education did not brainwash the educated class into treating Christianity as a substitute for Hinduism; instead, this class channelled its energies into social reform, particularly concerning the status of women — since a large share of India’s social evils were tied to women’s lives, reforms in this area had a wide-ranging impact.
- For instance, missionaries took up the cause of leprosy elimination.
- Similarly, Christian missionaries were among the first to attack the institution of sati, though it was the abolitionist campaign led by Raja Rammohan Roy that gave the movement its real momentum.
- The social activities of Christian missions aimed at moral reform in Indian society, helping emancipate individuals — especially women — from social evils such as sati, child marriage, untouchability, and caste discrimination.
- Missionaries strove to secure rights for women, such as the right to wear upper-body clothing.
- Missions demanded legal support from the British government in their fight against practices like widow-burning, child marriage, and the drowning of children in sacred rivers.
- With support from liberal Hindu leaders and missionaries, Governor-General William Bentinck introduced several legal measures of social reform.
- Generations of young men and women received modern education through missionary-run institutions, many being instilled with ideals of service, uprightness, and rectitude.
- Lakhs of people were treated and restored to health through hospitals set up by Church-affiliated organisations — the Christian Medical College, Vellore, being a distinguished example.
- St. Stephen’s College (Delhi), Madras Christian College, and St. John’s College (Agra) are among the many higher-education institutions founded by missionaries.
Contribution to Women’s Education
- Some of the first missions to arrive in India in the 1820s applied themselves rigorously to women’s education, operating on the belief that Indian women — as grandmothers, mothers, and wives — were the chief transmitters of “idolatry and ritual” to children, meaning conversions were unlikely unless their influence was addressed.
- This Christian educational work for girls went on to serve as a model that inspired the government and other agencies to establish their own girls’ schools.
- Pioneering work in women’s education was done by Pandita Ramabai, herself a Christian convert, who worked tirelessly for the cause and founded the Mukti institution to help widows and others.
- Institutions such as Women’s Christian College (Madras), Isabella Thoburn College (Lucknow), and Sarah Tucker College (Palayamcottah) remain notable in the field of women’s education.
- Following this lead, organisations such as the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, and Ramakrishna Mission also began taking an active interest in women’s education.
Contribution to Medical Care and Tribal Welfare
- The stark inadequacy of medical facilities in India led Christian missions to establish hospitals and dispensaries across cities and villages, including the Zenana Medical Mission (ZMM), founded to provide medical aid to women and children.
- The standard of living among tribal communities was raised, with missionaries helping them carve out sustainable livelihoods.
- The educational reforms introduced by missionaries also instilled among Indians a unifying spirit, bringing them together to fight for common causes as a nation, and missionaries additionally extended active support to the indigo ryots in their struggle.
Negative Impact of Missionary Activities in India
- In educating Indians about their own perceived “shortcomings,” missionaries often ended up destroying the self-confidence and self-respect of the natives.
- As Swami Vivekananda wrote: “The child is taken to school and the first thing he learns is that his father is a fool, the second thing that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all his teachers are hypocrites, the fourth that all his sacred books are a mass of lies. By the time he reaches sixteen, he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless…”
- Missionaries frequently characterised Hinduism as a false, stupendous, and barbaric religion.
- Alexander Duff, for instance, declared Christianity the one true religion meant to replace all “false” ones, stating: “Of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous.”
- Mass conversions contributed to the degradation of Indian culture and generated conflict between social classes, while Christian propaganda also caused converted Indians to develop contempt for their own community.
- Charles Trevelyan illustrated this with an anecdote: “A generation is growing up which repudiates idols. A young Hindu, who had received a liberal English education, was forced by his family to attend the shrine of Kali, upon which he took off his cap to ‘Madam Kali,’ made her a low bow, and hoped ‘her ladyship was well’…”
- On the whole, this insensitive propaganda against native religion and culture had a wounding effect on the people’s self-confidence and on Indian culture more broadly.
Analysis of Christian Missionary Activity
- The missionaries had, in their own understanding, come to India in obedience to Jesus Christ, who claimed to be “the light to the world,” with his plan of bringing light to the world involving sending his disciples into “all the world” as “light.” Challenging everything that appeared as “darkness” was therefore seen as a necessary part of the true Christian mission.
- The claims made by Christian missionaries also reveal their underlying, not entirely hidden, interests.
- They argued that Brahmanism had tried hard to retain a monopoly over religion in India, neither sharing its own rich language with others nor developing the languages of the wider population — and that India remained “under-developed” at the time of the missionaries’ arrival precisely because Brahmanism had failed to develop Indian languages, making this a task that fell to the Christian missionaries themselves.
- It is well established that Brown, Buchanan, and Carey used the secular Fort William College — established for training secular administrators — to translate the Bible and instil a missionary spirit in administrators, with the full backing of the Governor-General and support from some Company directors, the underlying objective being to lend stability to the Government in India and, in effect, “Christianize” it.
- For 150 years, even while serving the interests of British imperialism, the Church attempted to steer its Indian adherents away from Indian nationalism.
- Gandhi’s Collected Works record several instances of missionaries acknowledging to him that their institutions and services were, in truth, incidental to the larger aim of gathering a fuller harvest of converts for the Church.
- Such activities were also criticised by Swami Vivekananda, who admonished missionaries for taking spiritual advantage of famines and cholera epidemics.
- The 1911 Census Reports for Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and Sikkim recorded that converts from four tribal communities — the Oraons, Mundas, Kharias, and Santhals — accounted for nearly nine-tenths of all Christian converts in the region.
- In a speech delivered to the Baptist Missionary Society in London in April 1883, Sir Richard Temple declared that every Christian was duty-bound to spread the religion, that this responsibility fell most heavily on the British, that Buddhism and Hinduism were “dying and dead,” that tribal communities ought to be made the special focus of missionary exertions, and that India was, above all other countries, one that the Christians of Britain were morally bound to “enlighten with Eternal truth.”
