British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861 9781783087266, 1783087269

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British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861

British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861 Sutapa Dutta

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2017 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA © Sutapa Dutta 2017 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-726-6 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1-78308-726-9 (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-book.

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For Ma and Baba

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CONTENTS List of Figures

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Acknowledgements

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Abbreviations Introduction

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Part I. ON A DOUBLE MISSION 1. Merchants, Mercenaries, Missionaries

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2. Representing ‘Otherness’ and the Agenda of Reform

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Part II. FEMALE AGENCY 3. ‘Helpmeets’ and Wives of Missionaries (1793–1820)

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4. ‘Mothers’ and Single Women Missionaries (1820–40)

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Part III. INTERTWINED IMAGES 5. ‘Ladies’ and the Zenana (1840–60)

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6. The ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’ Sisters

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Notes

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Index

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FIGURES 1.1 Fort William, Calcutta, 1760 1.2 India, 1819, a map illustrative of the Baptist Missionary Stations 2.1 Suttee, 1826. From James Peggs’s 1828 essay, The Suttees’ Cry to Britain 3.1 Hannah Marshman’s School for Girls, established in 1818, as it stands today 3.2 The tomb of the Marshman family, Serampore 4.1 The Serampore College, established in 1818, one of the oldest colleges in the country that is still functional 4.2 Tabular view of schools 5.1 A Calcutta Zenana, from Woman in India by Mary Frances Billington (1895), depicts a bold Bengali ‘lady’ with her daughters, surrounded by maids. London: Chapman & Hall, 1895, 72 6.1 A page from Hannah Catherine Mullens’s Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran, 1852

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was begun at a very difficult and unhappy time as I saw my mother battling and losing out to a difficult illness. The months after her death were a vacuum, a hard reality in which writing this book has been as much an exercise in self-realization as it has been cathartic. As someone who inspired her daughters to realize their worth, I owe everything to her. It is a happy coincidence that many women have helped me write this book on women missionaries. To begin with, I am greatly obliged to the missionary sisters and the nuns who were responsible for moulding my formative years in school and college. I have only tried to emulate their dedication, discipline and devotion to work. The book is a grateful acknowledgement of their teaching and service to others. An Early Career Fellowship provided by the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) and Manchester University greatly facilitated the process of writing this book. It provided a stimulating academic environment where discussions with like-minded colleagues from all over the world forged deep bonds of the mind and heart. I  am specially grateful to Penny for her intellectual input and encouragement. A chapter written for a book edited by another special friend, Christina Smylitopoulos, forms the basis of the first chapter of my book. A conference organized at Oxford University by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) further provided me with a grant and a platform to read out a paper on this topic. The book was to eventually develop from this conference paper. I am thankful to the publishers for commissioning this book, to the unknown reviewers for their valuable suggestions and to the editorial department, especially Abi and Vincent, who have always responded with alacrity and professionalism. My students and colleagues, former mentors and teachers have been pillars of strength, with their suggestions, research materials or just emotional support whenever I needed it. I am particularly indebted to Dr Meenakshi Jain, with whom the long sessions of discussions would frequently spill into hours in the corridors and even parking lots. Her knowledge on the subject and the intellectual stimulation she provided have often been the most exciting reasons

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for the extended hours of stay in the college. Above all to my former teacher and mentor, the late Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, I am grateful for stimulating my interest in Indian literature. The seed of the last chapter was sown by her many years back. The research would not have been complete without the assistance of librarians and archivists, some of whom have gone out of their way to help me. Emily Burgoyne was extremely helpful during my brief stint at the Baptist Missionary Archive, Angus Library in Oxford and continued to track down elusive materials even after I had returned to India. Bennie Crockett gave me permission to reproduce images from the William Carey Center, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA, and Phaedra Casey at the Brunel University London Archives very graciously allowed me to access research materials pertaining to the British and Foreign School Society. I am equally grateful to the staff of India Office at the British Library in London; the John Rylands Library in Manchester; the Sahitya Akademi, Delhi; the National Archives of India; the Asiatic Society, Calcutta; and Carey Library and Research Centre, Serampore. Finally, the work was sustained by the help, support and encouragement of my family and friends. My sister Sujata has been the first sounding board for my ideas, and like in every point of my life, has been my best friend and critic. To Ayan and Pinku I am grateful for their patience and understanding, and above all I owe everything to my parents, who would have been very proud had they been here.

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ABBREVIATIONS BFBS BFSS BMS BZM CMS CSBS CSS EIC LMS LSNFE SPCK SPG SPFEE

The British and Foreign Bible Society The British and Foreign School Society Baptist Missionary Society Baptist Zenana Mission Church Missionary Society Calcutta School Book Society Calcutta School Society East India Company London Missionary Society Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Society for Promoting Female Education in the East

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INTRODUCTION The role of the British missionaries has been perhaps the single most important factor related to the long existence of the British in India. The involvement of missionaries in establishing educational institutions and the dissemination of materialist and humanist learning has enabled generations of Indians to have benefited from scholastic intercourse. Missionary activities in a colonial context have time and again been criticized for the ulterior motives of evangelization and conversion.1 In India, missionaries have been either the target of vitriolic attacks or are regarded as the face of a benevolent imperialism that introduced a ‘modern’ way of life. It is precisely because of such contrasting reactions that more scholarly insights are required to gauge the importance of missionaries in reforming indigenous lives in India. Of course, evangelization and conversion have remained inextricably entwined to colonization and empire building. At the same time, I can vouch, having studied in a ‘convent’ school and college (an indigenous lingo for educational institutions run by missionaries) that the overall general feeling towards missionaries is undoubtedly of appreciation for having enriched the intellectual and moral life of Indians. In spite of their positive input, missionaries remain largely unacknowledged, themselves preferring to remain in the shadows. Missionary activity in India has been one of the largest colonial ventures, but there are very few scholarly writings that throw light on this crucial encounter. Though a lot of writings exist by the missionaries themselves, there is a surprising lack of writings on them. One obvious deterrent to any study on missionaries in India is the sheer size and scope of such studies. My effort has been to limit the study to Bengal. Bengal was the place where at the end of the seventeenth century Job Charnock pitched his tent on a marshy piece of land and made an empire from it. It was again the place where, a century later, William Carey landed with his family, tired and battered after a long journey from England, hoping to establish an evangelical mission. Both men were hugely successful. Evangelization remained an intrinsic part in the establishment of the British Empire in India, and their mutual dependence paved the success of the British existence in India. What remains a disconcerting thought, though, is that apart

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from a handful of scholars and missiologists, there is a general lack of awareness regarding the involvement of the missionaries in laying the bedrock of the Indian education system. Some of the more prominent names like William Carey, fondly remembered as Carey Saheb, Alexander Duff and Robert May remain etched in the memory of Bengalis of the older generation. Sadly, these names and their contributions have hardly any reverberation in the minds of the present generation of Indians. It is important therefore to chronicle the contributions of missionaries in Bengal, not just for a deeper appreciation of their efforts but also, more importantly, to reassess their mark upon the historiography of the British Empire in India. In the study of British relations with India, missionary writings have been a major source of information which has largely shaped the way the West has perceived India. As many of the missionaries were vocal and scholarly, their opinions, views and representations of India mattered a great deal in influencing not just the opinion of Englishmen but also educated elite Indians. While most studies have given credit to male missionaries, the women who joined the missions have remained practically in oblivion.2 Many of them led extraordinary lives as partners to their more famous husbands, yet their contributions to the establishment of missions in India have either been ignored or dismissed. It is only recently that scholars have realized the importance of female missionaries’ contribution in fashioning an imperialist image.3 Most of such works focus on the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the scenario was to change perceptibly with an increasing number of women missionaries working in established and structured educational and healthcare missions in India. This book focuses on the participation of British women in mission work in Bengal, and the challenges faced by them between 1793 and 1861, especially when travelling to India or working in missions was neither a spontaneous nor an acceptable career decision for white women. The advent of the Baptist missionary William Carey in Bengal in 1793, and later the others who followed him, significantly altered the ways mission activity was perceived in India. From Hannah Marshman, who helped her more famous missionary husband, Joshua Marshman, open schools for girls, to Mary Ann Cooke, the first single woman missionary to go and work in India, and finally to Hannah Catherine Mullens who began working in the zenanas, was a long journey which helped professionalize women’s missionary work in the colonies. The year 1861 seems an appropriate year to end the study of the ‘early’ phase of missionary work, as a more proactive phase of evangelization and missionary activity in India was to begin thereafter. That year, as Ernest Payne observed, ‘marked a dividing line in the great Victorian era’.4 In India, the year 1861 witnessed a notable birth and a death. Rabindranath Tagore was born, and

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with his stupendous literary and artistic contributions he reshaped a new face of India. It was also the year that saw the death of Hannah Mullens and the end of an era of the early contributions to education and proselytization by women missionaries in India. This study traces missionary work by women belonging to various Christian denominations and affiliations like the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), London Missionary Society (LMS) and Church Missionary Society (CMS). Dorothy Carey, Hannah Marshman, Mrs Yates, Mrs Mundy, Mrs Pearce, Miss Bird, Elizabeth Sale, Marianne Lewis, Miss Mary Ann Cooke and Hannah Catherine Mullens were exemplary women, even if some were to only suffer silently and others were more active in their mission to ‘educate’ and ‘reform’ native women. They rendered invaluable service in running schools and boarding houses for girls, and providing shelter and security to the widows and orphans in the missions. Their work was a pioneering step which helped build a defining space and agency for women’s activities within a patriarchal colonial society. Their role and responsibilities have greatly shaped our understanding of the ‘woman question’ and future mission activities by women and for women in our society. Unfortunately, the utter paucity of any documentation of their work makes any interpretation more challenging. And whatever little is available, these women missionaries in true Christian spirit of selfless devotion to work, are modest of their achievements and seldom if ever voice their complaints and frustrations. Most of the information that is available to us comes from the private correspondence they had with their family, relative and friends in England. Ironically, information on women missionaries can be gathered more from the memoirs of male missionaries, which reveal bits and pieces of information on their female co-workers in missions. In fact, the Christian evangelical societies did not even recognize these women as ‘missionaries’. Missionary activity was largely a male domain, and women were merely ‘helpmeets’. Needless to say, except for a few ‘famous’ ones, the rest of the lives of female missionaries and their works have not been documented nor was even thought worth preserving. In interpreting missionary writings and correspondence, one has to therefore depend on the underlying meanings, silences and gaps. As J.  Cox emphasized, ‘Interpreting missionary records requires constant attention to the multiple levels of exclusion in the narratives’.5 The period under study saw a remarkable efflorescence of political, social and religious changes brought about by the advent of the British in India. From the initial military success of the East India Company in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, until Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India in 1858, the British image had largely altered from a mercantile company to one of the most powerful empires in the world.6 Within a span of a century,

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Bengal had witnessed dramatic changes. No longer was it the endless expanses of ‘new mud, old mud and marsh’.7 The European representations in Bengal were marked by hectic economic activity with the intention of gaining permanent territorial rights. The Dutch, French and Danes chose the right bank of the river Hooghly, while the English fortified the already anglicized Calcutta (derived from Kalikata) on the left bank. In place of the old Fort William, the new fort in Calcutta became emblematic of British power in India.8 It was recognized as a symbol of British military power, and the College of Fort William became one of the foremost centres of scholarly activity.9 The printing of textbooks, the translation of vernacular books, the establishment of schools and universities, churches and hospitals indicated that the British meant to settle in Bengal for a good period of time. As more women from England began arriving to join their men serving in the Company, a vast array of infrastructure began to be set in place. Calcutta was fast becoming an imperial city.10 Some of the newly arrived memsahibs, Mrs Kindersley, Mrs Fay and the anonymous author of Hartly House, wrote avidly of the splendour of magnificent buildings in Calcutta, a ‘City of Palaces’ where horse racing, boating on the Hooghly, visits to the theatres, ball dances and parties were becoming common.11 Not everyone was living in opulence, as these writings seem to imply, but unfortunately there was no one to write for the others. Nor do such chronicles mention the lives of the native Bengalis,12 who mostly lived huddled in a segregated area far from European settlement. But there was a distinctly rising elite mercantile class of Bengalis who were growing richer on the bounties shared with the British ruling class. As the British established themselves in Bengal from the late seventeenth century, they had to draw upon a range of ideas that would alter their image from mercenary mercantilists to benevolent imperialists. The ideas included defining a ‘civilized’ and ‘superior’ image of the English, and under the governance of men like Warren Hastings, Cornwallis and Wellesley, Bengal soon became an enviable centre of learning. The intellectual foundation upon which the British constructed their rule in India legitimized their governance, and consequently there was not much difficulty in convincing either the English back at home or the Indians that the imposition of their governance would be the most beneficial thing.13 The initial hesitation of the government in permitting evangelization may have delayed the arrival of the British missionaries in India. But by 1813 it was quite evident that in spite of differences between the Orientalists and the Anglicists,14 all roads were being paved for welcoming the missionaries. British policies of governance and evangelization in India began to be greatly influenced by the series of evangelical reforms in England and Europe which generated an active enthusiasm to introduce them for the moral

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improvement of Britain’s Indian subjects. Chapter 1 explores the governance and evangelical policies that enabled a handful of merchants to become the undisputed rulers of India. Simultaneously, early British representations of India in their writings, memoirs and letters facilitated and consolidated the evangelical project of ‘educating’ and ‘improving’ the natives. Locating the exotic, the pagan and the vast ungovernable excesses of India became a means to represent and formulate opinion about India and its people. Chapter 2 looks at some of the representative writings on India by British administrators, travellers and missionaries. The purpose is to indicate not only how India was imagined and represented but also how particular tropes of representation were used to demonstrate English superiority and control. The chapter examines some of the early writings roughly between 1760 and 1860 and looks at the embodiment of ‘otherness’ in the ways the British represented India. It does not claim to be exhaustive, given the vast array of writings available, nor does it purport to identify the complex determinants of ‘otherness’. The purpose is to trace some representative samplings of narratives and discourses which were imminent in shaping or changing perceptions. At the same time, such writings which generalize and sometimes stereotype social, cultural and gender characteristics, can be seen disregarding the sociocultural contexts and numerous other parameters that define the multiplicity of native identity. It is argued that the various ‘imaginings’ of ‘India’ were transformative in nature, using rhetorical strategies and tropes of discovering a nascent India which could be shaped and moulded according to colonial fantasies. The purpose of such colonial discourses was to diagnose what was lacking and to rectify it by playing what Promod K. Nayar calls ‘an interventionary and transformative’ role.15 The second part of the book chronicles and historicizes British women missionaries’ early contribution in Bengal. Chapter  3 deals with the participation of the wives of missionaries, particularly the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and Calcutta from 1793 to 1820 and their position typically as ‘helpmeets’ providing support and encouragement to their husbands. At a time when not many were willing to accompany their husbands to an alien land that was perceived as hostile in every possible way, these women came to India to be ‘useful’ to their husbands, and subsequently went on to establish orphanages and educational institutions for women. In fact, most missionary men travelling to India were actively encouraged to bring their families, as mission homes were to exemplify an alternative form of female agency and domesticity. This chapter looks at the challenges, both physical and emotional, as they sought to establish themselves and their work in Bengal. I  discuss further the apparent contrast and conflict between two dissimilar,

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contradictory sets of familial and marital relationships, as it was perceived – the ‘ideal’ British Protestant Victorian family life, organized domesticity and exemplar marital unions versus ‘heathenish’, ‘amoral’, multiple, dysfunctional native partnerships. At the same time I argue that the early missionary wives regarded as ‘empowered’ guardians and benefactresses of society, can be seen struggling to fit into the construed ideal role, often resulting in anxiety, mental illness and death. From the 1820s onwards, the education of females was envisaged to be instrumental as a particular agenda of ‘civilizing’ the colonies. The participation of women was not to be restricted just to a limited domestic sphere. Women’s work had obviously now greater potential. It was necessary therefore to mobilize women in order for women to alleviate the suffering of womankind. The result was a flurry of writings highlighting what the West perceived to be the pathetic and disgraceful condition of women in India, with volumes being published from India and England and having dramatic titles like A Collection of Facts and Opinions Relative to the Burning of Widows with the Dead Bodies of Their Husband; An Earnest Appeal to British Humanity in Behalf of Hindoo Widows and The Suttees’ Cry to Britain.16 Again, tracts like The Importance of Female Agency in Evangelizing Pagan Nations encouraged British women’s participation, to lessen the suffering of their Indian sisters.17 Chapter 4 focuses on the contributions made by female missionaries, especially single women missionaries who began arriving in the period from 1820 to 1840. These women worked under the aegis of the BMS, LMS and CMS, though they were still not officially recognized by these societies as ‘missionaries’. But for all practical purposes their work for the missions was no less than that of their male counterparts. The transition from ‘wives of missionaries’ to ‘missionary women’ was one of negotiation – a negotiation of women’s position within a very constricted patriarchal colonial framework. Their ‘natural’ characteristics as women and mothers were projected as qualities that differentiated them from not just men but also from ‘heathen’ women. In contrast to the limited freedom of women in contemporary Britain,18 these English women in India exercised the power to open schools, teach, instruct, discipline and impose social, cultural and moral norms and standards of behaviour. In trying to lessen the burden of their ‘other’ sisters, the white women were successfully empowering themselves. As agents of emancipation these women inadvertently opened a similar liberating space for themselves. The third part analyses the mutual control and influence that such contact points brought in the cultural identity of both the native and missionary women. Female education, which had until then been limited to lower-class native women, widened its scope to encompass the upper-class native women into its ambit. Chapter  5 explores the conflict and contestations of gender

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identity in the period from 1840 to 1860 as British women missionaries made their first foray into the zenana. As female education ventured into the hitherto sheltered zenana, the living apartments for aristocratic native ladies, it opened up a whole new world of caste, class, gender, prejudices and resistance. The zenana became a site of cross-cultural exchange, which despite the overall repressive history of British imperialism, curiously exhibited multiple ambivalent and paradoxical collaborations and mediations. As the women missionaries made an attempt to understand and represent a more structured embodiment of Indian womanhood, they inevitably redefined their own gender roles and identity. The encounter of two very diverse cultures, of reciprocal exchange and influence, often illuminated an intertwined image that cut across all binary polarities of weak and strong, colonized and colonizer, the caged and the liberated. Chapter 6 deals with the impact of missionary activities in shaping Indian society’s outlook. The chapter studies the implications of missionary writings on the lifestyle of Indian women, especially issues of defining femininity and womanly behaviour. A  stringent categorization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that codified morality therefore reconfigured the ways femininity and womanhood were conceived from the mid-nineteenth century in colonial Bengal. The defining of Christian and un-Christian behaviour as markers of morality and respectability came to be associated with unbridgeable cultural and racial differences. The vocabulary of social reform and philanthropy, with its metaphoric tropes of cultural superiority, also found an echo in the discourse of the rising educated Bengali middle class, who actively colluded with the dominant ideology. The Young Bengal movement, with which a small but fairly distinguished group of Bengalis of the period were associated, sought to reform society. Their active resistance to some of the obvious decadent and orthodox practices in society like child marriage and widow burning did bring positive changes in society. At the same time, adopting Western concepts of a ‘cultured’ life often resulted in Bengali babus and mems being comical prototypes of English gentlemen and ladies. The growing enthusiasm amongst the Bengali elites for the education of girls was a trend towards the moral and intellectual edification of women. Much of the emerging vernacular literature of this period too demonstrated a marked tendency to emphasize ‘proper’ feminine etiquette and ‘ideal’ wifely duties. Novels depicting the antithetical good sister versus the bad sister reiterated the concept of femininity as a constructed and cultivated prototype which women had to adhere to. It marked a new paradigm of identity and a new way of defining gender, race and class. The ‘improvements’ in women in particular and society in general came to be associated with the palpable benefits of education, moral instruction and Christian evangelization.

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The book argues that the arrival of the Western missionary women brought extensive contestations and transformations to the role and identity of both the white and the native sisters. It is important to understand the contradictory nature of such positions in terms of dominance and subordination when white women were brought in with a special imperial ‘burden of civilizing’ their counterparts in the colonies. These ‘sisters of mission’ were, albeit to a limited extent, seen as empowered agents responsible for civilizing and liberating their ‘other’ sisters. As the book demonstrates, this first generation of emancipationists were not doing it for a universal suffering, downtrodden sisterhood, and neither were they articulate in their arguments for female liberation. On the contrary, there was the struggle to adapt themselves to the challenges of complex factors like physical displacement from home, emotional bareness, economic dependence, family responsibilities, diseases and death. There was immense psychological pressure to fit into a stereotype of a good missionary/ wife – a role predetermined for them and many a times without their consent, which suited the largely male-dominated colonizing and proselytizing missions in British India. The issue of the ‘woman question’ was more about the demonstration of white women’s moral authority, as distinguished from the political authority exercised by men, and clearly differentiated in the private and public domain. Their moral superiority, though limited to the domestic sphere, helped ratify the public imperial space as beneficial. This then was their responsibility towards their race, nation and the empire itself. The work also seeks to demonstrate that the initial stages of missionary activities, secular or for conversion, were often undertaken without reflecting on or internalizing native women’s position, place or identity in the present society. Part of what has created a veritable tension between women’s role and imperialism has been the way Western feminism has ignored the realities and complexities of feminism and have universalized Western women’s experiences as representative of ‘problems of women’. Their entire exercise of educating and ‘uplifting’ native women, done with the purpose of ‘empowering’ the other woman, undermines and overlooks the agency with which such women are already empowered. The early missionaries ostensibly did not want to ‘interfere’ in the status quo and the internal affairs of the country but brought in their baggage of ideas regarding social transformation. Ideologies of ‘ideal’ womanhood from a Western-centric authoritative position led to much bewilderment and questioning of the existing native institutions of marriage, family and role of women. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the activities of the women missionaries helped shape the conditions under which women in future, both whites and natives, articulated and engaged in their struggle for power. The object of this work is to throw light, at a key moment in colonial contact, on a new interface between two races, religions

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and ways of life. From a hesitant beginning of preaching to and teaching the ‘lesser privileged other women’, to a more confident phase of mission activities in the form of establishing formal educational institutions and printing textbooks is a long legacy of white women’s participation in overseas colonial encounters. Historicizing imperial feminism will, I believe, enable us in locating and interrogating its ramifications on more ‘modern’ notions of feminism and reinforce the importance of colonial experience in self-fashioning a British and Indian identity.

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Part I ON A DOUBLE MISSION England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive and the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. – Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853

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Chapter 1 MERCHANTS, MERCENARIES, MISSIONARIES I prayed […] that England while she sent the thunder of her arms to the distant regions of the globe, might not remain proud and ungodly at home; but might show herself great indeed, by sending forth the ministers of her church to diffuse the gospel of peace.1 India has always been a fantastic host. Throughout the history of India, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mughals, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish and English have invaded and controlled parts of the country. The primary attraction for all the conquerors and colonizers who have time and again raided or ruled India has been the fabled great riches of a land of wealth and wonder. No doubt India lost a great part of her opulence and magnificence to the marauders, but in the bargain the country has also been immensely enriched by such long cultural associations with diverse foreign people. Modern European links with India began with the discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese traveller Vasco da Gama in 1497. The Portuguese had a settlement in Goa, on the western coast of India, until 1962. The Dutch company had its trading bases in Pulicat and Surat. The French had their posts in Surat and Pondicherry, and in Bengal they occupied Chandernagore, which was retained until 1954. The Danish company had a base in Serampore, in Bengal, between 1755 and 1845. The British East India Company (EIC), established in London in 1600 and known as ‘the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’, grew to be the paramount power in India, responsible for the governance of one of the largest empires in history. Its principal settlements were Bombay on the west coast, Madras in the south of the country and Calcutta on the eastern coast. In the first phase of its journey from merchants to administrators, the EIC was dictated primarily by commercial interests and then gradually to consolidate its interests especially against its other European rivals. The Company at first received a firman from the Mughal court in 1608 and got permission to trade in the western parts of India. With a consistent aim to establish its hold on the rest of India, it tried to receive more trading

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privileges. Its journey from a small handful of merchants, who came with the purpose of trade and commerce, to one of the mightiest colonial powers in India, is what Edmund Burke calls one of the ‘most stupendous revolutions that have happened in our age of wonder’.2 The transition from merchants to rulers was a gradual, conscious and strategized approach. This chapter traces the evolution of the British in India, from their arrival in Bengal in eastern India as a mercantile company, their political struggles to establish a hold in Bengal and subsequently the projection of a benevolent image of educating, civilizing and enlightening agent. When the English first came to Bengal in the middle of the seventeenth century, the place which was to be later named Calcutta was a small hamlet surrounded by unhealthy marshy land. The demand in the West for exotic commodities from the East and an increasing competition with other European powers were compelling reasons for the Company to establish permanent trading posts in Bengal. Having come to Bengal with allegedly ‘purely commercial purposes’,3 early factors like Job Charnock made Sutanuti, on the banks of the Hooghly, his ‘mid-day halt’.4 The Company merchants were allowed by the then ruling Mughal emperors to set up a factory by 1651. No site was marked for a factory, with ‘everyone taking in what ground best pleased them […] the English building near the river’s side, and the natives within land’.5 Charnock’s choice of the site which was to later become the capital of British India was perhaps not just by chance. It was ‘chosen with careful consideration’,6 and its strategic location next to the sea was undoubtedly of commercial and military advantage. P. J. Marshall notes that the early English factories, wherever they were established in India, ‘at first had certain obvious similarities. They confirmed to a pattern recognised throughout Asia.’7 These were secluded enclaves close to rivers, consisting of warehouses and living quarters for merchants who were staffed by servants. Having realized that trade would inevitably mean skirmishes with native powers and oppositions from rival merchant groups, William Hedges, the governor of the Company’s settlement in Bengal, as early as 1677, had urged the Company to build a fort for protecting their factory in Bengal. ‘We must seize some convenient port and fortify it […] Custom must not be paid. We must resolve to quarrel with these people and build a fort’.8 In 1683 the response was cautious and restrained, albeit with a whiff of threat: ‘Our business is trade not war.’9 A year later their belligerence was very evident when they sent an ultimatum to the nawab at Dacca warning, ‘if the Fort, Town and Territory thereunto belonging be not forthwith delivered to our Lieutenant Colonel Job Charnock, we would have our forces land, seize and take the said Town, Fort and Territory by force of arms’.10 By the end of the seventeenth century, the Company had been granted the rights of the three villages of Sutanuti, Kalikata and Govindpur, and Bengal

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had been declared a separate presidency. The fortified settlement was named Fort William in honour of the reigning king of England. While the Mughal Empire was still a powerful entity, the English Company had control over three important points in India, namely, Bombay in the west, Madras in the south and Calcutta in the east. By then the rest of the European powers were not doing too badly for themselves in Bengal. The Dutch had settled about 25 miles upstream at Chinsurah in 1653. A little way down the river, the French had founded their colony in Chandernagore by 1673. The Danes were to have their mission station in Serampore about half a century later. The English approach to territorial expansion was no different in technique from the other European colonizers, militarism and fortification being characteristic ways of overseas expansion.11 Both the Dutch and the French used better fortifications and firearms to transform their offensive and defensive operations. The start of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a remarkable expansion of, as Philip Woodruff put it, ‘an empire at which they looked with the incredulous elation, shot with sharp twinges of doubt’.12 It saw the arrival of boatloads of young men from Britain, eager to make their fortunes in Bengal. They were appointed as writers on the payroll of the Company and provided free board and accommodation in a long row of commodious lodgings known as the Writer’s Building in Calcutta. Apart from the salary they got, they were encouraged to trade privately, resulting in a free-for-all plunder of goods and wealth. Their callous and rapacious behaviour was soon to invite the displeasure of the nawab of Bengal, who wrote to the governor, ‘And this is the way your Gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, injure and disgrace my servants’.13 Not just the English, the Mughal rulers and the local zamindars (landlords) were equally led by avarice and corruption. Local traders and peasants continued to be fleeced mercilessly, and the economic condition of Bengal deteriorated sharply after the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707. There followed a period of chaos as the nominal successors of Aurangzeb did nothing to provide security, especially from the frequent attacks of the Marathas. To protect its interests the Company decided to strengthen the existing Fort William. Between 1701 and 1703, John Beard played a significant role in making additions to Fort William. He was determined to ward off any attack rather than ‘to be always giving to every rascal’ who thought he could injure the interests of the English.14 By 1710 the fort as it stood was ‘an irregular tetragon of brick and mortar’, an expansive bastion with mounted guns and heavy canons.15 Internal changes took place simultaneously as mud huts and thatched roofs were pulled down and more permanent warehouses and lodgings were built in its place. The gradual expansion and strengthening of the fort coincided with the increasing confidence and belligerent contentions of the English East India Company in Bengal. While it

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seemingly protected the trading interests of the merchants and provided security to its residents, the implicit message was also one of symbolic assertion of military prowess not to be taken lightly or ignored. However, all its show of strength was done in a slipshod manner, and though the fort ‘made a very pompous show to the waterside by high turrets of lofty buildings’, it nevertheless ‘lacked real strength or power of defence’.16 So, when the combative behaviour of the English invited the ire of Siraj-ud-daullah, the nawab of Bengal, Fort William was not in the least prepared to withstand the attack. The nawab strongly objected to fortification on his land and expressed his intention, saying, It has been my design to level the English fortifications raised within my jurisdiction on account of their great strength. If the English are contented to remain in my country, they must submit to have their fort razed, ditch filled and trade upon the same terms as they did [earlier].17 The nawab’s threat was presumably not taken seriously, and when in June 1756 his army attacked Calcutta, there was virtually no degree of preparedness among the handful of English men who guarded the Fort. J. Z. Holwell, the then-governor of the fort, recounts the nawab marching with an army of ‘30,000 horses and 35,000 foot with about 400 elephants of war’. This was clearly no match for the ‘260 European officers and soldiers’.18 The subsequent capitulation of the fort happened with the infamous Black Hole tragedy on 20 June 1757, in which almost all those who were in the fort lost their lives. When Siraj-ud-daullah overran the fort, he ordered all the English prisoners to be put in a room where, allegedly, of the 146 prisoners jailed in the cramped room, 123 died of suffocation. Holwell, who survived the Black Hole incident, built a monument in memory of those who perished. The Holwell Monument is inscribed with the names of those who died.19 Though the precise number of those who died that night has not been determined by historiographers, this incident remains one of the most wellknown leitmotifs of Anglo-Indian conflict in modern times. ‘The mythical history of the British Empire in the East begins in a black hole’, writes Partha Chatterjee, in his The Black Hole of Empire.20 Though its ramifications have probably been a little exaggerated and dramatized by historians, the incident no doubt became a pretext for further encounters between the English and the rulers of Bengal. A swift imposition of the authority of the English was possible by Robert Clive demanding the restoration of privileges and threatening the nawab with consequences of non-compliance. On 23 June 1757, at Plassey, near Calcutta, after a farcical war enmeshed with conspiracy and treachery, Siraj-ud-daullah was defeated and assassinated. The Battle of Plassey laid the foundation stone of the consolidation of the British Empire in India. At least

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Figure 1.1 Fort William, Calcutta, 1760. Coloured engraving by Jan Van Ryne. Source: Courtesy of Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D. D. (1761–1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA.

as Percival Spear put it, ‘the financial bleeding of Bengal had begun’.21 Clive took his share of £234,000 for all the trouble he had taken,22 and later Mir Zafar, who became the nawab in 1760, had to make considerable ‘presents’ to the Company to retain his position as a puppet king. After 1757, although the state continued to be ruled by the nawab, military power remained in the hands of the Company, and the merchants had a free run of the revenue. The times were alarming as everyone who could, preyed on the land and economy, made worse by the famine that hit Bengal in 1770. Into this mess walked Warren Hastings in 1772, at the age of 39, as general of Bengal. There was an urgent need for a complete overhaul of the image of the Company and a new incarnation as an imperial power. The Company needed a stronger fortification for fear of threats from indigenous rulers of Bengal as well as from European competitors. The battered old fort required to be replaced with a citadel more solid and impregnable. A more proactive imagining of an English identity back home23 meant a similar projection of identity in its colonies. The new fort, which was completed ‘at the total cost of two million sterlings’,24 became one of the most impressive showpieces of British rule in India. The East India Company Act of 1773 imposed a series of parliamentary and economic reforms. The Parliament gained substantial control over the Company, and Hastings was now officially recognized as the governor general of India.

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Hastings had an imperial vision, and in the founding period of the British Raj he can be justly credited for the shrewd adaptation and skilful manipulation of existing sociocultural institutions of India. Spear credits him for being the first ‘to understand Indian culture as a basis for a sound administration’.25 He was quick to realize that if the British had to have a long-standing hold on their colony, then the mercenary image had to be replaced by a more benevolent form. When Hastings took office he was appalled at the general ignorance and incompetence of the Company’s civil servants. Realizing the important role knowledge was to play in the consolidation of a permanent rule, he was quick to acknowledge, ‘Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity.’26 Hastings’s encouragement of oriental learning and patronage of traditional educational institutions was instrumental in the phenomenal revival of ancient learning in India. He himself had a knack for Indian languages, and had achieved a fair degree of competence in Persian and Urdu, two commonly used languages of north India. Assisted by a group of scholars like Charles Wilkins, N. B. Halhed, J. Duncan and William Jones, they made significant contributions to India’s literary landscape. Their scholarly pursuits manifested in the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. Both Sir William Jones, the English Orientalist who introduced Sanskrit literature to the West, and Charles Wilkins made invaluable contributions to literature in general by producing the first English translations of some of the greatest gems of Sanskrit literature. Wilkins gives credit to Jones for his ‘surprising talent […] in seeking fresh sources of knowledge and promoting their cultivation’.27 The European Orientalists were quick to realize the immense potential of this valuable repository of ancient knowledge and wisdom. As Jones emphatically declared, ‘I am convinced that whatever changes we make in our opinions, we always return to the writings of the ancients as to the standard of true taste.’28 The phenomenal rediscovery of the literary compositions of the past, and a significant revival of language and literature by the Orientalists under the aegis of Hastings have been seen as what David Kopf terms as a ‘Renaissance’ of a ‘Golden Age’. Such a renaissance referred to a revitalization of a definite pre-Mughal period of Indian history. Historically, it implied that the Mughal period was a transitory period of medieval barbarity which saw a breakdown of traditional Hindu principles and values and neglected the glorious culture and civilization of ancient India. This implicitly aimed to displace the supremacy of the Muslim rulers by discrediting their rule and tried to legitimize the advent of the English rule, which was seen as encouraging and reviving the glorious past

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of the Hindus. It was generally considered that the Indians’ moral deprivation was due to the long anarchic and despotic rule of earlier tyrants. Much of the evil is the inevitable effect of circumstances, that may disappear under our enlightened Indian government. It should be its object to make them act up to their own moral axioms; this is the first step to their improvement, and is well worthy of our beneficent system of legislation.29 The mercantile image of the East India Company was further increasingly modified and reconceived as a moral enterprise to educate and civilize the subject people under the governorship of Charles Cornwallis and Richard Wellesley. Cornwallis’s first act as governor general in 1786 was to reorganize and cleanse the administration. The Company was essentially still a commercial body, and most of the company officials regarded their role primarily as money-making traders. Cornwallis made a strict distinction between the commercial and the administrative roles by introducing a selective recruitment to the bureaucracy. ‘This was the beginning of the Civil Service as known in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the end of the Company’s commercial activities. Government in its world was now more important than trade.’30 If Hastings’s role was more of a guardian, as someone who patronized and supervised the ancient culture, its art and literature, Cornwallis was keener to Europeanize the administrative system by bringing more of his own people into the army and government. With the arrival of Lord Wellesley in 1798 dramatic changes occurred in the political and social scenes in India. In 1799, Wellesley successfully defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore at Seringapatam, one of the most dreaded enemies of the British and a persistent thorn in their sides. With this the entire South India became open to the British for territorial expansion. Along with its political consolidation the British were eager to strengthen their imperial image. Lord Valentia on his visit to India in 1802–4, was suitably impressed with the magnificence of the city of Calcutta and justified the expenses in his very famous lines: India is a country of splendour, of extravagance, and of outward appearances: that the Head of a mighty empire ought to conform himself to the prejudices of the country he rules over; and that the British, in particular, ought to emulate the splendid works of the Princes of the House of Timour, lest it should be supposed that we merit the reproach which our great rivals, the French, have ever cast upon us, of being alone influenced by a sordid, mercantile spirit. In short, I wish India to be ruled

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from a palace, not from a counting-house; with the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo.31 Wellesley gathered around him an eclectic group of able men who were to form a new British India. He was much enthusiastic to give shape to Hastings’s dream of a centre of learning which would provide training and knowledge of Indian languages. Moreover, he was critical of the existing standards of the young recruits who came from Britain. Most of them were in their teens without any formal education, undisciplined and ignorant of the duties and responsibilities of their station. It was imperative that the civil servants consider themselves no longer as ‘agents of a commercial concern’ but as ‘ministers and officers of a powerful sovereign’.32 On 3 January 1799, Lord Wellesley, the governor general, issued a notification to the civil servants of Bengal Presidency which stated, From and after 1 Jan 1801, no servant will be deemed eligible to any of the offices unless he shall have passed an examination (the nature of which will be hereafter determined) in the laws and regulations and in the languages, a knowledge of which is hereby declared to be an indispensable qualification.33 This rule made it mandatory for officials to have a minimum proficiency in Persian and Hindustani.34 In 1800, Lord Wellesley opened an academy and learning centre of Oriental studies which came to be known as the Fort William College, with the explicit purpose of teaching the vernacular languages to those British who were to be part of the ruling group in India.35 In his Minute in Council at Fort William, dated 18 August 1800, Wellesley stated his objective in establishing a college in Bengal: The British Possession in India now constitute one of the most extensive and populous Empires in the world […] The duty and policy of the British Government in India therefore require, that the system of confiding the immediate exercise of every branch and department of the Government to Europeans educated in its own service, and subject to its own direct control, should be diffused as widely as possible, as well with a view to the stability of our own interests, as to the happiness and welfare of our Native Subjects.36 The College contained accommodation for students and staff, a dining hall, lecture rooms, a science laboratory, a large exam hall and a library that had

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valuable manuscripts in its collection. Wellesley paid detailed attention to the education of the civil servants, ‘their studies, the discipline of their education, their habits of life, their manners and morals so as to establish a just conformity between their public consideration and the dignity and importance of their public stations’.37 John Clark Marshman, in The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward, informs that a notification was circulated throughout the country ‘announcing the establishment of the College and inviting men of learning from its various provinces to proceed to Calcutta and accept the office of teachers, of which more than fifty availed themselves’.38 Only Europeans were appointed as professors and teachers. The College started with a balanced curriculum between oriental and occidental studies. The attempt was to integrate Indian and Western thought and knowledge. Wellesley took personal interest in those he appointed in the College, and most of them, like David Brown (provost), Claudius Buchanan (vice provost), N. B. Edmonstone (Persian), John Baillie (Arabic), H. T. Colebrooke (Sanskrit), J. B. Gilchrist (Hindustani) and William Carey (Bengali), went on to make a considerable name for themselves. Indians were appointed as munshis to help assist and translate Indian languages and literature, and some distinguished Indian scholars eminent in their area of study were Mrityunjay Vidyalamkar (Sanskrit), Ramram Basu (Bengali), Mir Bahadur Ali (Hindustani) and Maulavi Allah Dad (Persian). An essay written by a student of the College in 1802 expressed this feeling: The establishment of the College of Fort William has already excited a general attention to Oriental languages, literature and knowledge, which promises to be productive of the most salutary effects in the administration of every branch of the affairs of the honourable Company in India.39 In spite of its initial success, the College soon became a point of contention among the court of directors. The larger issues were a clash of personalities among the members. While Wellesley’s aim was to train the newly appointed recruits of the Company to undergo ‘an assimilation to Eastern opinions’, Charles Grant, the director of the board, regarded Westernization as a more efficient way. The Company regarded the College as a potential centre for the gradual evangelization of India, as is evident from what Grant wrote in a letter to the Rev. David Brown, dated 19 June 1810, ‘believing the Institution to be capable of producing considerable effects, not political only but religious and moral’.40 Wellesley tried to convince the board by emphasizing that the College of Fort William is founded on the principles of Christian religion, and is intended not only to promote the knowledge of Oriental Literature, to instruct the students in the duties of the several stations to

