Organizer and Chair: Mitchell W. Numark, University of Oklahoma

Discussant: Susan S. Wadley, Syracuse University

Compared with other colonial societies and other regions of the world the study of Christian missionaries has been generally neglected in pre-modern and modern Indian historiography. Surely one reason for this neglect is the relative dearth of Christian conversions in India. This lack of conversion, however, should not detract from the Christian missionary impact on and interaction with Indian society. In their effort to convert Indians to Christianity, Christian missionaries often worked with and within Indian linguistic and religious traditions rather than simply advocating the replacement of those traditions with an English language oriented Christianity. The four papers of this panel focus on the more vernacularist tradition, broadly speaking, of Protestant Christian missionary activity. One paper explores a Bengali reformer’s Bengali translation of a commonly used British school textbook and argues that this textbook, used by British missionaries in their Bengali vernacular schools, supported a more secular rather than Christian enlightening agenda. Another paper examines Scottish missionary-orientalists in Bombay and how they understood and sought to use the various religious traditions in Bombay to facilitate Christian conversions. Similar to the paper on Scottish missionaries in Bombay, the third paper focuses on two Scottish orientalists in India who were not explicitly "Christian missionaries" but nevertheless in their effort to translate a particularly Scottish enlightenment based concept of Christianity into an Indian idiom operated as de facto Christian missionaries. The final paper examines the first Protestant missionary in India, the German Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, and the nature of his understanding of Hinduism in relationship to Christianity.

Mitchell W. Numark, University of Oklahoma

Sottish missionaries in nineteenth-century Bombay argued that Christianity missionaries needed to acquire a comprehensive understanding of Indian "religions." This knowledge, argued the Scottish missionaries, would facilitate the conversion Indians to Christianity. In fact, the Bombay Scottish missionaries saw the religions of the Indian people as the path through which the truth of Christianity would be most effectively illustrated. But what exactly were the religions of India? How were they formulated and classified? How were the Indian religions related to the Scottish missionary notion of both "Christianity" and the conceptual category of "religion"? This paper explores these questions by excavating the category of religion in nineteenth-century Bombay Presidency. It examines the concept of "religion" held by Scottish missionaries and how that conceptualization informed their formulation of the "religions" of Bombay’s diverse inhabitants. Scottish missionaries in nineteenth-century Bombay were some of the most respected Orientalist scholars in western India. They employed their "Orientalist" knowledge in their religious debates with Bombay’s Hindus, Parsis, Jews, Jains, Muslims, and Roman Catholics. The encounters between Scottish missionaries and Bombay’s religiously diverse population makes Bombay a particularly rich context from which one can explore how the British understood and sought to disseminate their idea of "Hinduism," the conceptual category "religion," and the other religious traditions represented in Bombay.

Parna Sengupta, DePaul University

The scholarship on nineteenth century colonial school books and children’s literature tends to focus on how "Western" models and prototypes were "vernacularized" by native writers. In this essay, I examine an interesting instance of how a "native" version of a "Western" schoolbook, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar’s Bodhodoy, managed to capture the imagination of "Western" missionaries in Bengal. I tell this story through a debate, in the 1870s, between local Bengali missionaries and various metropolitan organizations over the practice of using Vidyasagar’s language readers in place of Christian texts produced by the CVES (the Christian Vernacular Education Society). The CVES texts offered a simplified Bengali orthography and didactic Christian messages. The books written by Vidyasagar employed a highly Sanskritzed and erudite Bengali, sadhu-bhasa that was a language better suited to literary production than the more utilitarian concerns of evangelical literacy. However, missionaries in Bengal were convinced that the "poetic" nature of Vidyasagar’s Bengali spoke to its "authenticity" and routinely used Bodhodoy to instruct their students and incoming missionaries in the Bengali language. What local missionaries studiously ignored, and what the CVES and metropolitan organizations pointed out, was that Bodhodoy (a Bengali translation of the Chambers’ Rudiments of Knowledge) explained the world through emerging theories of natural science and geology rather than evangelical Christianity. Vidyasagar further modified the Chambers’ books to reflect the social and religious beliefs of upper-caste Hindus. I argue that by choosing Vidyasagar’s texts over the CVES evangelical primers and readers, local missionaries took on a pedagogic vision that was not only more "secular" than that of metropolitan Christian schools, but also informed by an upper-caste Hindu model of language and culture.

Richard Young, Princeton Theological Seminary

Though by no means cut from the same cloth, John Wilson (Bombay), Alexander Duff (Calcutta), and John Anderson (Madras) are perhaps the three figures considered most representative of Scottish missions to India. Less well-known are the non-missionary Scots who favored an Enlightenment paradigm for the transformation of India, one that was overtly ‘pro-Christian’ but less soteriocentric and more comprehensively modernist. Orientalists John Muir and James Ballantyne, two Scots who presided over the Benares Sanskrit College in the middle of the 19th century, will be discussed with a particular focus on their textual projects for translating the Scottish Enlightenment into Sanskrit. Central to this project was the construction of a ‘shastra’ (a systematic corpus of philosophical theology), the recruitment of indigenous ‘advocates,’ and the articulation of a broader vision for India’s transformation than the one ordinarily associated with missionary Christianity.

B. William H. Sweetman, University of Otago, New Zealand

For European missionaries in India, the study of Indian religions was always subordinate to their primary work of conversion, despite criticism from Europe which sometimes suggested otherwise. There is evidence to suggest, however, that some missionaries took a long view of their missionary task when assessing their strategic priorities. The first Protestant missionary to India, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, was also one of the greatest of all missionary scholars of Hinduism. Until his return to Europe in 1714, Ziegenbalg devoted much of his time to the study of Hinduism. This paper will examine the reasons for this, and will speculate on the reasons why he did not write anything of significance on Hinduism after his return to India in 1716. Ziegenbalg took great pains to assemble a library of Tamil manuscripts but, as the loss of this library demonstrates, few of his immediate successors in the Tranquebar mission approached the study of Hinduism with comparable seriousness. The paper will consider the reasons for this, and the use of Ziegenbalg’s writings on Hinduism by later missionaries.