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which they may be destined in the government of the British empire in India […] but also to maintain and uphold the Christian religion in this quarter of the globe.41 Obviously, then, the College at Fort William, the ‘Oxford of the East’, was meant to reflect the wider religious and educational contentions in contemporary Great Britain. The British policies of governance in Bengal in the early nineteenth century were evidently inspired by larger debates and disputations in the home country and stirred by sociopolitical and religious motives. Evangelical revivalism in England in the eighteenth century, growth of Methodism and New Dissent ensured that the Church of England lost its monopoly over religious life. The industrial population was multiplying and spreading to towns and cities, and the church was incapable of providing for their spiritual requirements. It was a new era of religious and social relations, of challenging passive consensus underlying the social order. Sects adopted and expanded domestic practices; houses and cottages, barns and sheds replaced the function of chapels, providing improvised services in many areas. Such ‘cottage societies’ incorporated local and private affairs into religion in a way that institutionalized services could not and successfully promoted a feeling of shared intimacy and spiritual equality.42 Elementary education was provided by dame schools run by ladies, usually in their houses. These schools catered to the private education of children and imparted rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing. There were also free charity schools especially for children from the lower classes. The instruction given in these schools was very limited, with emphasis being placed on religious learning. The purpose of such schools was avowedly to improve the morals of the lower classes, to make them ‘useful’.43 These free schools were run under the aegis of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). By the middle of the eighteenth century as small villages and towns mushroomed into industrial cities, the demand for education was greatly felt throughout Britain. The radical Anglo-Irish thinker and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft strongly advocated for the education of children and women and laid out specific arguments for the need to empower women.44 Hannah More, the Evangelical educationist known as the ‘shebishop’,45 greatly contributed to the development of Sunday schools. The More sisters opened a boarding school for young ladies in 1758 in Bristol. In the next ten years, Hannah and her sister Martha went on to open about a dozen Sunday schools, and these soon became immensely popular. The SPCK published moral books written by Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer, which used short exemplary stories as the first schoolbooks to be adopted for the moral improvement of the poor.46 From the late eighteenth

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century onwards and all through the nineteenth century, ‘useful knowledge’ in the form of tales, parables and fables, especially from the scriptures, came to be regarded as a compulsory component of elementary education in Britain in order to impart the necessary distinction between vice and virtue, especially among the poor and the deprived. It was not a mere coincidence therefore that moral pedagogy was introduced as a reformation tool to highlight and correct the moral depravity of the subjects in Bengal. Economic and social deprivation was often associated with moral decadence, and it was assumed that those who were ‘superior’ were obliged to reform social profligacy. Sir Edwin Arnold, who translated the Hitopadesha, a book of fables, from Sanskrit to English, claimed in the preface that it was his ‘residence in India, and close intercourse with the Hindoos’ that had given him ‘a lively desire to subserve their advancement’.47 Again in his long introduction to A Glossary, Sir Graves Chamney Haughton stated that the role and object of the newly established educational institutions in Bengal and the rest of India was ‘bettering the condition of the natives’48 and ‘anxious to facilitate the progress of the student, I  have from time to time prepared elementary and other works filled for the purpose.’49 Education was seen as a tool for reformation, and the rule of the British as a benevolent alternative to the erstwhile rulers of India. Haughton further observed that should the Company officials not perform their duties zealously, ‘she [India] will relapse into a state of anarchy and misery greater than that from which the skill and valour of the British arms have rescued her.’50 Grant, an Anglicist and a votary of Western education, had been the first to propose intertwining religion with education. His A Proposal for Establishing a Protestant Mission in Bengal and Behar (1787) and later his Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (1792) were highly influential in determining the ways the colonial government would govern its subjects in the coming years. Grant’s enthusiasm for the evangelization of India had led him to put forward his Proposal, which urged that ‘it was the duty of Englishmen to impart to them [the people of India] the civil and religious privileges which they themselves enjoyed’.51 Grant’s Observations, a remarkable educational treatise of its time, was avowedly written with the sole object of ‘remedying disorders, which have become thus inveterate in the state of our society among our Asiatic subjects’.52 Grant’s argument for the establishment of Christian institutions of learning was that the true cure of darkness is the introduction of light. The Hindoos err, because they are 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.53

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Grant’s conclusion was that the eradication of ignorance could be successful with the spread of Western education, and the reformation of society was only possible by the introduction of Christianity. When Grant returned to England in 1790 he, with the help of William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, tried to get the provision for religious instruction of Indians to be included. And when the Charter of 1793 came up for renewal they pressed for the incorporation of the ‘Pious Clause’, which read as follows: XXXIII. And whereas it is the Duty of this country to promote the Interest and Happiness of the Native Inhabitants of the British Dominions in India; and such Measures ought to be adopted as may tend to the Introduction among them of useful Knowledge, and of religious and moral Improvement, and in furtherance of the above Objects, sufficient Facilities ought to be afforded by law to Persons desirous of going to and remaining in India, for the Purpose of accomplishing those benevolent Designs.54 The Company strongly opposed and defeated Grant’s proposal mainly because propagation of Christianity could spell trouble for the Company. In a memorial to the Parliament they unequivocally declared, ‘The sending of Christian Missionaries into our Eastern possessions is the wildest, maddest, most expensive, and most unwarranted plan that was ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast.’55 The Pious Act was eventually officially endorsed in the Charter of 1813, but by then a number of ‘persons desirous of going to and remaining in India, for the purpose of accomplishing those benevolent designs’ had already landed on the shores of India. Though for many decades prior to 1813 the Company had actively discouraged missionary activities in Indian colonies, a series of evangelical reforms in Britain and Europe had generated an active enthusiasm to introduce them for the moral upliftment of its Indian subjects. The establishment of Catholic missions beyond Europe had begun as early as the sixteenth century, particularly when Spain and Portugal embarked on their colonial enterprise. The word missio to denote ‘bringing the unbaptized to faith’56 was used by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The Protestant countries, in contrast, had very little contact with non-Christian nations and people. The Church of England stressed formal theological correctness and formalities. The Methodist movement particularly, led by John Wesley after 1738, stressed a more personalized type of piety that gave importance to good work. Methodism became an indirect inspiration for the Evangelical movement led by Willberforce from the 1780s onwards. The Evangelicals laid emphasis on the practical methods of moral and social reforms and supported scriptural teachings in elementary

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schools. The SPCK was founded in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701. These two English missionary societies, both Anglican, were responsible for spreading Christian knowledge in Britain and its colonies. They were not only instrumental in sending a supply of ministers to spread the Gospel in colonial parishes but also provided printed books and study materials for elementary education. The evangelical revival of the eighteenth century was based on two cardinal principles: conversion and Christian perfection. It rested on the belief that moral reformation of a nation was not possible unless its people became true Christians.57 And England was firmly of the opinion that it was the best suited for this purpose. And surely, if ever the light of the Gospel of Jesus the Redeemer and Saviour of mankind shall come to the Natives of this country, it must come from England; for there is not a nation in all the world, as the state of the world now is, that has the means or the opportunity for such an undertaking: but for this excellent purpose, it seems the Lord has chosen England.58 Active missionary work was to begin from the early nineteenth century, but the stage was being set. In 1706, after Denmark conquered Tranquebar in South India, King Frederick IV sent Lutheran missionaries to the newly established Danish colony on the Tamilnadu coast. Most of the ministers were Germans, and their initial responsibility was to translate the Bible into the local languages. In 1706, the German evangelist Bartholomew Ziegenbald arrived and applied himself to learning the Tamil language. By 1714, the New Testament was published in Tamil. The Lutheran missionary Christian Friedrich Schwartz, supported by the SPCK, came in 1750 to work in Tanjore. The foundation of three new societies by the end of the century catapulted the spread of Christianity to an exciting height and marked a new era in missionary movement. The Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) was founded in 1792, the London Missionary Society (LMS) followed in 1795 and in 1799 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was instituted. Bengal’s tryst with missionaries and Christianity had begun a century back when a Portuguese Jesuit named Nicolas Pimenta visited Bengal in 1598 and established himself at Hooghly.59 In about 1715 the English merchants founded the Old Church about 50 yards from Fort William. The Armenians, an industrious mercantile people, soon followed the example of the English and built the Armenian Church of St Nazareth in 1724. The English Old Church was destroyed in an earthquake and hurricane which hit Calcutta on 12 October 1757. After the battle of Plassey, the Old Church was demolished. The

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English population had increased significantly by then and, as the Historical and Ecclesiastical Sketches of Bengal noted, the need for a public place of worship was acutely felt in Calcutta, ‘as might be expected in the capital of our Indian Empire’. The new church, St John’s Church, was completed in May 1787 at a cost of nearly two lakh rupees.60 At the same time the need for educational institutions was felt. In 1782 the Military Orphan Institution was founded for the education and support of the orphans of the soldiers of the Bengal military. By this ‘noble institution’ under the guidance of Colonel William Kirkpatrick, ‘numberless boys have been provided for, and a thousand tender females saved from temptation and profligateness’.61 More public charitable institutions appeared, and the Calcutta Free School Society was set up by the end of 1789. Recommended by the SPG, the first Protestant missionary to be sent to Bengal was John Zachariah Kiernander. Born in Sweden, Kiernender’s fate changed when he was ordained in the ministry of Cuddalore in South India. He arrived in India in 1740 and after a brief stay in Cuddalore, where he got married, and then in Tranquebar, he eventually reached Calcutta in 1758. Kiernander opened his Mission School in Calcutta on 1 December 1758, and by the following year there were 175 children enrolled in it.62 Soon he was to lose his wife, but in the following year he remarried a wealthy widow, and ‘the remembrance of all former sorrows was obliterated in the silken embraces of opulent beauty’.63 The wealth of this ‘opulent beauty’ enabled him to complete the Mission Church in Calcutta. When Kiernander died in 1799 at the age of 88, the Mission Church had expanded much and his school was well attended. At the same time another person began his mission in Bengal. William Carey, a Baptist missionary whom his biographer George Smith calls the ‘founder of the Modern Missionary Enterprise’,64 was the most illustrious of the English missionaries in Bengal. A  shoemaker with no formal education, Carey went on to be known for his contributions to education in Bengal. Carey arrived in Bengal in 1793. Aware of the EIC’s antipathy towards missionary work, Carey and his family settled in the Danish settlement of Serampore. He had already published his missionary manifesto in England, titled An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. He was soon joined by Joshua Marshman and William Ward, and in 1800 they founded the Serampore Mission and a Bengali elementary school with 40 boys.65 The Serampore Trio, as Carey, Marshman and Ward were known, took the active lead in setting up schools and printing books, contributing significantly to the supply of educational materials for Fort William College. Their mission work was complemented by Ward’s printing press in Serampore which produced educational materials. With the help of native

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scholars, punches and presses were designed in the vernacular languages. The greatest contribution of the press was in printing textbooks for Fort William College. Even though the Pious Act had been defeated in 1793, Wellesley allowed the missionaries to extend their influence and operations into British territory. Carey was appointed professor of Bengali at the College, and the immediate problem he faced was the almost total lack of pedagogical materials and textbooks. With the active participation of a staff of learned native pundits, Carey set about enhancing the resources by composing a variety of works such as grammars, dictionaries and textbooks in colloquial Bengali. Between 1800 and 1832 the press published about 212,000 books related to grammar, history, folk tales, dictionaries, translations of the Bible and translations of Indian texts.66 A network of missionary and school societies engaged with the spread of liberal instruction was a part of the larger framework of the civilizing mission in Bengal. When the 1813 Charter Act legalized the missionary work in EIC territories, it was decided that a sum of not less than one lac of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India.67 Elementary and higher education in Bengal witnessed a flurry of experimental activities by missionaries, chaplains and laymen, bringing significant changes especially in curriculum and medium of instruction. A large number of mushroom schools sprang up in and around Calcutta. Serampore, Chinsurah, Burdwan and Calcutta were the four important centres. Marshman opened the Benevolent Institution for destitute Eurasian children of Calcutta. Others followed the example of the Serampore Baptists. Henry Creighton, an Evangelist appointed by Grant as the manager of the indigo factory at Guamalati, went on to open several free schools for the native children in Guamalati. Henry Martyn, an Anglican missionary, arrived in India in 1806 and for some months assisted the Serampore Baptists in Bible translation work. He proceeded to Dinapur where he opened schools for vernacular teaching. Nathaniel Forsyth was sent by the LMS. He settled in the Dutch enclave of Chinsurah at the end of the eighteenth century and went on to establish several elementary schools thereafter. He was followed by Robert May, who opened his first Bengali school in his house in 1814. A  direct partnership between the missionaries and the Bengal government led to May’s establishment of the Chinsurah School in the same

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year. Encouraged by financial assistance from the government, May went on to open 15 more Bengali elementary schools in and around Chinsurah. By 1818, when J. D. Pearson took charge, the number had increased to 36, extending up to Bankipur.68 The CMS missionaries were active in the region of Burdwan. Captain James Stewart was to open the Burdwan School in 1816, and he was soon joined by the German missionaries Andrew Jetter and W. J. Deerr, and by the Englishman John Perowne. Some of the well-known public schools in Bengal run by Europeans were the Malda School (1803) run by John Ellerton, Cumming’s Calcutta Academy, David Drummond’s Dharmatala Academy, Sherburne School and Alexander Duff’s school. The Calcutta School-Book Society was established in 1817, with the aim of publishing elementary textbooks at less than cost price and supplying them to schools in the country, and in 1818 the Calcutta School Society was established with the objective of opening elementary schools in Calcutta and its vicinity. By 1817, the Serampore missionaries claimed to have begun more than a hundred ‘native schools’ in the surrounding villages.69 The use of one’s mother tongue was considered the most effective at the elementary level, and most schools used Bengali as a medium of instruction. In 1787, when Grant had sent his proposal to the SPCK, it had recommended to the court of directors to introduce English, but it did not meet with much success.70 The confrontation between the Anglicists and the Orientalists would not be resolved until the 1830s, but in the meanwhile educationists like the Serampore Trio preferred to translate Western learning from English into the vernacular languages, believing whatever instruction it may be desirable to communicate to them, must be imparted in their own language […] the hope of imparting efficient instruction to them, or indeed to any nation in a language not their own, is completely fallacious […] instruction […] should be such as to render the inhabitants of a country happy in their own sphere but never to take them out of it […] one grand step towards imparting instruction to our Indian neighbours with due effect, will be that of improving them in the knowledge of their own language.71 Though the educational institutions of Bengal assumed responsibility for patronizing vernacular languages and traditional learning, it was obvious that a simultaneous emphasis was being given to groom a select few with European science and English language. An outline of the policies, drawn up by Ward, to be followed by the College for the Instruction of Asiatic Christians and Other Youth at Serampore, states that not only should the institution furnish a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic but also

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Figure 1.2 India, 1819, a map illustrative of the Baptist Missionary Stations. Source: Courtesy of Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D. D. (1761–1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA.

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enable a select number of these youth to acquire a complete knowledge of the English language […] A mind capable of this, is not found, it is acknowledged in every individual; but if from a 100 native Christian youths, 20 such could be selected, or even half that number, the English acquisitions of these 10 would be of more value to their country than those of a 1000 common minds.72 The stated purpose of providing such a practical education was ‘so that the educated youth may be able to superintend other schools’ and ‘furnish instruction from Gospel’.73 The Serampore missionaries had already envisaged a consistent chain of teachers who would introduce the scriptures slowly and steadily to other natives. Marshman’s aim was definitely to prepare the students on a more Christian basis, ‘for the advantageous study of the Sacred Scriptures’74 so that ‘every idea set before them […] may one day lead them to reflect on the sin and folly of idolatry’.75 Not everyone was comfortable with imparting specific Christian teaching. They were apprehensive of a refusal of financial support from the government which specifically forbade preaching of Christianity. Moreover, there was always the anxiety of antagonizing the native learners. May in his letter to the LMS expressed this fear, ‘I wish to introduce the Scriptures as much as anyone […] but […] attempts to force the Scriptures […] might be the means of driving the Children from the Schools’.76 Since direct Christian teaching was unfeasible, most school curriculum circumvented the problem by introducing moral tales as part of elementary instruction. A selection of parables, tales and ethical maxims from the scriptures formed an essential part of school curriculum, and it was hoped that this would suitably educate without provoking anyone. Between 1801 and 1817, of the total number of books printed at Serampore Mission, 44.25 per cent were related to scriptures and mythologies, followed by 16.09 per cent of books on grammar and dictionaries.77 The period between 1813 and 1835 saw the ongoing debate between the Anglicists and the Orientalists, thus shaping the official policies towards education and evangelization in British India. James Mill, in his History of British India, expressed his contempt for traditional Indian knowledge and culture.78 He advocated the promotion of ‘useful learning’ in the form of modern sciences and Western learning. When William Bentinck became the governor general he gave up his predecessors’ policy of non-intervention. He took a firm resolve on how to best spend the ‘one lac’ money allocated in the Charter of 1813. On 7 March 1835, he passed the resolution that was to put an end to the long ensuing debate on Indian education: His Lordship in Council is of opinion that the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and

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science among the natives in India, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone.79 The participants in ‘The Great Indian Debate’80 now included Indian personalities as well. In 1829, some members of the Bengali intelligentsia were invited by the Orientalist H. H. Wilson to membership in the Asiatic Society.81 One of the most prominent names among Indians was Raja Rammohan Roy. Born into an upper-caste Brahmin family, and well versed in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and English, Roy is known foremost as a social reformer who took up the cause of women’s education and condemned some of the rigid practices of Hinduism. When the newly constituted Committee of Public Instruction planned to spend the one lakh grant in setting up a Sanskrit College, Raja Rammohan Roy voiced his protest, hoping that this sum would be laid out in educating the natives in western and useful sciences. Roy made a forceful demand for the introduction of English and a more ‘liberal and enlightened system of instruction’. In a public meeting held at the town hall in Calcutta on 15 December 1829, Roy is said to have remarked, ‘From personal experience, I am impressed with the conviction that the greater our intercourse with European gentlemen, the greater will be our improvement in literary, social and political affairs.’82 Thomas Babington Macaulay’s arrival in India in 1834 and his momentous Minute of 1835 put an end to any further speculation as to how the British should spend the sum of one lakh rupees: we are free to employ our funds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic.83 As the president of the General Committee of Public Instruction, Macaulay’s Minute became the basis for the introduction of English education in India. Contemptuous of Oriental civilization and dismissive of Eastern learning, Macaulay was firmly of the belief that only Western education could set up a desirable standard of ethical and moral values among the natives. His model of education was based on a downward filtration of knowledge which would percolate from the top echelon of society down to the masses. This version was soon to catch the imagination of educationists like the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff, whose endeavour was to ‘court the society of those natives belonging to the wealthy, influential, and learned classes, who had already received a liberal education’.84 Duff’s emphasis was thus on English education and Christian religious teaching in his school. It followed the same pattern of Western curriculum and learning, as had been earlier seen in Hindu College

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in Calcutta, established by a group of wealthy Bengali patrons. Another champion of English education was David Hare, whose name was inextricably linked with the foundation of Hindu College. A new intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Bengal, represented by Rammohan Roy, Radhakanta Deb, Rasamay Dutt and Pandit Vidyasagar, sought to recover and reinterpret some phase of the ‘glorious’ past of Indian history mostly to refute Macaulay’s and Mill’s views of India. At the same time they went ahead and adopted the European Reformation as their model for regenerating their future. The Bengali educated class realized the importance of female education for bringing social reformation, and reformers like Roy, Vidyasagar and Radha Kant Deb endorsed education for girls. There was a general apprehension linked with caste taboo and superstitions among the Bengalis about sending girls to school. But the new orientation towards Western ideas and the efforts of the missionaries resulted in the development of native female schools. Prior to the Wood’s Despatch of 1854, female education was not officially recognized as a part of the state system of education in India. But efforts for educating the native girls had begun much earlier, almost with the first settlement of the English in Bengal. Captain Williamson’s East India Vade Mecum mentions that Mrs Hodges founded the first school in the vicinity of Calcutta way back in 1780,85 and Hartly House (1789) refers to a Mrs Savage who kept a boarding school for girls in Calcutta.86 With the arrival of the Baptist missionaries and their wives the issue of female education was taken up more seriously. Mrs Hannah Marshman, the wife of the Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman, founded a school and a boarding house for girls in Serampore. Mrs Pearce and Mrs Lawson opened a school for girls in Calcutta in 1803. Most of these schools catered to the education of European and Eurasian girls. Some native girls, mainly from the lower sections of society, came to learn the vernaculars and household chores and needlework. In 1819, the Female Juvenile Society of Calcutta was founded, and it established four free schools for female education, which was probably the first attempt to impart formal education in an organized manner to native converts. Hare started a school for girls in Calcutta which was very popular. Ward went to England, and it was partly in response to his appeal to improve the pathetic condition of native women that the CMS sent Miss Ann Cooke to Bengal. Under her auspices a network of schools was started, and by 1823, there were 17 schools in and around the town, with 300 girls.87 The CMS also founded the Ladies Society for Native Female Education in 1824 which had patrons like Lady Armherst, the wife of the governor general and Mrs Ellerton. Other than Calcutta, there were several schools established in other districts of Bengal. May opened a school for girls in Chinsurah. In Budwan, Mr Wietbrecht ran a school, and in Cutwa the Baptist Female School Society

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under Carey was very active. Though records indicate an impressive number of schools being established, attendance was poor and many schools had to close down. Missionaries were continually urged to establish more schools as these were ‘indispensable […] for the introduction of knowledge, whether human or divine, in the interior of Bengal’.88 These schools in the early eighteenth century, either covertly or explicitly, had an ideological position, and religious teaching remained one of the most important components of the curriculum. It is obvious that Christian religious teaching alone justified the financial assistance that these schools received from missionary societies. Whether they were ‘secular missionaries’ who worked for social reformation and education or were committed to the spread of Christianity and Christian culture, their role in the transformation of Indian society cannot be doubted. Between 1820 and 1854, almost every town in Bengal had female schools run by missionaries. Upper-caste women, who were still hesitant to attend school, were showing a keen interest in being educated at home. Wealthy Bengali gentlemen who had received an English education were keen to have educated wives. Zenana education, as education of upper-class women came to be termed, began to gain momentum in Bengal as missionaries too realized the immense influence wives and mothers had on the future generation. It is estimated that in 1854 when Charles Wood, the president of the board of the EIC, was to propose his education policy, there were approximately 626 girls’ schools in India, out of which 288 were in Bengal.89 He stated, ‘We have observed with pleasure the evidence which is now afforded of an increased desire on the part of many of the natives to give a good education to their daughters.’90 Wood’s Despatch of 1854 provided a more formalized structure to the education system in India by proposing an education department in every province and the setting up of universities in the mode of London University in the metropolitan cities in India. In accordance, the University of Calcutta was established in 1857. This period simultaneously also witnessed economic prosperity in Bengal. Several mercantile agency houses, some owned by Marwari bankers and local agents, sprang up in Calcutta and worked as the managing agencies for Companies in Britain. Agency houses assumed multiple functions, from providing initial capital for joint ventures, to purchasing shares in companies and managing them as joint stocks. Several enterprising well-to-do Bengali families invested in commercial activities, foremost being Dwarkanath Tagore and Motilal Seal. The House of Carr, Tagore and Company set up a string of commercial ventures in rural estates, banking, shipping and opium trade. Dwarkanath Tagore’s company, which went on to establish the Union Bank, purchased huge tracts of land for opium cultivation and coal mining and soon became a legendary name in terms of wealth and influence. The economic

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crisis after 1848 saw a considerable fall in the fortunes of rich Bengalis, and the political upheaval of 1857 further aggravated the situation. The 1857 rebellion was a manifestation of the simmering discontent and deep sense of alienation felt by the agrarian society and soldiers. Also termed the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and the ‘First War of Indian Independence’, it was an organized rebellion by peasants and Indian sepoys against the existing repression of colonial rule. The mutiny which broke out in north-western India did not have any substantial repercussions in Bengal, but the intensity and the ferocity of it had left the British shaken. What followed was a set of more stringent strategies for ruling, based on mutual suspicion and acrimony. On 2 August 1858, the British Parliament transferred all authority from the EIC to the British Crown and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India. By 1860 it was very apparent both to the missionaries and the prominent figures in Calcutta that it would be beneficial for the two parties to cooperate. For the interests of the missionaries it was evident that they needed the patronage of the upper-class natives if education and evangelization were to be successfully implemented. For upper-class, upper-caste Bengalis it meant an education and status which would bring them to an equal footing with their colonial masters. The colonial experience in India actualized a nebulous amalgamation of each other’s culture and customs, and of mutual interests to ensure a balance-of-power equation. Across a long continuum of colonial experiences in which several roles were played, of merchants, mercenaries and missionaries, various interventions and investments made by the British and the Indians ensured that roles and identities shifted, overlapped and frequently became interchangeable.

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Chapter 2 REPRESENTING ‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE AGENDA OF REFORM In every heathen nation, the Missionaries are generally best qualified to delineate the character of the inhabitants. Both in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres the religious men have described the country and manners of the people. The commercial men in the East know, in general, very little of the subject. Residents […] occupied by foreign avocations, rarely penetrate into the interior, to investigate […] As to the literary men, again, who merely consult books, their advantages of information are confessedly very far inferior to those of the Missionaries.1 As the above quote suggests, British dominance of India depended on how well they could ‘delineate’, ‘penetrate’, ‘investigate’ and ‘know’ the sociopolitical contexts of ruling the country and the people. If topographical surveys and cartographic projects enabled the British to chart out the physical extent of their rule,2 the ‘advantages of information’ apropos the character, manners and religion of the inhabitants were considered equally important. British policies of governance, education and evangelization in India were greatly shaped by the opinion they had of those they ruled. At the heart of the contention was how the British conceived of the Indians. The complex quandary was whether to regard the Indians as facsimiles of their selves with the possibility of integration or to regard them as inherently different and therefore to reject them. It is worth exploring the almost obsessive persistence of conceptions regarding India in the writings of the British in India, as it signifies the trajectory of the development of ideas regarding the land and the people. The chapter, in light of Claudius Buchanan’s prophetic claim in the above quote, also examines the involvement of the missionaries in perpetuating such conceptions. India has always been central to Western imagining of the Other.3 A rich mosaic of images of India has slowly accumulated in the intellectual tradition of the West, overlapping and contradicting, constructing an extraordinary palimpsest of representations.4 The earliest surviving accounts of references on

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India in Western literature can be found in the History of Herodotus (480–425 BC).5 The Greek historian Herodotus observed India to be ‘the furthest region of the inhabited world towards the east’, a land of abundant gold, some dug from the earth, some washed down by the rivers and some carried off by golddigging ants.6 The enduring image of India represented in these early writings was a land occupied by fabulous creatures and immense wealth. Herodotus made a tentative suggestion of the Asian character by comparing them with the ‘barbarian’ Persians.7 Later the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) was to present a more explicit opinion on the Asians, regarding them as ‘less warlike’ and ‘feeble’ and providing physical and climatic explanations for their sluggish temperament.8 Aristotle too referred to despotic governments in Asia and was of the opinion that ‘Asiatics than Europeans, do not rebel against a despotic government […] because the people are by nature slaves’.9 Alexander’s invasion of India and accounts written subsequently heightened the curiosity regarding India. With trade links opening up, Western imagination and curiosity were fed with fantastic stories of India’s fabulous wealth and its rich markets. The concept of India that long endured in the Western imagination was a land of exotica on the margins of civilization, with all kinds of marvellous possibilities for those who could venture there. From the sixteenth century onwards European writers began to show interest in Asia, particularly India, and began to reiterate the idea of India as ‘a source of illustration of social development under divergent conditions’.10 The writings of Jean Bodin (1529–1596),11 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689)12 and Francois Bernier (1620–1688)13 were to strengthen the general impression that the universal application of laws of governing could not be applied to India because of its differing sociopolitical and cultural conditions. In their discussions on the concept of sovereignty, both Bodin and Bernier gave considerable attention to Asian political institutions. The central category of ‘Oriental despotism’ that was attributed to the type of monarchy in India was based on the assumption that Asian countries had no laws and hence no rights of property. Such a government implied that the right and property of the subject could be arbitrarily invaded. It meant that the king was the absolute proprietor of the land, governing his people as he wanted and dispossessing them as he thought fit. Bodin emphasized, ‘Nowadays […] there are very few despotic monarchies save in Asia […] Elsewhere in Europe […] I know of no despotic monarchies’.14 This then was an implicit illustrative proof of the contrast between a characteristic despotic Orient and a more humane Western kingship. The early English writers who wrote on India were merchants, ambassadors, doctors and chaplains who arrived in the seventeenth century mainly to seek employment in the courts of the Mughal rulers. These travel narratives presented India as a land of plenty, an Edenic paradise filled with thick

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woods and fertile lands of plentiful harvest and exotic vegetation. Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614) and Edward Terry’s A Voyage to East-India (1655) present India as a rich and spacious place, a magical land of awe and wonder. Terry gives a detailed topographical description of India’s landscape, a result of his being an ‘eye witness’ during his stay of two years at the court of a ‘mighty monarch the great Mogul’.15 Addressing his readers, Terry urges them to read his account because of the ‘divine truths that lie scattered up and down in many places of this narrative’. He states he has undertaken to write, For the court there, there is so much riches and splendour sometimes to be seen in it, that it may draw up the meditation of those who behold […] seriously to consider the glory of Heaven. And for the soil, it is exceedingly pleasant, rich, and good […] and if almighty God hath given such sweet places of abode here on the earth to very many whom he owns not, how transcendently glorious is that place which he hath prepared for those that love him.16 It is evident that as these early travellers discovered a radically different world so rich and plentiful, not all their thoughts were based on ‘divine truths’. The intrinsic thematic interpretations of such representations can be (1) it was just by God’s grace that these riches were endowed to these people, and (2) if God could give so much to ‘whom he owns not’, then imagine how much the ones loved by him are entitled to. The oblique implication was that such profusion of riches then ought to belong to people who work for it, and they ought to be the rightful claimants of ‘that place which he hath prepared for those that love him’. Though these early tales of encounters with India may have been dominated more by mercantile interests rather than political aims, it is evident that India and her fantastic wealth captured the imagination of the West in more ways than just economic. The desire to acquire, to lay a stake on this Paradise had become the paramount obsession with the West. From the latter half of the eighteenth century as the British began to consolidate their physical territories in India there began a simultaneous process of constructing a vision of the Empire, informed by colonial fantasies. The avidity with which the West lapped up descriptions of travels and the experiences of traders and sailors, was evident from the prolific production of travelogues and information on exotic ‘encounters’ in the East.17 India began to be presented in ways that would appeal to the curious informed readers back in England. There is a huge cache of writings on India by British travellers, historians, merchants, company officials, statesmen and missionaries, spanning genres like travel narratives, travel guides, memoirs, opinions, tracts, letters, observations, sketches and memoranda, that strive to inform and formulate

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opinion and perceptions of alien realities. Colonial discourses on India can be seen as projects willed by the colonial agent to transform situations to fit an imagined, invented Other. Such discursive interventions were either generalizing and homogenizing, or provoked a xenophobic cultural superiority, or proposed a more authoritarian role for the British in India. ‘The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse’, as Homi Bhabha pointed out, demanded ‘an articulation of forms of difference’.18 Colonial discourses based on a range of perceived differences that informed cultural, racial and sexual hierarchization was simultaneously shaped by a wish to project a ‘British’ identity.19 The European relationship with India for the next 200  years remained based on vague conceptions, assumptions and misrepresentations. From the 1770s, as the East India Company took a more proactive role in administration, the key to how Britain could ensure better ‘control’ lay in the detailed study of India. There began an intense cataloguing and categorizing of languages, races and tribes in India to secure a better understanding of the unchartered civilization they had to administer. Only when the ‘difference’ had been understood and listed, could there be hope for taming and controlling. An early guidebook on India which proposed to fill in the gaps in information required by European statesmen, military men, merchants, civilians and all those who proceeded to this new country, was Captain Thomas Williamson’s The East India Vade Mecum.20 In his voluminous guide, Captain Williamson claimed to provide a ‘just’ conception of the ‘characters of the natives’ in India. He should know, as his stay of ‘twenty years’ in Bengal, he alleged, was the reason for his considerable insight and knowledge.21 It is again obviously his long stay in India which made this gentleman eminently qualified to give a ‘just’ idea of other things ‘wild’, having earlier written on The Wild Sports of the East,22 an extraordinary book that documents vivid descriptions and picture plates of animal hunting in India, especially tigers. His Vade Mecum, he emphatically professed, would remove all doubts, prejudices and national opinions, which if allowed to prevail ‘must occasion every object to be seen through a false medium’.23 Williamson’s assertion that his guidebook is not a false medium is apparently a self-professed rejection of such historical interpretations which are perceived very often through the narrow and distorted glasses of Western preconceptions of India. As the study of such narratives would show, there has never been a constant nor a dominant conceptual defining parameter, the variables often overlapping and shifting from ‘sublime’, ‘grand’, ‘picturesque’ to ‘barbaric’, ‘dirty’, ‘impoverished’, depending on which facet of the marvellous or the monstrous needed to be highlighted. Such viewpoints and enterprises reflected usually two extremes. At the one extreme, there was an exuberant display of wonder and curiosity in those

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who saw India as a land of marvellous differences. The other extreme was to conceive India as a threat – as a land of dirt, disease and death – an exotic but a dangerous place. Throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth century as the British tried to contend with territorial supremacy, first in Bengal and later in the rest of the country, such contradictory tensions of differences and similarities continued to bother them. The sense of wonder, doubt, anxiety and uneasiness existed side by side as they tried to ‘master’ the land, the languages and the laws.24 The early narratives of voyages to India were one of comprehending the multiplicity and the differences. These writings reflect the bewilderment of the early travellers as they tried to grasp an alien culture and the vastness of the topography. Some of them, like John Henry Grose’s A Voyage to the East Indies (1766),25 an early account of his travel to India, describe the land replete with fantastic flora and fauna, tantalizingly beautiful yet ‘wild’, ‘unknown’ and ‘difficult’. Grose had sailed from England in 1763 to make his fortunes with the EIC and during his brief career as a writer with the EIC in Bengal (1763– 71) had encountered ‘singular species of creatures, of which I had heard much in India’ in the ‘impenetrable forests, that afford a shelter for wild beasts of all sorts’.26 ‘A couple of these creatures’, Grose confirms, were held captives and sent as presents to the governor of Bombay. They were scarcely two feet high, walked erect, and had perfectly an human form. They were of a fallow white, without any hair, except in those parts that it is customary for mankind to have it. By their melancholy, they seemed to have a rational sense of their captivity, and had many of the human actions. They made their bed very orderly in the cage in which they were sent up, and on being viewed, would endeavour to conceal with their hands those parts that modesty forbids manifesting.27 This is the classic case of the European ‘viewing’ a ‘discovery’ of a new species, a sample specimen that has to be collected and then minutely observed. There is comparing and contrasting, similarity and difference as the author oscillates between the two poles of awe and aversion. The two creatures under scrutiny, the readers are perfunctorily told, die in captivity, and it is decided to ‘procure another couple’ as one should ‘grudge no expense to be master of such a curiosity’.28 The colonial project is clearly to ‘master’ the ‘curiosity’. If these Yahoo beasts are grotesque in their variance from ‘normal’ human form, then the implicit mission of the colonial masters is to tame the inhuman beasts. Like Jonathan Swift’s protagonist,29 Grose too is eager to emphasize the difference, and at the same time to organize into neat, identifiable categories: ‘the

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Gentoos are comprehended and known to the Europeans, under that common appellation, which is derived from the corrupt Portuguese Lingua Franca […] signifying Gentiles or Heathens’.30 Like the powerful singular symbol of the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels, the ‘heathens’ in Grose’s narratives represent the bestial, the unenlightened, unregenerate, dehumanized creatures who inhabit the Indian landscape. They are parallel with Thomas Hobbes’s Man in state of Nature, ‘with no arts, no letters, no society […] and the life of man solitary, nasty, brutish and short’.31 In theological terms it is a tacit presentation of the original sin, the Fallen Man bereft of reason or morality, ashamed of their nudity and awaiting redemption. Seventeenth-century European ethical thought dominated by Blaise Pascal and Henry More, had emphasized the centrality of the doctrine of the original sin as the foundation of the Christian religion. More’s Divine Dialogues had presented problems raised by the theory of the plurality of worlds and the denial of salvation of beings who live in remote places in the world. Such beings, More suggested, who were outside the ken of ‘that Religion that the sons of Adam are saved by’32 would live a placid, ‘melancholy’ life and will be deprived of the knowledge of the glory of God and from reaching the heights of human excellence. An eighteenth-century history of India written by the Scottish Orientalist Alexander Dow, professed to provide some pseudoscientific explanations behind the ‘inherent’ placidity of the natives. Dow joined the Bengal infantry in 1763 as an army officer in the EIC. In 1768, during his leave and stay in England he published the History of Hindostan, translated from the Persian, which immediately became a great success. He then returned to India in 1769 and wrote two dissertations, On the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan and An Enquiry into the State of Bengal. According to him, The languor occasioned by the hot climate of India, inclines the natives to indolence and ease […] Tranquillity is the chief object of his desires. His happiness consists in a mere absence of misery; and oppression must degenerate into a folly, which defeats its own ends before he calls it by the name of justice. These phlegmatic sentiments the Indian carries into his future state. He thinks it a mode of being, in which passion is lost, and every faculty of the soul suspended, except the consciousness of existence.33 The ‘love of ease’ was attributed to the hot climate, plentiful productions of the fertile land and a religion which inclined them to peace and submission. The projection of India as a singular national entity with identifiable homogeneous attributes that can be tagged as ‘Indian’, served as the starting point of constructing a selective essentialist identity for the ‘natives’. Such colonial

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postulations of a reductive essence of Indian identity were sought to be explained by citing the hot climate and nature of the people. Robert Orme too considered that these alike contributed to producing a being so ineffectual and submissive as to make the native Hindu ‘the most effeminate inhabitant of the globe’ and an easy prey for the ‘fierce’ and ‘hardy’ Muslim invaders from the north.34 Such ideas neatly fitted into the colonial teleology of creating binaries of opposition between Hindu-Muslim, past-present, submissive-despotic. But just vilifying the present state of India was not merely enough. Dow felt it was necessary to present an alternate perception of what could be achieved. In History he affirms that a conquest of ‘Hindostan’ would be obviously advantageous. It would enable the British government to pay the national debt, and there would naturally be a great influx of wealth. Dow was thus providing a justification by suggesting that such conquests would result in ‘promoting the cause of justice and humanity […] and give to so many millions of mankind, a government founded upon the principles of virtue and justice’.35 The promoters of ‘virtue and justice’ are obliquely contrasted against the ‘violent Tartars’, the ‘despotism of the Patans’, the ‘tyranny of the Mahommedans’. These successions of conquerors have by their despotism, cruelty and tyranny, Dow suggested, weakened the innate principles of justice and humanity. The past, as Dow peremptorily stated, was blamed for the present: The seeds of despotism, which the nature of the climate and the fertility of the soil had sown in India, were, as has been observed, reared to perfect growth by the Mahommedan faith.36 The ‘psychology of colonialism’, as Ashis Nandy points out, was assumed on ‘a clear disjunction between India’s past and its present’37 that blamed the erstwhile Mughal rule for the degradation of society. The colonial rule was posited as a modern benefactor who would bring about improvement in society. The legitimization of colonization was based on the argument that the present was politically servile and morally degraded because of past dissensions, and that colonial rule would enable present India to rise above its retrogressive, corrupt and fragmented state. In effect, it identifies and isolates those aspects it codes as ‘barbaric’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘morally degenerate’ that have the potential to improve because of colonial interference and control. The same sentiments are closely echoed by John Zephaniah Holwell, the governor of Fort William, and best remembered as the survivor of the infamous Black Hole incident. He arrived in India in 1732 as a surgeon in the EIC. In his Interesting Historical Events, relative to the Province of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan, published in 1767, at the same time that Dow published his History, Holwell too points out the accession of ‘Auring Zebe [Aurangzeb]

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to the throne of Indostan; to which he himself did not arrive without wading through a sea of blood’, the reason for an almost unparalleled ‘religious fraud, perfidy and cruelty […] His bloody example was exactly copied by his descendants.’38 Holwell’s stoic observation about dominion and power is that such approaches ‘are generally founded […] on the subduction [sic] of every virtue from the human breast: as, the sacred tyes of justice, affinity, gratitude and true benevolence’. But, as he is quick to point out, there are exceptions which may subsist ‘in the course of many thousand years’, ‘but they are so very few’.39 Holwell’s observation of Indian history comes specifically at a time immediately after the Battle of Plassey (1757) and the Battle of Buxar (1764) when Bengal had become a powerful mercantile and military centre. Holwell acknowledges, ‘the East-Indies, and particularly Bengall [sic] are now become so important an object and concern to Great-Britain that every elucidation thereof, must I think be acceptable, that is founded on facts, just observations, and faithful recitals’.40 His knowledge founded on ‘facts’ and ‘observations’ is derived from the study of the ‘Shastah’ (shastra), the religious texts of the ‘most venerable sages the Bramins’.41 The author in the ‘course of thirty years residence in Bengal’ claims to have collected during his ‘leisure hours’ materials concerning the ‘religious tenets of the natives of Indostan’.42 Having studiously perused all that has been written about the ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ state of the country, he can venture to ‘pronounce them all very defective, fallacious and unsatisfactory’. Creating a dichotomy between modern and ancient, he says that both the ancient and modern authors tend to convey a very ‘imperfect and unjust semblance of a people, who from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation’.43 All the modern writers represent the Hindoos as a race of stupid and gross Idolators:  from the ancients indeed these people met with better treatment; although they too as well as others were equally ignorant in the subjects they treated of.44 It is apparent that Holwell assiduously wants to cultivate an alternate ‘modern’ vision of Indian society that undercuts the earlier notions of primitivism, barbarism and despotism associated with it. He categorically voices the need to change the mode of thinking and representing because disdain towards the other will not be beneficial in knowing them. If they were to rule well it was important to know the laws and customs of those subjected to them. As Jonathan Duncan was to write to Cornwallis, the governor general in Fort William, ‘endearing our Government to the native Hindoos’ was possible by ‘preserving and disseminating a knowledge of the Hindoo Law’.45 Hastings had by then already established the importance of accumulation

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of knowledge, especially the ‘laws which continued unchanged, from remotest antiquity’ regarding inheritance, religious matters, caste and marriages in India.46 Hastings was enthusiastic to promote Oriental learning and a phenomenal revival of ancient learning was witnessed with the combined efforts of Orientalists like Jones, Wilkins and Colebrooke. For the Orientalists too, India remained an object of wonder. Sir William Jones, who embarked for India in 1783 to take up his official duty at the Supreme Court of Bengal, expressed his gratitude for the job in his letter written to Lord Ashburton (27 April 1783) on board the ship, writing that in ‘no other station […] could I have gratified at once my boundless curiosity concerning the people of the East’.47 Before Jones arrived in India, ‘the celebrated Empire of India’ was for him exotic and mysterious, ‘the land of Pepper’, ‘famous for producing the best aloe-wood, a favourite perfume of the Asiaticks’ and a fabled land that ‘produces so many precious perfumes, jewels and spices’.48 The English Orientalist during his stay of 11 years in India mastered the Sanskrit language and made an invaluable contribution to literature in general by producing the first English translations of some of the greatest gems of Sanskrit literature. Lord Teignmouth, who wrote a memoir on the life of Jones, states, ‘to Sir William Jones every new scene was interesting’. He possessed, Teignmouth claims, an ‘inexhaustible supply of subjects’, which he could apply for the purpose of ‘recreation’ and ‘improvement’.49 No wonder Jones went on to delve into every conceivable aspect of India – history, laws, scriptures, languages, traditions, geography and politics of the Hindus and the Muslims. In 1784, Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal to encourage Oriental studies. His efforts aimed at finding the common roots of ancient languages and parallels and common origins of languages, race, literature and so on.50 He further translated classical texts from Sanskrit and brought to everyone’s attention the fables of the Hitopadesha, which he declared ‘the most beautiful, if not the most ancient, collection of apologues in the world’.51 Jones’s friend and contemporary Wilkins published his English translation of The Heetopades in 1787. In the preface to this book he traces the antecedents of the text and quotes from James Fraser’s catalogue of Oriental manuscripts: The ancient Brahmins of India then after a great deal of time and labour, compiled a treatise in which were inserted the choicest treasures of wisdom, and the perfectest rules for governing a people.52 Wilkins further asserts that ‘the Brahmans of the present times are totally ignorant’ of the origin and composition of this narrative and gives credit to Jones for his ‘surprising talent […] in seeking fresh sources of knowledge and promoting their cultivation’.53 Wilkins’s comment thus indirectly hints at the

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present apathy and obliviousness of the Indian scholars towards their own culture and literature, and recognizes the contributions of Orientalists like Jones who brought out these ‘great discoveries’ from the abyss of the past. David Kopf attributes the ‘phenomenal Orientalist rediscovery of the Hindu classical age’ to ‘those components of the European Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century that was ‘cosmopolitan rather than nationalist in their view of other cultures’.54 Kopf is of the opinion that to fully appreciate the Orientalists’ enthusiasm for cultural interaction, one must understand the spirit of the age. The concepts of universalism, tolerance and cultural relativism, he points out, were some of the most significant ideas to emerge in this period. Western Enlightenment ideas of tolerance, positive sympathy and appreciation of diversity of other cultures were the thoughts that predisposed the Orientalists to appreciate India’s civilization. Agreeing with Peter Gray, who characterized Voltaire as one of the ‘real cosmopolitan’ men of the Enlightenment, Kopf cites the example of Voltaire’s deep interest in the classical form of ancient civilizations: ‘Whoever thinks, or whoever possesses taste,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘only counts four centuries in the history of the world.’ The four ages were all classical or neo-classical:  Greece, Augustan Rome, renaissance Italy, and the age of Louis  XIV.55 But it is to be noted that in spite of Voltaire’s professed intellectual regard for other cultures (he greatly admired the Chinese), his approbation is only for four civilizations limited to Europe. Again, to assert that the Orientalist movement in India under the aegis of Hastings was uniformly based on a newfound regard for non-European people and culture would be a gross exaggeration to say the least. There could be no neat patterns or simplistic explanations for such a cultural confrontation. As the Orientalists sought to comprehend the complexities of the situation, the attempt was often to divest India of its strangeness and to fit it into a familiar framework that would be more comprehensible for the Western onlooker. What was incomprehensible was either dismissed or ignored. In his letter to Mr Justice Hyde (14 May 1784), written from Calcutta, Jones tries to hide his bafflement behind the facade of patronizing superciliousness: I am inexpressibly amused by a Persian translation of an old Sanscrit book, called Siry Bha’gwat, which comprizes almost the whole of the Hindu religion, and contains the life and achievements of Crishen;56 it is by far the most entertaining book, on account of its novelty and wildness, that I ever read.57

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If Hindu religion and scriptures roused amusement and were to be contemptuously dismissed as ‘wild’ fantasies, then Hindu learning and language too, according to Jones, had lost its earlier sheen. the city of BENARES on the Ganges, famous for an academy or college of Indian priests, commonly called Bramens, who once possessed all the learning of India and spoke the language […] but their learning, it is probable, has not been preserved among them in any great degree, and their ancient language begins, like the Greek to be respected rather than known.58 This implicitly suggested that the preservation of such scholarship was now the concern and responsibility of the new rulers. The Orientalist commitment to the advancement of Oriental languages and literature was not just simply a quest for universal principles that unite mankind. Neither could it be merely attributed to a romanticist view of the ‘universalist and rationalist’ scholarship of Jones et al.59 The discursive construction of India now clearly focuses on granting particular roles for governance and power. Postcolonial studies have sufficiently highlighted how the politics of colonialism was based on the art of managing the assent of its subjects. Obviously, a colonial system assured its continuation and perpetuation by inducing the colonized to accept new norms and cognitive categories for subscribing and even colluding with the rulers. Colebrooke picked up the torch of scholarly interest in India from Jones and went on to serve as the second president of the Royal Asiatic Society. Henry Thomas Colebrooke began his service with the EIC as a writer in 1782. He worked his way up and was entirely self-taught in the study of India’s history, philosophy, religion and languages. Colebrooke demonstrated remarkable expertise in a wide and varied field of scholarship on Sanskrit grammar, the Vedas and comparative philology. He expressed the same argument as his predecessor did regarding India’s cultural heritage, and stated, ‘To those countries of Asia, in which civilization may be justly considered to have had its origin […] the rest of the civilized world owes a large debt of gratitude’.60 Colebrooke desired to repay the debt, but unlike Jones he is more forthright in expressing the purpose of aiding ‘the advancement of knowledge in relation to Asia’. England, as most advanced in refinement, is, for that very cause, the most beholden; and, by acquisition of dominion in the east, is bound by a yet closer tie. As Englishmen, we participate in the earnest wish that this duty may be fulfilled, and that obligation requited; and we share in

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the anxious desire of contributing to such a happy result, by promoting an interchange of benefits, and returning in an improved state that which was received in a ruder form […] with the hope of facilitating amelioration of which they may be found susceptible.61 Though Colebrooke’s argument was couched in the rhetoric of the liberal spirits of ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, ‘interchange of benefits’, ‘improvement’ and so on, it does not take a too discerning critic to understand that the Orientalists had by then successfully projected themselves as ‘saviours of India’62 who had restored India to its rightful place. Earlier Orientalists like Jones had elided over women’s issues or did not particularly react to issues of women’s position in society. With Colebrooke, the focus was directly on women’s issues, notably the practice of sati. One of the first pieces of study on this aspect was Colebrooke’s ‘On the Duties of the Faithful Hindu Widow’, a compilation of commentaries from the sacred books of the Hindus on the practice of sati, in which a widowed wife immolates herself on the burning pyre of her dead husband. Having referred to a variety of ancient texts, and presenting contradictory practices, Colebrooke concludes, happily the martyrs of this superstition have never been numerous. It is certain that the instances of the widow’s sacrifices are now rare; on this it is only necessary to appeal to the recollection of every person residing in India, how few instances have actually occurred within his knowledge.63 But in spite of this brief clarification the overwhelming notion that got perpetuated in the minds of European readers was of a barbaric practice enjoined by the Hindu texts. For the next couple of centuries, the dominant impression of ‘a dutiful Hindu widow’ became synonymous with a woman burning herself with the dead body of her husband. The end of the eighteenth century witnessed a paradigmatic shift in the ideological framework within which the British viewed India. By the time Marquess Wellesley was named governor general in 1798, the British possession in India had become a huge empire. Not only was this period more challenging in terms of political confrontation with France and other European powers but it also entailed a more responsible administration of the Company’s writers, factors, merchants and civil servants. Wellesley was aware of the need ‘to fix and establish sound and correct principles of religion and government in their minds at an early period of life […] for the stability of the British power in India’.64 It was mainly with the aim to ‘reform’ and educate the newly appointed company officials that the College at Fort William was established in Calcutta

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in 1800. The College was soon to become one of the finest centres of Oriental learning and vernacular languages, and some of the most eminent scholars of that period, like Carey, Gilchrist, Colebrooke, Wilson and Buchanan, to name just a few, were associated with it. But the fate of the College was soon to be inextricably linked to complex debates between the Anglicists and the Orientalists. Central to the argument was whether missionary activities could be involved as part of the civilizing mission. The evangelical Protestant revival in Britain in the late eighteenth century ensured that Christianity began to be seen as an invaluable aid in colonizing and civilizing projects. While Catholicism spread with other European empires, Protestant churches had been reluctant to expand to overseas missions. With imperial expansion in the post-enlightenment period, proselytizing offered the British a justification for reformation of the indigenous communities. In Britain, too, the missionary societies were primarily projected as philanthropic organizations committed to the poor and the disadvantaged in society. The financial contributions that the rich were implored to donate was for the welfare of the lower classes. At the same time it was perceived that this would enable their moral betterment; poverty and virtue being thought to have an intrinsic connection. With imperial expansions and subsequent extensions of the missions in foreign zones, the same ethical responsibilities were sought to be replicated in the colonies. The writings of this period began to clearly demonstrate the almost aggressive reinforcement of a ‘divinely ordained’ Britain having the moral authority to intervene in the lives of the ‘heathens’ for their social and moral reformation. Charles Grant was the most vociferous critic of the Oriental approach of the College of Fort William and strongly advocated Western education based on Christian religion and teaching. He travelled to India in 1767 to take up a military position, but very soon he rose in the ranks of the EIC and was appointed as a member of the Company’s board of trade. Grant lost two of his children to smallpox and thereafter had a religious change of mind. He went on to play a significant part in changing the Company’s views on education and evangelization in Bengal. His two treatises A Proposal for Establishing a Protestant Mission in Bengal and Behar (1787) and Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving it (1792) were instrumental in affecting future pronouncements on the subject. Grant sent 14 copies of his Proposal to leading churchmen and influential people in England,65 advocating that ‘the people of India had a claim on the British Government, and it was the duty of Englishmen to impart to them the civil and religious privileges which they themselves enjoyed’.66 The Company had up until then been reluctant to permit Christian missions in the Indian territory as it was wary of social

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and religious repercussions. Both Hastings and Cornwallis were in favour of non-interference in matters of religion and of leaving the Indians free to practice their religions. As new missionary societies began to be formed and the Church of England was determined to reassert its influence, the EIC was put under pressure to do more for the promulgation of Christianity in India. Grant’s Observations was the most damning portrayal of the state of Indians to have been written. As a complete volte-face from the earlier Orientalist representation of a ‘marvellous’ India, Grant went on to paint a sweeping, lurid picture of the ‘people of Hindoostan’: a race of men lamentably degenerate and base; retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices, in a country peculiarly calculated by its natural advantages, to promote the happiness of its inhabitants.67 Grant was anxious to dilute the harsh indictment by embedding conciliatory explanations, as he ‘would abhor the idea of needlessly or contemptuously exposing the defects of any man, or set of men […] his wish is not to excite detestation, but to engage compassion’. But, he ‘has an affecting sense of the general imperfections of human nature’, and though it may be ‘painful’ to talk about such imperfections, ‘nothing except the consciousness of meaning to do good could have induced the author to proceed in it’.68 But perhaps the greatest finality with which an indictment was pronounced on ‘the character, the history, the manners, religion, arts, literature, and laws’ of the people of India was James Mill’s The History of British India (1817).69 Mill had never been to India, but that, according to him, was not a limitation in ‘knowing’ the country because ‘a duly qualified man can obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India’.70 Mill’s intention in bestowing his time and labour was to leave a collection for the benefit of others, as he considered the earlier writings on India to be an imperfect ‘chaotic mass’. His writings set out to provide readers a ‘useful history’ that separates out the ‘real facts’ from the earlier chaotic testimonials on India.71 Employing his utilitarian philosophy as a yardstick for judging cultures, Mill points out in History that the qualities of ‘combination, discrimination, classification, judgement, comparison, weighing, inferring, inducting, philosophizing’ are necessary ‘for extracting the precious ore from a great mine of rude historical materials’.72 With an authority that only Mill could

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typically muster, he states, ‘Hitherto the knowledge of India enjoyed by the British community, has been singularly defective’ and there is not a man who can be said to know anything of India and its affairs.73 Mill sets out to correct this shortcoming by providing the final irrefutable version of his knowledge of the ‘rude and credulous people’ characterized by ‘wild and ungoverned imagination’, whose religious books are ‘absurd’, who are ‘perfectly destitute of historical records’ and whose Brahmins are the most ‘audacious, unskilful fabricators’.74 Mill’s History can be perceived as fulfilling a ‘useful’ service by determining for the British government their role in shaping a policy of civilizing such ‘rude’ nations.75 By citing examples from history to reinforce his argument about the rudeness of the Indian culture, and having assigned one of the lowest places to India in the scale of civilization, Mill’s purpose was to enable the colonial power to rework its mission of reforming India. From the end of the eighteenth century the correction of the natives’ ‘imperfections’ and the ‘improvement’ of their subjects became the focus of the British in India. British representations of India began to fully exploit the intellectual and ideological conjunction of evangelism and governance. William Carey can be credited for bringing about this pronounced change. Belonging to a humble background and having been a shoemaker until he was twenty-eight, Carey demonstrated extraordinary linguistic skills very early in life. Self-educated, and by his own admission ‘a plodder’, Carey made up by sheer hard work what he lacked self-confessedly in intelligence. He was very soon ordained in the Baptist Church, and ‘he would be frequently conversing with his brethren in the ministry on the practicability and importance of a mission to the heathen, and his willingness to engage in it’.76 When Carey arrived in Bengal in 1793 he had to settle in the Danish settlement of Serampore, near Calcutta, as the EIC did not encourage missionary activities in its domain. From a preliminary observation of Bengali people and culture, Carey wrote, ‘They are very avaricious and deceitful […] Their servility is extreme and their ignorance also, except a very few Learned Men among them.’ He was convinced that ‘Bengal needed Christ desperately’.77 As early as 1786, when he was in England, Carey had put forward his arguments for a Protestant missionary movement to lay the foundation of the Christian religion among ‘heathens’. This was later published as An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792). A well-researched treatise with practical suggestions on missions, the pamphlet in the words of Carey’s biographer is thought to ‘extort the admiration of the learned even of the present day’.78 Carey states in his introduction to Enquiry that since God enjoined that ‘his will be done’, it is the duty of true Christians to apply ‘every lawful method to spread the knowledge of his name’.79 He chides the ‘multitudes [who] sit at

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ease, and give themselves no concern about the far greater part of their fellowsinners, who to this day, are lost in ignorance and idolatry’.80 Carey computes the number of heathens in the world who are ‘inveloped [sic] in ignorance and barbarism’ and urges fellow missionaries to do their duty by posing the following rhetorical questions: Can we bear that they are without the gospel, without government, without laws, and without arts, and sciences; and not exert ourselves to introduce among them the sentiments of men, and of Christians? Would not the spread of the gospel be the most effectual mean of their civilization? Would not that make them useful members of society?81 Carey’s efforts to spread the words of the gospel by translating the Bible into vernacular languages and various other religious tracts printed at the Serampore Press, opened the floodgates of mission activities in Bengal. At the same time as the debate on the Pious Act became more contentious, a host of treatises on the need for evangelization in India came to the forefront, written primarily by those who had a stake in mission activities. The other two Baptist missionaries at Serampore, Marshman and Ward, were like Carey well educated despite their lower-class origins. The Serampore Trio, as Carey, Marshman and Ward were known, made significant contributions in linguistics, printing and education in Bengal. Their views expressed in their writings on Indian religion, manners and customs were instrumental in influencing the opinion of the West towards India. These accounts were purported to urge and motivate missionaries to come and serve in India. William Ward joined Carey in 1799 and contributed greatly in establishing a printing press at Serampore. Apart from his printing and preaching, Ward was a prolific writer and published his voluminous work of four volumes under the title Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos (1811). This was later republished under the title A View of the History, Literature and Mythology of the Hindoos:  Including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works (1818). It is a lengthy work on the history of India from Hindu monarchy, through the Muslim rule, up to the commencement of the English power in India. In the preface to his Hindoos the author states that his ‘having resided more than eleven years in Bengal, acquainted with the works religion, manners and customs of the Hindoos’, and his familiarity with the Bengali language and natives have enabled him ‘to speak with certainty’. The reason for this stupendous labour, he elucidates, is because ‘he has often perceived the errors of writers in Hindoo customs,

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but declining the unpleasant task of exposing their mistakes, he has contented himself with laying before the public simple facts’.82 On the Hindu shastras and philosophy, Ward has this to say: It is now evident, that little if any real knowledge, either in History or Sciences is to be expected from these books; that they abound with the greatest absurdities, the greatest exaggerations and the most puerile conceits.83 And though the Hindus have numerous ‘Kavya Shastras, or poetical books’, it is impossible to give their poets credit for a refined taste. Their sublimity is bombast, and many of their figures are to the last degree ridiculous. We seek in vain, in the Hindoo poetry, for the simplicity of Homer, or the purity of Virgil. The licentiousness of their poets agrees with the modern manners of their lascivious people.84 Ward extends his derision to the manners, customs, language, religion and practically everything associated with the Hindus. The Hindoos are exceedingly wanting in compassion and benevolence. The Hindoos are a lascivious people. This is attributed to their climate, to indolent habits engendered by the heat, and to the impure histories of their gods, to their public shews, poojas, dances, songs, etc.85 Every possible negative aspect of the natives is highlighted, with the author calling them ‘deceitful’, ‘covetous’, ‘literally Jews’, ‘perpetual liars’, ‘indecent’, ‘cruel’, ‘degraded of character’ and prone to ‘extravagant flattery’.86 The Bengali language is judged to be ‘poor sterile, incapable of becoming the vehicle of communication’.87 The Hindu history and religion ‘abound with […] licentious allusions which characterize all the productions of the Easterners’.88 Ward’s accounts are often glaringly contradictory, and his views keep shifting from declamatory denigration to effusive praises. He finds great similarity between the Grecian and the Hindu school of philosophy when the ‘Hindus were at their zenith’ and many great Grecian philosophers visited the Hindu schools.89 He also praises the Bengali language for its ‘pleasant sound and sweetness’ and concedes that it is a ‘copius language, for there are no ideas which it is not capable of expressing’.90 And further, ‘no reasonable person will deny to the Hindoos the praise of extensive learning’.91 The Hindoos was rather a harsh picture of Indian society. Daniel Potts grudgingly accedes, ‘In a modern context one might feel that Hindoos is an

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overly-critical and biased study.’92 In spite of his professed low opinion for the poetical works of the Hindus, Ward nevertheless filled four massive volumes of translations of a wide range of literary works from Sanskrit. Ward’s accounts of ‘Suttee’, ‘Drowning in the Ganges’, ‘Dying under the wheels of Jugunnatha’s car’, ‘Infanticide’ and ‘Ascetics devoured in forests by wild animals’, based on his knowledge of ‘facts’ as he alleged, was more to sensationalize and dramatize the darker side of a culture which he knew so little. But it did serve his purpose. It elicited from Western readers a huge interest in Hindu religion and customs. When between 1819 and 1821 Ward toured many parts of England, Holland and America to solicit financial support for the Baptists’ mission work in Bengal, he received tremendous support. Not only was he able to raise 26,000 dollars for the College in Serampore93 but he was also successful in arousing the interest of the ladies of England by publishing what M.  A. Laird terms ‘somewhat lurid accounts of the degraded conditions of their sisters’.94 James Peggs, who initiated the English Baptist mission in Orissa, continued to demand prompt action against ‘barbarous’ Hindu practices. The ‘perennial Baptist propagandist’,95 as Daniel Potts called him, addressed a series of pamphlets to the government. The Suttees’ Cry to Britain, Ghaut Murders in India and Infanticide in India, indicate the issues of ‘the horrid rites’96 of the Hindus against which he sought British regulation and support. In his India’s Cries to British Humanity (1828–30), Peggs took up these issues and made an impassioned dramatic appeal to the public in England for promoting ‘the abolition of the cruelties of heathenism’: Shall superstition be suffered to issue her decrees, from year to year, and from age to age, against the lives of poor defenceless and disconsolate widows [and, it may be added, of female infants, pilgrims, and the sick exposed by the Ganges], – hundreds of whom are annually sacrificed to its relentless cruelty, and yet no voice be lifted up on their behalf ? Then where are human sympathies? And what are nature’s claims? But no, humanity can refrain no longer. A cry has at length been raised for the daughters of sorrow on the plains of India. It has reached the British Isle, and reverberated from her shores:  it has sounded in the ears of her Legislature: – it is heard in the midst of our city: – it is a loud and bitter cry!97 Finally, in the face of the hesitancy of the government to make any direct interference, Peggs rests his hope in Divine Providence, that ‘God in his habitation’ may ‘incline those who hold in their hands the destinies of India’ to work for the welfare of the millions in India.98

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Figure 2.1 Suttee, 1826. From James Peggs’s 1828 essay, The Suttees’ Cry to Britain. Source: Courtesy of Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D. D. (1761–1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA.

Peggs’s propaganda is based on demonstrating the absolute contrast between cultures, religion, people and ways of life. Peggs criticizes practically every aspect of the culture and society of the Hindus:  ‘a race of men whose standard of morality is so low’, ‘conversation is so licentious’, ‘their religion is indeed a horrible one’ and they ‘shed blood with so little repugnance’.99 At the same time they are charged to be ‘weak’, ‘effeminate’ and ‘cowards’.100 By suggestive contrast the British appear to be inherently virtuous, filled with magnanimity and benevolence for their fellow sufferers. Their ‘wisdom’ and ‘sensible’ and ‘decisive’ nature make them eminently responsible for rectifying these evils in society.101 Peggs authoritatively states, ‘The state of learning, morals, and religion in India demonstrates the necessity of European colonization.’102 If this justified colonization, then Christianity was considered to be the bane of all evils. After having carefully examined the ‘tendency of Hinduism and Christianity’, Peggs comes to the conclusion that it is not presumptuous to assert, that India stands peculiarly in need of Christianity. We need Christianity to extinguish the fires of the funeral pile, into which superstition is annually casting its victims […] We need

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Christianity to annul the prohibition for widows to marry […] to teach women to read, to cultivate their intellectual faculties, to raise them in the scale of being, and to open to society the benefit of their influence.103 It had become common for missionaries to use the pages of the English-owned newspaper Friend of India and other publications to publicize their views on the need for evangelization to reform society. One such editorial was critical of the persistent efforts to denigrate the religion and customs of the Indians: ‘Here, Christians of all sections have one common object to pursue, the destruction of a debasing superstition, and the diffusion of Christian truth among the heathen.’104 Nonetheless, the Baptist missionaries played a substantial role in spreading the knowledge of Christianity. Though they were not too successful in converting, their focus remained what Grant had advocated, ‘the introduction of light’,105 and to this end they remained committed with zeal and passion. Not every Englishman attacked Hindu culture with rancour and bias. There were some, albeit a very few, who staunchly defended the manners and customs of the natives. Charles Stuart, an Irishman, travelled to India when still in his teens and made it his home forever. He soon adopted Indian customs and rituals, of bathing in the river, worshipping idols and dressing like a native and was nicknamed ‘Hindoo Stuart’. He was mostly regarded as an eccentric British general by other officers in the Company’s service. He wrote a delightfully irreverent volume on European women’s clothing, called The Ladies Monitor, Being a Series of Letters first published in Bengal on the Subject of Female Apparel Tending to Favour a regulated adoption of Indian Costume and a rejection of Superfluous Vesture by the Ladies of this country With incidental remarks on Hindoo Beauty, Whale-Bone Stays, Iron Busks, Indian Corsets, Man-Milliners, Idle Bachelors, Hair-Powder, Waiting Maids, and Footmen. He recommended perspicacity and caution if a revolution was to be brought in the sentiments of the Hindus. In his anonymously written A Vindication of the Hindoos (1808), a reply to those who denigrated Hinduism, Stuart stated, there are some zealous votaries of Christianity, who view the extended map of religion through the confined vista of partial tenets; who thus limited in their views, and attached to local prejudices, vainly imagine all moral fitness, and all religious excellence, to have exclusively arranged themselves under the banner of Christianity; and that neither truth, justice, honour, gratitude, or charity, are to be found pure beyond the sphere of its influence; and who thence take occasion to vilify, with equal justice and discrimination, the whole population of an extensive empire.106

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Stuart was incisive enough to understand that more could be achieved by befriending the natives. His advice to missionaries was to exercise prudence and that for their own interests they ought not to antagonize those they sought to convert. His astute suggestion was, ‘Give to those who seek, without inviting to the purchase. Voluntarily then, from choice and from conviction, if they seek the Gospel blessings of redemption, let us receive them with open arms.’107 But the promulgation of the Gospel did not produce desirable results, and conversion proved to be difficult. Evangelists like Alexander Duff, who strongly advocated the use of English and Christian teaching in schools, despaired at the low rate of conversion and the growing criticism from Christians at home. Duff attributed the resistance towards conversion to the ‘stubborn and degeneracy’ of people ‘in a country like Hindustan in particular, where the opposition to the spread of the Gospel in particular is so inveterate and so universal’.108 Missionaries blamed the rigid adherence to traditionalism amongst the Hindus, especially upper-class women, who were perceived to have a lot of influence on their children. From the 1850s the zenana became the focus of most of the women missionary accounts. The zenana (apartments for upperclass Indian women) was seen as the hub of ignorance and superstition, and therefore a fit object of the missionary’s labour to bring in light and knowledge for their ‘imprisoned sisters’.109 In The Women of India and Christian work in the Zenana, Mrs Weitbrecht, the LMS missionary at Burdwan, wrote that such strongholds of Hinduism could be ‘penetrated’ if ‘the doors of this cruel captivity’ could be opened to bring in ‘unsanctified freedom to those poor suffering sisters’. Weitbrecht candidly asserted the purpose of employing control of ‘we’ over ‘them’: ‘We want Christian women to teach them the glad tidings of great joy, to illumine with gospel light these cheerless homes, and to create […] a freedom.’110 At the same time the zenana was perceived as a threat to ‘modernization’ and evangelization in India. ‘It is through the influence of women that reformation in India is so effectually opposed in its progress’,111 wrote Weitbrecht and gave instances of arguments posed by Hindu women on the comparative merits of their gods and goddesses, and how difficult it was to prove to them ‘the validity of the mighty and merciful works of our Saviour’.112 Such diverse and paradoxical sets of representations in which India was projected and evaluated only reconfirm the conundrum of India that the colonizers tried to organize into a more knowable and manageable entity. These early representations facilitated and justified a collective impression of a land and people that essentially needed to be controlled. Pramod K. Nayar, in Colonial Voices, goes so far as to say, ‘Colonialism […] was the consequence and manifestation of a set of representations’.113 Undoubtedly these representations

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justified the role of the colonizers, whether it was to intervene politically or socially in the lives of their subjects. At the same time it was an exercise in self-fashioning and projection of an image. As they mapped, categorized and ordered the unknown, they were powerful; as they interpreted history, art and traditions, they were scholarly; as they reformed, preached and taught, they were humanitarians. From imaginative construction to actual lived experiences, these discourses on India indicate how the colonizers negotiated the tenuous boundaries of reality and fancy, us and them, self and other.

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Part II FEMALE AGENCY I intreat thee also, true yolk-fellow, help those women which laboured with me in the Gospel. – Apostle Paul; Phil 4:3 Protestant scriptural Christianity requires such agents in evangelizing the degraded nations of the world; and it may confidently be affirmed, that according to the manifest arrangements of Divine Providence, without that efficient class of agency, the Heathens cannot be brought to the knowledge of salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ. – Rev. Thomas Timpson, Memoirs of British Female Missionaries, London: William Smith, 1841. Preface, vii–viii.

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Chapter 3 ‘HELPMEETS’ AND WIVES OF MISSIONARIES (1793–1820) Man requires a ‘Help Meet’, and in every country the infant mind receives its earliest impressions from the female sex. Wherever, therefore, this sex is left in a state of ignorance and degradation, the endearing and important duties of Wife and Mother, cannot be duly discharged, and no great progress in general civilization and morals can be reasonably hoped for.1 Some of the first British missionaries to arrive in India were the Baptist missionaries. In 1792, the BMS was founded in England by a small handful of enthusiasts who belonged to the lower strata of society. William Carey, who was apprenticing as a shoemaker, was eager for a mission life abroad. Aware of the difficulties of a foreign station, Carey had certain suggestions for the English missionaries who were venturing to heathen lands.2 They must have piety, courage and forbearance; leave all the comforts of life behind them; encounter unknown inconveniences and undefined hardships; and be able to survive in a harsh alien land. He emphasized the importance of company, ‘for two, at least, to go together’, and suggested they ‘should be married men’. The wives and family who accompanied them should be wholly employed in providing for them and must know ‘husbandry, fishing, fowling’. They should cultivate a little piece of land, sow their crops and have a few utensils of husbandry, a few articles of stock, a cow and bull and other cattle, preferably ‘of both sexes’. Carey’s recommendation is an idealized image evocative of British pastoral domesticity that the missionaries would try to recreate in a distant land. The missionary was expected to live a quiet frugal life with his wife and family, cows and bulls, cultivate his lands and subsist on fishing and fowling. When Carey first put forward the above views on propagating Christianity in An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the

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Heathens, he was a young man in his twenties and had no personal experience of India. But his advice had significant implications for future missionary activities in India. Carey’s instructions indicated (1) missionary activities were clearly a career choice only for men, (2)  wives were to assist, provide, divide the toil and hardship and (3) the value and utility of such companions was equivalent to cattle. Whether it be women or beasts, their usefulness was to toil, breed and proliferate in the new world. At the time when Carey and evangelical societies were encouraging missionaries to spread the words of the Gospel in the Far East, not many would have been enthusiastic to bring their wives and family with them to an unknown hostile destination. Other than their ‘usefulness’ for their men and their role as cultural guardians, the wives were also seen as the moral saviours of the white men from potential sexual liaisons with native women. An important ‘dissonance’ between Christianity and paganism, as perceived by the West, was sexuality. While chastity, purity and virginity were qualities prized in Christian women, Indian women were associated with sexuality that was potent enough to entrap and ensnare the white men. Captain Thomas Williamson, in his guidebook on India, pointed out the connubial attachments that many European men maintained with native Indian women. Lack of company and incompatible climate were considered oppressive in the long run.3 ‘Plurality’ (polygamy) he wrote, ‘is common among natives of opulence, and is not unprecedented among Europeans’, and one such elderly European gentleman ‘solaced himself with no less than SIXTEEN, of all sorts and sizes!’4 Williamson’s justification for such attachments of European men with native women was that what was liable to be deemed in terms of Christian religion as ‘libidinous or licentious’ was acceptable in this land because of the sheer shortage of mates for these men.5 While the government ignored such alliances and attachments in the private sphere, it was anxious to keep it strictly separate from the more formal public existence of the officers because of potential legal complications and state responsibilities towards children born of such biracial relationships and mixed marriages.6 European men who had Indian mistresses and children did not enjoy the same social position and respect as those whose alliances were ‘purer’. Moreover there was always the fear of defilement, of venereal diseases, of transgressing the moral dictates of the scriptures. Geoffrey Moorhouse gives an instance of the first missionaries who sailed to Tahiti in 1796, some of whom within months of landing declared their decision to marry heathen women.7 They declined to submit any longer ‘to the restraint of the Gospel’, and their actions were considered ‘directly contrary to the Word of God’. These men were promptly excommunicated and the reason given was,

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It was not a case of a missionary marrying a native convert, but of a Christian man uniting himself to a heathen woman, and that on an island, where the testimony of the missionaries, after a residence of eighteen months, was that in all probability not one single female on the island over ten or twelve years of age had escaped pollution.8 The central representational modes of such writings showed the contrary reactions of fascination and fear of native alliances. The sensual, seductive yet dangerous had to be controlled by imposing policing, moralizing and civilizing checks. Unlike Catholic missionaries, who remained celibate, Protestant missionaries were encouraged to take their wives with them to the foreign stations where they were posted. The Christian family was represented as an ‘alternate’ paradigm to ‘heathenish’ sexual relations. Missionary families were to serve as an epitome of ‘proper’ relationships and as an exemplar for natives to emulate. They were ‘intended to have a didactic function as an “object lesson” which indigenous people imagined to be imitative of Europeans’.9 ‘Marriage’, ‘home’ and ‘family’ were imbued with a moral value that the missionary discourse tried to perpetuate not only among the ‘pagans’ but also among the British in England. The role of the early missionaries to India was shaped by complex developments within British society as well as in the colonial context. Eighteenth-century evangelicalism emphasized the sanctity of family and home as a model for society. Evangelicals designated the home a cloistered place where carefully prescribed restrictions were in place. Hannah More elevated women as moral and cultural sentinels of the family, and regarded them as a crucial support for family and state. John Wesley represented the family as an ideal community of believers. Domesticity and familial relationships were central to evangelical ideology especially when posted abroad. It was expected that the wives would accompany their missionary husbands to the mission fields as supporters and encouragers to their husbands. Missionary families embodied the ideal British Protestant Victorian family life of a man and woman living together in a loving relationship, caring for their children and tending to a well-organized, cultivated home and hearth. The scope of women missionaries was again intimately connected to the growing British power in India to reinforce the image of the English as benefactors of society. Missionary wives were typically regarded as upholders of moral values, vested with the responsibility to resist corruption and degeneration when residing among the heathens. With their virtuous purity they were supposed to protect their family from the forces of contamination in the foreign fields. Marriages and partnerships were represented as exemplary relationships where the man was to lead and the rest of the family members

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would willingly comply. The mission as an idealized home that housed a pious family was thereby a reinforcing of a contrast in the godly life of the good Christian versus the heathen, typically suggested as polygamous and as having dubious illicit sexual relationships. The sanitized domesticated space of the missions was used as a foil to the widespread stereotyped representation of the lascivious Indian male, surrounded by his harem of slavish, debased, oppressed women. The Serampore Baptist missionaries were pioneers in introducing the words of the gospel among the indigenous population of Bengal. They were also the first to represent the mission as a well-bound, closely knit family. The early British missionaries who came to India brought their wives along with them, perhaps inspired by the example of Carey, who was accompanied by his wife and children. While he was enthusiastic for an evangelical career in India, his wife, Dorothy, was very hesitant to accompany him. When Carey married Dorothy Plackett in 1781, there was very little in common between them. She was uneducated, much older than Carey and did not share his zeal for or vision of proselytization. Her reluctance to accompany her husband to India and her subsequent mental illness have led her critics to brand her as ‘weak’. Daniel Potts is dismissive of the ‘less determined’ and ‘reluctant’ wife who ‘later lapsed into insanity’.10 George Smith, Carey’s biographer, considered her an impediment in the life of Carey, ‘Never had minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate’,11 and harshly denounced her as ‘a peasant woman with a reproachful tongue’.12 The barrage of reproaches is obviously because she does not neatly fit into the stereotype of a dutiful wife that a woman in contemporary English society was supposed to be. ‘She never learned to share his [her husband’s] aspirations or to understand his ideals’,13 is the accusation levelled by Carey’s biographer. When Carey made his decision to travel to India along with Dr John Thomas, a medical missionary who had been to India before, Dorothy despite their persuasions was determined not to go. A mother of three children and expecting the fourth, she understandably had apprehensions of travelling far away from her homeland to an unknown place. She agreed to let her eldest son, Felix, go with his father. Carey decided to proceed, as ‘he could not cease to be a Christian […] to relinquish his purpose of disciplining some of the idolatrous world to Christ’.14 As Carey tried to persuade Dorothy to change her mind, he wrote while on board the Oxford, ‘If I had all the world I would freely give it all to have you and my dear children with me. But the sense of duty is so strong as to overpower all other considerations; I could not turn back without guilt on my soul. […] You want to know what Mrs. Thomas thinks, and how she likes the voyage. She would rather stay in

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England than go to India; but thinks it right to go with her husband.’15 On their first attempt, Carey and Thomas could not travel as their applications were rejected and they had to disembark. Fortunately for them, they came to know of another ship that would soon sail to India. Thomas made another appeal to Mrs Carey. I went back, and told Mrs. Carey her going out with us was a matter of such importance, I could not leave her so – her family would be dispersed and divided for ever – she would repent of it as long as she lived. As she tells me since, this last saying, frequently repeated, had such an effect upon her, that she was afraid to stay at home; and afterwards in a few minutes, determined to go, trusting in the Lord; but this should be on condition of her sister going with her.16 A number of conclusions are apparent from this about the position of the missionary’s wife. There is obviously the perceptible difference in the role of man and woman, for him, whose greater duty was to ‘attempt great things for God’,17 and for her to keep the family together. Ironically, Dorothy’s decision to stay back with her children is blamed as dividing the family, while Carey proceeds to leave his family and pregnant wife. Again, there is immense psychological pressure to fit into the cast of the ‘good’ wife. Both Carey and Thomas repeatedly invoke her duties as a wife and mother, either by comparing her with other ‘dutiful’ wives or appealing to her familial responsibilities. Those who cannot or will not collude with the patriarchal definition of womanhood are made to feel guilty and fearful of contravening. These can be seen as powerful arsenals of control over women. Clearly, the early white women to accompany the missionaries to India, presumably to support their husbands in uplifting the heathens, were not that empowered themselves. The Careys arrived in India in 1793, and William began working in the indigo factories at Mudnabatty, near Calcutta. While he busied himself learning the Bengali language and translating the Bible, Dorothy struggled to cope with the hostile and unfamiliar surroundings. The heat, poverty, recurrent illness and loneliness, coupled with the loss of her five-year-old son, Peter, in a year’s time, drove Dorothy to a mental breakdown. Her sister Kitty, who had accompanied them, soon got married and left. During the first three months of Dorothy’s retreat from reality (January–March 1795), Carey lamented, ‘This is indeed the Valley of the Shadow of Death to me. […] O what would I give for a kind sympathetic friend such as I had in England to whom I might open my heart.’18 Dorothy’s psychotic delusions and deteriorating mental instability led her to be confined to locked rooms. From April 1796, in his letters written to his sisters back home, Carey frequently mentioned his wife’s insanity and

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her confinement ‘to prevent Murder which was attempted’.19 In a letter to his father, Carey confessed, ‘Poor Mrs. Carey is totally deranged in her intellect.’20 In 1801, he wrote, Mrs. Carey is obliged to be constantly confined. She has long got worse and worse, but fear both of my own life and hers, and the desire of the police of the place obliged me to agree to her confinement.21 And by 1805, Poor Mrs. Carey is a very distressing object. Her whole life is a life full of fear and rage […] for her children are ill or injured constantly fills her mind with all the most boundless rage against the supposed enemies of her offspring.22 After twelve years of insanity, Dorothy died on 8 December 1807, at the age of 51.23 A brief notice in the Periodical Accounts informed the public: ‘Mrs. Carey, after having been ill about a fortnight, died.’24 In the same letter that he wrote to inform his sisters of Dorothy’s death, Carey announced his decision to remarry.25 He married Charlotte Rummohr, a ‘pious’ and ‘wealthy’ lady, who went on to give him ‘as great a store of domestic happiness as I can reasonably deserve’.26 After 13 years of togetherness, she too passed away in 1821, leaving Carey ‘lonely and unhappy’, and wishing he was ‘more spiritually minded’.27 He went on to marry a third time to Mrs Grace Hughes, who ‘contributes to my happiness’ and mission work.28 What we can gather about Carey’s tragic domestic life is from his letters and memoirs. So, no doubt he gains our sympathy and compassion. We do not have Dorothy’s side of the story. Her illiteracy meant that unlike her erudite husband, she could not communicate her feelings with her family and friends in England. And for all his pity for ‘poor Mrs. Carey’, we do not know how much Carey really understood her. She had at least failed by his standards of domestic bliss by not contributing to his happiness. Perhaps her greatest sorrow was her failure as a mother and her decreasing influence on her children, who were often taken care of by others in the mission. As James Beck in his analysis of Dorothy’s insanity puts it, ‘Perhaps she felt that her one remaining area of influence was declining and disappearing.’29 Like the confined demonic Bertha Mason of Charlotte Bronte’s novel,30 Dorothy’s only means of venting the frustration, anger and hatred against patriarchal expectations and control was her ‘boundless rage’. For a long time prevailing ideas on mental illness, especially in women, was entrenched in complex social and cultural taboos.31 No wonder Carey’s writings regarding his wife’s depression and insanity were either reticent or accusatory. In fact,

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nineteenth-century England associated mental illness as a typically ‘female’ disease, attributed to biological and psychological factors. A close connection was often drawn between madness, female sexuality and morality. Mental maladies in females were often associated with ‘unnatural desires’, which diverted the woman from being ‘ideally’ female.32 It is now recognized that mental disorders are the result of far more complex social and economic factors triggered by women’s subordinate social status, economic dependence, poverty, ennui, stress in marriage and housework.33 The manifestation of female mental disorder became a common problem amongst white women in colonial India. Dorothy’s case was perhaps one of the earliest cases, but these were often unrecognized or hushed up. Social and cultural alienation, homesickness, boredom, frequent loss of near ones and a sense of helplessness seem to have contributed to female mental illness in British India. Such instances of hysteria and madness can be interpreted as the venting of the white women’s pent-up anger and frustration at their social circumstances. If Carey’s wish was to represent an alternative form of female agency and domesticity in his mission homes, he had failed most miserably in his personal sphere. His wife’s insanity and his sons growing up to be wayward and uneducated was not exactly the picture he wanted to be presented of missionary life in India. Nevertheless, he pursued devotedly to entreat the society to send more missionaries and their families to India. I then earnestly entreat the society to set their faces this way, and send out more missionaries. We ought to be seven or eight families together; and it is absolutely necessary for the wives of missionaries to be as hearty in the work as their husbands. Our families should be considered nurseries for the mission; and among us should be a person capable of teaching school, so as to educate our children.34 The Baptist Society began to send more missionaries to Bengal. The first to arrive was John Fountain, in 1796, who began teaching in a school in Mudnabatty. He was followed by William Ward, a printer, William Grant, Daniel Brunsdon, Joshua Marshman, a schoolteacher, and his wife, Hannah Marshman. Grant died just three weeks after his arrival in Bengal. Ward was to eventually marry Mary Tidd Fountain, the widow of missionary John Fountain. She had sailed out in a 1799 party with the Marshmans to marry Fountain, but John died before their first anniversary and the birth of their only son. Brunsdon and Thomas died in 1801. The group of English Baptist missionaries who arrived in Bengal first began work at the indigo plantations in Mudnabatty more to acquiesce with the British government’s strict refusal to have any missionary activities in its

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territory. Later they settled in the Danish settlement of Serampore, 12 miles from Calcutta. Serampore became the base for Baptist missionary activities, and the Serampore Trio as Carey, Marshman and Ward were famously known, took the active lead in setting up schools, printing books and contributing significantly to missionary activities. Much credit has been given to the three of them for their contributions to Bengali society, particularly ‘Carey Saheb’, as he was fondly addressed by the Bengalis. But their wives have remained practically in oblivion. The wives of the missionaries led extraordinary lives as partners to their more famous husbands, yet their contribution to the establishment of missions in India has either been ignored or dismissed. Missionary work, as Valentine Cunningham asserts, ‘was clearly perceived as a task performed by men which women merely supplemented. Missionary was a male noun; it denoted a male actor, male action, male spheres of service.’35 The fate of these women was to be lumped under the generic noun of ‘wives’ or to be known by their husband’s last name. John Pritchard, himself a missionary, says that missionary history ‘inevitably pays more attention to the heroes, the saintly characters, the achievers’.36 He further corroborates that in many cases where the societies sent British and Irish women abroad, ‘it has been impossible to discover the forename of the women’.37 The voices of these ‘helpmeets’, as they were referred to, have been undocumented or muted. Some were barely literate to pen their thoughts on paper, and most were far too occupied with the trials and tribulations of daily survival and looking after the family. Some voices, like Dorothy’s, were regarded as an embarrassing fact to be hidden, and some others were not ‘heroic’ enough to be recorded. Only a few, like Hannah Marshman, provided the right balance of sacrifice and service to become the brand ambassador of the ‘missionary women’ in India. George Smith regards her as ‘the first missionary to the woman of India, and indeed the first of all woman missionaries in modern times’.38 Even then, Daniel Potts’s seminal work, British Baptist Missionaries in India, finds no mention of Hannah Marshman’s contribution either in the private or the public sphere. He has just a comment in parenthesis for Marshman’s ‘domineering wife’, as he calls her, and says she was ‘the only missionary wife who took a constantly active part in the Mission’s work’.39 The unsaid presupposition was that ‘British Baptist Missionaries’ were all males, and that the contribution of the women was not of any significant importance. In spite of such silences and dismissive attitudes, it cannot be overlooked that women like Hannah Marshman played an important role in shaping the image of early mission work in India. Hannah Shepherd married Joshua Marshman in 1791. Initially a weaver, Marshman was encouraged by his wife for academic and spiritual

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pursuits, and he began teaching in a school in Bristol. For some years prior to their arrival in India, they were part of the Baptist Church in Bristol. Greatly inspired by John Rylands, the Marshmans, along with Ward, Grant and Brandson, volunteered for service to India for propagation of the gospel. It was not an easy decision. Hannah was at first ‘doubtful’ whether this was her path of duty. She had ‘a strong objection’ to the decision of her husband to leave England, and it was painful to leave her friends and associations behind. But as Marshman was to write to his daughter, ‘Your dear Mother, from love to the Redeemer, gave up all for the sake of His cause in India’40 and cheerfully accompanied her husband in this arduous journey. After 20 weeks of confinement in the ship and serious ill health, they arrived at Serampore on 13 October 1799. At the Serampore Mission, both in the private and the public sphere, Hannah shouldered extensive responsibilities and rendered invaluable service. There were six missionary families living at the mission: Mr and Mrs Carey and their four children; Mr and Mrs Marshman with three children; Mr and Mrs Fountain; Mr and Mrs Brandson; Mr Ward (single); Mrs Grant (William Grant’s widow) and her two children. There were in all ten adults and nine children. They lived like a big joint family, dined together and had a common account. Hannah managed this big family and kept the accounts. She had overall an influential impact on her husband and on the Mission family, especially the sons of Carey, who were wayward and directionless. But funds were required to run an establishment of nineteen people. Hannah founded the first girl’s school and fee-paying boarding house in Serampore. The advertisement in the Calcutta Gazette, on 20 March 1800 announced the opening of a Mission House in Serampore: ‘On Thursday, the 1st May 1800 a school will be opened at this House, which stands in a very healthy and pleasant situation by the side of a river.’ The fee per month for board and washing was Rs. 30, and another Rs. 35 was to be charged for reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, Latin and so on. The advertisement stressed that ‘particularly attention will be paid to the correct pronunciation of the English language’.41 Hannah’s boarding schools proved to be highly popular, especially with the European and the Eurasian settlers. A  school for native boys also proved to be a huge success. The schools expanded rapidly, and an adjoining house had to be purchased to accommodate the students. Hannah ably managed the funds and expenses of these schools and controlled community expenses for the mission. The boarding school yielded an income of nearly £1,000 a year, and the Marshmans took just £34 a year for their personal expenses.42 The schools were also liberally supported by the Europeans in the country. Whatever was earned went into the

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common stock. Writing to Mr Ryland, Marshman praised his wife’s dedication and service: My dear partner is very happy in her employ, although the school, together with the case of her family, and learning Bengali, for which her desires are scarcely less ardent than my own, render her life very laborious.43 And in a letter to her friend, Hannah expressed her feelings: I searched my mind very minutely before I engaged in the School, lest it should be irksome to me afterwards. However I was enabled to leave all, and thankfully to give myself up to the work; and through mercy I have not repented, and hope I never may. I am not worthy of being employed in anything belonging to Christ, and often wonder at the dispensations of God in sending me to this land, where so much grace is needed, and my daily experience is such that I  often fear least I  have none. This however I know, I long for the increase of Christ’s kingdom upon earth, especially in this benighted part of it.44 Clearly, Hannah’s sense of evangelical mission is deeply rooted in believing herself an agent of change with a responsibility towards India. As she affirmed, teaching was her passion: ‘To me there is no employment equally pleasant with that of teaching children; it is delightful beyond description, particularly when the little creatures are attentive to the instruction given.’45 By 1815, the Marshmans were in charge of 45 schools within 20 miles of Serampore. Hannah also provided shelter to widows and orphans in the missions. The Benevolent Institution managed by the Serampore missionaries offered basic education to the indigent Christians. And the Baptist Female Society had begun schools for girls in and around Calcutta. There was a lot of responsibility to shoulder. Not all the wives of the early missionaries chose public life, and if some like Hannah did, then there was an effortless fluidity with which the domestic and the public coexisted in their lives. There was no rigid segregation of the public and private domains of her responsibility. Her journal and her letters, which she regularly maintained throughout her life, indicate this fine balance that she maintained between the two spheres of her life. The predominant focus of her writings is on tending to her domestic duties; maintaining a neat, orderly house; keeping accounts; and enforcing order in the schools. Her detailed observations of the native customs, domestic arrangements, climate, food, dining, the making of tea, drinks and even tailoring are as much delightful in their naivety and variety as their vivid portrayal of the diametric contrast between two cultures.

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Figure  3.1 Hannah Marshman’s School for Girls, established in 1818, as it stands today.

If Carey was the ‘father’ of the mission, then Hannah played the role of a mother, bestowing her care and attention on her school and family. Hannah’s letters convey her enthusiasm in running these schools and her intense involvement in providing facilities to the students. She thanks her patrons in Exeter for their contributions towards the schools, for sending ‘1500 rupees worth of fancy articles for the children […] with which they will be exceedingly delighted’.46 She writes to Mrs Haugh in Calcutta for ten yards of ‘cheap flannel’ that would do for ‘dirty boys’, and some at a higher price for ‘clean boys’.47 At the same time there is motherly concern for her own family. She advises her daughter Rachel to make arrangements for her school holidays, take care of her lessons and ‘pay particular attention to your carriage’.48 She stood as a solid pillar of support to her family, advising them, consoling them, giving them spiritual strength when they lost a near and dear one. With equal resoluteness she defended her schools when they came under criticism. One letter in particular provides a delightful insight into Hannah’s toughness when she strongly rebuffed the allegation that a dance had been held in Serampore on the anniversary of the foundation of the mission.

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a letter […] in which you said that the brethren at Serampore on the anniversary of the Mission after having had a feast, ended the day with a Dance – your remark […] that it has not concluded with prayers […] It will be twenty-one years the first of next month since Mr. Marshman and I opened the schools at Serampore. Our own children have never learned to Dance […] we never introduced Dancing into our schools […] Gentlemen from almost all parts of India have sent their children to our School […] I cannot think for a moment that my Brethren and Sisters […] had given up to folly as to have had a Dance […] we always have a prayer meeting and thanksgiving in the evening.49 Trivial as this incident may be, it does provide a glimpse of the austerity with which the missionaries were expected to lead their lives. They were to be the role models of piety, which meant a strict adherence to missionary values of hard work, less consumption for self and family, and the leading of an orderly rigorous life. Hannah’s Memoirs indicate that, though they did have a decent income from the schools and boarding houses, they took the bare minimum required for their personal expenses. Carey, she mentions, received a little extra from the consolidated fund to enable him to appear in ‘decent apparel’ at the College and at Government House.50 Hannah’s journals written during this period show the grit and the perseverance with which she faced daily ordeals. Her journal conveys the arduous life of the missionaries, their daily routine of learning, teaching and preaching. She writes, ‘I am constantly employed, and yet I am continually harassed about my own improvement of time. I am a very prey for Satan who worries whom he can’t devour, with a malicious joy.’51 There were problems and hardships, a constant adjustment to everything that was foreign around them. There are frequent descriptions of the physical difficulties of living in India – fever and sickness, lack of proper accommodation for all, roof falling in heavy rains, poisonous snakes in the bedroom and bathing area and one ‘twisted round my leg’.52 Sickness and death is another recurrent theme in Hannah’s correspondence. There is a constant fear of diseases ‘out there’ from which the mission and the inmates have to be protected. Horrifying epidemics besiege the native quarters of the city, and though the mission is a ‘stable’, ‘protected’ space, there is always the fear of being vulnerable to such diseases. Circumstances were very trying, but ‘their zeal was only redoubled by the obstacles and difficulties that they had to encounter’.53 There are moments of doubt and worry and despair of an idealism that cannot be attained: Five years ago I first set my foot on the shores of India. The time seems short to look back, but oh, what have I  done in all this time that is

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acceptable to God? Nothing, nothing in comparison to what I ought to have done. In the course of these five years which are past, many changing scenes have taken place, much affliction both in the family and the Church.54 And again there are flashes of hope, a self-reassurance that ‘work has begun’, some have benefitted from the words of the gospel and ‘the hand of the Lord is in our favour’.55 Along with her attempt to control and bring order to the public spheres of her responsibility, there was simultaneously a constant anxiety to have a grip on her inner self. She often reflects on the spiritual state of herself and her children, seeking God’s mercy and strength to bear difficult times. As she tries to cope with her own ill health, her children’s illness, rain, fire, snake bite and death, there are signs of slipping, of being torn between her duty and the affections of the heart. She feels she is ‘wicked’, ‘a hypocrite’, ‘the vilest creature’ to complain of her miseries, for ‘by complaining I cannot bring myself a step closer to God’. There are bouts of mental confusion, anxiety and questioning, ‘What shall I do, or whither flee/To escape the vengeance due to me?’56 Some of her diary entries show her acute distress of mind, the incoherent ramblings of an anguished mind. Thy compassions fail not and therefore I am not consumed. I am in bondage because of my sins, and am afraid of thy judgements, my heart is a sink of iniquity, the hold of every unclean thought. I am terrified at the sight of myself. Cleanse thou me. Very narrowly escaped the bite of a snake this evening while crossing the yard. How good is God to one so vile, unworthy of thy love and care, and yet thou keepest me by night and day.57 And frequently she blames herself for not meeting the required standards and is afraid of divine retribution: Jesus suffered the just for the unjust […] but while I am shut up in unbelief this salvation is lost to me, as though I am reserved for blackness and darkness forever.58 Surprisingly, the memoirs and letters of Carey and Marshman contain virtually no reference to the physical and mental pain that Hannah had to cope with. Both Carey and Marshman leave hardly any trace of personal failures, frustration or disillusionment in their correspondence. They tend to gloss over the tension, and are more inclined to document the ‘public’ sphere of their work. The role of their wives is seen as ‘helpmeets’ merely to assist the men in their mission. Marshman’s last letter, dictated from his deathbed to his wife, mentions the invaluable support and strength she provided him in his trials.

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You have been even to me the best of wives […] and you have more than deserved all my love, you have been my strength […] in all my trials. I should never have [ …] enabled to do even that I have attempted to do, if you had not.59 Most discourses on the missionaries highlight the ‘missionary’ aspects of their lives and extol their self-sacrifice, patient suffering, the relinquishing of all personal desires, selfless service and so on. There is usually silence on the ideological pressures to conform to the prototype of a missionary. In fact the ‘missionary characteristics’ could prove to be binding in the making as well as the unmaking of the missionary’s identity. It was the women especially who were ‘obliged’ to bear their ‘heavy’ burden of responsibility, and it took another woman some years later to say that: If all Christians are bound to exert themselves in this cause, surely the obligation that rests on Christian women is fourfold! They, far more than men, owe to Christianity their present free and happy state – while it is on their sex that, in other lands, the hard bondage of heathenism presses with a heavier weight.60 If such demands led to mental instability, as in the case of Dorothy Carey, then the individual woman was blamed for her fallibility. And if like Hannah Marshman she was able to withstand the physical and mental hardships, then she was elevated to the position of a saint and heroine. Christopher Smith calls her ‘an unsung heroine’, who was never appointed or formally recognized by the BMS as one of its missionaries. In fact the role and identity as a missionary’s wife depended on the fatiguing demands of her job, which were said to therefore take a toll on her mind. These were then considered visible manifestations of her ‘saintly’ persona. The epitaph on Hannah Marshman’s tombstone pronounced her ‘a mother in Israel’ in recognition of her virtuous life and for being a guiding light for other women. Smith too stresses her position as a universal ‘mother’ figure among the missionaries at Serampore:  ‘In truth, the Serampore mission hardly could have survived without her ministry and herculean contributions. That is why she came to be known by Baptists in Bengal as the mother of the Serampore Mission’.61 When Hannah Marshman died on 5 March 1847, at the age of 80, The Bengal Obituary praised her for ‘having consecrated her life and property to the promotion of this sacred cause’ and for having exhibited ‘an example of humble piety and energetic benevolence for forty-seven years’.62

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Figure 3.2 The tomb of the Marshman family, Serampore.

Such individual examples of piety were imagined and represented as the collective virtue of all women missionaries. In the context of contemporary representations of the ‘Other’ woman in missionary discourses and in the wider imperial imagery, the Christian missionary woman was literally the embodiment of purity. Esme Cleall argues that ‘the body acted as a prism through which colonial and colonized societies were refracted and understood, suggesting that the discourses thereby produced were essentially discourses of embodied difference’.63 The white, healthy, pure body was marked as different from the black, sick and impure body of the heathens. Discourses of differences represented the missionaries as administering to their soul rather than to their body. So, missionaries had less to say about their physical hardships or bodily ailments. In fact, such sacrifices and sufferings were considered ennobling, a mark of a martyr. By contrast, the native women were perceived as victims of oppression. It was up to the white women missionaries to redeem the lives of the native women. As Antoinette M.  Burton points out in her essay,64 the Indian woman was regarded as a ‘special imperial burden’ for the white feminist reform activities. By passing a judgement on ‘suffering’ native women’s degradation and religious backwardness, a distinctly superior position

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was marked out for the white women. By prescribing a distinctly inferior position for the ‘other’ women, the missionary women appeared more enlightened and emancipated. Though missionary discourse invariably painted a degrading picture of the condition of native females and of practices like sati, the position of the ‘empowered’ missionary woman and the ‘oppressed’ native woman was one of striking similarity. Both regarded their ‘sacrifices’ as acts of piety; both thought they were ordained by their respective Gods; and both considered their special role would lead them to salvation. Again, the arsenals of patriarchal control over both sets of women were the same. Both had their mind and body under patriarchal control; both were insidiously manipulated to collude with the patriarchal definition of womanhood; and both were rewarded by being elevated to the pedestals of ‘saint’ and ‘heroine’. Hannah Marshman’s mantle was passed on to other wives of missionaries, though there have been allegations of her reluctance to relinquish her ‘territorial’ rights. The next generation of missionaries many times did not meet her expectations and was met with a light-hearted disapproval: ‘The dress of these new sisters staggers me, but God looketh at the heart, no doubt they are like the King’s daughters all glorious within.’65 At the same time, Hannah realized the inevitability of handing over the responsibility to others, and she wrote, I have acted according to the ability that God has given me, but two will be better than one, because they have a good reward for their labour. I have beaten the track, and laid something of a foundation, and now if God should see fit to take from me my stewardship, and give it to another more worthy, I must submit.66 After 1813, with missionary activities being legalized and with the implementation of the educational clause of the Charter Act, more schools opened in Bengal and more teachers were required. Though quite a number of schools had opened in quick succession, and the missionaries did project them to be very successful, nevertheless it was not so simple or easy to get students. The European settlers were enthusiastic in sending their children to school, but a whole lot of problems could be seen in the case of native students. The uppercaste Hindus were reluctant to allow their children to sit with the lower-caste children. As for the girls, Hindu society frowned upon the education of girls, and as a result of social taboo not many native girls were allowed to go to school. There was also the problem of obtaining female teachers. And most of all was the general apprehension of being converted to Christianity. The Serampore missionaries were at this time at the zenith of their intellectual and benevolent activities. Carey was particularly solicitous of a successor. The second generation of the Serampore missionaries had to begin

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their work, but their way of working was very different. Very soon conflict arose between the older and the younger generations over financial matters and the degree of devotion and commitment to work. Carey’s son Felix had been posted as an ambassador to Burma, but far from being elated with his son’s elevation, Carey observed, ‘Felix has shrivelled into an ambassador.’ For him, the highest honour was to be a ‘Missionary of the Cross’.67 In 1815, Felix returned to India, but his wife and children had drowned in the ship on their way, and he had escaped with great difficulty. Eustace Carey, the son of William Carey’s brother, had also arrived with his wife in 1814, the first missionary to land in India after the passing of the new charter in 1813.68 As a result of strained relations, Eustace soon formed a separate missionary union in Calcutta in 1815. He was the first resident European missionary in Calcutta, of any denomination, who was devoted to native work.69 It was, however, William Yates whom Carey considered the most suitable person to take on his responsibilities.70 Yates had been sent by the Baptist society to India in 1815, ‘the first missionary to be sent out by the society, unmarried’.71 He went on to become a distinguished scholar and worked with the Serampore missionaries on the translation of the Bible. The British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), founded in England in 1804, was already assisting the Serampore missionaries in the translation and distribution of scriptures in the area. Yates soon became an indispensable part of the mission. In 1816, he married Catherine Grant, the daughter of a deceased missionary. She had as a child accompanied her parents to India and, having lost both of them quite early, she was left entirely in the care of Hannah Marshman. From her childhood she had been reared as part of the mission family and was competent to assist in the school. The Memoir of William Yates mentions her as a suitable partner for him in every respect. Herself a partaker of the grace of the gospel, she had, from earliest infancy, breathed a missionary atmosphere, and had been trained amidst missionary operations. With her, all which pertained to missionary life was necessarily a sober reality; she was unusually free from the romance and poetry of the undertaking, and therefore peculiarly a help-meet for such a man, and prepared to encounter with him, the trials and cares which characterize the early part of his career.72 The schism between the younger and older generation of missionaries led Yates to move to Calcutta. The newly constituted fraternity of missionaries in Calcutta, the Calcutta Baptist Missionary Society, now included Eustace, Lawson and Yates, and they were soon joined by William Hopkins Pearce and Rev. J.  Penney. Calcutta became a new field of missionary activity. Penney

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arrived in India with his wife in 1817 upon a request made by the brethren at Serampore to the BMS. As a deacon and president of the Ladies Society for Female Education, he was known for his ‘authority and kindness’.73 Under the direction of Mr and Mrs Penney, the Benevolent Institution instructed the indigent children in ‘religious and useful knowledge’ through the medium of English and Bengali. The number of girls under Mrs Penney’s care was 94, and they were divided into four classes of Reading, Writing, Spelling and Needle-work.74 Regarding the education and general improvement of these girls, Mrs Penney wrote, There are many pleasing indications of good. In habits of industry we see gradual advances; and can refer to several instances, within our own knowledge of Girls who are not only a comfort to their aged parents, but also the chief support of the family, by what they gain by their needles. Many have married and are comfortably settled in life; and if we may judge by their respectable appearance, seem to have carried their industrious habits from School into their families and connections. The elder girls have an increasing desire for reading, and manifest great anxiety to understand what they read.75 Mr Pearce had decided to come and work in the East when he received a letter from Ward asking him ‘to come over and help us’.76 He married Martha Blakemore in 1817, and that same year they left for Calcutta. A house for the missionaries was built at Durgapur, very close to Calcutta, where they replicated the domestic arrangements of the mission in Serampore. Pearce took the charge of the printing press to translate Bengali works. The first definite object of the brethren at Calcutta was to organize a young ladies’ seminary to be superintended by the wives of the missionaries. The Benevolent Christian School Society, which had originated in 1809, had a free school in Calcutta in 1810, and it was extended to include girls by 1811. At the end of the fifth year there were 13 schools with 200 girls in the Northern Division, or that which belonged to the Baptist mission, and at the end of the sixth year the number of girls had increased to 246. The growing popularity was attributed to the devoted superintendence of Mrs Coleman. She was in charge of 12 schools with about 280 girls. After she left, these were under Mrs Pearce and Mrs Yates.77 At Seebpore, there were 37 girls in the female boarding school. The ‘adult females were assiduously instructed in the Scriptures’ by Rev. George Pearce and his wife, and it was claimed that 15 were successfully baptized.78 The Calcutta Baptist Missionary Society is rightly credited with the initiation of educating the native females of India. The Calcutta Female Juvenile Society for the Education of Native Females was formed in 1819, and the

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female students were put under the care of Mrs Lawson and Mrs Pearce. Mr Pearce was the president of the society. This was the first attempt to provide organized education to native girls. The girls were taught reading, writing, geography, knowledge of the scriptures and needlework. Mrs Lawson and Mrs Pearce were also in charge of the young ladies’ boarding school. The LMS missionaries were not too far behind the Baptist missionaries in their activities related to native education. Almost 12  months before Marshman and Ward had landed in India to help Carey, a devoted and diligent agent of the LMS, Nathaniel Forsyth had begun his work from the Dutch settlement at Chinsurah on the west side of the river Hooghly in Bengal. He was alone in his efforts, and the society did not do much to support him. Quietly and indefatigably he managed to support himself by his own property, and must be credited for getting a foothold for the LMS missionary activities in Bengal. He was succeeded by Mr and Mrs Robert May, who arrived in Calcutta in August 1812 and soon after settled at Chinsurah. When the Mays established and conducted native schools at Chinsurah, the Settlement was in the possession of the English. The schools run by them were conducted on the British system, where the children of Europeans were taught reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction. The Missionary Register of 1820 states that at one point there were 30 schools with 3,000 students studying in them.79 Mrs May died in September 1813, and a few years later Mr May married again. Carey, perceptive about the important role women were to play in missionary activities, effusively praised the efforts of the wives of the missionaries for native women’s education in India: In the work of missions, especially in the educational department, as much depends upon the endowments and devotedness of females, as upon those of their husbands. The work of female education in India is conducted entirely by the wives of missionaries, or by such pious females as are sent under the auspices of different institutions for that purpose. A Society is now in operation, consisting of ladies of piety and evangelical sentiments, without regard to denominational peculiarity, for selecting and affording protection, and if needed, support, to ladies who are deemed suitable for the work, and are disposed to consecrate their talent for the literary and religious improvement of their own sex […] The usages of society in eastern countries are such as to bar access to the female population, except by their own sex; and when women are converted to the faith, their religious principles and conduct require a constant vigilance, and wisdom, and condescension in their superintendence, different from, and far beyond, what men either can or will bestow.80

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Among the missionaries’ wives, Mrs Yates was regarded as the most competent female in India at that time to superintend the schools. When Mr Yates returned to England for two years to recover his health, the principal reason why his wife stayed back in India was, as Mr Yates wrote, ‘During my absence she will be employed in the superintendence of native female schools; for which, without boasting, I can say that there is no person in the country better qualified, as she has been in the habit of speaking the native language from a child, it is as familiar to her as the English’.81 Under her supervision these schools for native girls became hugely popular and were generously supported by funds from British ladies. In her correspondence, Mrs Yates wrote, We are all much pleased to hear that the ladies in England have taken such a deep interest in the education of the females of this benighted country, and sincerely hope, that they will have cause to rejoice in what they have done […] Some of the girls read and write very well […] The natives had a very great prejudice against females being taught at all, but we trust this prejudice is wearing away a little. As a beginning is now made, we hope it will be attended with success.82 We get sporadic glimpses of her life from Yates’s memoirs – of debilitating diseases, pain, numerous instances of coping with death of near ones, missionary brethren falling ill and dying and the fear of native troops attacking them. She opted to remain in the country with her infant son when Yates went on a two-year tour of England to recover his health and to solicit support from the British for his work in Calcutta. It must have been a difficult time for her, more so when in October 1827 she was to lose her son. Her husband’s consolatory letter to her, which must have reached her long after she most needed such sympathies, very accurately reveals the contrast in their grief of losing a child. While his ‘public engagements’ and ‘public meetings’ prevented him ‘from feeling so much’, she had only ‘religion’ to support her. MY DEAR CATHERINE, – I received your very distressing letter […] I need scarcely tell you how much I was affected by the mournful and unexpected tidings […] My being obliged to preach, and speak at public meetings, prevented me from feeling so much as I should otherwise have done […] My public engagements, however, came in so quick succession that, what with them and the time necessary to prepare for them, I found it impossible to write till I returned home. There were two things which greatly consoled my mind on reading your letter: the one was, that you had the consolation of religion to support you; and the other was, that you had every attention paid you by the kindest and dearest friends.83

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Eustace Carey had left Calcutta in 1824 due to poor health, and Mr Lawson too died soon after. Their departure meant a paucity of workers, and the remaining were feeble and frequently afflicted. Mrs Penney died in 1829. She was known for her ‘sincerity, humility, devotion, prudence and perseverance’ and had made useful contributions in the Benevolent Institution.84 In 1833, natural calamities, earthquakes, pestilence and famine wreaked havoc in Bengal, and thousands of lives were lost. The same year, Mrs Chamberlain, who had been ill for some time, passed away. Mrs Yates, who too had been ailing and had gone on a sea voyage to recuperate, died in 1838. Rev. Penney died in 1839, and in 1840 Mr Pearce died of cholera. In 1841, Yates married Martha Pearce, the widow of his long-time friend and associate William Hopkins Pearce. When Yates had gone to England, leaving his wife and son behind, Pearce had prophetically written, Be assured that, as far as friendship can suggest and execute, my beloved Martha and myself will make dear Catherine and your sweet little one happy. I shall act towards her, as in similar circumstances I should expect you would act towards my Martha, were I to leave her in the care of one for so many years my bosom friend.85 The only two left of all who had commenced the mission in Calcutta, then decided to spend the rest of their days together. Yates was to die at sea on 3 July 1845. For more than two decades, all the brethren and their wives who had started the mission had resided together under the same roof. Their deaths within a span of a few years meant a chapter of missionary activities had closed in Bengal. They had been worthy inheritors of the mantle of missionary labour passed on to them by Carey, Ward and Joshua and Hannah Marshman. As for the wives of the missionaries, a distinct change was perceptible. More and more of them accompanied their husbands to India and became willing partners in their evangelical mission. The unreserved consecration of their time, energy, talent, learning, service and labour in the land of their adoption was carried on until their last breath. They seemed to have adopted and followed what Yates said, that the missionary ‘must never think to put off his armour, till he was ready for others to put on his shroud’.86 If the early efforts put in by the British missionaries and their wives had not transformed very successfully into concrete ‘results’ of conversion of natives, it was not because of any lack of hard work on their part. As Mrs Esther Carey, the widow of the late Eustace Carey, was to remind the critics, in the first couple of decades of missionary work in India it was more important to do the groundwork rather than expect the fruits of labour.

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All calculators of missionary work should remember that the preparatory work is as much connected with the harvest, as if it were the harvest itself. We may justly conclude, therefore, that not only ‘the tender plant, the bud and the blossom’, are to be considered amongst the fair issues of missionary success, but the work itself which has been performed in preparing the soil ready for planting the trees of righteousness and the fruits which are afterwards realized.87 It was quite a fitting imagery. William Carey had dreamed of a heathen land laid bare for ‘taking’, ‘sowing’ and ‘cultivating’,88 and two decades after the first British Baptist missionaries had landed in India, it was ‘just time enough in which to sow the seed that is to yield, in after years, the summer’s harvest’.89

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Chapter 4 ‘MOTHERS’ AND SINGLE WOMEN MISSIONARIES (1820–40) O ye British Mothers – ye British Widows, to whom, if not to you, shall these desolate beings look? In whose ears if not yours, shall these thousands of orphans cry, losing father and mother in one day?1 A notable feature of some of the early attempts to spread education in Britain and its colonies was the emphasis on female education. The British and Foreign School Society (BFSS), established in 1808 for the promotion of the British system of education, was very soon to recognize the importance of education for girls alongside that of boys. Several schools for female children, especially for the poorer classes, were opened throughout Britain, in Manchester, Birmingham, Dudley, Ipswich, Sheffield and Halifax. A Society of Ladies was formed to promote education among women not just in Britain but also to train women ‘to unite in rescuing other females from the degrading consequence of ignorance’2 throughout the British dominion, in India, Ceylon, Canada and the United States. A  report dated November 1814, from Miss Ann Eliza Springmann, the superintendent of the Female Establishment, stated how the general condition and manners of poor girls in manufacturing towns had remarkably improved after they learnt to read and write.3 It was hoped that ladies in general would be stimulated by the examples set by the Female Department of the BFSS and that more women would be encouraged to contribute to the advancement of female education. The school societies thus envisaged a wider participation of British women not only in terms of monetary contributions but also in their roles as encouragers of benevolence and piety. Education of the poor working class was regarded as the special responsibility of the ‘ladies’ of Britain. For the ‘upliftment’ of the moral and material standards of the working class, it was felt education of women was equally important. Reproaching the society for having neglected

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the state of women for so long, the BFSS pointed out ‘the advantages which must result to families, to society, and to the rising generation, from female education’: They stay at home; and while they do this they stamp their own character on the families where they reside; – and so great is female influence, that every Society with which they are connected derives its character from them […] what must be their influence on the rising generation? If they are uneducated, can they teach their children? Does not the earliest instruction of children devolve principally upon mothers? But where they posses not knowledge, they cannot communicate it. The consequences will be, that their offspring will grow up in ignorance; and if the present system of leaving poor females uneducated be continued, their children will be like themselves.4 Of course, it went without saying that the advantages of female education had to be ultimately beneficial for men. Not only would education make women good mothers, it was pointed out, but they would also make good wives and companions. ‘But is it to the advantage of man, that the being created for his happiness should be his slave? – should be unfit to be received as his companion?’ was the standard rhetoric posed to men so as to give them the prerogative to decide on the moral and intellectual standards of their partner. A female well instructed was considered capable of ‘cheering’ and ‘amusing’ sick invalids, providing solace by reading the scriptures, and in general proving to be more ‘industrious, orderly and well behaved’. These, it was pointed out, would be ‘the duties, the pleasures of the instructed daughter, sister, wife or mother’.5 Education of women was then essentially seen as crucial for teaching domestic virtues of industry, sobriety, obedience and moral conduct. While education for boys was aimed at assigning them a position of authority and enabling them to become a recognized agent within a particular social set-up, female education was more of a tool of control. The CMS in its report of 1822 laid stress on the instruction of Hindu girls in Bengal. When Schools for the education of the rising male population were first projected at this Presidency, the state of society seemed to preclude Females from the immediate benefits of such exertions; yet, in the progress of the experiment, it has been found that the Female Mind also can be roused to seek after the blessings resulting from education.6 The success of the Serampore and Calcutta branches of the Baptist missionaries in establishing native female schools further justified their efforts

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to extend the means of education to girls. The woman’s role as a mother and as the first instructress of her children was promoted as a crucial step in the direction of ‘civilizing the subjects’, especially where mothers were found to be ‘destitute of every moral principle’.7 British imperial mission was based on two infallible assumptions: (1) the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, and hence their responsibility to reform the other races,8 and (2)  the moral superiority of British women, who were thus legitimately justified in emancipating other women.9 British women were consequently encouraged to see themselves as the prototype of a superior race of women, the saviours of the ‘degraded’ women in other nations. They were called upon to promote the reformation of the poor uneducated women in foreign countries. Alexander Duff’s address delivered at the First Annual Meeting of the Scottish Ladies’ Association in Edinburgh in 1839, was to highlight the ‘bad’ Indian mother versus the ‘good’ British mother, to accentuate the need for female education in India. His conclusion was based on the statistics he provided of female infanticide in India, who were butchered, he said, by ‘the mothers, – the unhappy mothers, – who, in the name of false honour, and false religion, have no compassion on the fruit of their new-born babes’.10 He therefore directed his appeal to ‘Ye British mothers, who have fondled your smiling babes, and clasped them to your bosoms, as the most precious gifts of heaven’, and claimed that what made them ‘different’ from the ‘unhappy millions of female fellow-subjects in the East’, was ‘Christianity, heaven’s best gift to men’.11 A marked increase in the involvement of women missionaries after 1820 was acknowledged by a simultaneous production of memoirs and biographies of women missionaries. These were distributed by the societies as part of their fundraising efforts and also to encourage more participation from women. One such commemoration was Memoirs of British Female Missionaries, which gave credit to some of the ‘exemplary’ British women missionaries who contributed to female education and mission work in India. Much of such exemplary women there were among the primitive Christian Missionaries, occupying various stations of life, and filling several departments of invaluable labour for the salvation of immortal souls[ …] Many excellent women have adorned, and still adorn, our foreign missions […] Missionary biography ought not, therefore, to be limited to Schwartz, Henry Martyn, Dr Morison, Milne, Carey, and such laborious and apostolic men [original] […] Women, possessing those indispensable qualifications which have conferred imperishable honour and shed such lustre on the cause of the Redeemer, are needed to accompany the servants of Christ in their evangelical missions. And

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[…] to endow them for that most distinguished service, these memorials of departed female excellence have been compiled.12 As the above passage indicates, women missionaries’ status within a maledominated realm of activity was to be confined to a limited sphere of feminized missionary activity. They were ‘needed to accompany’ their menfolk for evangelical missions. Missionary service was definitely still a sphere of male activity. The women’s ‘invaluable labour’ was no doubt ‘indispensable’, but their presence, it was perceived, would ‘shed such lustre’ so as to ‘adorn’ the foreign missions. Participation by British women was seen as the first step toward elevating the condition of the society and as a means of salvation for the ‘heathens’. Jemima Thompson’s tract The Importance of Female Agency in Evangelizing Pagan Nations, which featured as an introduction to Thomas Timpson’s Memoirs,13 notes the important role women had to play in evangelizing in foreign missions: supposing for a moment that we were bound only to attempt the conversion of the male part of the heathen population, the influence of wives and mothers, on the next generation would alone be a sufficient argument for endeavouring to rescue and raise them.14 In the tract Jemima Thompson laid stress on the scope of ‘well educated, pious women’ who could with their virtues and manners and ‘cultivated mind’ impress the natives with the ‘superiority of our system’.15 The ‘bondage of heathenism’, she asserted, presses most heavily on native women, and ‘the obligation which rests on Christian women is fourfold’ to lessen this burden.16 She laments that most white women who come to live in India waste their lives in ‘restless indolence’ and would be much happier if they took a ‘share in the regeneration of the world’.17 Their natural qualities that distinguished them from men, it was pointed out, made them eminently suitable to take up this work. The ‘appropriateness of employing women to teach women’, according to her, was because of the ‘feminine’ qualities of tenderness, endurance, devotion, compassion and a ‘forgetfulness of self ’.18 Clearly, more middleclass women were being urged to extend their sphere of work beyond what was considered as ‘appropriate’ feminine activities without transcending the innate attributes of ‘femininity’. The representation of missionary women as emancipated, intellectual and capable, and yet fitting neatly into the archetypal mould of ‘Christian womanhood’, as Jane Haggis pointed out, ‘lay in the religious rubric in which it was couched’. It was the ‘call of God’ which legitimized women’s ‘work’ in the missions, a role perceived as ‘allocated to

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Christian women’, which Haggis says attracted women to leave their homes and travel thousands of miles to do their duty to God.19 It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the missionary societies would begin to directly employ female missionaries. Single independent woman missionaries coming to work in early nineteenth-century India was still considered untenable. Mrs Anna Carey, wife of Jonathan Carey and secretary of the Female Schools, in 1827 wrote in her letter addressed to Rev. J. Dyer in London that, though the first female native schools ‘present a most encouraging aspect’, yet India is not a place for young ladies to remain unmarried. There are a thousand objections to a spinster’s life here which are not there in England, and I know but one happy exception […] of a single lady and that is our dear Chaffin. This is a solitary exception to a general rule.20 The ‘solitary exception’ was Miss Ann Chaffin, to whom Potts accredits the honour of being ‘the first woman nurse’.21 She was the first independent woman to join the Baptist mission in India in 1813. She came to assist Dr William Johns, a trained Baptist medical missionary who worked at Serampore between 1812 and 1813. In a letter to John Ryland, Carey once noted that though ‘an excellent woman’, she was not ‘of any use to the Mission’.22 At a time when the Baptist missionaries were actively campaigning against ‘barbaric’ Hindu practices inflicted on Indian women, efforts were to involve more women in the work of the missions, and Chaffin’s contribution lies perhaps in her eyewitness account of the practice of sati in India. Dr Johns on his return to England published a volume titled A Collection of Facts and Opinions Relative to the Burning of Widows with the Dead Bodies of Their Husbands (1816), which included as his evidence a revised version of Chaffin’s account. She recounts the scene of a young widow being immolated on the pyre of her dead husband, as witnessed by her from on board a boat. This was the only detailed account of its kind by a British woman.23 Chaffin’s representation of sati, as Lata Mani points out, ‘situates it firmly in the domain of everyday practice, undermining the tendency toward idealization found in many other European accounts’.24 Chaffin’s conclusion, like most of her male missionary colleagues, was that the spread of Christianity was the only way to combat such practices. Whether her representation of sati was more authentic, secular or empathetic from a woman’s point of view may be debatable. What is noteworthy is the element of legitimacy that a white woman’s narrative is deemed to bring to colonial discourses on Indian ritualistic practices. Most European accounts of sati were almost exclusively the products of male observers. A white woman’s eyewitness account gives her a vantage point, an advantage that was to lend

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more credibility to the colonial narratives on sati. It was also linked to British women’s Christian duty to identify and ameliorate the sufferings of their ‘heathen’ sisters. Throughout the 1820s, the focus of the evangelical campaign was to urge the British government to ban sati. The writings of Baptist missionaries highlighting the ‘horrific’ practice were used to campaign against sati. Ward’s Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos had painted a dismal and critical picture of the practices of the Indians. In 1825, the Anglican vicar Thomas Shuttleworth Grimshawe wrote a pamphlet titled An Earnest Appeal to British Humanity in Behalf of Hindoo Widows, which urged the government to take action against sati. James Peggs’s pamphlet that he addressed to the government, The Suttees’ Cry to Britain, demanded prompt action against the ‘barbarous’ Hindu practices, and in his India’s Cries to British Humanity, Peggs appealed to the British public for support. All of them presented the life of the Christian woman as a superior exemplary alternative to the ‘degraded’ lives of the Hindu women. Jemima Thompson’s tract The Importance of Female Agency has as its frontispiece a picture of the ‘burning of the wives and slaves of Runjeet Sing, June 1839’ and begins with a dedication to the Honourable Lady Barham, stating that the purpose of the volume is to illustrate ‘the moral dignity and excellence of Christian women of Great Britain’ and ‘the deplorable degradation of women in Pagan and Mohammedan nations’ and the ‘necessity for female agency in their evangelization’. The degraded condition of women in Hindu society is corroborated by providing accounts from other missionary writings, personal experiences and eyewitness accounts. She clarifies that these are not random sporadic incidents provided as evidence. ‘Such is the rule throughout the heathen world. If any happy wives or mothers can be found there, they are the exceptions.’25 The missionary campaign was careful not to directly mention religious conversion. The religious was often presented as secondary to the secular ‘salvation’ of the Indian women. Even after 1813 when the Government withdrew its earlier stiff opposition to any form of proselytization in its Indian domain, there were still tremendous obstacles to be surmounted. The History of the London Missionary Society26 specifies some of the impediments typical to India, like the extensive size of the land, vast population, colossal systems of religious beliefs and practices, caste systems, polytheistic idolatry, lack of social liberty, Brahmanism, superstitious beliefs, degradation of women and ‘their bigoted resistance to all new truth’. In a rare candid declamation, it expressed the difficulties and the strategies required to be adopted. it will be obvious that victory over it can be won by no brief, spasmodic attacks, but only by a careful, many-sided propaganda, patiently and steadily maintained for a prolonged period. In previous centuries the

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Christian Church has never realized these facts, and has attempted the conversion of India by puny and inadequate efforts foredoomed to failure. During the nineteenth century it selected the most appropriate methods, and on a larger scale, which in due time will accomplish its purpose, and replace Hinduism by a fairer Christianity.27 The aggressive language of the above quote gives the impression of evangelism being adopted as a strategy of war, where victory has to be won by careful planning, propaganda, patience and prolonged, many-sided attacks, until Hinduism can be vanquished and replaced by Christianity. Hinduism was obviously the villain which had to be painted black and contrasted with a ‘fairer’ Christianity. A  whole ‘jungle’ of corrupt practices had to be first located and then felled. astrology, belief in omens, obscene tantric rites, human sacrifices, thuggism, infanticide, false-swearing, forgery, cunning […] unscrupulous usury, the prohibition of foreign travel, and the spirit of compromise […] as well as of vice and lust and cruelty. All these have to be replaced by the light of knowledge, and by the sweet atmosphere of Christian love, purity, justice, trust, and godliness.28 The entire edifice of evangelization from the 1820s onwards stood on three pillars: Christianity, Christian education and Christian women. As Thompson was to encapsulate it so succinctly in her pamphlet, Christianity is the only remedy for the sufferings of women in heathen and Mohammedan countries; and Christian education can be imparted on no large or efficient plan, but through the interpolation of their own sex in this country.29 Nearly all missionary societies had a segment engaged in female education that sent their representatives to work among the Indian women. While on a tour of England, Ward, wrote an open letter to the ‘Ladies of Liverpool, and of the United Kingdom’ and made a fervent appeal to his ‘fair Countrywomen’ and ‘to every female in Britain’ to come and serve in India. He drew their attention to the ‘state of ignorance and superstition’ that, according to him, ‘had no parallel in the history of tribes the most savage and barbarous’, and urged the British women to assuage the sufferings of the Indian women.30 Ward gave a detailed and lurid account of the ‘horrors’ of sati, infanticide and the killing of widows and the elderly related to the state of female society in India. In a letter addressed to a female associate, he wrote, ‘I am very anxious to have

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awakened in the minds of benevolent females in Britain and America, that concern for their sex in India, which will ultimately secure an amelioration of their condition.’31 He then continued in his Farewell Letters to describe the state of ‘seventy-five million suffering women in Hindoosthan’ who ‘by their want of education are lost to themselves, to their families, to society, and to Christianity’.32 Ward’s speeches and his writings were greatly responsible for leaving an indelible negative impression of Indian society on the minds of the British public.33 His appeal to the British conscience, particularly its women, was perhaps the biggest cause of the mobilization of white Christian female missionaries arriving in India in the next couple of decades. Ward based his petition to the British women on a woman-to-woman appeal by presenting to them the sordid conditions of the state of their sex in British India. The common thread that united them was their sex. He pointed out that women’s misery was a divine retribution, a consequence of the Original Sin and the divine denunciation ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow’, and therefore it was a common cause for all women.34 Ward put forward an affecting and dramatic rhetoric to draw the empathy of British women. The emancipation of women in British India was projected as ‘the cause of woman’, the responsibility of ‘every christian widow – of every christian mother – of every christian female’.35 The appeal was directed to an idealized notion of womanhood, of a good mother, wife and woman which was expected of every Christian woman. The white women’s relationship with native women was sought to be based on a nebulous dominate-subordinate power structure that appeared to cut across class, race and ethnicity. As women, mothers, widows they shared the same universal sufferings and were therefore equal. At the same time, as ‘guardians’, the Christian women were expected to ‘deliver’ and ‘rescue’ the native women.36 Ward was optimistic that despite differences in race and background, Indian women had the same spiritual and intellectual potential as British women. And he was confident that the intervention of British women would enable the native women to reach great heights and become the Hannah Mores and Elizabeth Frys of India.37 Moved by Ward’s description of the ‘degradation’ of Hindu women and in response to his petition, the BFSS towards the end of 1819 resolved to select and send out a well-qualified female teacher to institute schools for native female children in India. They solicited funds from the public for sending out a suitable female teacher and urged British women to apply for training native female teachers. The BFSS selected and recommended Miss Mary Ann Cooke to the Calcutta School Society (CSS) because of her ‘sincere love of her sex and fervent piety toward her Saviour, united long acquaintance with the work of education’.38 On the eve of her departure to India (she embarked for Calcutta aboard the Abberton on 28 May 1821), the BFSS reported,

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in considering the very pathetic appeal made by the Rev. William Ward, on behalf of upwards of thirty millions of females committed to the care of Great Britain in India, and to whom every vestige of mental cultivation has hitherto been denied […] they have most gratefully to acknowledge that this appeal has not been made in vain, The benevolence of British Ladies has already raised a sum of £521 9s 0d for this very urgent claim. And your Committee have been supplied with the means of preparing, and qualifying, a Lady, who has nobly devoted her talents, and life, to the cause of native Female Education in India. She is just on the eve of her departure, and your Committee trust that the Divine Blessing will prosper her in this great and important undertaking.39 Miss Cooke had worked as a governess in England, and was ‘a Lady well qualified to train native female teachers’.40 In his letter dated 29 November 1821, Mr Montague, Secretary to the CSS, wrote to Mr Harrington, who had so enthusiastically solicited for the cause of a female teacher, Miss Cooke arrived in the Abberton about a fortnight ago, and was received with great pleasure, by myself and Mrs. Montague, in good health, and her heart bent on the work before her […] the friends of the good cause all rejoice at it, sure of finding scope for Miss Cooke’s zeal and talents in behalf of the female natives sooner or later.41 This observation was to be proved right in view of the future contributions made by Miss Mary Ann Cooke (1784–1868), who was thirty-seven years old when she arrived in India. She was at first placed under the direction of the CSS, but as their plans for female education had been just partly composed, she was subsequently transferred to the CMS.42 She was to spend the next 23 years promoting her mission under their auspices. In the beginning, her efforts to educate women were met with scepticism and sometimes even resistance. She engaged in learning Bengali for the purpose of communicating and instructing native students. Her Pundit, ‘a high Brahmin with the most profound contempt for the Bengalee females’, Cooke wrote, would discourage her efforts as he considered the native women to be ‘all BEASTS  – quite stupid’, who could never learn, ‘nor would the Brahmins ever allow THEIR females to be taught’.43 The Missionary Register of 1822 mentions that Miss Cooke would impart instruction at home to the female children of natives of higher class, and a separate school was to be established for them.44 She persevered against discouragement and prejudice against a European woman from all quarters, including from Europeans themselves.45 However, within a few weeks, with patronage and donations from benevolent

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people, which included the governor general, Lord Hastings, and his wife, the CMS had received a donation of 3,000 rupees,46 and by 1823 the number of schools had increased to twenty-two, with nearly 400 female students,47 thus putting to rest the criticisms of her efforts. Miss Cooke’s schools were run efficiently and exemplarily. Schools were neat and orderly. The female students sat in rows and not only displayed ‘a great desire for learning to read and write, but some showed considerable talents’. These very soon, the society circular assured, would be ‘raised to that rank which they should hold as human beings’.48 When the mothers of the native students inquired whether Miss Cooke was married, they are informed, ‘No: she is married, or devoted, to your children; she heard in England, that the Women of this country were kept in total ignorance, that they were not taught even to read or write […] it was also generally understood, that the chief objection arose from your having no Female, who would undertake to teach: she therefore felt much sorrow and compassion for your state: and determined to leave her country, her parents, her friends, and every other advantage, and come here for the sole purpose of educating your Female Children.’ They with one voice, cried out, smiting their bosoms with their right hands, ‘Oh! What a pearl of a Woman is this!’ I added, ‘She has given up the greater expectations to come here; and seeks not the riches of this world, but that she may promote your BEST INTEREST.’ ‘Our children are yours – we give them to you’ – replied two or three of the mothers at once.49 The response ‘No: she is married, or devoted, to your children’ reaffirms the general unacceptability of single women in the missionary field. As a ‘mother’ figure, the female missionary enjoyed more respect and acceptance. She is represented as having ‘maternal’ feelings of sorrow and compassion, and, like the biological mothers of these children, she too claims to have made great sacrifices. She has given up all family ties, worldly comforts and ‘greater expectations’ to devote herself to the ‘best interest’ of these children. Not only is she hailed as ‘a pearl of a Woman’, as the native women hand over their children to her, but also her stature is transformed into a universal mother, a woman and a mother worthier and more deserving to be in charge of their children. As Jane Haggis and Clare Midgley have pointed out, Cooke was the forerunner of single female missionaries who found a new sphere of opportunity in India that was in contrast to the restricted lives they led in Britain. In moving away from Britain, women like Cooke shifted from a marginal position that was associated with middle-class single governesses, to a position of more public prominence and recognition.50 In empowering ‘other’ women, they had

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at first empowered themselves. Within a couple of decades of the first British missionaries arriving in India, a perceptible difference was noticeable in the ways women missionaries, especially single female missionaries, had begun to negotiate a space for themselves within what still remained a tightly patriarchal set-up. The transition from ‘wives of missionaries’ to ‘missionary women’ was no doubt a considerable achievement, though the position of women still remained within a narrow constricted space between the domestic and the public, sandwiched between wives and mothers on the one hand and educators and reformers on the other. In fact, the native woman was as much necessary for the white woman as the white woman was for the native. Fully aware of the influence women could exert as mothers and wives on the next generation, missionary societies regarded it crucial to include them too, and not just men, in the ambit of education. Alexander Duff, pointing out the impact that such an attempt would have on the times to come, glorified the role of an educated mother: in every country the infant mind receives its earliest impressions from the mother; that wherever the female sex is left in ignorance and degradation, the endearing and important duties of wife and mother cannot be duly discharged […] it must be granted that the improvement of the female mind would react on every member of the domestic circle […] and in another generation would tend to new-form the character of a whole family of sons and daughters […] It can never be a question how vastly important, how incalculably beneficial is the influence of a cultivated female mind. The only question that can ever be entertained regards not the advantageous and desirableness of the object, but the practicability of accomplishing it; – and not so much now the practicability of its accomplishment in the abstract, as the degree of practicability.51 But it was not so easy to make a foray into the domestic lives of the natives, considering that women in India were, as J. Richter put it, ‘the protectress and zealot adherent of traditional heathenism’.52 Missionaries had to be careful to take, first and foremost, the women into confidence. Many a time when they were assured of having made an impression on young minds, their efforts had been counterbalanced by the influence of the women in the family. In a way this was a contradiction of the colonial representation of native women as being totally under the control of their men. The explanation that Miss Cooke gave to the mothers who accompanied the girls to the schools was her desire to work with selfless devotion, and the only return she wished for was to promote their interest and happiness. Such avowed disinterested efforts for the good of the native women, in Priscilla Chapman’s opinion, ‘prevented much

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suspicion from being entertained as to her motives, and according to the habit of the natives, when any advantage may accrue, petitions for female schools were presented from different quarters of the native town’.53 Miss Cooke’s position as a ‘motherly’ lady missionary probably helped assuage the fear of conversion among native Hindus who sent their children to school. Chapman cites an episode where Miss Cooke was asked to sign a paper handed to her by a girl’s father, agreeing that she would make no claim upon the child on the ground of educating her.54 Watts’s Catechism, fables and teachings from the New Testament were taught along with general reading, writing and sewing. Examinations were regularly conducted, and girls who did well were awarded with books and sometimes an outing with Miss Cooke in her palanquin carriage as she went to visit other schools. The best students had the pleasure to assist her to teach in the other schools. Encouraged by the success of Miss Cooke’s efforts, the Ladies Society for Native Female Education (LSNFE) was set up in Calcutta in March 1824, and the CMS handed over to them the charge of the native schools for girls. Miss Cooke had by then become Mrs Wilson, by virtue of having married the CMS missionary Rev. Isaacs Wilson in 1823. She was appointed as the superintendent of the newly built Central School for Girls in Calcutta for providing education and training to native females to be future teachers. And on 1 April 1828, Mr and Mrs Wilson took charge of the Central School and commenced with 58 girls.55 Mr Wilson died soon after, and Mrs Wilson continued to preside over the schools. She founded a girl’s orphanage at Agarpara, near Calcutta. Mrs Wilson writes about the purpose of instituting a Native-Female Orphan Asylum, ‘I have for several years been endeavouring to collect twenty destitute Girls, either Hindoo or Mahomedan, to train them for Christian Schoolmistresses hereafter.’56 And Bishop Herber, who visited the school, remarked that the aim of the institution was not to attempt in any direct way the making of converts, but to give as many Indian females as possible, an education of a useful and moral character, to enable them to read the scriptures; and to leave them in short in such a state of mental cultivation as will enable them in afterlife to chose their religion for themselves.57 But it is evident that such attempts of ‘mental cultivation’, to convert, had begun with the most destitute, neglected and marginalized sections of the society. Moreover, the BFSS had categorically stated that ‘it gives pecuniary aid to no school in which the Holy Scripture shall not be read’, as Scriptural teachings were deemed ‘the foundation of all religion and morality, and therefore

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[…] a necessary part of every system of education’.58 Mrs Wilson gives instances of young native schoolgirls who wished for Christian instruction and to be baptized. Some of them, like Harroo, a Hindu girl aged 11 years, was ‘determined’ to convert to Christianity despite violent opposition from her family. In July 1826, after being ‘put under daily Christian Instruction’, three were baptized by the names of Matthew, Rebekah and Mary Anne. Rebekah, according to Mrs Wilson, ‘exhibits a truly Christian conduct in all respects’, and Mary Anne was the ideal native Christian. She acted as the head monitor of the Central School for two years, in which 150–200 heathen girls were receiving Christian Instruction.59 By April 1836, the number of children in the institution who had been baptized was 108.60 Within the School the children were instructed and provided Christian knowledge, but ‘the heathen practice without’ was a most ‘fearful counterbalance’. Converting the ‘heathens’ was, as Mrs Wilson bemoaned, no easy task, and though as missionaries, she felt, it was their duty and privilege to spread Christian teaching but ‘God the Spirit alone can convert a soul’. The natives who come in large numbers to listen to the Christian teachings, she writes, ‘make no opposition […] pay the greatest attention; declare all they hear to be true and necessary; confess themselves sinners; and that their own system provides no Saviour;  – but remain Heathens still!’61 In 1836, having devoted 23 lustrous years of her life in missionary service in India, Mrs Wilson retired from her missionary labour in India. The remaining 23  years of her pilgrimage were spent in Syria for some time, where she opened schools, and then in Italy, where she taught the gospel, and the last phase of her life was back in England, where active until the end, she passed away at the age of 84. Miss Mary Ann Cooke may be justly considered to have led the way for single British women to come to India for missionary work. She definitely was one of the pioneers of female education in Bengal and perhaps the most eminent woman missionary in the history of British missionary activities in Bengal. But much before her arrival, another single British missionary woman to India was Miss Martha Cobden, later Mrs Martha Mundy, wife of Rev. George Mundy, an LMS missionary at Chinsurah. Miss Martha Cobden, born in Chichester, had shown distinct signs of a spiritual nature since childhood, which she was believed to have received from her mother. These ‘exhortations and prayers’ of her mother had the most ‘beneficial’ effects on the young Martha’s mind, and it made her ‘frequently to weep’ and pray to be of service to God. But ‘timidity’ kept these thoughts ‘confined in her own bosom’ and ‘made her bed to swim with her tears’. She often retired in private and ‘implored that she might be cleansed from

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her iniquities, and be made whiter than snow’.62 Typically, such spiritual excesses, bordering on hysteria, are particularly noticeable in the memoirs of women missionaries of that time. Perhaps the pressure of being pure, devout and spiritual was more on women than on men. All this made Martha keen to be ‘useful’ to her religion and fellow beings. So when her sister invited her to come and work in India, Martha’s obvious decision was to choose the missionary field as her sphere of work. Her sister had married a missionary posted in Bellary, in India, and from her brother-in-law, Rev. W.  Reeves, Martha had heard about the condition of the ‘degraded condition of the heathens’ there. When there was an opening in the mission family at Bellary, Martha was more than eager to be of service there. In 1819, at the age of 18, she arrived in India, and under the patronage of the LMS began to aid in the mission schools at Bellary. She added a small boarding school, the profits of which were transferred to the support of the school for natives in the mission. Her stay in Bellary was short, and in 1821 she married Rev. George Mundy, and moved with him to Chinsurah in Bengal. She immediately commenced the study of the Bengali language and acquired a fair proficiency in it. With the association of Mrs Townley, she opened a school for native girls in Chinsurah, to which very soon three more were added, one of which had more than 60 girls. She also imparted education to the Dutch ladies settled in Chinsurah and was much loved and admired for the spiritual talks she delivered. An epidemic fever and the premature delivery of her child caused her early death at the age of 23. The Bengal Obituary stated that ‘her funeral was affecting, followed as it was by her sorrowful pupils, together with their parents […] the old and poor, for Christian, Musslman, or Heathen all shared her bounty’.63 Rev. George Mundy was married a second time to Louisa Kemp. She was a widow and 46 years old when she received the offer, and in 1833 she travelled to India to join her husband at Chinsurah. Louisa Mundy began her missionary journey at an advanced stage of her life, but she was as much enthusiastic and earnest in her labour as any of the other sisters involved in missionary work. Her primary concern was the school she opened for the poor uneducated Portuguese emigrants who had settled in Chinsurah. They were nominally Roman Catholics, and her schools came to be known as Christian Schools. She added an infant school as a separate institution, which had 80 young children studying in it, and further opened a native girls’ school too. She died in 1843, after ten years of hard work in the mission field. Her memoir was written by her husband.64 The Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine had a word of commendation for this memoir as they felt ‘deeply responsible’, particularly for ‘memoirs of female missionaries’ because

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their biography is a mould of a very different kind, to that of our own sex. It will fix, as well as form the character of their successors. Young men may read the Lives of Schwartz, Morrison, Carey, or Williams; and besides catching their spirit, strike out for themselves new and independent lines of operation […] But the qualities and habits of a missionary’s wife, must be very much the same everywhere. Her duties can hardly be said to depend on circumstances at all. For one heroic Mrs. Judson that may be wanted, hundreds of Mrs. Mundys will be required. We deem it, therefore, a desideratum in our missionary literature, to have a few such pictures of a “helpmeet” for a missionary, as that sketched by Solomon as the model of a good wife for any good man. For the woman, whose “price is far above rubies” at a mission station, is one whom, “the heart of the husband doth safely trust,” and who will “do him good and not evil, all the days of her life;” who “openeth her mouth with wisdom, and hath the law of kindness in her tongue;” who “looketh well to her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” Such was Mrs. Mundy, and such should the wife of every missionary be. No woman is fit to be a missionary’s wife who can dream of either an idle or a bustling life.65 This was a pretty long and elaborate requirement in women who sought to be wives of missionaries, to say the least. Women missionaries’ characters were expected to fit the ‘mould’ that such discourses sought to ‘fix and form’. The qualities required were desired universally in all missionary wives. In determining the target readers of this memoir, the Sunday Magazine hoped this would be read not just by female missionaries who were likely to join a mission but also by all female friends of the mission, and by ‘the senior class of girls in boarding or Sunday schools’.66 Schools for girls, boarding houses for females and orphanages were convenient sources for producing a factory line of such ideal women who could ‘fit’ to be a missionary’s wife. Such institutions were expected to churn out ‘hundreds of Mrs. Mundys’, who did not intimidate with their ‘heroic’ qualities but rather could be safely trusted to be just ‘helpmeets’ to their men. Most of the schools run by the mission societies in Bengal, at least in the early nineteenth century, showed pronounced religious and ideological bias. Though a fair amount of secular reading, writing and general knowledge was imparted, the emphasis no doubt was on teaching scriptures. As noted in Chapter 1, scriptures were a part of the curriculum in the mission schools from the very beginning, ever since, first, the Baptist missionaries and then the LMS missionaries opened their schools. Not only were such

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scriptural teachings aimed to ‘civilize’ the ‘heathens’ but they also invariably represented a prototype of ‘good’ Christians, particularly Christian women. Educational institutions and religious teaching served the insidious purpose of ‘moulding’. Whether it was native girls or missionary wives, both were victims of a repressive patriarchy that sought to idealize women by presenting a ‘model of a good wife’. In the first flush of enthusiasm a large number of schools and boarding houses for girls had been established at all the main mission stations in Bengal. Mention must be made of some of the other not so eminent women missionaries who, even though they worked on a much smaller scale, contributed in their own way to native women’s education in Bengal. When Ward made his appeal to the British public in 1821, another single woman who joined the LMS was Miss Piffard. She arrived with her brother, the Rev. C. Piffard, in Calcutta at the close of 1825, and for the next 15 years, from 1825 to 1840, they provided their devoted services to the CSS. Mr and Miss Piffard took up their residence at Kidderpore and proceeded to establish additional schools for the native population. There they assisted Mr Trawin’s ministry, and a total number of eight native converts were baptized at Kidderpore. Under the tutelage and superintendence of the Piffards, the Christian Seminary aimed to ‘provide a supply of native preachers and schoolmaster, the descendants of native Christians only […] [and] furnish good education, conducted on Christian principles to the sons of their native converts’.67 A female native school was soon added to the existing five schools for boys in that area, and the ‘decidedly Christian aspect with which these schools have been commenced […] the missionaries hail as among the indications of the dawn of a brighter day in this part of India’.68 By February 1825, there were 15 schools in Kidderpore, and four female native schools ‘were formed, supported and superintended’ by Miss Piffard.69 She not only gave her services but also defrayed the entire expenses connected with the schools. She was soon to marry Mr Edward Ray, and subsequently joined the missionaries in Calcutta. Mr and Mrs Ray superintended two boys’ and two girls’ schools in Calcutta. By 1828, the LMS had 11 schools, with about 178 girls, superintended by Mrs Trawin and Mrs Ray.70 Girls’ schools were run by Mr and Mrs Robert May and by Mrs Mundy in Chinsurah, Berhampore, as well as in and around Calcutta. There was Miss Ward, who took over charge of the Central School in December 1829, during Mrs Wilson’s short absence. She had travelled from England to join the Wilsons and assist them in their labour. And after Mrs Wilson retired in 1836, the superintendence of the Central Female School passed into the hands of Miss Thompson and Miss White from 1837. The Baptists had schools in Serampore, Cutwa, Dacca, Jessore and Chittagong, and the CMS had schools running for girls at Burdwan, Kalna and Bankura.

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Figure 4.1 The Serampore College, established in 1818, one of the oldest colleges in the country that is still functional.

Mary (Martha) Edwards (widow of the LMS missionary Thomas Higgs), who married the CMS missionary John James Weitbrecht, was again a notable contributor to mission work. They served as CMS missionaries in Burdwan from 1834 to 1852. After the death of her husband in 1852, Mrs Weitbrecht continued to serve in India for many more years. She died in London in 1888. Regarding her active participation in missionary work, her husband wrote, ‘I am now a husband, and can venture to say, from my short experience, that it is not good for man, particularly for a missionary, to be alone […] [I am] blessed in having found a suitable and devoted companion, who possesses the qualities so much needed in a missionary’s wife’. And to Mr Jowett he wrote, ‘Our native Christian females have now what they so much needed, a mother who cares for their temporal and spiritual improvement.’71 Mr and Mrs Weitbrecht established a girls’ day school in Burdwan and an orphan and boarding house for girls, which the latter personally supervised and continued to do so after her husband’s death. The girls, mainly belonging to the poor, lower castes of society, were taught rudimentary Bengali, English, writing and arithmetic. The main focus was to enable them to support themselves by their industry. They were taught sewing and household work and encouraged to become good wives and mothers so that they could in turn train other native girls to be useful to

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their families. Mrs Weitbrecht emphasized the importance of training the girls ‘morally and religiously’ so that they could become ‘more active in domestic concerns’ and ‘turn out to be best wives and mothers’.72 She provided accommodation, food and clothes to the selected native Christian girls, who were trained to be future wives, teachers or domestic servants. Chapman mentions that ‘Mrs. Weitbrecht has been very successful in training some of them as servants, selecting them by turn for daily occupations in her own family.’73 The BFSS acknowledged the useful work done by women ‘engaged in the good work of rescuing the oppressed daughters of India from ignorance and disgrace’, and hoped that their exemplary zeal and actions would encourage the societies to send more women to take up this path as ‘there is great room’ for such labours in India.74 In its Annual Report of 1825, the BFSS estimated that upwards of 21,000 children were deriving the benefit from the exertions of various societies for the education of children in British India. It provided a tabular view of schools in India, their religious affiliation and the number of students, both boys and girls, being instructed.

Figure 4.2 Tabular view of schools, 20th Report of BFSS, 9 May 1825, 106–7. Source: Courtesy of BFSS Archives at Brunel University London Archives, UK.

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The mushrooming of schools meant that these had to be constantly supervised. As a result there were two distinct problems: (1) retaining the girls in the school, and (2) obtaining dedicated trained female teachers for these schools. The missionaries were prone to exaggerate the outcome of the education imparted to the students, and some assertions were highly doubtful, like when the newly formed Ladies’ Society, the LSNFE claimed, ‘Females of the most respectable caste and station in society have both sent their Daughters and, in some instances, have themselves expressed anxiety to obtain instruction.’75 Social customs prevalent in India prevented upper-caste girls from going out of the house or studying in the same school where lower-caste children went. The mission schools for girls were attended mainly by the lower castes, by ‘cobblers and sweepers’, as was stated by the LMS missionary John Campbell.76 The missionaries had to attract the girls to attend schools and had to pay them or give them little gifts, and such students attended school only for the money. A number of native women called Hurkarus were employed by the schools, and their task was to round up the girls every morning and bring them to class. It was considerably difficult to retain the girls for very long. Most of them left school just after a rudimentary learning of words to get married or to take up work, as the general perception among the lower section of the indigenous population was that education of girls was a financial waste and neglect of domestic duties. There were objections to women becoming more learned than their husbands, and it was feared that they would become ‘untractable, disobedient, and vicious’.77 The Christian missionaries’ act of educating the socially separate lower classes was not always an act of philanthropy. A firm nexus was established between the marginalized society and conversion to Christianity. The destitute, widows and orphans remained the optimum target of female education. Enrolments of the socially marginalized and simultaneous scriptural education ensured a soft and pliable target for conversion. The second problem was to obtain female teachers for these schools. Most of the schools were superintended by the wives of missionaries. To fulfil the growing demand for female teachers, efforts were made to train some of the native women who had been former students. But the ‘difficulty of finding native females properly qualified to instruct others’, as John Statham stated, ‘continued to retard the progress’ of the societies.78 Raymunee, aged 15, was engaged as a teacher who could ‘read pretty well’ and keep ‘the accounts of a shop’. Her widowed mother was placed over the ‘second school of the Society […] where there are now twenty scholars’. The ‘third school’, which had 24 scholars, was ‘taught by a native woman, whose attainments qualify her for the duties of her office’. Her daughter, aged 19 years, ‘who is also clever’, assisted her mother in instructing the students. Though Statham confidently assures that ‘this school, therefore, is in a very promising state’,79 the future of female native education did not look too bright after all.

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The native female education under the enterprising supervision of the CMS had failed in one important respect. It had remained considerably limited to a narrow stratum of society and had not succeeded in building a stronger connection with the elite section of Hindu society. Upper-caste Bengalis rarely, if ever, sent their children to mission schools, though they were very much desirous of obtaining English education. The credit for making the first foray into the elite bastion goes to another single woman missionary independent of any missionary society, Miss Mary Bird.80 She was in every possible way a contrast to Mrs Wilson, and yet she left a mark on native education in Bengal. She was not blessed with the same physical strength and vigour of Mrs Wilson, nor did she get enough time on this earth to work long and to receive honour. Mrs Wietbrecht describes her as ‘feeble in body though strong in spirit, honoured to do individually and noiselessly an important work, and to prepare the way for those who succeed her in an eminent though almost unperceived and unrecognised way’.81 She was 34 years old when she came to India in 1823, just two years after Mary Ann Cooke had landed in that country. A call from her brother, R. M. Bird, who was an official in the East India Company, made her decide to come and minister to his comfort and also to fulfil her earnest desire to work for the progress of women in India. She began her work from Gorakhpur, where her brother was stationed as a commissioner. Having won the confidence of the locals, who consented to send their girls to her, she soon opened a separate school for boys and another for girls. She mastered the vernacular language and prepared books for the use of her pupils in her schools. She could have returned to England, but decided to continue her stay in India and moved to Calcutta. There she established a Bible class and opened a Sunday school at the Free School Church. During this time she continued to compose books in English and Hindustani. Notable among them were Commentary on the Book of Genesis, England Delineated, Outline of Ancient History, a tract on the Ten Commandments and several schoolbooks for general use. Besides all this she translated from English into vernacular languages several works related to geography, history and even astronomy. She was equally loved and respected for her cheerful nature and her deep commitment to her schools. When in 1833 she died of a sudden bout of cholera, Mrs Wilson was by her deathbed, and a crowd of natives attended her funeral to pay their tribute and love for her. ‘No power but love could thus have animated a feeble and delicate female: love to God, in the first place; love to her fellow-beings, in the next’,82 was the obituary for her. In the short span of the 10  years (1823–33) that she spent in India, Miss Bird, in spite of her slight health, a distressing lameness which was the result of an earlier accident and the fatigue of her profession, made a remarkable contribution to native education and improvement

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of women’s condition. She went on to give a completely new direction to missionary activities in India by being the first woman missionary to visit the homes of female students to impart education to them. These were mainly girls born to European fathers and native mothers. Such unions were quite common in a metropolis like Calcutta, and very often their progenies were treated as outcasts by both the Europeans and the natives. Her next attempt was to provide education at home to the upper-class native women who, due to social taboos, were averse to receiving formal education. This form of education imparted by women missionaries for upper-class Hindu and Muslim women was to have long-lasting effects on female education. Such upper-class women, who for the most part remained ignorant of the outside world, were often desirous of learning the English language and the customs and manners of the Europeans. But mostly they were curious. Some of the women missionaries who were allowed an entry into the houses of the upper-caste natives and could interact with their women, became the objects of curiosity. They were expected to open a whole new vista of knowledge and information. As Miss Bird recounts, she had a difficult task making the women serious about their studies, as they wanted to know more about ‘the large ships’ and ‘why they didn’t sink in water’ and ‘why she is not married’.83 Though the period between 1820 and 1840 had witnessed a substantial growth in education, especially for women in India, it was disappointingly still not embraced with much enthusiasm by the upper classes. The efforts of the missionaries, though commendable, were able to attract mostly the poor, downtrodden individuals belonging to the lowest classes of Indian society. Moreover, they were mainly lured by the lucre that the missions provided for their upkeep. Therefore when Alexander Duff, the Scottish missionary, arrived in India in 1830 with his wife, his foremost focus was to get the uppercaste influential classes interested in English education. Within a few weeks of his arrival, Duff set about to bring the native youth of India under Christian influence by imparting education to them. Up until then, the most obvious method of the Protestant missions had been to educate the Christian community and the Eurasians settled in India. They had been wary of antagonizing the upper classes and had failed to make much foray into those very sections of society that could make a difference to intellectual life in India. Duff hoped to make education a prerogative of the elite classes, and thus expected that ‘from his schools would grow up […] a body of truly converted young men, all of them belonging to the very best families and equipped with a complete Western and Christian education’.84 In contrast to to the earlier direction taken by the Bengal missionaries, Duff resolved to make the English language the channel to communicate the learning and culture of the Western world. Mr and Mrs Duff’s schools aimed at the men of the highest strata of the

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society. Duff’s schools in Calcutta, patronized by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, an influential Bengali elite and founder of the Brahmo Samaj who had himself received English education, were to soon become popular with the younger generation of upper-class Indians eager to receive Western education. Duff’s attempts to introduce English education happily coincided with the important changes being made in the existing educational policy. Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 made funds available for fostering the English language and Western literature and science in the educational curriculum, and by 1844 the governor general, Sir H. Hardinge, at least officially opened the ‘covenanted service’ of the Indian Civil Services to English-speaking Indians without distinction of race or creed. Each year, the government schools and mission schools were to furnish a list of eligible candidates who could enter the service. Though it remained a far cry from being enforced in reality, this became a principal catalyst that rejuvenated the Indian education system. A direct result of Duff’s educational work was the conversion of some of the brilliant minds of Bengal. Some of the bright young personalities of Bengal society like Krishna Mohan Banerjea, Gopinath Nundy, Mohesh Chunder Ghose, Anando Chunder Mazumdar and Lal Behari Day became members of the Christian Church, and almost all the aristocratic families of Calcutta were represented among the converts. ‘They were unanimous in asserting it to be a time wholly unique […] that every family had had to face the conversion of its most able and gifted members’.85 Duff’s theory of the conversion of the higher classes and castes and, via them, the possibility of converting the great masses of Indians seemed at that time quite revolutionary. Though Duff’s vision of a wide dissemination of Christianity among the elite classes did not meet with much success, and only a handful of conversions did take place; nevertheless, a new direction had been struck out. Whether the diffusion of education aimed for direct evangelization or for secular purposes, it did not fail to make young upper-class Indians eager for English education. As Duff so prophetically pointed out, ‘Over the present (1830–40) generation little or no control can be exercised by these youths. But as time rolls on they become the heads of families themselves, and then they will be prepared, in many instances at least, to give practical effect to their better judgement.’86

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Part III INTERTWINED IMAGES The image is built up as a result of all past experience of the possessor of the image. Part of the image is the history of the image itself. – Kenneth E. Boulding. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961 [1956], 6.

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Chapter 5 ‘LADIES’ AND THE ZENANA (1840–60)

Observing a certain lady on board treated my wife contemptuously as a missionary’s wife, I felt indignant and remarked both to the lady and afterwards to Mr. O [Osburn] My wife is a lady, both by birth and education, she has two uncles clergymen and has, what few ladies in India of any class have, an independent fortune. I admired my wife for her devotedness to doing good, knowing that in India there was a fine sphere.1 In the above passage Rev. James Long, the CMS missionary feeling offended at his wife not being treated as a ‘lady’, obviously seeks to reconstitute the customary perception of a missionary’s wife. In nineteenth-century England, English missionaries who had traditionally come from the lower working class faced the same depreciatory treatment and ambiguous status as did English governesses. Within a span of 50 years, from the early 1800s when the wives of missionaries like Carey and Marshman accompanied their husbands to India, to Mrs Long, who arrived with her husband in Calcutta in 1848, the image of the wives of missionaries had drastically changed. No longer were they content to project themselves as the pecuniarily constrained, self-effacing wives who came from the lower strata of the working class to serve by the sides of their husbands. They were now ‘ladies’ by virtue of their birth, education and fortune, ‘better’ than the ‘ladies in India’. Such a modification in the image of the woman missionary was necessitated by vital changes which were occurring in Indian society as a result of the confluence of two cultures. As British missionaries made a foray into the inner sanctum of native houses, a hitherto unknown world of class, caste, domesticity and gender opened up that redefined gender and cultural roles. As late as 1840, Mrs Wilson’s schools had been mostly attended by lowcaste, poor native women. The period 1840–1860 was the beginning of a new approach by missionaries, which surprisingly took a long time to be realized, that if proselytization of Christianity in India were to be successful, it had to target caste, class and gender. The Hindus had been averse to adopting

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Western ideas, religious or secular, mainly from an anxiety of ‘losing’ caste and being excommunicated from their community.2 English education and missionary schools were perceived as a threat to their religion and caste. Caste was so deeply ingrained in a Hindu’s identity that, as has been rightly pointed out, it had ‘hardened into a system of domination and exclusiveness’ which secured the supremacy of one caste over another, of the ‘Khetriya over Shudra, man over woman, and Brahmin transcendently over all’.3 Caste and class being the predominant loci points of the Hindu existence, an education based on Christian ministrations could be successful only if it kept these issues intact. The resistance and prejudice, it was felt, would be much less, especially among upper-caste Hindu families, if education were imparted to them in the familiar settings of their homes. The earlier method of ‘civilizing’ the ‘heathens’ was steadily to be replaced by a more sophisticated and practical approach to reach out to the potentially influential upper castes. As natives of rank became interested in English education, it became eminently evident to the missionaries that their spheres of influence had to encompass, first, the men of the higher castes and then to reach out to the women in their households. If the rich and the socially prominent could be persuaded to adopt and convert, they would be the exemplars for those on the lower strata to follow suit. Female education from the 1840s onwards indicated dynamic rethinking and new strategization. Rev. Edward Storrow, who worked with the LMS mission in Calcutta from 1848 to 1866, was to perceptibly point out in his comprehensive study, Our Indian Sisters, that the most efficient agency for reaching the native ladies was to educate on a Christian basis their sons and brothers.4 Education was beginning to enter the zenana, the inner chambers of rich native houses where the women of the house resided. Though zenana education was still not termed so and any significant outcome of educating upperclass women was only discernible after 1860, nevertheless the wheels had begun to roll in that direction. Julius Richter computed that of the 150 million women and girls of India, 40  million resided in the zenanas, ‘a population greater than that of Prussia’.5 Etymologically ‘zenana’, a Persian word, meant both women (the word for men is ‘mardana’) and the inner sanctum of a house where women resided. Such a system existed mostly in the northern parts of India where the Islamic influences of Muslim rule had been greatly felt. The zenana was typically an Indo-Islamic cultural product commonly seen among aristocratic Muslim families. Religious conversions and long associations between Hindus and Muslims had found expression in the fusion of Islamic and Hindu culture, which was evident in the architecture, music, customs and sociocultural practices of the period. The zenana was the women’s private apartment located in a separate section of the house where men and

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strangers were not permitted to enter. It was considered an inviolable place, more to maintain the privacy and dignity of women. In Bengal the concept of a zenana was not so acutely defined, but most upper-class Hindu homes with a general proclivity to imitate elitist cultural tropes, had been quick to adopt such demarcated spaces in their households. The baitak-khana, literally meaning the sitting room, was an area where the men and their guests congregated. The living quarters where the women resided were called the andarmahal or antohpur, literally meaning the inner chambers. What was initially a Middle Ages practice among the Hindu and Muslim aristocracy of protecting women from predatory attacks, soon became a much maligned system that ‘resulted in an extreme seclusion and consequent emptiness, in which amorous, and sometimes political intrigue became a frequent if banal diversion’.6 Female apartments were regarded as bare, dreary and comfortless.7 The women were considered ignorant, superstitious, conservative and as leading a monotonous and wasteful life. The zenanas were found to be inaccessible, in which women were perceived to lead a cloistered life, jealously guarded by their men, ‘hermetically sealed against all Christian influences’.8 The sudden interest of the English in the zenana might seem surprising, given that it was a concept not too well known in Bengal at that time. The expansion of the British territories in north India, which extended to Delhi and subsequently to the annexation of Sindh and north-western provinces, meant that Bengal was not impervious to the social and cultural influences of northern India. Serious interest in the zenana in Bengal was to happen only after 1860, and a possible factor, as Rosemary Seton considers, was ‘the great rebellion that broke out in 1857’ and the active part taken by the Ranis and Begums in it.9 This view is of course irrefutable as the Mutiny of 1857, which has also been termed the First War of Indian Independence, served to put forward a unified face of India. It also drew out the hitherto unseen, unreckoned forces that could potentially disrupt British rule in India. The transition to Crown Rule after 1858 changed the existing political and social equation between India and Britain. It augured in a period of cultural, social, religious and racial polarization in colonial India. But in the period before 1857, missionaries’ interest in female education was just taking a logical step forward by entering the bastion of the upper classes. Until about 1848 there was not a single zenana in Calcutta open to any woman missionary.10 But some of the female organizations working for the evangelization of their Indian ‘sisters’ were already active. The foremost was the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE), which had already taken root in Great Britain in 1834. It had been a pioneer in supporting Mrs Wilson in Calcutta, sending missionary representatives to Bombay and subsequently to Ludhiana to establish training schools

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and homes for zenana workers.11 Mrs Wilson’s schools had made education accessible to native females, though women of the upper classes still remained aloof. Priscilla Chapman mentions the lone instance where Mrs Wilson had been admitted, albeit for a short period, to teach the English language to the wife of Raja Boidyanath Roy Bahadur, a rich and prominent personality of Calcutta who had generously donated Rs. 20,000 for the establishment of the Central School in Calcutta in 1824.12 The first proactive approach to introducing education in the zenana was taken by Scottish missionaries. In 1838, Captain Jameson founded the ‘Scottish Ladies Association for the Advancement of Female Education in India’, which greatly advanced the work begun by Alexander Duff in India. Duff had hit the bullseye when he declared that the young Bengali men educated and familiar with Western culture would no longer want their wives to be illiterate. Up until then, upper-class Bengali women were barred from attending schools as the general superstition was that educated women were likely to become widows. The presumption was that such women would prove to be conceited, disobedient and unmanageable. The highly respected and prominent Bengali pundit Krishna Mohan Banerjea used his erudition and influence to persuade other aristocratic families to encourage their women to study. He was a regular among the educated Hindus who met at the private sittings in Calcutta for instructing their female relatives.13 He summed up the general feeling and attitude of the upper classes towards female education when he wrote, I do not think the respectable classes will at present suffer their females to attend any public school. Even if any solitary individual may decide to do so, the tone of society which would pronounce his conduct to be ungenteel, if not impious, is likely to deter him […] The custom of secluding females must undoubtedly prove an obstacle to female education […] I conceive there will be no difficulty in persuading many natives to accept the blessings of education for their women when these shall be offered within their own doors.14 Since the upper-caste women of affluent families were not willing to attend schools, the only way to reach out to them was by house-to-house instruction. The idea was apparently first mooted by Dr Thomas Smith, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary in Calcutta. In a powerful article on ‘Hindu Female Education’ written for the Calcutta Christian Observer in 1840, he declared, ‘If it is impossible to get the daughters of the higher classes of natives to attend schools, till once they have been taught, then we must teach them without requiring their attendance in school. If the men of India will not permit their female relations to come to us for instruction, we must become all things to

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all men, and must send our teachers to them.’15 Such noble thoughts were not always from a purely philanthropic desire to improve the condition of women. Educating the zenana was an integral part of the Christianization of India. Smith was convinced of the importance of female education and the role it would play in the evangelization of India, declaring in a conference in Liverpool, ‘I have never met one who has not admitted that, if the millions of Indian females are to be Christianized at all, it must be to a great extent by means of educational operations.’16 And to those who looked at female education as subordinate to other departments of missionary work, he bluntly asked, ‘But then how is India ever to become a Christian land apart from the influence of female education?’17 Between 1839 and 1840, two Hindu men from prominent Bengali families who approached Duff and sought baptism were Govindo Chunder Das and Umesh Chunder Sirkar.18 The latter was only 16 when Bible teaching in school so disturbed him that he, along with his child-wife of ten, sought baptism and longed to be instructed by the missionaries. Duff’s biographer, George Smith, mentions that this was in Bengal regarded as ‘the first instance of a respectable Hindoo and his wife being both admitted at the same time, on a profession of their own faith, into the Church of Christ by baptism’.19 Between 1830 and 1855, the Free Church Mission in Calcutta claimed to have baptized 70 males, of which 22 were Brahmins. And of the 29 baptized as a result of instruction given by the LMS, Calcutta, between 1850 and 1857, 6 were Kulin Brahmins and most of the others were of high caste.20 The conversion to Christianity and the adoption of Western learning by some of the elite Bengali men meant a similar desire to see their womenfolk educated in the language and manners of the English. These young converts enthusiastically instructed their wives to read the Bengali Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress, even if often in the secrecy and privacy of their homes. Such ways of female education became the precursor of zenana education, which was soon to progress under the efforts of the English ladies. Duff was shrewdly aware of the ultimate influence of these men on their wives: it is a perfect chimera to expect anything like a general system of female education, until there first be a general scheme of enlightened education for the males […] the extensive enlightenment of the latter, and that alone, can secure the extensive enlightenment of the former […] in the business of female instruction nothing very great or effective can be anticipated till the males are first educated.21 In 1849–50, another Scotsman, Drinkwater Bethune, the president of the Council for Educational Affairs, built at his own expense a native female school for girls belonging to the very best families in Calcutta. Known as the Bethune

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Institution,22 the school provided closed carriages to convey the girls to school. Though the school promised a secular education and excluded all religious instruction expressly to secure the active cooperation of native gentlemen, it was not too successful in attracting the higher-caste girls to attend school. The deep-seated prejudices and the general distrust for missionary schools among the natives resulted in rather a moderate response. Nevertheless, as Mrs Weitbrecht pointed out, ‘a good impression had been made’, and ‘the rich but not the high born girls have been influenced to attend’.23 As schools for the instruction of girls increased in number, the need for more trained female teachers began to be felt. An important step in this direction was the formation in 1851 of the Normal School for the Training of Christian Female Teachers. It was not enough for the wives and daughters of missionaries to pitch in with their services as they had done before. The only few trained teachers, like Mrs Wilson, were sent by missionary societies from England. There was an urgent need for a more organized and structured organization for the training of teachers to meet the growing demand. As has been elaborated in the previous chapter, missionary schools trained native Christian girls with the explicit purpose of moulding potential future teachers. Evidently, the very concept of ‘training’ and ‘educating’ was hierarchical in structure, with the white Christian missionaries training the native Christians, who in turn would reach out to native ‘heathens’. It marked the commencement of organized zenana instruction, which was to percolate downwards as it trained mostly native Christians and Anglo-Indian girls with the assumption that it would be easier for them to gain entry into the homes of the natives. In 1853, another Scottish missionary, John Fordyce, and his wife joined Duff in Calcutta to superintend the Free Church Female Institution, which started the first zenana mission in 1855. Fordyce was convinced that zenana education was the only effective means to reach the women of higher classes. He was introduced by Dr Thomas Smith to a few native gentlemen. While some declined because of their suspicion regarding Christianity, two or three families consented to receive zenana teachers into their homes. He also called on the head of the renowned family of Tagores. He persevered in this course by lecturing on ‘The Emancipation of Indian Women’, publishing ‘Fly-leaves for Indian Homes’, collecting subscription for training teachers and soliciting the cooperation of native gentlemen to allow women missionaries into the zenana.24 The first concrete step was in 1854 when a Eurasian, Miss Eliza Toogood, and Rebecca, a native teacher, were sent to visit native homes regularly to teach the women and receive payment for instruction given. It was, as Mr Fordyce observed, ‘the beginning of a new era for India’s daughters’.25 In Calcutta it was viewed as a doubtful and risky experiment, but there was no opposition either. He was soon rewarded in his efforts by patrons from

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England and India whose generous contribution provided for ‘a ghari [a carriage] and horse, coachman and groom’ that was essential for zenana work.26 As more natives showed their eagerness for English education, Miss Toogood was soon joined by Miss Isabella Marr from the Calcutta Normal School. Miss Toogood also taught at Duff’s Girls’ School and in the orphan house. She was later Mrs Scott, and continued to work until her death in Calcutta. Miss Marr, later Mrs Price, was also a remarkably qualified and dedicated teacher. As the first English women to start zenana visitations, they have with their dedication and service earned a name in the history of the zenana mission. In the BMS in Bengal, among the first wives of missionaries to visit and teach women in the zenana were two friends and associates, Elizabeth Sale and Marianne Lewis. Born in France, Elizabeth Geale (1818–1898) grew up in England, where she became a Baptist. She received some training in medicine and surgery at a London hospital, an unusual achievement for any woman at that time, even before Florence Nightingale had made nursing her profession. In 1848, she married the BMS missionary John Sale, and shortly afterwards they arrived in Bengal to work for the BMS. They worked in Barisal and then in Jessore where, in 1854, she first gained entry into upper-class Hindu homes where she taught the women to read. She taught the women at the home of Debendranath Tagore, where Rabindranath Tagore was to be born in 1861. From 1858 they lived in Calcutta, where later they ran a girls’ school, the Sale Institution. Though they were to return to India later, in 1861 they left for Britain because of Mr Sale’s continuous ill health. By then Elizabeth Sale had already earned for herself the title of ‘the first Englishwoman who gained a systematic entrance into the homes of the Purdah women in India, and by doing so established a form of missionary effort known as zenana work’.27 Elizabeth Sale was an inspiration for Marianne Lewis, with whom she had worked in close association ever since the former landed in Bengal. Marianne. Gould was a Sunday school teacher in England before she married Charles Bennett Lewis in 1845 and set sail for service with the BMS in Ceylon. They moved to Bengal in 1847 when her husband was transferred to Calcutta to take the place of William Yates, who had just died. Charles Lewis, with his linguistic accomplishments, was considered the best replacement, and he began to learn Bengali and Hindustani to carry forward the translation work begun by the Serampore missionaries. Mrs Lewis took the overall responsibility of the mission school, especially the promotion of female education, teaching the girls needlework and reading. In spite of the demands of her growing family, she proved herself capable, and when Mr and Mrs Pearce left for England in 1852, she took charge of the mission school at Entally in Calcutta. Her close associates praised her for ‘her amiability of character, her devotedness to Christ’s service, and the zeal and the assiduity of her endeavour’.28

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Mr Lewis had become by then the head of the Calcutta Mission Press, and the increasing demands on their responsibilities were taking a toll on Mrs Lewis’s health. So when, in 1861, the Sales decided to return to England, the Lewis family also accompanied them home. These two women had made a notable contribution to women’s education. As Ernest Payne points out, until then the missionaries had been able to work only among native girls and native Christian women, but by opening up the zenana for education, these early pioneers had entered ‘a wonderful new and needy field’.29 Marianne Lewis wrote a brief pamphlet, A Plea for Zenanas, which remains one of the early testimonies of zenana visitations by British women missionaries. The Plea, written during her visit to Britain in 1866, was by her admittance, a result of her ‘own anxiety to awaken as widely as possible the concern of English ladies for their less favoured, yet most interesting, Indian sisters’.30 Lewis’s pamphlet is clearly an attempt to provide to Western readers a glimpse of the ‘drudge’ and the ‘desolation’ of the ‘imprisoned inmates’ of the zenana, so uniquely ‘oriental’ in its set-up and cultural orientation that ‘such a position as this is sufficiently revolting to our English idea of social comfort and domestic bliss’.31 Western education, Lewis cites, has effectually ‘enlightened’ the young men in India, and, stimulated by the possession of ‘true knowledge’, these men are eager for their wives to acquire the same intellectual level. In spite of some obvious and typical ways of viewing the zenana from a Western point of view, Lewis’s seven-page pamphlet is perhaps the most informative and lucid representation of the early attempts made by Christian women missionaries to propagate education among upper-class native women. Lewis points out the arduous task cut out for a woman missionary who has to ‘journey to the houses she has to visit, made in the very hottest part of the day through dirty and squalid thoroughfares […] and sit and teach in the close and dirty apartments’. She draws attention to how severely taxing such ‘labour of love’ can be for both mind and body, and ‘the amount of self-denial required for the discharge’ of such duties. Her appeal draws a realistic picture of the industry, patience and fortitude required to persist in this task, and also the eagerness and the loving gratitude of the learners, ‘which are sufficient to make the Christian visitor oblivious of discomfort and weariness’.32 The task of teaching the Hindu women in their own homes understandably was not an easy one, and Lewis reveals the difficulties, the social prejudices, the suspicion of people and even the lack of funds that often proved to be major encumbrances. But there is a feeling of optimism as the ‘work has continued to advance’, and there are already ‘more than one-hundred houses in Calcutta in which instruction is being given, and every one of these is a centre of influence’.33 And she is forthrightly honest when she has to draw the larger purpose of such free ‘philanthropic effort’:

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There is this advantage, too, in a free education, that we are left to ourselves in determining the nature of the instruction to be given. If it were in any sense paid for, we would, without doubt, be often fettered by stipulations that nothing intended to effect religious conversion should be communicated.34 Lewis’s writing exudes the confidence that a non-interventionist, non-insidious method of teaching will slowly but surely mould the natives’ thinking, especially their attitude towards the gospel and Christianity; and they would eventually acknowledge that ‘the Christian religion must be good after all! Our Shasters teach us nothing like this.’35 As she urges the Englishwomen at home to form a society to aid its operations among the female population of the East, she assures them that as so many of the ‘dark homes’ have opened for instruction, there is a potential 90 million women in India and 20 million in Bengal alone waiting to be ‘harvested’; all that is required are ‘labourers’.36 Her active campaigning led to the formation of the ‘Ladies Association for the support of Zenanah work and Bible women in India in connection with the Baptist Missionary Society’, which later became known as the Baptist Zenana Mission (BZM). The Lewis couple remained in Calcutta with the BMS until 1878, when Mr Lewis’s ill health forced them to finally return to Britain. Among the CMS missionaries, and perhaps the most lionized figure in the history of women missionaries in India, is Hannah Catherine Mullens. In spite of the brief 35 years of her existence in this world, or perhaps because of it, she was titled the ‘Apostle of the Zenana’. Hannah Catherine Lacroix was the daughter of the eminent Swiss-born Alphonse Francois Lacroix, a missionary sent to Chinsurah in Bengal by the Netherlands Missionary Society. But after the Dutch withdrew from Chinsurah in 1827, Lacroix continued his service with the LMS in Calcutta.37 Hannah was born in Calcutta, a second-generation missionary to be born in Bengal, which gave her the immense advantage of knowing the place and the people well. In that sense she was an ‘insider’, and surrounded by Bengali servants she had gained a proficiency in the Bengali language like any native Bengali. She received a brief one-year formal education in school, after which she was educated at home by her mother. Her mother, Hannah Herklots, was a protégée of Hannah Marshman. Apart from raising her three daughters, she worked tirelessly to educate Bengali women. Young Hannah received formal education at school for only a year and picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and needlework from her mother. She gained much more intellectually from the conversations of her learned father and his missionary friends. Her ease with the Bengali language led her father often to seek her services whenever he needed any Bengali text to be read or interpreted. At the young age of 12 she also began assisting in taking classes

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at the Bhowanipore day school for girls in Calcutta begun by her mother. Just before she turned 15, she made a public profession of her faith and joined the church in Union Chapel. In 1841, she travelled to England with her parents. Her fellow passenger, Mrs Parson, the widow of a missionary, greatly influenced her, and this association not only greatly enlarged her knowledge of the world but also strengthened her spiritual inclinations. On her return to Calcutta she attempted to open a girls’ school, but not successful at the start, she began with teaching a class of female servants of the family and their children. In 1845, when she was 19, she married Joseph Mullens, the LMS missionary who would later become the foreign secretary of the society. This was a marriage of two like-minded and devoted persons. Her schools for daughters of native Christians became very popular. She formed a Bible class for women and instructed them in the Bengali language, striving only to introduce improvements without upsetting their native customs or habits. In her school she kept steadily in view the position and sphere of life in which her scholars moved: and determined not to raise them above it, but elevate and improve them in it. She preserved, therefore, their native habits, introducing only such improvements as tended them more befitting the purity and comfort of Christian life. They wore the native dress […] they sat on mats during their lessons; they slept on a dry board floor; were fed in native fashion […] [and] instructed then in their own tongue.38 This system was greatly appreciated by Hindu women, and it was the mutual acceptance and tolerance that led to a steady increase in the number of students. By 1861, her boarding school had 60 students, and two schools had been established for respectable upper-class native students in private houses. Mrs Mullens now opened a new sphere of female education by beginning instruction of Hindu upper-caste women in their own homes. Zenana teaching was increasingly being more in demand, and Mrs Mullens was quite popular among the Hindu households. Her knowledge and experience of native life, especially in the rural hinterlands of Bengal, helped her write in 1852 her first literary work in Bengali, Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran (The History of Phulmani and Karuna), which presented a contrasting picture of a Christian and an un-Christian woman and its impact on their respective families. The novel, considered as the first novel to be written in vernacular Bengali, was intended for ‘Native Christian women’ to show ‘the practical influence of Christianity on the various details of domestic life […] and the duty of women’.39 The book, which is discussed in greater detail

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in the next chapter, became what we call a bestseller today. In Mrs Mullens’s Memorials, her sister writes, ‘Everywhere they were anxious to secure copies, and a large edition was put into circulation in a very short time.’40 Three thousand copies were printed, and it was in great demand among native converts and mission societies. Mrs Weitbrecht writes that ‘missionaries were delighted to obtain a book so completely adapted to the wants and position of their people’, and within a few years it had been translated ‘into no less than twelve Indian languages’.41 Hannah Mullens went on to write The Missionary on the Ganges:  or, What is Christianity? in 1856 and to translate her Bengali novels into English. She was unable to complete Faith and Victory and Prasanna and Kamini due to her sudden death in 1861. These were then completed by her family members and published later. Her works, written in simple idiomatic Bengali and English, were meant to address the doubts of native Indians regarding Christianity. Her work The Missionary on the Ganges:  or, What is Christianity explains the position and purpose of the Christian missionaries, their source of funds for evangelization, their mission and the ‘glory’ of the missionaries. The brilliance of Mullens’s works lies in the candid conversations between the Christian and Hindu characters, each one trying to put forward his/her side of the argument. Thus, when the missionary’s wife encourages Radanath, the native gentleman, to promote women’s education in Bengali homes, he counterposes, ‘Why, what good could learning do them? […] learning is money to me, but my wife, were she ever so highly educated, could turn it to no account!’42 And the missionary’s wife emphasizes the importance of having educated mothers, sisters and wives, as ‘learning is its own great reward’, impressing upon the native gentlemen that if Bengalis had views like these and if they enlisted women on the side of education, then the spread of Bengali enlightenment would be far more rapid.43 When Radanath expresses his hesitation, as he is afraid this will lead to women neglecting their house work, the missionary’s wife says, there is no woman who could not give two or three hours a day, to the improvement of her mind without neglecting any duty whatsoever. I really do not think the husbands would lose much, if the time now given to foolish gossip, and sleep, and that endless braiding of the hair that your ladies seem never to tire of, were devoted to reading of a proper kind. On the other hand, what would they gain? Intelligent companions […] help-meets fitted often to counsel in difficulty […] instructors for their children; they would gain wives […] more like ours.44 Such discourses expressed the perceptible differences in religion, culture and ways of life between ours and theirs, urging the native Hindus to change their

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outlook. Yet in spite of the open and fervid zeal for conversion, the number of converts in Bengal was still relatively low. But many were optimistic as it was felt that ‘the individuals converted have belonged to such classes and caste that the positive influence of their conversion in shaking Hindooism and convulsing Hindoo society has been vastly greater than it might have been if hundreds or even thousands of a different class or caste had been added to the Church of Christ’.45 The ‘shaking’ and ‘convulsing’ of Hindu society was not as great as it has been made out to be. Native Christian women who were sent to tutor the women of upper-caste Hindu society were never fully accepted, and a general prejudice pervaded against them. In spite of that, it cannot be denied that a decided change had come about in the way female education was being accepted. By 1859 it was claimed that ‘15,000 Hindu girls’ were receiving education in schools,46 and that some wealthy natives have become disposed, to permit their daughters and nieces to receive instruction in their own houses. The practice has commenced of sending a teacher to a few such families, where instruction is given for a few hours every week. Taking into account the construction of native society, this plan seems most likely to give satisfaction.47 Missionary discourse on the representation of native women began to increasingly occupy an uneasy and ambiguous position. The representation, or what Bhabha calls ‘the process of subjectification’, cannot be empirically or logically proved, but is rather based on ‘stereotypical discourse’, which ‘is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’.48 As has been noted in the earlier chapters, the well-worn, stereotypical, ‘already known’ colonial perception of the native woman was that of a victimized slave of her husband’s passion, submissive and ineffectual in taking any decision. Education of women and evangelical intrusion were justified on the grounds of ‘liberating’ them, ‘uplfting’ them from their oppressed, degraded positions. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Oxford University’s Boden Professor of Sanskrit, argued in a strong militant tone the need to ‘open’ the oppressive surroundings, to ‘free’ such women from their bondage: The missionary band must carry their ark persistently round the Indian home, till its walls are made to fall, and its inner life exposed to the fresh air of God’s day, and all its surroundings moulded after the pattern of a pure, healthy, well-ordered Christian household […] until a way is opened for the free intercourse of the educated mothers and women of Europe […] with the mothers and women of India in their own homes,

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Christianity, at least in its purer forms, will make little progress either among Hindus or among Mohammedans.49 At the same time, paradoxically, women in the zenana were seen as agents of change. Indian mothers were seen as having a strong manipulative authority over their sons, and were expected to aid Christian evangelization by exerting their influence on the next generation. Anna Johnston thinks that ‘like British women, Indian mothers were expected to fulfil their national duty by giving birth to the new generation of Christianized (and concomitantly Anglicized) Indians who would serve and support the British administration’.50 But as native women proved to be rigidly resistant to any incursion of Christianity, such expectations often resulted in frustration. As James Kennedy observed disappointedly, ‘I have been often struck with the powerful influence which I  have known Native Women to exert. This influence has been, unhappily hostile to the Gospel.’51 The realization that native women as wives and mothers could and did play a pivotal role in influencing the men in the family, redefined the entire approach of evangelizing native Indians. In Hannah Mullens’s novel Faith and Victory, which presents the influence of Christianity on the young son of an upper-caste Hindu household, ‘penetrating the recesses of the Hindu home’52 is successful when the lady of the house is presented with a copy of the Bengali Bible by a Christian missionary at a moment when she is emotionally and psychologically most vulnerable. Forty years later, the ‘little precious seed sown’53 bears fruit, when the same lady, now a grandmother, hands the Bible to her grandson and gives her tacit consent to his conversion to Christianity. With women missionaries being allowed to enter the zenana, a new conception of the position of Indian women began to evolve – one that was still fraught with inconsistencies and ambivalences and multiple facets of interpretation. On the one hand was the formulaic representation of the woes of native women, their dark lives, and the need for more dedicated missionaries for the emancipation of the lot. On the other hand there was the allure for the ‘different’, and very frequently a sense of perplexity at the incomprehensibility of a culture that was so foreign. Even as early as 1789, Hartly House, Calcutta, on the life and times in Calcutta during Warren Hastings’s government, depicted the wonder and fascination with which European ladies viewed the glamour of the ‘eastern state and etiquette’ of rich Indian ladies. The anonymous author is dazzled by the ‘genteel air’, ‘elegant form’ of ‘country-born women’ as they lie languidly, sensuously smoking ‘a most superb hookah’ while the servants go about taking care of the whole apparatus.54 In her novel Faith and Victory, Mullens struggles to comprehend and interpret women’s lives in the zenana, which from her perspective as a white Christian woman is as much

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a stereotypical ‘Indian’ problem, as it is intriguing in its difference. Her representation vacillates between the contradictory revelation of the ‘degraded’ women in the zenan, and the rare exposition of attachment, affection and camaraderie that exist among such women. She describes the domestic skirmishes of the women characters in her novel, and says that scenes such as these are of frequent occurrence in the bosom of many a Hindu family. They arise from various causes. The chief cause must ever be the want of Christianity, that elevator of the affections, that softener of the heart, that religion so eminently the friend of woman […] Females are kept in such a state of ignorance and degradation that everything that is high and noble in their nature is crushed, almost destroyed; and therefore it is natural that they should display petty jealousies or have recourse to mean methods of obtaining favour.55 At the same time, the author marvels at how quickly such petty rivalries and acrimony among these women are forgotten, and they become engaged once again in their childish games. To an Englishman, she says, all this might seem very strange, ‘but such a one, if she has lived among Hindoo ladies’ would find that such scenes did not ‘give rise to those bitter feelings that might otherwise be expected.’56

Figure 5.1 A Calcutta Zenana, from Woman in India by Mary Frances Billington (1895), depicts a bold Bengali ‘lady’ with her daughters, surrounded by maids. London: Chapman & Hall, 1895, 72.

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In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of writings were published on the experiences of missionaries in the zenana. Some of them were written by the women missionaries who had worked in the zenanas, and also a few by others who had some knowledge or experience of it. One of the early impressions of the zenana is provided by Mrs Helen Mackenzie. She was the second wife of the Scottish army officer Lieutenant-General Colin Mackenzie, and travelled with him extensively in India from 1846 onwards. While in Calcutta she met Alexander Duff and was impressed by the education imparted to the native girls at the Female Orphan School under the supervision of a very ‘lady-like’ Miss Laing. Her experiences, published in two volumes, Life in the Mission, Camp, and the Zenana, or Six Years in India (1855), gives extensive accounts of her first-hand experience of life in the zenanas, mostly in the northern frontier regions of India where her husband was posted. She provides detailed descriptions of the zenana among the Afghans, at which she was a frequent visitor as she ministered medicines to the women and shared their experiences. Hers is probably one of the most original and balanced accounts written in this period of the mutual fascination that the English and the native women had for each other’s customs and culture. She presents a sympathetic understanding of two diverse cultures, and at the same time points out what she assesses to be the shortcomings of both. As someone who was a regular in the Muslim zenanas, she claims she can refute authoritatively on ‘prima facie grounds’ ‘the fine theories’ that some European men (Feringhi) have about the feelings of the Muslim woman (Mussalmani) in the zenana. Hitting out spiritedly at such men she writes, What can a man know of the matter? Did he go about visiting in the form of an old woman? Had he friends and acquaintances in half a dozen Zenanas? Would any Mussalmani woman speak freely to a Feringhi, even if he did obtain speech with her […] It is presumption for him ever to talk of a Mussalmani’s feelings; I will flap him out of the field with the end of a purdah. I do not think their secluded life makes them objects of pity. They are hardly more devoid of excitement than I am myself; they see their female friends and their dearest male relations […] They are far from viewing the matter as we do, and I should suppose Hasan Khan’s Zenana a favourable specimen.57 The crucial point that Mrs Mackenzie’s account indicates, is that perceptions vary as do people, and that zenanas, like any other homes, have separate distinguishable characteristics, each one being as different in its appearance and temperament as its inmates themselves. But not all narratives on native women and their life depicted it as a ‘favourable specimen’, least of all the missionaries’.

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As Haggis noted, ‘the missionary account of India and its women was, if not the main, then undoubtedly a primary contributor to the public perceptions of India as an appropriate subject of British rule’.58 Most missionary writings clearly supported this agenda. Mrs Weitbrecht’s The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana purportedly aimed ‘to impress our country-people with the importance of helping to raise the women of our Indian Empire to their right position’.59 Mary Weitbrecht, who, after serving with her husband as a CMS missionary in Burdwan from 1834 to 1852, continued to work for the cause of women in India, published some important works on the zenana. Acknowledging that the subject of zenana visitation is still one that requires to be ‘touched cautiously’, Mrs Weitbrecht cites mythological-historical ‘evidence’ of Hindu women’s ‘degradation’ to prove her point that the ideal of womanhood as delineated by mythical female characters have had untoward adverse influence over the Indian female mind.60 Such tales, with their emphasis on wifely duties, devotion and unquestioning obedience to the husband’s will, she concludes, have ‘continued most vigorously to be applied to the conjugal relation in India, and has brought about the enslavement of women’.61 She quotes extensively from the Laws of Manu (Manusmriti), traditionally regarded as the most authoritative book of the Hindu code of laws (Dharmashashtra), to establish the abject position of Hindu women, and their complete dependence on their husband and other men in the family. She concedes that the laws of Manu are strikingly similar to the original condemnation of women pronounced at the Fall, ‘Thy desire shall be unto thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’62 But Weitbrecht makes no attempt to draw any parallels with the condition of women in contemporary England, of the middle-class  Victorian homes, which, to quote Haggis, were largely similar in their ‘confinement and site of rebellion for many Victorian women, an image more nearly like that of the “zenana” of the missionary imagination’.63 Weitbrecht’s portrayal of Indian women as victims of an oppressive sociocultural, religious system makes it appear as a typical and unique fallibility. She claims that ‘apart from the influence of Christianity, Western usages ever allowed greater liberty to women than was accorded to them in the East’.64 By presenting the Hindu women in the zenana as deprived of books, of rational interactions or any ‘useful’ occupation, and depicting them as engaged in domestic chores, religious observation, spending their days in combing their hair, putting on apparel and jewels,65 Weitbrecht distinguishes between two converse spheres of employment. Intellectual engagement is posited as considerably superior to domestic activities, with which British ‘ladies’ by implication are occupied. As the disseminators of ‘knowledge’, ‘ladies’ involved in the ‘emancipation’ of ‘women’, claimed superiority for themselves. Just as imperial power rested on

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military, racial and cultural supremacy, white women as cultural imperialists performed, as Gayatri Spivak put it, a ‘crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English’.66 Weitbrecht’s accounts, like Rev. Storrow’s, provide a Western Christian perspective in outlining the status of native women and the responsibility of the missionaries to bring about a change. For Weitbrecht, there is still hope for the women of Bengal, ‘prisoners’ of the stronghold of Hinduism: ‘Happily we can now speak of her as a “prisoner of hope”, for […] there are some [households] where light and joy have entered through the zenana teacher’.67 Missionary discourses represented ‘ladies’ work in missions and as teachers to be indicators of enlightenment and emancipation that reinforced the marginalized position of ‘women’ involved in domesticity. Such discourses using binary oppositions of light and darkness, of caged and free, became convenient tropes for presenting alternate images of the ‘superior’ English ‘ladies’ and the ‘degraded’ native ‘women’. Integrated with this representation of Indian women as passive and confined, is disdain for Bengali men who are dominated by their women. Weitbrecht contradicts her earlier contention by depicting the surprising agency that Bengali women exercise in their domestic circle and the influence that these women as mothers and wives have over their men. These women, she writes, begin to exercise a mastery over the actions and conduct of the men. The husband consults his wife on questions of domestic economy, and leaves in her hand all the petty details of household business. As natural guardian of the babe in her arms, the husband gives all the consideration due to her rank, and suffers himself to be dictated to, not only in respect to domestic affairs, but to his own pursuits in life and mode of conduct.68 Clearly, the man who ‘suffers himself to be dictated to’ is an object of derision, an ‘effeminate Bengali’ as compared to the ‘manly Englishman’.69 Women’s agency, ironically, is thought to be the reason why reformation in India is slow. Women are seen as restrictive to progress, a clog in the wheel of modernity. Indian women’s resistance to evangelization and ‘modernization’, and the firm control they exercised over their sons especially, resulted in a deflection of ‘sympathy for the victim’ to ‘blaming the victim’. Weitbrecht attributes the regressive attitude of Hindu men to the influence that their women exert on them. Young Bengal is full of European ideas when abroad, but quite a Bengali when at home. He eats mutton chops and drinks champagne when in

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society; within the walls of the zenana, he kneels before the image of stone which is the family idol. Half the amount of education spread over the land would have been sufficient for mighty changes but for their influence.70 As Mrs Helen Mackenzie had earlier pointed out, not everyone who wrote about the zenana had direct access to or any long personal association with it. James Long, in his characteristic sarcasm for the English method of ‘mapping the field of action’, expressed his dissatisfaction with the approach of English enquiry. Europeans cannot penetrate into the Antapur [another name for the inner apartments], or unravel the intricate web of native society; in various cases where they have attempted to write about it, it was in the spirit of the Marquis de Custine, who, after a few months’ residence in Russia, wrote several works about everything in it, – boasting ‘that he saw nothing but guessed everything’ […] An American writer, to shew the difficulty of foreigners understanding natives easily, mentions that he was 25 years in Scotland and fancied he understood the English – but after 25 years in England also he began to think he understood neither the Scot nor the English!71 Long drew attention of the British to the ‘empirical investigation on social questions in India’ and advised the English to direct their attention to various social evils in their own country, stressing that sociological enquiry should be left best to the educated Indians themselves.72 His dissatisfaction stemmed from the various societies which were formed to classify and arrange knowledge of the social condition of the Indians. There were sections on education, Indian literature and philosophy, art and science and ‘Native Female Improvement’. Such information was neatly tabled in the annual reports of the societies. The great number of such ‘findings’ and missionary writings on Indian social conditions followed a formulaic discursive pattern like a palimpsest that inscribes and reinscribes previous ‘knowledge’. In fact, the theme and language of such narratives are so similar that one wonders at the very originality of them. These writings outline the Indian institutions and ideologies which are responsible for the degradation of women, repeating such cultural markers as sati, infanticide, child marriage and widowhood as the standard ills that beset the Indian society. The ‘template for such recursive discursive manoeuvres’, as Johnston points out, is what gives their writings ‘the confidence of evangelical authority’.73

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Both Mrs Weitbrecht and Rev. Storrow, the latter who, from having spent 18  years in Calcutta considered himself to have substantial experience of native culture, described the zenana from the point of view of what they wanted to see, and from what had been shown to them by earlier missionary writings. Their portrayal of the zenana is based on what is physically apparent – the dark windowless rooms, the lack of furniture, the women bedecked in sensuous attire, laden with ornaments and finery. The scrutiny of the zenana, depicted through the distorted cultural lenses of Eurocentric perceptions, highlights the ‘difference’ between two ways of living. Storrow, who as a male missionary had probably never entered a zenana, had by his own admission derived his ideas from his stay in Calcutta with Dr and Mrs Mullens.74 He provides a graphic picture of the interiors of a zenana in Our Indian Sisters, which has a mat on the floor instead of a carpet, a charpoy that serves as a bed, a fireplace that has no chimney, windows which are very high up, walls that are ‘neither papered nor painted’ and ‘tables, chairs, sofas, drawers, cabinets are seldom seen’, so that ‘one is struck by the entire absence of all that constitutes to our idea the complement of a room – furniture, tables, and chairs’.75 In contrasting the unfamiliar with the familiar, it is evident that the observer fails to account for the differences in culture or climate before a deprecatory appraisal is made on all zenanas in general. The incomprehensibility of the difference is what causes the anxiety as there can be no control over the enigmatic. And what cannot be neatly slotted and fitted into the European understanding of domestic and gender roles is quickly stereotyped as a racial and cultural quirk. So, Storrow in his earlier work The Eastern Lily Gathered (1856) did not think ‘our want of extensive means of information’ to be of any particular disadvantage as he went on to authoritatively assert that, after having spoken on the position of women in India, ‘it is necessary that we should say something of their character’. And he proceeded to pronounce his judgement: ‘That they [the Indian women] are generally fond of ornaments and finery, indolent, gossiping, capricious, and frail, is undeniable; but that these vices are the pernicious fruits of that social and religious system under which they live, we believe to be equally undeniable.’76 Such writings also convey the consequences that such contact points have on both the subject and the object. As Johnston puts it, ‘Missionary representations of the contact zone of Indian gender reform evince the destabilizing ways in which cultural difference might effect both Indian and British conception of identity.’77 Very often the distinction between the subject and the object, the self and the other, the gaze and the gazer becomes fuzzy. In Lacanian terms, the subject of the gaze, in this case the women in the zenana, are destined to be seen.78 However, the paradox is that, because of the ubiquity of the gaze, it is accepted as ‘normal’, and hence gets excluded

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from the consciousness of the subject. ‘Seeing-the-other’ often transforms into the uneasiness of ‘being-seen-by-the-Other’.79 Mrs Weitbrecht, in her brief pamphlet Christian Woman’s Ministry to the Heathen Sisters of India, narrates an interesting episode where unwittingly the voyeur becomes the object of voyeurism. Some years ago an English lady of position was admitted through private influence to a Zenana. On entering she was gazed on with wonder, and asked puerile questions such as would scarcely have been put by one of our young children. “Tell us”, said they, “how your husband looks?” She did. “Oh that we might see him!” was the exclamation. “You shall,” said the lady. A purdah, or screen, was placed across the room and perforated with eye-holes, and a tall gentleman walked in and showed himself off for the gratification of the poor prisoners, whose delight and wonder was touching. “We shall never forget it,” said they. “We shall have something to talk of all our lives.”80 The reverse gaze and the realization that the Other has the power to ‘talk’ is distinctly an uncomfortable position. Paradoxically, the one who has been used to ‘looking’ and ‘talking’ does not realize in the field of consciousness that he/she is actually at the mercy of the gaze of the Other. But it is evident that subconsciously there is an anxiety in relation to the scrutiny of the identity-less ‘they’. The child-like, ‘puerile’ ‘poor prisoners’ scrutinizing, discussing and assessing then become a threat that endangers not only the image of the ‘English lady of position’ and the ‘tall gentleman’ but also the very representation of the white imperial masters. Hence it is necessary to ‘show off’ for the delight, wonder and gratification of the Other. Helen Mackenzie too, as she observes, explores and explains the wondrous zenanas and harems of Hasan Khan, and as she ‘watched Hasan Khan very closely to see how Muhammedan husbands behave’,81 is aware that her husband is as much the object of their curiosity: ‘I observe they are much more particular with C. He modestly stands on one side of the door and the female speaker on the other, so that although they make up for it by peeping after him, he cannot see them.’82 The interest that the subject takes in the representation of his/her own identity is intricately bound up with that which determines it. It is therefore important to conduct and mould themselves and create for themselves an identity in the light of the gaze of the Other. For women missionaries, it had been always felt necessary to give a testimony of their ‘adequate’ education, commitment and ‘capabilities’ as a ‘useful helpmeet’ to their husbands and as a ‘gentle mother’ to their ‘heathen’ students and converts.

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The role of the women missionaries continued to being determined in light of their experiences with the Other women. Class and caste now became the determining factors. Johnston asserts that the impetus behind the introduction of women missionaries belonging to ‘respectable middle or even upper-class backgrounds’ for zenana education was ‘primarily one of class’.83 Haggis too argues that class binds the shared assumption of ‘womanly identity’. On one level class serves to cement a sense of sisterhood between English ladies and their assumed counterparts in the (usually) upper classes zenanas of India, whose member are acknowledged as ladies, or at least potential ladies, and thus as ideal recipients of lady missionaries’ enlightening influence […] It was to this group that lady missionaries were enjoined to adopt a friendly ‘sisterly’ approach.84 Haggis seems to suggest that the onus was on the ‘lady’ missionaries to accept the zenana women as ‘ideal recipients’ of their attention. I  argue that, on the contrary, it was the missionary women who were anxious to be accepted and acknowledged as ladies by the upper-caste elite native households. The upper-class/caste Hindu women’s aversion and opposition to Christians entering their houses was not just from their resistance to ‘the spiritual ministrations of evangelical British gentlewomen’’, as Johnston argues.85 It was more because of social and religious taboos which prevented upper-caste Hindus from accepting the presence of Christian missionaries. Upper-caste ‘respectable’ Hindus considered Muslims and Christians mlechha (impure), and their very presence was a matter of distress, such that contact with them necessitated a ‘purification’ of the house and its inhabitants. Such a prejudice meant that Christian teachers, even native Christian female teachers, were not considered ‘respectable’ enough and never fully accepted by uppercaste Hindu society. Parna Sengupta links the importance of respectability with female literacy in Bengal and points out that ‘the paradox of teaching respectability through nonrespectable teachers helps explain how, in spite of multiple traditions of female literacy, women’s education remained relatively limited in colonial Bengal’.86 If the ‘citadel’ of upper-caste resistance could be infiltrated, it was only by projecting the ‘respectability’ of women missionaries. This explains why Rev. James Long was quick to assert the respectable status of his wife in his words quoted at the beginning of the chapter. Despite modest backgrounds, it was assured, one could be elevated to the position of a ‘lady’ by virtue of education and independent situation. This could bring them closer to the highborn native women and forge a bond of ‘sisterhood’. The image of the earlier

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working-class, impoverished woman missionary, who had travelled halfway across the world in need of employment, had turned full circle and transformed into an educated well-bred, self-sufficient lady who was employed in missionary work by altruistic motives. Such ‘ladies’ were to project their ‘superiority’ by educating, enlightening and imposing a suitable code of womanhood and gender roles on their upper-caste, but ‘less privileged’, sisters.

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Chapter 6 THE ‘GOOD’ AND THE ‘BAD’ SISTERS

The dust has no alliance with the pure sky.1 Missionaries in India brought about enormous changes in the social fabric of the country. Not only were their influence and intervention obvious in the formulation of policies for the governance and education of natives but they also created major upheavals in the ways identity and gender were defined. Their influence brought dramatic and far-reaching changes in which both the self and the other sought to refashion and recreate each other. The traditional dominant social groups in Bengal found it increasingly difficult to keep their markers of identity impervious to change as social mobility began to transcend the earlier rigid limitations of caste and class. As education began to be considered a benchmark for social acceptance and status, more and more social groups began to construct new identities, or radically modified their existing identities and aspired to ‘fit’ into the newly defined parameters of acceptance under the British Raj. Western education in mission schools and conversion to Christianity, either or both, not only guaranteed a clerical job but were also seen as sure-shot ways of being included within the ambit of what Macaulay defined as a new ‘class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.2 Perhaps the most fundamental revision in ‘taste’, ‘opinions’, ‘morals’ and ‘intellect’ was seen in expectations related to gender roles, particularly the role of women. The increasing participation of Christian women missionaries and the emphasis on female education in schools and in the zenana, was bound to have decisive repercussions on the identity of Indian women. Missionary discourses highlighting the contrast between Western or Eastern, or Christian and non-Christian, very often brought in issues of morality and respectability as an indicator of racial difference. The ‘good’ woman versus the ‘bad’ woman discourse tended to define a limited category of attributes and behaviour within which Christian women and Indian women were deemed to

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fit. This chapter looks at the representation of women in missionary discourses and subsequently in indigenous literature, which went on to define a code of femininity to which women were expected to conform. These have had a lasting impact on conceptions of ‘feminine’ attributes, behaviour and appearance, on the ways in which women have been perceived and on the collusion of native elites in perpetrating an image for themselves. One of the notable missionary writings to have a substantive impact on contemporary readers was Hannah Catherine Mullens’s novel Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran (The History of Phulmani and Karuna).3 It was written in 1852 in Bengali, a language Mullens was proficient in as she was born and brought up in Calcutta. This work, which is regarded as the first novel to be written in Bengali,4 went on to sell an impressive number of copies. Mullens describes the life of common village folks in rural Bengal and contrasts two female characters, both Christian native Bengalis. Phulmani is the ideal ‘good’ Christian woman, hard working and friendly, and Karuna is the un-Christian prototype of a ‘bad’, lazy and shrewish woman. In the preface, written in English, Mullens says that the book is ‘specially intended for Native Christian women’ and that the endeavour is to show the practical influence of Christianity on the various details of domestic life, such as the forming of marriage connections, behaviour to husbands, moral training of children, and the duty of women, specially to the poor, to the sick, and to the heathen. (3) The story is narrated by a white memsahib, a magistrate’s wife who visits the households of native Christian converts in a village in Bengal. She finds Phulmani to be the ideal Christian, a good wife and mother who tends to her family, house and garden with equal devotion. In spite of her limited means, she remains a model of goodness, hard work and spirituality, follows the words of the Bible, goes to church on Sundays and is therefore much respected by her family and neighbours. Karuna, in contrast, is lazy and dishonest, wastes her money and is in debt. Her house and family are uncared for, she remains attired in dirty clothes even on the day of Sabbath and is in a perpetual state of misery and deprivation. Clearly, the ‘positive’ Protestant ideals of morality, honesty and hard work are being promoted as values which the narrator as a representative of the white Christian community believes it embodies, and in which she takes pride. Karuna’s degradation is a result of not following the standard conventions of Protestantism. To quote Peter Hulme, such a discourse ‘provides a simplifying crucible in which complexities can be reduced to their essential components’.5 Phulmani is ‘good’, hence ‘happy’, and Karuna is ‘sinful’ and therefore ‘poor’ and ‘miserable’.

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The White English memsahib sets out to demonstrate the superiority of her race and the Christian religion by taming the undisciplined, by cleansing, educating, and bringing order. The psychic strategy here is to rigidly fix binary dichotomies, the cultural and racial differences between the white and the native, the Christian and the non-Christian, the advanced civilized race and the poor uncivilized barbarians. The narrator says that ‘it was only after seeing their character and hearing them that I was utterly convinced of what I ought to do […] When we study the Bible we see that God gives the parables of spiritual characters to instruct us on good moral behaviour. This made me think that if I  write about good Christians, then with the blessings of God, the sisters in Bengal can read that and get spiritual consolation from it’ (2). Not only did such writings on a simple level justify imperialism and evangelism but they also sought to emphasize the superiority of one race and religion over another. When the villagers ask the memsahib the reason for her visit to the village, she emphatically states, ‘it is the responsibility of the foreigners to advance the welfare of the Bengali Christians’ (6). The simple and poor villagers are shown to be in awe of the white sahibs and the memsahibs, treating them with respect and admiration, looking up to them as arbiters and saviours. The white, Christian padre (priest), the magistrate and their wives are the repository of what is morally good and lawfully right. They are, for the native converts, the symbolic parental figures who provide them with advice, support and help. So when Phulmani is in a moral dilemma, she goes to the padre for advice; when Karuna has no money, she expects the narrator to support her; and when the narrator helps Rani give birth after a particularly difficult labour, she is hailed by the assembled women as their ma-baap (mother-father) and ‘protector’ (93). The white memsahib is thus literally and metaphorically the ‘mother’, one who gives birth, sustains and takes care of her simple-minded, ignorant ‘children’. Moreover, she is the epitome of an ‘ideal’ Christian woman, who exemplifies by her own deeds that which native women ought to aspire to. Mullens’s novel is clearly meant to be a continuation of the devotional and didactic literature popularized by John Bunyan and John Milton. The character of Phulmani is inspirational, an idealized modern ‘Christian’. The names of the characters denote their implicit characteristics. Phulmani, which means the ‘beloved flower’, and Karuna, meaning ‘pity’, indicate stereotypical antithetical characters. Phulmani’s son, Sadhu (Holy), and daughter, Satyavati (one who speaks the truth), also epitomize the values implicit in their names. The themes of sin and goodness, rebellion and punishment, repentance and deliverance determine the overall allegorical structures, parables and Biblical allusions in the narrative. The distinct disparity of outlook and responses of the Christian and the un-Christian characters towards the spiritual and the

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Figure 6.1 A page from Hannah Catherine Mullens’s Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran, 1852.

godly highlight the all-pervasive influence of Protestantism in shaping their identity and course of action. Both the characters face the daily trials of life and undergo vicissitudes of the soul. Phulmani tries to listen to the voice of Providence and understand the operation and the methods of God. For her, the words of Jesus and the Bible are her constant guide and inspiration. Karuna does not read the Bible nor does she attend to the ministrations in the church, and therefore she has no one to provide her spiritual guidance. The narrator makes it clear that if there is a providential meaning behind every remarkable and humdrum incident, then clearly it is a divine plan that makes it happen. The narrative shows the ungodly Karuna and Madhu, who bring sorrow to themselves by disregarding such divine guidance. The drunkard and

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wife beater Madhu is shown to be ridden with doubt and fear as he approaches his death. As he lies on his deathbed and looks back at his past he cries, No, no, God is not with me. Oh! If only He was besides me all my fear would have vanished; but He is not here! It seems like the Devil is sitting next to me and whispering in my ears that now I have to face the consequences of all my evil deeds.’ (71) The narrative does not miss an opportunity to portend doom for unbelievers and ‘sinners’, invoking images of the snake and the devil, of fire, brimstone and hell. At the same time there is ‘hope’ of redemption if ‘you hold the hand of Jesus’ (74). The characteristic representation of Phulmani as a practical, industrious native Christian convert in a way reiterates the idea that the ‘degraded’ natives can improve their position by adopting the path of Christianity. Mullens’s narrator emphasizes this in the sermon she gives to the local women when the latter make a distinction between the ways and attributes of English women and Bengali women: You have embraced the religion of Christianity, therefore it is not correct for you to follow the path of the idolatrous. When you believe in things which are auspicious and inauspicious you displease God. (94) And when she meets a Bengali family who impresses her with their hospitality and good manners, she verily concludes, Such good behaviour is essentially the result of Christian religion; because this religion has such a quality that a nation which truly embraces it is bound to reform in to a loving, sympathetic and well behaved one, even though it was uncivilized and ignorant in the past. (99) It is evident that Mullens’s novel reiterates the usual missionary theory of proselytization that all differences which are normative of race, climate, culture and so on can be conveniently dismissed and swept under the enveloping universal humanism of Christianity. Christianity is propounded as a common equalizer which erases all differences between the white women and the native women, making them purportedly all equals. The narrative recurrently stresses that true Christians have the potential to influence others and increase their numbers: ‘If all Christian women were like Pyari and Phulmani, then within a few days not a single Hindu or Mussalman would have existed’ (186). The association of such ‘good’ Christian women persuades not only Karuna to become a good Christian but also the memsahib’s Muslim ayah to take up

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the Christian religion. Such an act on their part reassures them of a ‘good’ and ‘happy’ life. The narrative unwittingly reveals the conflicting cultural values that vex its characters as they grapple to comprehend contradictory ideas, particularly in the sphere of gender and sexuality. The novel is fraught with tension as the memsahib tries to sympathetically represent native practices and at the same time to prescribe superior imperial and evangelical ideas. The cross-cultural encounters are particularly evident in matters of motherhood, childbirth and child rearing. The novel, in sync with most missionary representations of ‘heathen’ mothers, shows native women to be careless and neglectful of their children. Only those women who have become ‘true’ Christians are ‘ideal’ mothers, capable of loving and nurturing their children. The memsahib notes with some confusion and dismay the birthing practices prevalent among the natives and tries to impress upon them the ‘western’ and hence the ‘better’ method of delivering babies. These ignorant women kept her [the expectant mother] bended on her knees for three hours, as a result of which she was completely exhausted and limp. Seeing this I asked the midwife to allow her to lie down. In the west all women lie flat when they deliver. The midwife was quite annoyed when she heard me and said that there was a lot of difference between western ladies and Bengali women and if I was so keen to get the delivery done in the English way then she will not take any further responsibility. I agreed. I was quite adept at what ought to be done at such moments and I  was sure with God’s blessings nothing would go wrong. (91–92) The key focus of the novel is a long discussion on the difference between native women and English women, their roles in society, the societal expectations from them and their impact on the formation of the women’s identity. The narrative poses the discomfort that missionaries felt at what they saw to be the restrictive and cloistered lives of native women. Such women, it is argued, were more tempted to transgress than English women, who had free access to men’s company. Mullens very often puts her own speeches in the mouth of her Bengali characters, and though it sounds highly improbable for Phulmani’s teenage daughter, Sundori, to speak so wisely, it at the same time gives the impression that the native population is willing to validate the missionary views. Sundori states, Memsahib, in this country the men do not allow their daughters to go out of the houses. They say, women ought to be always in purdah, under lock

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and key. But it is the lock and key that we have inside us which is more important. If we confer our thoughts and our mind to Christ and do as He bids us to, then the Devil can never tempt us. (257) The key issue of this discourse is posed by Phulmani when she asks whether the Bengali woman ought to follow the examples of the British memsahibs. Can she talk to men as freely, mix with them, be alone in their company without society talking ill about such women? What would be the British memsahib’s opinion about such Bengali women? The memsahib then proceeds to explain by establishing the imagined difference between the ‘false’ modesty of native women and the ‘true’ modesty of British women. It is not my desire to see Bengali women become like the British ladies. To mix with men, you need modesty, and not just the modesty of covering yourself in a veil. You should not talk about improper things with men and not behave in such a way as to attract the attention of men […] Bengali women just remain in purdah, but they do not have the same modesty as British women. In front of other men Bengali women can unabashedly discuss about conceiving, and other such topics; but if an English lady talks about such things to any man other than her husband, she is considered to be shameless and uncivilized. It is true that in such matters the Christians are much better than the Hindus, but there are still a lot of shortcomings. Till then it is better not to mix with men. Gradually when they receive English education, they can become like us. But perhaps it will take another hundred years for them to accomplish this. (261) Such missionary writings thus reaffirmed the construed unbridgeable cultural and racial differences while simultaneously depending on evangelical Protestantism to control ‘uncivilized’, ‘immodest’ sexual behaviour. The concept of ‘true’ and ‘false’ modesty in the above passage is mobilized around three cultural issues of body, clothing and language. The depreciatory attitude towards native women is precisely because they are seen to have no control over either their sexuality or their language and therefore need the superior reformative control of the white Christians. Modesty was one of the crucial components of the Victorian ideal of womanhood, and the nineteenthcentury English obsession with covering the body and with sexuality was as much a part of emphasizing modesty as it was important to have a ‘proper’ conduct. Missionary writings on India have been particularly uneasy with native women who go about bare bodied, and an important component of reforming of women and promoting civilized behaviour was to cover their

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bodies. The construction and representation of ideal womanhood overlapped with Protestant ideas of being in control of sexuality and behaviour. The narrative depicts British women as the paragon of modesty, virtuosity and propriety, who thus set a standard of ‘true’ femininity to which Indian women, in spite of their inherent aberrations, should aspire. Mullens’s novel ends with an appeal to readers to follow the path shown by the virtuous characters ‘who were once Hindus like you, and their customs, behaviour and rituals were just like yours’. The readers are encouraged to follow the example of Phulmani. They are also reminded of the fate of a sinner like Karuna, who had to bemoan the death of her son. ‘If you become Christians’, they are assured by the authorial voice, ‘you too can become well-behaved and happy’ (296–98). The good sister/bad sister dichotomy rests on the representation of a mutually shared destiny wherein the ‘good’ English, Christian sister will with her example eventually reform the ‘bad’, ‘heathen’ sister. Mullens’s next novel, Faith and Victory, written in English and published in 1867 after her untimely death in 1861, was again meant primarily to educate Bengali readers.6 The English edition was prepared first as it was thought to be equally informative for English readers. The main purpose was to throw light on Hindu life and manners by providing a fictitious insight into the home and life of an upper-class Hindu family. The novel once again negotiates complex issues related to Hindu and Christian identity, and the differences between the upbringing of English women and their Indian counterparts. Prosonno, who belongs to an upper-caste, well-to-do Hindu family, is shown to be attracted to the ‘positive’ aspects of Christianity, and his fervent desire to convert is met with stern disapproval and tough resistance from his family. It is interesting to note the befuddling effects of cross-cultural conflicts on the identity of those caught in it, like Prosonno, whose clothes, food, relations and even language changes, so that when he is forced to return to his family, his own mother ‘hardly knew her son again. His very phraseology was altered’ (114). Anna Johnston’s extensive analysis of this work sufficiently demonstrates the complicated forms of missionary representations of the relationship of the colonizer and the colonized.7 This chapter studies the textual construction of the dual idea of womanhood, especially that which tried to fit the British and Indian women into two neatly structured slots. Prosonno’s communication with the anonymous missionary’s wife and his social interaction with Christian ladies results in his despairing about the position of women in his own community. As someone who has a newly initiated perspective on the Christian community, Prosonno is struck by the ladies the most, noting that ‘our ladies are not wanting in beauty and sweetness, and even in intelligence; and yet they are different from English women, as is the jungly marigold from the garden rose’ (186). To emphasize the point

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that Prosonno is making, the missionary’s wife asserts that ‘the difference in both cases arise from the same cause, namely, the want of culture’ (186). The assertion is that with proper cultivation of the minds of the native women, they can transcend from their ‘wild’ state to a ‘cultivated’ garden rose. Lack of education, religion, want of training and even racial and climatic causes are the reasons given for this ‘wildness’ of character and the ‘false notions of female delicacy and female reserve’ that women in India tend to believe about themselves. The women in Britain, by contrast, are posited as empowered, hard working, educated and loving mothers and wives. After listening to the detailed description of ‘the daily life of a Christian woman in England […] its freedom, industry and activity’, Prosonno cannot help feeling how different it was ‘from the history of a day in the very best of Hindoo homes’ (192). Such claims of racial and cultural superiority in colonial missionary writings, as Jane Haggis pointed out, was for the purpose of ‘self-representations to an audience at home in Britain – another version of the “Great I” ’.8 Such selfrepresentations substantially aided in raising the British image and self-esteem back at home. The existing gender conditions in Victorian England were far from the picture drawn here. The prevalent stereotype of Victorian women as passive and confined ‘angels in the house’ indicates the contradictions and tensions within and between Victorian and colonial gender ideologies.9 The Indian mothers involved in the ‘trivialities’ of their housework, preparation of food or in their religion pale into insignificance as compared to British mothers who are ‘educated, and have something to talk about’ to their children (192). The family structure of Hindu households, where a number of people live together as one unit, are shown to have its disadvantages, and the Western model of a nuclear family, wherein a man keeps a separate establishment for his wife and children, are particularly presented as better options. A man does not marry until he is able to maintain a separate establishment for his family, and as his wife is not a child, but at least twenty years of age when she marries, she does not need the care of a mother-in-law, and is perhaps better without her. (193) When Prosonno voices his worries about the fate of old parents who would be left alone in such a familial system, he is informed by the missionary’s wife that in England ‘often there will be one of the daughters who remains unmarried, and she will continue to live with her parents, and take care of them’ (195). Missionary discourses reinforced indigenous conventions of marriage and motherhood as primary social roles for women, but disparaged the Indian mother as a bad role model for her children. Moreover, it upset all pre-existing thoughts and practices of a Hindu family where it was the norm to have big

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joint families, and sons contributed to the upkeep of dependent family members. It at the same time marginalized women’s domestic roles as ‘trivial’, giving more importance to the woman who was educated. The construction of good/ bad wives/mothers resulted in a fissure in the identity of Indian women, with generations of women having to subsequently face the mockery of society that labelled them as ‘mems’ if they chose the option of education over domesticity. Only upper-class women who had money and leisure could afford to follow the memsahibs and engage themselves in reading, writing and embroidery. These activities were considered a wasteful ‘pastime’ amongst women of the middle and lower classes for whom working at home or in the fields had more economic value. Women seeking education were seen as neglecting their ‘primary’ duty of looking after their families and were denigrated as ‘aspirational’. Such women were considered ambitious, ‘unfeminine’ and a potential threat to patriarchal authority. In short, they were the ‘bad’ women. The representation of femininity and gender roles, both colonial and indigenous, depended on one common aspect  – the construction of womanhood. Both the apparently conflicting cultural ideologies remained undisputed over cultivating women. For the English, the wild marigold had to be cultivated into the garden rose. So in Mullens’s Faith and Victory, Prosonno’s wife, Kaminee, decides to follow the path shown by Christianity and leaves her father-in-law’s house to join her husband and the Christian community. Mullens’s didactic novel shows the successful planting but does not indicate the destabilizing ways in which such a cross-cultural grafting can affect both the Indian and British conceptions of identity. Looks were an important consideration in defining ideal femininity. Appearance and the colour of the skin became important indicators of class and caste, and began to play an important role in categorizing women on a hierarchical scale. The ethnolinguistic classification of Aryan and non-Aryan began to be applied to racial hierarchy, and fair skin became an indicator of racial purity. Historically, the contact of the Aryans who came from northern Asia and Europe with the indigenous population of India had resulted in hierarchical social ordering in which important religious, military and educational functions remained in the hands of the Aryans, and menial functions were relegated to the non-Aryan population. The word ‘Aryan’, derived from the Sanskrit root arya, meaning ‘noble’, implied a ‘civilized’ race as compared to the non-Aryans considered as uncivilized. Light skin, light eyes, regular chiselled facial cuts and a tall, well-structured physique became distinguishing markers of the upper class/caste, in contrast to the dark skin, flat features and short body construction of the non-Aryans. The appreciation of native beauty in missionary writings was largely based on how closely they resembled the English ideal of ‘good’ looks. Sweetness,

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modesty and a clear complexion were reiterated as beauty in women. In Faith and Victory, the bride chosen for the native convert Ram Doyal was an orphan, about 16 years of age, ‘very modest and pretty’ (201) and ‘from her sweet face and complexion’ it was presumed that she belonged to the upper caste (199). In Mrs Helen Mackenzie’s narration of her experiences in India,10 she finds Rose ‘the sweetest looking young Bengali I  have seen’, whose ‘face is quite lovely, not only from feature, but from the sweet, modest, pathetic expression’ (43). And Rev. E. Storrow’s The Eastern Lily Gathered: A Memoir of Bala Shoondoree Tagore11 describes Bala Shoondoree Tagore in the following way: In person she was extremely beautiful and dignified. She was slightly beyond the middle size, and thinly but elegantly formed. Her features were beautifully symmetrical, and finely chiselled; her eyes were large, black and expressive of both modesty and intelligence; her complexion was of a light olive colour, and, like that of the higher classes generally, remarkably fair and pure. (75) Missionary writings that sought to define the paradigms for the ‘ideal’ Indian woman were clearly attempting to replicate the benchmark set for the ‘ideal’ English womanhood. One of the most noteworthy influences that left an indelible mark on English life, literature and womanhood in the nineteenth century was the writings of the English writer and activist Hannah More. More’s religious tracts, published in England in the late eighteenth century, had acclaimed the feminine virtues of piety, propriety, modesty and humility.12 Her plays and verses, her religious essays and other writings, assiduously concentrated on the exposition of womanly duties and conduct, considering propriety to be ‘the first, second, and third requisite for woman’. Her heroines were pleasing in appearance, modestly dressed, virtuous and the essence of propriety in their conduct. More’s Coelebs (1809) presented the picture of the ideal English lady which ‘met with the approval of no small section of the upper and middle classes, since it became the standardized picture of the Victorian gentlewoman’.13 A sweet and modest countenance was considered the visible form of personal purity. More’s heroine Lucilla Stanley’s ‘pure and eloquent blood’ ensured that her ‘beauty is countenance; it is the stamp of mind intelligently printed on the face’.14 Like More’s heroine, Bala Shoondoree Tagore’s outward beauty was a manifestation of the purity of heart and mind. Her countenance was a reflection of the ‘good’ woman’s beauty, simplicity, piety and her ‘pure blood’. Rev. Storrow claims in the preface to the Memoir of Bala Shoondoree Tagore that the narrative of this daughter of a Hindu priest is ‘worthy of a place beside the monuments raised to the memory of her more favoured sisters’, who have

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with their examples of ‘godliness’ featured prominently in Christian literature. Bala remains a voiceless entity in Storrow’s portrayal of a one-dimensional character. Bala was married at the young age of 12 into the reputed Tagore family of Calcutta, known for their high social position. Along with her young husband she received English education, and the Scriptures and Bunyan’s allegory so influenced her that she was soon eager to adopt Christianity as her religion. In the transient state from one religion to another, Storrow says that she found the practices of Hinduism ‘profane’ and ‘sacrilegious’ (50) and was prepared ‘to do battle with earnest heart and soul in behalf of the religion of their choice’ (57). It was with her ‘diligence’ and ‘perseverance’, amidst great social prejudices, ‘difficulties and obstructions’ that she persevered in her ‘search for truth’ (preface). Her sudden death at the young age of 19 cut short her desire to be baptized. Storrow characterizes her as being ‘singularly free’ from many of those features which ‘we have mentioned as distinguishing her countrywomen’ (76). She was indifferent to the attractions of rich and costly jewels and dresses and willing to forego all luxuries and property. She hated idolatry, and for her ‘the Bible alone was the formula’ (77). She was kind, pious, charitable to the poor, simple and dedicated to God. Bala Shoondoree Tagore is presented as a prototype, an exceptional native woman, and by implication, then, her ‘countrywomen’ possessed none or few of these virtues. More provided an explanation for such differences that characterize the superior sister over the other ordinary ones. Coelebs, in search of a ‘suitable’ wife, makes the following observation: I had frequently remarked, that the musical and the dancing ladies, and those who were most admired for modish attainments, had little intellectual gayety. In numerous instances I found that the mind was the only part which was not kept in action; and no wonder, for it was the only part which had received no previous forming, no preparatory moulding.15 Intellectual activity was deemed superior, and thus women who engaged in pursuits of ‘serious’ activities of the mind were superior to those who were busy in ‘frivolous’ gaiety. Mary Wollstonecraft too persuaded women to acquire strength of ‘mind and body’, to dismiss ‘soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment’, which she considered ‘synonymous with epithets of weakness’.16 Whether it was Wollstonecraft, More or Rev. Storrow, they were prioritizing and hierarchizing intellectual activities which had until then been a predominantly masculine domain and had enjoyed ‘superior’ status. Education of women as it existed, was conceived as soft and weak, limited to ‘modish attainments’ and distinguishably inferior to education of men. Not

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only were such attainments gender specific but it was also hinted to be race specific too. So, Coelebs’s future father-in-law remarks, The education which now prevails, is a Mahometan education. It consists entirely in making woman an object of attraction. There are, however, a few reasonable people left, who, while they retain the object, improve upon the plan. They too would make woman attractive; but it is by sedulous labouring to make the understanding, the temper, the mind, and the manners of their daughters, as engaging as these Circasian parents endeavour to make the person.17 Here the mind is posited as superior to the body in accordance with Christian belief that regards the physicality of the body with its animalistic, carnal associations as baser than the higher, intellectual activity of the mind. Dualism of mind and body permeates Western thought, and the theory has a distinguished philosophical lineage from Plato to René Descartes. Descartes’s thesis on the mind-body distinction sufficiently argued with ‘irreligious people’ that the soul/mind is immortal even though the body is impermanent. In the Synopsis to Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes claimed that though the body decays and dies, the mind survives the body’s destruction. Rev. Robert Hall’s ‘Sketches of Original Sermons’, delivered at Bristol 25 February 1827, expressed the same idea: ‘The superiority of mind over body, the eternal duration of the one and the mouldering frail tenure of the other, leave no comparison for a moment between them.’18 Mind over body, the Platonic concept of ‘intellectual beauty’, was a widely current idea especially in the writings of radical intellectuals like William Godwin and Percy Byshe Shelley. Catering to the mind, cultivating and moulding it, improving upon it, was taken to be a sign of a superior people, as compared to certain ‘lowly’ races whose endeavour was to make the body attractive. While More finds Mohammedans and Caucasian women ‘inferior’ because they belabour on the attractiveness of their body, Christian missionaries found the women in the Indian zenanas ‘degraded’ because of the latter’s fondness for rich clothes and jewellery. Giving attention to one’s looks, overt dressing, adorning the body and so on became not only signs of vanity in a woman but also came to be interpreted by extension as signs of the mental vacuousness of the entire race. The emphasis on a cultivated mind thus effectively projected a sphere of superiority in Englishwomen which was neither visible nor quantifiable. The Englishwoman therefore ‘knew’ more than her Indian sisters, and it was a space from which the Englishwoman could emit ‘knowledge’ of colonized women.

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By the middle of the nineteenth century when the Bengali aristocratic class began to invade the upper echelons of intellectual circles, a new formation of ‘knowledge’ of Indian women emerged in native discourse. Bengali intellectuals initiated a number of social reform movements particularly championing the cause of women’s emancipation against some of the oppressive social practices prevalent in Bengali society. Raja Rammohun Roy was one of the foremost reformers known for his contribution to the abolition of sati and for his serious opposition to polygamy and child marriage. His erudition and his mastery over many languages impressed both the English and the Bengalis. In 1815, he started the Atmiya Sabha (Association of Friends), an association of a select group of newly formed aristocratic, intellectual liberals for discussing Hindu religion, philosophy, scriptures and social customs. These meetings were attended by prominent Bengalis like Dwarakanath Tagore, Raja Kalishankar Ghosal, Nandakisore Bose, Mrityunjaya Vidyalankar and Ramchandra Vidyavagish. This was a precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, which was founded in 1828 and went on to become an alternate ‘modern’ sect of Hinduism whose appeal lay largely within a limited circle of educated and well-to-do people. Roy was much influenced by Carey, though there were also serious differences between them. Roy’s radical thinking and reform movement antagonized many, both orthodox Hindus and Christians. But there is no doubt that such a movement was the ‘first important evidence of a new epoch in Indian intellectual history’.19 Roy wrote extensively, and his views on religion and social problems came out in a number of books and tracts. In his Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females (1822),20 a concise tract of only 16 pages, Roy cited property inheritance rights as the reason for the oppression of women. He based his study on the ancient and modern Hindu laws and elucidated the shortcomings in the modern laws of property inheritance, which he said had limited the rights of women and kept them dependent on the patriarchal society. Economic deprivation and financial dependence were alleged to be the main reason for social atrocities against women like sati, polygamy and female infanticide, and not ‘from religious prejudices and early impressions only’. Women’s ‘miserable state of dependence’ is why ‘she is driven by constant unhappiness to seek refuge in vice’, he asserted.21 The economic rationale of Roy’s perspective provided a new insight for what had until then been represented in colonial discourses as innate vices of Hindu women. Even conservative Hindus welcomed Western education and education for women. Radhakanta Dev, the leader of the conservatives who occupied positions of eminence in the Hindu College, the Calcutta School Society and the Royal Asiatic Society desired changes based on Western ideas. But he was suspicious of the missionaries, and their motives for introducing education

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and strictly opposed the propagation of any religious teachings in educational institutions. The 1820s and ’30s witnessed the clash of ideas and increasing conflict between Christian missionaries, liberal reformers and conservatives. The Young Bengal Movement started by Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and some of his chosen students from the Hindu College went on to encourage free thinking among the youth. Western literature and the works of Voltaire, John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and Tom Paine were very much in demand in Bengal. Greatly impressed by Western ideas and English education, Derozio and his band of young thinkers voiced their protest against Hinduism and vociferously denounced Hindu customs. Their radical ideas and their condemnation of Hindu practices did make it much easier for missionaries like Alexander Duff to emphasize the need for the spread of Christianity. Derozio, the cause of consternation, was removed from the Hindu College, and another radical reformer, Krishnamohun Bandopadhyay, who emphatically stated that ‘a people can never be reformed without noise and confusion’,22 was excommunicated from his home. Some of them, like Krishnamohun Bandopadhyay and Lal Behari Dey, embraced the Christian faith and sought to bring reformation through their writings. They formed societies and associations where meetings took place regularly and ideas on various subjects were shared. Some started their own publications to voice their opinions. Derozio brought out a daily paper, East Indian, to ‘advocate the just rights of all classes of the community’.23 Some of the publications brought out by the Derozions were The Enquirer, Quill, Bengal Spectator and the Hindu Pioneer. The writings focused on civil and social reformation, encouraging vernacular languages, emphasizing the history of India and above all the importance of women’s education. Madanmohan Tarkalankar, Krishnamohun Bandopadhyay, Peary Chand Mitra and Ishwaschandra Vidyasagar were eminent scholars of Sanskrit and Bengali and great patrons of women’s education. Like Rammohun Roy, Rev. Krishnamohun Bandopadhyay too cited pecuniary reasons for the neglect of women’s education, stating that ‘the desire to teach male children is the consequence of the prospect which knowledge opens of wealth and honor’. He went on to state that the example of the English ladies was a great motivation for natives who wanted their female relatives to be educated. Many Hindus of respectability are, I know, from personal observation, very desirous in the abstract of instructing their females. They see the palpable benefits which education has conferred upon their Western sisters, and often wish they could boast of such accomplished wives and daughters as those of their European neighbours.24

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Emulating the Western sisters became a conspicuous trend among the Bengali upper classes, especially in the ways of dressing, having an English governess, learning to speak English and embroidering, and even playing the piano. Rev. Storrow’s Memoir of Bala Shoondoree Tagore mentions an English governess who came to teach her English. The women in the distinguished Tagore family received education at home, and someone like Swarnakumari Devi went on to become an acclaimed woman writer of nineteenth-century Bengal. The women in Mitra’s family were also highly literate. The interest in educating the daughters of elite Bengali families was perceptible in the writings of learned Bengalis. An early pamphlet urging female education was Gourmohan Vidyalankar’s Strisiksha Bidhayak (1822), written in Bengali, ‘whose design is to prove that female education was formerly prevalent among the Hindoos, especially in higher classes, and that such instruction, as from being, as is generally supposed, disgraceful or injurious, is calculated to produce the most beneficial effects’.25 (vii). It was on the request of Miss Cooke and other women missionaries that Gourmohan Vidyalankar wrote this tract, primarily to encourage native women to attend school. Gourmohan was associated with the Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS) and was the head pundit of the School Book Society. The booklet, which begins in the form of a conversation between two native women, voices the general reluctance among contemporary Indian women to receive education. ‘Learning is meant for men. How will it benefit us?’, asks one. She is told by the other woman that ‘it is our good fate that the sahebs have introduced education for women’ (3). Citing precedents of educated women from ancient texts, the author urged the education of women, as not only would that benefit her children but she would also be an asset to her husband by managing the household better. At the same time the book goes on to admonish women on their duties. She will nevertheless have to do all that is expected from women. During her childhood she has to follow her parents’ words. As a young maiden she has to serve her husband and his family, and she ought to be skilled in cooking and looking after her children. In old age she should follow the path of righteousness. Women ought not to desire any man other than her husband, or live with another man, or travel on her own, or be in the company of bad women. All this is bad for her. She should be skilled in housework, be loved by her husband, have modesty and propriety, be virtuous and pious, and be devoted to her husband and to God. This will give her happiness in this life and in the afterlife. (32) The ending of the book makes it emphatically clear that women’s foremost duty was unflinching loyalty and devotion to her husband, irrespective of

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whether the husband was good or bad, devout or irreligious, rich or poor, good looking or unsightly. ‘Hence’, the women are reminded, ‘when you find time in between your routine housework to educate yourself, know that according to the religious laws and scriptures the greatest happiness lies in serving your husband’ (32). The author’s obvious approach is to draw a middle path, to pacify both the conservatives and the liberals. The growing popularity of writings by Bengalis advocating women’s emancipation is noticeable from the fact that another anonymous booklet written by a Brahmin, as is made clear in the title The Zenana Opened, or a Brahmin Advocating Female Emancipation (1851), sold 7,000 copies. The pamphlet, written in Bengali with an English title page, was evidently intended for an Englisheducated Bengali section of society. This then was meant to percolate down to the not-so-educated class. It presents neatly structured arguments in favour of the intellectual capabilities of women, providing examples of learned women in the past and the benefits of women’s education to the country. The author urges the upper-class educated men to encourage their womenfolk to learn both Bengali and English, but realizes it will be impossible to find lady teachers from the upper classes as their families would not permit them to work. The solution, he feels, lies in employing Christian Bengali women well versed in English, who can be recruited at a much lesser wage than the white Christian women.26 Female education was deemed necessary for the physical and mental development of the future generation. At the same time there was the niggling worry that education would make women brash, arrogant and hence uncontrollable. The opinions of the Bengali male intellectuals clearly indicate their anxiety, as much as More’s writings established her insistence on keeping women in their ‘right’ place. The Bengali bhadramahila,27 like her Victorian sister, was to be a neatly packaged amalgamation of the virtues of a ‘woman’ and the qualities of a ‘lady’. As one essayist wrote some time later, ‘it is the duty of the educated bhadramahila to give up the defects of both old and new women, and to adopt their good qualities’.28 The attitude of the Bengali bhadralok was one of admiration for the ‘superior’ ways of the English and a corresponding denunciation of indigenous culture which was regarded as vulgar and lowly. The attempt of the elite class was to disassociate themselves from those on the lower orders of society and to create for themselves exclusive parameters of ‘respectability’.29 The new system of education to the women in zenanas produced, to quote Sumanta Banerjee, ‘a schism in this cultural homogeneity among Bengali women’,30 creating a rigid difference between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘vulgar’ class. The dilemma of defining and representing the ‘ideal’ woman was evident not just in discursive writings on women but also in the emerging literature of

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the period. English novels were beginning to be much in demand among a new class of Bengalis educated in Western learning and eager to have more exposure to western literature. The novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and William Thackeray were not just avidly read by Indian readers but also some of the educated natives began to try their hand at literary writing. Some of the early indigenous writers who had received English education were eager to experiment with this new and exciting literary form. Their works showed a queer mix of realism, folk tale and mythology, a perplexity born out of an attempt ‘to reconcile two sets of values – one obtained by reading an alien literature and the other available in life’.31 As Meenakshi Mukherjee explains, the early efforts by Indian writers indicated the confusion in trying to integrate two diverse cultural, social and literary ways.32 ‘Reconciling two sets of values’ was evident not just in literary genres and style but also in the representation of characters and ideology. Michael Madhusudan Dutta was an example of this synthesis of the East and the West. He came from an aristocratic Bengali family and was steeped in Western education. His conversion to Christianity in 1843 created quite a furore in Calcutta. He began his literary career by writing in English but soon returned to writing in his mother tongue and dazzled Bengali readers with his Meghnad-badh Kavya (1861). Influenced by Western literary genres, he based his long narrative poem on the Indian epic the Ramayana, in which he boldly represented Ravana, the conventional villain, as more heroic than Rama. His Birangana Kavya (1862) was a string of epistolary poems written by imaginary heroic women who defy conventions and traditional social values. It was apparent that young radical thinkers of Bengal were ready to experiment with new ideas and to challenge existing archetypical gender roles, women’s subjectivity and binary identities. Another popular Bengali writer of this period was Peary Chand Mitra. He came from a well-educated family where the women were literate and could keep accounts. Infused with the revolutionary ideas of Derozio’s Young Bengal, Mitra very soon became the secretary of the Bengal British India Society. The society expressed its loyalty to the British rule, and its objective was the collection and dissemination of information related to the condition of the people in British India. Most of his writings strongly denounce the prevalent social ills, and above all he was a staunch advocate of education for women. According to him, the women in his house were fond of reading, but there were no suitable ‘instructive books’ for them. Thus, he says, ‘I was forced to think how female education could be promoted in a substantial way. The conclusion I came to was that, unless womanhood were placed on a spiritual basis, education would never be productive of real good. For the furtherance of this end I have been humbly working.’33 His book Ramaranjika

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dealt with female education and gave examples from the lives of eminent Englishwomen and distinguished Hindu women. His novel Alaler Gharer Dulal (1858) was hailed as a groundbreaking literary work for its easy colloquial style and humour. The story of a spoilt son of a rich landlord is interwoven with, as G. D. Oswell, the English translator of the novel, says, ‘disquisitions on virtue and vice, truthfulness and deceit, charity and niggardliness, hypocrisy and straightforwardness’.34 Matilall, the ‘spoilt child’, is shown to be a decadent character whose evil dispositions and bad habits are the results of a vacuous mind. The mind, the author warns, should be assiduously employed in a variety of pursuits. Stressing the important role that mothers have in the education and upbringing of children, Mitra compares the ways in which English and Indian children are brought up. The children of Englishmen are instructed by their parents in a variety of innocent pastimes, in order that they may have sound minds and sound bodies […] Boys in this country follow the example that is set them: their one wish is to be dressed in gorgeous attire, […] to make up picnic parties […] and to live luxuriously in all a Babu’s style. Fondness for display and extravagance naturally characterises the season of youth […] and a variety of evils result, by which eventually body and mind alike may be irretrievably ruined. (70) Another early Bengali writer renowned for his efforts to bring about reform in Hindu society was Rev. Lal Behari Dey. Dey belonged to a marginalized caste traditionally discriminated against by the Brahmins, and in 1843 he converted to Christianity. His novella in Bengali, Chandramukhir Upakhyan, which came out in serialized form in 1859, was ostensibly the story of a female character, though the focus of the story shifted to issues related to conversion. His heroine, Chandramukhi, was ‘created after the concept of the ideal nineteenth-century woman:  beautiful, intelligent but obedient, educated but soft-spoken’.35 He wrote two books in English, Govinda Samanta (later renamed Bengal Peasant Life) and Folk Tales of Bengal. Dey’s collection of popular unwritten folk tales of Bengal, he believed, ‘would be a contribution, however slight […] which proves that the swarthy and half-naked peasant on the banks of the Ganges is a cousin, albeit of the hundredth remove, to the fair-skinned and well-dressed Englishman on the banks of the Thames’.36 The collection begins with the tale of a king who had two queens, Duo and Suo, the quintessential story of the good and the evil queens. A  popular folk tale among Bengalis, it portrays the contrast between two ‘types’ of women – the archetypal ‘good’ queen Suo, who is charitable, generous, soft spoken and much loved by the king, and Duo,

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who is wicked, deceitful, cruel and who kills her stepson and is ultimately punished for her misdeeds. Such antithetical characters representing the duality of femaleness became a popular didactic and instructive guide for women to follow the path of goodness and righteousness. Many of these early fictions were written explicitly on the request of British officials and received patronage from them. Rev. Dey’s Folk Tales, written evidently for the moral reformation of natives, was dedicated to Captain R. C. Temple of the Bengal Staff Corps, who was first to suggest to him such a collection of folk tales Mitra’s Alaler Gharer Dulal, was translated into English and became a popular textbook. Most of the early fictional works in Indian languages were written in response to initiatives taken by British authorities. Pandit Gauri Dutt Sharma, the author of the first Hindi novel, Devrani Jethani ki Kahani (1870),37 acknowledged his debt to Mr M. Kempson, the director of public instruction, for encouraging his work by purchasing 200 copies and for which he also received a cash prize of Rs. 100 from the lieutenant governor.38 This story, a brief work of only 35 pages, of two sisters-in-law, is again based on the popular tales of good and bad sisters. The author highlighted the apathy towards female education and some of the resultant existing evils in society. The book shows women who solely delight in beautifying themselves with ornaments and rich clothes to be a bane for society. The Jethani (the elder sister-in-law) is thus the quarrelsome, selfish woman, who is contrasted to her educated and wise Devrani (the younger sister-in-law). The author focuses on a number of social problems like child marriage, wasteful expenditure in marriages, women’s immoderate attachment to ornaments, domestic disputes, neglect of old people, widowhood and suggests that only women’s education and emancipation can resolve these issues plaguing society. Another early novel in Urdu, which holds a mirror to women for feminine etiquette and manners, was Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat-ul-Arus (1869), which went on to be translated into English in 1903 as The Bride’s Mirror by a retired civil servant, G. E. Ward. Nazir Ahmad was already writing school textbooks in Urdu when he wrote this book in response to an offer made by the government of the Northwest Frontier Provinces. The British government was offering prizes for books that ‘shall subserve some useful purpose, either of instruction, entertainment, or mental discipline’ and ‘books suitable for women of India will be especially acceptable, and well rewarded’.39 Ahmad’s Mirat-ulArus received the award in 1870, and apart from a cash prize of Rs. 1000 and a watch as a token of appreciation from the lieutenant governor, 2,000 copies were instantaneously printed to be used as a school textbook. Within 20 years, Ahmad’s book had become a bestseller in Urdu, with 100,000 copies sold, and translated into all major Indian languages. Mirat-ul-Arus was quickly followed by Banat-un-Nash and Taubat-un-Nasuh. He won prizes for these two works too,

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and Matthew Kempson went on to translate the latter into English. All three together comprised a series for the instruction of women. But the first part remained the most famous and popular of all his writings. In Mirat-ul-Arus, Ahmad recreates the familiar folkloric tale of two sisters. Akbari, the elder, is uneducated and mean tempered, and Asghari, the younger, is the educated, patient and pious countertype. The book was written, according to the author, for the ‘moral instruction’ of his daughters, ‘which should improve their ideas and correct their habits in respect of those affairs which a woman encounters in her daily life’ (2).40 The author warns girls to learn reading, writing, the keeping of accounts of the household expenses, needlework and cooking, for no one knows ‘what contingencies may meet our path in the future’ (10), and urges women to learn life skills which will enable them to lead a better life. All such endowments, he assures them, will raise the women to a ‘higher kind of esteem in the eyes of men’, and the men ‘would drink the very water in which they had washed your feet, and would make you the enduring crown of their existence’ (15). Though in a reductive sense, the author’s advice to women seems merely to please men, its importance lies in encouraging women to take a bold step in a patriarchal society that believed in keeping women in seclusion. What the author thereby emphasizes is that men respect and appreciate women who are educated and can look after the moral and physical welfare of their children. But there is an obvious quandary over the extent of women’s emancipation. How far can they be allowed free movement? Can they become smarter than men and will that jeopardize the stability of family happiness, are a few of the lurking worries. The text tries to do a neat balancing act between the old and new roles of women without destabilizing the apple cart. Before beginning with the tale of the two sisters, Ahmad sums up his message, ‘the successful management of a household in every detail depends upon a sound judgement, and the cultivation and correction of the judgement depends upon the acquisition of knowledge’ (17). In keeping with the didactic approach of a work that was to be used as a moral guide and textbook for young girls, the author presents the contrast between the two sisters Akbari and Asghari as owing to a difference in training. Asghari has received ‘good training’ (56), is intelligent, can manage the household accounts and is loved by everyone. This girl was to her family what a rose in full bloom is to a garden, or the eye to a human body. Every kind of acquired excellence, every kind of natural intelligence was hers. Good sense, self-restraint, modesty, consideration for others – all these qualities God had bestowed upon her. From her childhood she had distaste for romping, and jesting and ill-natured jokes. She loved reading, or doing the work in the house. (51)

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Akbari, in contrast, is lazy, refuses to do domestic chores, cannot cook or look after her things, and is cheated by others. In her girlhood Akbari did not learn a single accomplishment, nor were any faults in her temper corrected […] as she had no practical knowledge of housekeeping, in a short time she let the whole of her possessions go to rack and ruin. (51) So ‘girls who are taught nothing that is useful or practical, invariably reap trouble and sorrow throughout their after lives’, and ‘blessed indeed are those parents who owned Asghari for a daughter’ (50–51). In spite of the emphasis on knowledge from books, it is evidently suggested that proper training in domestic activities and housekeeping is of greater value to a woman. Written in an easy colloquial style, such didactic books for women became immensely popular among the indigenous readers. These books, as has been said before, were patronized and promoted by the English, which ensured their widespread influence. Such books were commissioned not just for their moral worth but also, more importantly, to depict to Englishmen back home the ‘white man’s burden’ of educating the ‘ignorant’ natives. In the translator’s note to The Bride’s Mirror, Ward states that his purpose was to present ‘an authentic picture’ of Muslim life which ‘may perhaps be not devoid of interest to the British public in general’.41 The spread of education, especially female education, was a significant feather in the cap of the British which denoted their successful efforts to civilize the natives. This was then promulgated with equal vigour and enthusiasm by the indigenous intellectuals, who moved towards a standardization of behavioural and cultural norms. But as has been seen, it was not just a matter of simple collusion. There were subtle differences over what constituted women’s ‘proper’ education and what made a ‘good’ woman. Such writings demonstrated cultural and ideological conflicts and often the sheer bafflement in reconciling two contrasting paradigms of femininity. The search for ‘perfect’ femininity continued in indigenous literature, with writers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhya depicting spirited female characters for the first time in Bengali literature to represent a new female subjectivity. Most of Bankim’s novels, named after the female protagonist, Durgesnandini, Mrinalini, Debi Chaudhurani, are about bold emancipated women who can make independent and often audacious decisions regarding their life. They go beyond societal expectations and norms and exercise incredible power and clout over their surroundings even when confined within a narrow domestic sphere. In creating radical heroines in his novels, Bankim not only pioneered a new trend in literature but was also responsible for

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creating an image of womanhood that was fundamentally different from the traditional social roles of contemporary women. Bankim counterposes the idealized romantic classical heroines with more active, strong-willed and mature women. The female fictional characters central to Bankim’s novels often transcend Hindu domestic conventions and traditional gender paradigms. But the subjectivity of women still remained largely a male construct.42 These women are portrayed as strong yet charming, wilful yet coy, rebels yet domesticated. Bankim’s heroines occupy a nebulous position between the public and the private, the docile and the bold, the conventionally ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, vacillating between a self-sacrificing mother, a dutiful housewife, and one who defies her mother-in-law, an outlaw even, and if need be a warrior in the battlefield. These women characters personify what Bankim envisaged as a new identity for the motherland and become the symbolic representation of what the new India could become. The figure that captured the literary imagination of India in the late nineteenth century was that of a powerful, independent and self-confident woman who could be a custodian of the moral life of both the household and the nation, who simultaneously defined as well as defied the canon of femininity.

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NOTES Introduction 1

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Arun Shourie, the eminent Indian writer, journalist, politician and economist, has expressed his severe views on missionaries and Christianity in India, considering the church and evangelization ‘big business’, obsessed with conversions and involved in the ‘harvesting of souls’. See Arun Shourie, Harvesting Our Souls: Missionaries, Their Design, Their Claims (New Delhi:  Rupa, 2000/2006), and his Missionaries in India:  Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: Rupa, 2006). Not much work has been done on the contributions of early British women missionaries to Bengal in the period under scrutiny. Most existing works in this area focus either on missionaries in general, like M. A. Laird (Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793– 1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India 1793–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), or are silent and dismissive of women’s contributions to mission activities, like Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1967)  and K.  P. Sen Gupta, The Christian Missionaries in Bengal 1793–1833 (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1966). There have been in recent times a whole range of pertinent works that examine the late nineteenth-century historical experiences of European and Western women in imperialist and colonialist contexts. See, for example, Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History:  British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915; Burton’s ‘The White Woman’s Burden:  British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865–1915, in Western Women and Imperialism. Spec. issue of Women’s Studies International Forum; Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism:  Complicity and Resistance; Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule; Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867; Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860; Susan Haskell Khan’s ‘From Redeemers to Partners: American Women Missionaries and the “Woman Question” in India, 1919–1939’, in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant, ed. Barbara Reeves-Ellington et  al.; Mary Ann Lind, The Compassionate Memsahibs: Welfare Activities of British Women in India, 1900–1947; Rosemary Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Land: British Missionary Women in Asia. Ernest A.  Payne, Marianne Lewis and Elizabeth Sale:  Pioneers of Missionary Work among Women (London: Carey Press, n.d.), 4. J. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5.

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BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 Bernard S.  Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 165–210. The comment was made by the well-known geographer O. H. K. Spate, in his India and Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography. Quoted in Geoffrey Moorhouse, Calcutta (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 12. For a detailed perspective on Fort William, see M. L. Augustine, Fort William: Calcutta’s Crowning Glory (New Delhi: Ocean Books, 1999) and C. R. Wilson, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal, vol. 1 (London and Calcutta: Thacker, 1895). See S. K. Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (Calcutta: Orion Publications, 1978) and Sutapa Dutta, ‘Agents of an Epistemological Space: Education and the Civilizing Mission in Early Colonial Bengal’, in Agents of Space:  EighteenthCentury Art, Architecture and Visual Culture, ed. Christina Smylitopoulos (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 192–209. For an early description of Calcutta, see Lord Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India (1811). Some of the recent works on imperial Calcutta are by Geoffrey Moorhouse, Calcutta (1971); H. E. A. Cotton, Calcutta Old and New (1980); Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta: Past and Present (2003); Krishna Dutta, Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (2003). Miss Jemima Wickstead married Captain Nathaniel Kindersley, an officer in the Bengal establishment, and travelled to several places in India. Mrs Kindersley’s accounts were published as Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies in 1777. Mrs Eliza Fay, the wife of a barrister, came to Calcutta several times in the 1780s. Her lively accounts were captured in Original Letters from India. Phebe Gibbes anonymously wrote Hartly House, Calcutta, which depicts the manners and customs of Calcutta in Hastings’s time and was published in 1789. I use the term ‘native’ throughout the book to mean the indigenous, local residents of India and not the pejorative connotation it had begun to assume in the colonial context of the nineteenth century. See Linda Colley’s argument that the ‘forging’ of the new ‘British’ identity encouraged the British to consider themselves as special and legitimized the subjugation of the Others, in Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The Orientalist-Anglicist controversy was between scholars who held opposing views of the way to modernize India. The Orientalists, mostly European administrators and scholars with an appreciation for Indian heritage and culture, were confident that the key to modernization lay in linguistic competence in Oriental languages. The Anglicists, in contrast, had more faith in European culture language and civilization. For further discussion on this, see the first chapter of this book. For more details, refer to The Great Indian Education Debate, by Zastoupil and Moir (1999), and David Kopf ’s British Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance (1969). Pramod K. Nayar, Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 3. Written by Dr William Johns, 1816; Thomas Shuttleworth Grimshawe, 1825; Thomas Pegg, 1828. Jemima Thompson’s tract features as an introduction to Rev. Thomas Timpson, Memoirs of British Female Missionaries: With a Survey of the Condition of Women in Heathen Countries (London: William Smith, 1841), xiii–xlv.

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Though most middle-class women in Britain had a limited scope of freedom, there were also plenty of independent women, especially with wealth and independence, who traversed the limitations of their sex. Nicola Phillips’s Women in Business, 1700– 1850 (2006) throws light on female business networks in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, and the ability of women to act as independent traders in spite of legal restrictions on businesswomen. This only reiterates that there was already an emerging tension between traditional roles and de facto female initiatives in Britain as there was in India.

1 Merchants, Mercenaries, Missionaries 1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

Henry Martyn in his journal for 10 January 1806, en route to India. In Life and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, by John Sergeant (London:  Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1868), 132. Quoted in Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. C. R. Wilson, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal (London and Calcutta: Thacker, 1895), 1:1. Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, 1886, immortalizes the deplorable condition of Calcutta, which Charnock chose to be the base of the British Empire: Thus the midday halt of Charnock- more’s the pity! Grew a city As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed So it Spread Chance – directed, chance-erected, laid and built On the silt Palace, byre, hovel – poverty and pride – Side by side; And, above the packed and pestilential town Death looked down. Wilson, Early Annals, 209–10. Ibid., 128. See P. J. Marshal, ‘The 17th and 18th Centuries’, in The Raj: India and the British 1600– 1947, ed. C. A. Bayly (London: Pearson, 1990), 17. From Hedges’s diary, quoted in Wilson, 89. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West 1500– 1800. 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988/1996), 133. Wilson, Early Annals, 90. Parker, Military Revolution. Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India (London: J. Cape, 1953) 1:103. Quoted in ibid., 106. From Hedges’s diary, quoted in Wilson, Early Annals, 161. Wilson, Early Annals, 131. Court’s letter, 2 February 1713, cited in Fort William: A Historical Perspective. A Project of Eastern Command of Indian Army, ed. Chakrabarty et al. (Calcutta: Sankar Mondal, 1990), 15. Letter from the nawab to Khoja Wajid, 28 May 1756, cited in Fort William, Chakrabarty et al., 19.

154

154 18

19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 Letter from J. Z. Holwell to the Court of Directors, 17 July 1756, reproduced in S. C. Hill, ed., Bengal in 1756–57. 3 vols. (Delhi and London: John Murray, 1905). Published for the Government of India. Delhi (reprint 1985, vol. 1). The original monument was built in 1760 by John Zephania Holwell (1711–1798), the then-governor of Fort William. This was demolished in 1818 when structural changes were taking place in the old fort. A new monument, a marble obelisk, was later built in 1902 by Lord Curzon, viceroy and governor general of India. Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire:  History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1. Percival Spear, A History of India, vol. 2, (New York: Penguin, 1965), 84. Ibid. In 1749, ‘God Save the King’ was first sung in Britain, and ‘Rule Britannia’ was also published; see Ideologies of the Raj, by T. R. Metcalf (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1998/2013), 50. Walter K. Firminger, Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink,1906), 28. Percival Spear, The Oxford History of Modern India 1740–1947 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1958), 513. Hastings to N. Smith, 4 October 1784, quoted in David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernisation, 1773–1835 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1969), 18. See the introduction to The Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma by Charles Wilkins (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1787), 9. S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1987), 42. Graves C. Haughton, A Glossary, Bengali and English (London: Cox and Baylis, 1825), x. Spear, History of India, 95. George Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, The Red Sea, Abyssinia, and … 4 vols. (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811), 1:191–92. The Dispatches, Minutes and Correspondences of the Marquees Wellesley, ed. Montgomery Martin, 2 vols. (London: W. H. Allen,1837), 2:329. A. K. Ghosal, Civil Service in India, under the East India Company (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1944), 244–45. Ibid. For the history of the College of Fort William, see Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (Calcutta: Orion Publications, 1978). Thomas Roebuck, The Annals of Fort William College (Calcutta: Philip Pereira, 1819), i–ii. Quoted in Das, Sahibs and Munshis, 6. J. C. Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward (London, 1859), 1:147. Essays by the Students of the College of Fort William in Bengal (Calcutta:  Honorable Company’s Press, 1802), x. Das, Sahibs and Munshis, 28. Ibid., 7. Deborah M. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton: Princeton Legacy Library, 1985), 23. ‘The children were to be rescued from idleness and vagrancy, washed and combed, and instructed in their duties by the catechism, that they might become good men and women and useful servants’, in M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1938), 74.

15

NOTES 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54

55 56 57

58

59

60 61 62 63

64

65

155

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: J. Johnson, 1792). M. A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 9. ‘My object is not to teach dogmas and opinions, but to form the lower classes to habits of industry and virtue’. Quoted in Martha More, Mendip Annals (London: J. Nisbet, 1859), 6. Also see Hannah More’s Christian Morals (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813). Sir Edwin Arnold, preface, The Book of Good Counsels: From the Sanskrit of the ‘Hitopadesa’ (London: W. H. Allen, 1861), x–xi. Haughton, A Glossary, 1825, x. Ibid., xi. Ibid. Henry Morris, The Life of Charles Grant: Sometime Member of Parliament for Inverness-shire and Director of the East India Company (London: J. Murray, 1904), 19. Charles Grant’s to the Court of Directors, East India Company, 16 August 1797, published in his Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving it, 1792 (London: The House of Commons, 1813), 146. Ibid., 148. An Act for continuing in the East India Company, for a further term, the possession of the British Territories in India, together with their exclusive Trade under certain Limitations … 1793, 33 Geo. III c.52. John Pritchard, Methodists and their Missionary Societies 1760–1900 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 24. Ibid., p 1. See D.  W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London:  Routledge, 1998); G.  M. Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (London:  University College London Press, 1998); David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1984). Anon., Historical and Ecclesiastical Sketches of Bengal, from the earliest settlement, until the virtual conquest of that country by the British in 1757. (Calcutta: Oriental Press, 1829/ 1831), 204. For a detailed account, see Donald F.  Lach and Edwin J.  Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3, bk. 3 (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1123; and E.  Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4. Anon., Historical and Ecclesiastical Sketches, 187. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 199. Asiaticus: In two parts. Part the First: Ecclesiastical, Chronological and Historical Sketches respecting Bengal (Calcutta: Telegraph Press, 1803), 25. Also quoted in Anon., Historical and Ecclesiastical Sketches199. The title of the chapter on ‘William Carey’ by George Smith, in Twelve Pioneer Missionaries (London: Thomas Nelson,1900). For a biography of William Carey, see George Smith, The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary (London:  James Nisbet, 1885). Periodical Accounts, 1800, 70.

156

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67

68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82

83

84 85

86 87 88

89

90

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 T. Roy, ‘Disciplining the Printed Text:  Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance of Bengali Literature’, in Partha Chatterjee (ed.) Texts of Power:  Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 31. East India Company, 1999, Document four: EIC Charter Act of 1813, Section xliii. In The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781– 1843, ed. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 91. India Office Records, Bengal Judicial Proceedings, No. 14, 18 September 1818. First Serampore School Reports, Serampore Mission Press, 1817, 12. Morris, Life of Charles Grant, 122 William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward, Hints Relative to Native Schools: Together with the Outline of an Institution for Their Extension and Management (Serampore: Mission Press, 1816), 10–11. William Ward, College for the Instruction of Asiatic Christians and Other Youth (Serampore: Mission House, 1819, 8; original emphasis. Ibid. 3rd Serampore Schools Reports, 35. Ibid., 27. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal, 91. Roy, ‘Disciplining the Printed Text’, 38. See James Mill, History of British India, vols. 1 and 2. William Bentinck, Document 17:  Resolution of the Governor-General of India in Council in the general department, dated 7 March 1835. In The Great Indian Education Debate, Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate, 195. Title of the book by Zastoupil and Moir (1999), to denote the debate between the Anglicists and the Orientalists. Kopf, British Orientalism, 264. Speech on settlement of Europeans in India, in The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy with an English Translation of ‘Tuhfatul Muwahhiddin’ (Allahabad: The Panini Office, 1906), 917. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute of 2nd February, 1835. In Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education. Introduction and notes by G. M. Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1935/1952), 359. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal, 203. Captain Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade Mecum; or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the East India Company (London: Black, Parry, and Kigsbury, 1810), 2:216. Hartly House, Calcutta, published anonymously, and recently credited to Phebe Gibbes (Dublin, 1789), 256. BMS Report, 19 June 1823, 15; also Laird, 135. Henry Creighton, ‘Memoranda on the Most Obvious Means of Establishing Native Schools for the Introduction of the Scriptures and Useful Knowledge among the Natives of Bengal’, in Periodical Accounts Relative to a Society Formed among the Particular Baptists for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (London:  Button, Thomas, 1792– 1828), 3:445–51. Y. B. Mathur, Women’s Education in India, 1813–1966 (Bombay: Asia Publishing, 1973), 26; Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996/2004), 41. Wood’s Educational Despatch 1854.

157

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2 Representing ‘Otherness’ and the Agenda of Reform 1 2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Claudius Buchanan, An Apology for Promoting Christianity in India (Pittsburgh:  Robert Ferguson, 1813), xviii. The Survey of India was set in 1767, and the first ‘Map of Hindoostan’ was drawn in 1783. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) elucidated the political-ideological intentions of the West in representing the Orient as the ‘Other’, which places subjects in a dialectical relation of discursive binarisms of power and dependence. Homi Bhabha thinks it is important to recognize the construction of representations as powerful tools for understanding colonial discourses on the Other. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Location of Culture, 66–84 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Histories by Herodotus, trans. and notes George Rawlinson, with an introduction by Tom Griffith (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1996). Ibid., bk. 3, sec. 105–6, p. 271. Ibid., bk. 9, sec. 113. ‘Airs, Waters, Places’, in Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1957), xvi. Aristotle, Politica, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 10, bk. 3, sec. 14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). Ainslie T. Embree, Imagining India: Essays on Indian History. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 36. Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, abr. and trans. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1576/1955). Travel in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, trans. and ed. V.  Ball (London:  Humphrey Milford, 1925). Tavernier’s Les Six Voyages was first published in 1676. Travels in the Mogol Empire, 1656–68 by Francois Bernier, trans. and ed. Archibald Constable (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1670/1891). Bodin, Six Books, bk. 2, chap. 2, ‘Concerning Despotic Monarchy’, 57–58. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London, 1655/1777), iv. Ibid., xi. See Pramod K.  Nayar, English Writing and India, 1600–1920:  Colonizing Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 2. Nayar lists some of the travel writings which were regularly published in London Journal, The Englishman, English Post and City Mercury roughly between 1682 and 1725. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, 67. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Captain Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade Mecum, 2 vols. (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810). Ibid., vol. 1, preface, vii. Thomas Williamson, Oriental Field Sports, or the Wild Sports of the East (London: Edward Orme, 1809. Thomas Williamson, East India Vade Mecum, vol. 1, preface, vii. Thomas R. Metcalfe, in Ideologies of the Raj (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 167, asserts that India’s attraction lay in the contrasting tensions it generated between mastery and submission, denial and desire, difference and sameness.

158

158 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 John Henry Grose, A Voyage to the East Indies; containing authentic accounts of the Mogul government in general… (London: S. Hooper, 1772). Ibid., bk. 5, 232. Ibid. Ibid., 233. Gulliver, in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, 1726. Grose, Voyage to the East Indies, 231. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 1, ch. 13. Henry More, Divine Dialogues, containing Sundry Disquisitions & Instructions concerning the Attributes and Providence of God (London: James Flesher, 1668), 529. Alexander Dow, A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan (London: John Murray, 1792), vii–viii. Robert Orme, Government and People of Indostan, pt. 1, bk. 4. (Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, 1753/1971), 38–48. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, Translated from the Persian (London:  John Murray, 1792), 428. Dow, Dissertation, xx–xxi. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17. John Z. Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, relative to the Province of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan, pt. 1 (London: T. Becket and P.A.D. De Hondt, 1765), 19. Ibid., 17; original emphasis. Ibid., 2–3; original emphasis. Ibid., 7; original emphasis. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 6. Letter from Jonathan Duncan to Cornwallis, 1 January 1792, quoted in Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1999), 78. Cited in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. In The Bernard Cohn Omnibus (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26. ‘Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones’, in The Works of Sir William Jones, with The Life of the Author, by Lord Teignmouth, 13  vols. (London: John Stockdale and John Walker, 1807), 2:5. History of the Life of Nader Shah (1770) by Sir William Jones, in Anna Maria Shipley, The Works of Sir William Jones in Six Volumes (London: John Stockdale, 1799), 5:579. ‘Memoirs’, in The Works of Sir William Jones, Lord Teignmouth. 2:3. Jones is best known today for propagating the theory that the three ancient languages, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, had a common root and that they may be related to Gothic and Celtic languages as well as to Persian. See Jones’s The Sanscrit Language (1786). Quoted by Charles Wilkins in the preface to The Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma: In a Series of connected Fables, trans. Charles Wilkins (Bath: J. Marshall, 1787), ix. Ibid., x. Ibid., viii David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance:  The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1835 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1969), 22. Ibid., 24

159

NOTES 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

159

Sri Bhagwat Gita is the Holy Book of the Hindus, dealing with the life and teachings of Lord Krishna. The Works of Sir William Jones, with The Life of the Author by Lord Teignmouth, 13:31. History of the Life of Nader Shah by Sir William Jones, 582; original emphasis. Kopf, British Orientalism, 35. H. T. Colebrooke on ‘A Discourse Read at a Meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society’, 15 March 1823, in Miscellaneous Essays, notes E. B. Cowell (London: Trubner, 1873), 1:1. Ibid., 1:1–2. Warren Hastings was frequently referred to as ‘Saviour of India’. Henry Colebrooke, ‘On the Duties of a Faithful Hindu Widow’, in Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society in Bengal, 4:205–15 (Calcutta: Asiatick Society, 1801), 215. Quoted in Kopf, British Orientalism, 47. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), 28. Henry Morris, The Life of Charles Grant: Sometime Member of Parliament for Inverness-shire and Director of the East India Company (London: J. Murray, 1904), 19. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving it, 1792 (London: The House of Commons, 1813), 71. Ibid. James Mill, The History of British India. 6 vols. 3rd edn (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1826), vol. 1, bk. 1, p. 2. Ibid., preface, xii Ibid., iv. Ibid., xii. Ibid., vii. Ibid., book 2, chap. 1, pp. 143–44. Adam Knowles, in ‘Conjecturing Rudeness:  James Mill’s Utilitarian Philosophy of History and the British Civilizing Mission’, argues that the allegorical nature of Mill’s History was to make British readers realize their own rudeness as a nation and their love for domination. In Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia:  From Improvement to Development, ed. Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011). From the Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, qtd. in George Smith, The Life of William Carey: Shoemaker and Missionary (London: John Murray, 1885), 30. Quoted in Kopf, British Orientalism, 92. George Smith, The Life of William Carey:  Shoemaker and Missionary (London:  John Murray, 1885), 33. William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, with an Introduction, reprinted from the facsimile edition of 1792 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1891), 3. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 70. William Ward, Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos, vol. 1 (Serampore: Mission Press, 1811), preface, unpaginated. Ibid., 1:v. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 100.

160

160 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 Ibid., xx–xxi. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 2:370. Ibid., 1: vi. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 2:419. E. Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 93. Memoir of the Rev. William Ward, One of the Serampore Missionaries (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1835), 12–13. M. A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 134. Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 143. James Peggs, India’s Cries to British Humanity (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1832), preface, iii. Ibid., iv; square brackets in the original. Ibid., v. Ibid., bk. 6, ‘Colonization’, 408. Ibid., 404. Ibid., 405. Ibid. Ibid., 406. ‘Union among Christians’, in Friend of India, 7 September 1837. Grant, Observations, 148. Vindication of the Hindoos from the aspersions of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan…by a Bengal Officer [Charles Stuart] (London: Black, Parry, and Kingbury, 1808), 2. Ibid., 9. Alexander Duff, India, and India Missions:  Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism, both in theory and practice (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1839), 441. Mrs [Mary] Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (London: James Nisbet, 1875), 68. Ibid., 95–6; emphasis added. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 124. Pramod K.  Nayar, Colonial Voices:  The Discourses of Empire (West Sussex:  Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 6.

3 ‘Helpmeets’ and Wives of Missionaries (1793–1820) 1 The address dated 23rd February 1822, circulated in Calcutta and nearby places, was made by Rev. Daniel Corrie, the Secretary of Native Female Education, in an appeal on behalf of female education. Quoted in Missionary Register, November 1822, 482. 2 See William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (Leicester, England: Ann Ireland,  1792), 74. 3 The East India Vade Mecum of Captain Thomas Williamson in two volumes, 1810 (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury), 1:453–4.

16

NOTES 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

161

Ibid., 412; original emphasis. Ibid., 453. In 1792, Lord Cornwallis banned the biracial children from being sent to England. See Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (India: Oxford University Press, rept. 1998), 63. Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Missionaries (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). Ibid., 42–3. Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 32. E. Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 13. George Smith, The Life of William Carey:  Shoemaker and Missionary (London:  John Murray, 1885), 23. Ibid., 180. Ibid. Memoir of William Carey, by Eustace Carey (London:  Jackson and Walford, 1836), 86. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 94–5; original emphasis. William Carey’s most famous statement: ‘Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.’ Quoted in James R. Beck, Dorothy Carey: the Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1992), 116. Some of the most candid letters he wrote about his personal life were to his sisters, Mary (Polly) Carey and Ann Hobson. Letter from William Carey addressed to his sisters, dated 10 April 1796, from Mudnabatty. William Carey Letters 1784–1814, vol. 12. All manuscripts, letters, memoirs and journals of the Baptist missionaries of Serampore are sourced from the BMS housed at the Angus Library and Archive, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, UK, unless otherwise mentioned. Letter from William Carey addressed to his father, dated 6 October 1800, from Serampore, vol. 17. Letter from William Carey addressed to his sisters, dated 23 November 1801, from Serampore, vol. 19. Letter from William Carey addressed to his sisters, dated 15 July 1805, from Calcutta, vol. 21. Mentioned in Carey’s letter to his sisters dated 20 January 1808, vol. 24, and also in his journal, entry date 18 January 1808. Periodical Accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society, vol. 3, no. 18 (1807–8), dated 8 December 1807 (London: Baptist Missionary Society, 1808), 416. William Carey to his sisters, dated 20 January 1808, from Calcutta, vol. 24. William Carey to his sisters, dated 8 August 1809, from Calcutta, vol. 27. Letter from William Carey addressed to his sisters, dated 16 February 1822, from Serampore, vol. 42. Letter from William Carey addressed to his sisters, dated 5 September 1823, from Calcutta, vol. 46. Beck, Dorothy Carey, 153. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

162

162 31 32

33

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady:  Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830– 1980 (London: Virago, 1987). This idea was to soon gain much prominence through the influential work of the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley’s Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, specially in reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870). See Waltraud Ernst’s path-breaking work on European insanity in colonial India, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–1858 (London: Routledge, 1992) and, more recently, Indrani Sen’s ‘The Memsahib’s “Madness”: The European Woman’s Mental Health in Late Nineteenth Century India’, Social Scientist 33, nos. 5–6 (2005): 26–48. Letter to Mr Fuller, dated 16 November 1796, Mudnabatty in Memoir of William Carey, 272. Valentine Cunningham, ‘God and Nature Intended You for a Missionary’s Wife: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre and Other Missionary Women in the 1840’s’, in Women and Missions: Past and Present, Anthropological and Historical Perceptions. ed. Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood and Shirley Ardener (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 89; original emphasis. John Pritchard, Methodists and Their Missionary Societies 1760–1900 (Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013), xx. Ibid., xxi. George Smith, Twelve Pioneer Missionaries (London, Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1900), 67. Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, 21. Memoir of Mrs. Hannah Marshman’s Earlier Years. Compiled by her daughter Mrs Rachel Voigt, Box IN/20 (in Microfilm) at Angus Library, 7–8. Sunil Kumar Chatterjee, Hannah Marshman: The First Woman Missionary in India (Hoogly: Sunil Kumar Chatterjee, 1987), 40. Memoir, Rachel Voigt, 41. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 29–30. Ibid., 53. Hannah’s Letter to Mrs Kilpin in Exeter, 14 January 1828. Hannah’s Letter to Mrs Haugh in Calcutta, dated 14 October 1833. Hannah’s Letter to her daughter Rachel Marshman in Bath, 1820, no date or place mentioned. Letter dated 7 April 1821, Hannah from Cheltenham replying to Mr Morgan in Birmingham on his report that a dance had been held in Serampore. Memoir, Rachel Voigt, 41. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. The personal letters of Hannah Marshman, given to the BMS in 1963 by descendants of the Marshmans, Section 3, letter dated 1837. Miss Thompson, ‘The Importance of Female Agency in Evangelizing Pagan Nations’, in Memoirs of British Female Missionaries by Rev. Thomas Timpson (London:  William Smith, 1841), xv.

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65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

163

A. Christopher Smith, ‘The Legacy of William Ward and Joshua and Hannah Marshman’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 23, no. 3 (1999): 120–29, here 124. The Bengal Obituary (Calcutta: Holmes, 1851), 345. This inscription to her memory is placed in the Mission Chapel in Serampore. Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference, 75. Antoinette M.  Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden:  British Feminists and “The Indian Woman”, 1865–1915’, in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 137–57. Memoir, Rachel Voigt, 53. Ibid. Memoir of William Yates, D.D.  of Calcutta by James Hoby (London:  Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), 66. Eustace Carey:  A Missionary in India by Mrs Eustace Carey (London:  Pewtress, 1857), 166. Ibid., 170. Carey’s letter to Mr Fuller dated 17 May 1815, Serampore. Memoir of William Yates, 35. Ibid., 78. William Yates, ‘A Short Account of the Life and Death of the Late Rev. J. Penney’. Yates preached this sermon on the occasion of the death of his friend and fellow missionary, Rev. Penney, in the Union Chapel, Dharmatallah, Calcutta. Sourced from the Calcutta Christian Observer, no. 82, March 1839, 121–32. Missionary Register, February 1828, 83. Ibid., 84. Life of Rev. W. H. Pearce, included in Memoir of William Yates by James Hoby, 363–480, here 383.For an account of the life and work of Rev. Pearce, see also the Memoirs of the Rev. W. H. Pearce, by his friend and companion (Calcutta: Baptist Missionary Press, 1841). Missionary Register, vol. 16, 1828, 84. Missionary Register, vol. 27, 1828, 137–38. The Missionary Register, 1820, with the proceedings of the Church Missionary Society (London: L. B. Seeley, 1820), 419. Memoir of William Carey, by Eustace Carey, 272–73. Memoir of William Yates, 160. Mrs Yates’s letter to Mrs Hoby, in Memoir of William Yates, 161. Memoir of William Yates, 230. Ibid., 269. Ibid., Mr Pearce to Mr Yates, Calcutta, 31 December 1826, 215. Ibid., 350. Eustace Carey, 174. William Carey, An Enquiry, 74. Eustace Carey, 174.

4 ‘Mothers’ and Single Women Missionaries (1820–40) 1 2 3

William Ward’s Letter to the Ladies of Liverpool and the United Kingdom, in Missionary Register, November 1820, 466. 20th Report of the British and Foreign School Society, 9 May 1825, 41. In Report of the BFSS, November 1814 [Publ. London: 1815], 11–16.

164

164 4 5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 Ibid., 55. Ibid., 56. Missionary Register, November 1822, 481. 16th Report of the BFSS, 17 May 1821, 25. Mr Penney, who joined the Baptist missionaries at Serampore, in his first report sent to the BFSS in London, wrote on 25 July 1818, ‘A Hindoo must therefore ever remain a Hindoo, inferior to the European by the force of all those habits which his superior exertions have rendered natural to him’. See Report of BFSS, 2 July 1818, 82. Antoinette M. Burton refers to it as the British feminists’ special ‘imperial’ burden. Refer to her essay ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and “The Indian Woman”, 1865–1915’, in Western Women and Imperialism:  Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1992), 137–57. Alexander Duff mentions in a footnote that his observations of female infanticide were based on a tribe of Rajputs (the Minas) who practiced female infanticide as an extenuation of hereditary social practices in their community. See Duff’s Female Education in India, being the Substance of an Address Delivered at the First Annual Meeting of the Scottish Ladies’ Association for the Promotion of Female Education in India (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1839), 17. Ibid. Memoirs of British Female Missionaries by Rev. Thomas Timpson, ix. Jemima Thompson, introduction to Memoirs of British Female Missionaries: With a Survey of the Condition of Women in Heathen Countries by Rev. Thomas Timpson (London: William Smith, 1841), xiii–xlv. Ibid., xviii. Ibid., xxi. Ibid., xv. Ibid., xxi. Ibid., xx. Jane Haggis, ‘Professional Ladies and Working Wives:  Female Missionaries in the London Missionary Society & Its South Travancore District, South India in the 19th Century’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1991), 110–11. Letter from Mrs Anna Carey, Calcutta, to Rev. J. Dyer, BMS, London, April 1827. Box IN/15, Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), Angus Library and Archive, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, UK. E. Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 65. Ibid., 65fn8. See Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 78. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 186. Thompson, in Memoirs of British Female Missionaries, xvii; original emphasis. Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795–1895, 2  vols. (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1899), vol. 2. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 6.

165

NOTES 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62

165

Thompson in Memoirs of British Female Missionaries, xix. Quoted in Missionary Register, November 1820, 465–67. William Ward, Farewell Letters to a few friends in Britain and America on returning to Bengal in 1821. Letter VI to Miss Hope of Liverpool, dated 31 March 1821 (Lexington, Kentucky: Thomas T. Skillman, 1822), 60–76. Ibid., 60. See his Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos, in Four Volumes (Serampore: Mission Press, 1811). Ward, Farewell Letters, 60. Letter to Miss Hope in Farewell Letters, 74. Letter to Miss Hope in Farewell Letters, 75. Ibid., 76. Missionary Register, November 1822, 481. 16th Report of the BFSS, 17 May 1821, 33. Missionary Register, May 1821, 197. 17th Report of the BFSS, 16 May 1822, 47. Missionary Register, November 1822, 481. Missionary Register, April 1823, 194–95 and August 355–60; original emphasis. Missionary Register, November 1822, 485. Jean Antoine Dubois had strong reservations against the success of education of Hindu females and considered it merely ‘visionary’ and ‘impracticable’. See Rev. James Hough’s A Reply to the Letters of the Abbe Dubois: On the State of Christianity in India (London: L. B. Seely & Son, 1824), 165. Missionary Register, November 1822, 485. Priscilla Chapman, Hindoo Female Education (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1839), 82. Missionary Register, November 1822, 483. Ibid, 485; original emphasis. Jane Haggis, ‘White Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-Recuperative History’, in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 45–78. Duff, Female Education in India, 18; original emphasis. Julius Richter, A History of Missions in India, tr. Sydney H. Moore (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908), 329. Chapman, Hindoo Female Education, 78–79. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 92. Missionary Register, March 1832, 141. Amelia Herber, Life of Reginald Herber (London: John Murray, 1830), 2:187. Quoted by Aparna Basu, ‘Mary Ann Cooke to Mother Teresa: Christian Missionary Women and the Indian Response’, in Women and Missions: Past and Present, ed. Fiona Bowie et al., 187–208 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 193. Report of the BFSS, 2 July 1818, 103; original emphasis. Missionary Register, March 1832, 138–40. Chapman, Hindoo Female Education, 127. Missionary Register, March 1832, 141. Biographical sketch of Mrs Martha Mundy, in American Missionary Register, vol. VI, July 1825.

16

166 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 The Bengal Obituary (Calcutta: Holmes, 1851), 353. The Bengal Obituary wrongly mentioned Martha Mundy’s year of death as 1842 and her age as 57 years. This was when George Mundy lost his second wife, Louisa Mundy. Memoir of Mrs. Louisa Mundy, of the London Missionary Society’s Mission, at Chinsurah, Bengal: with Extracts from Her Diary and Letters, by her husband. (London: John Snow, 1845). The Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine and Journal of Education, third series, vol. 2 (London: Richard Davies, 1845, 84); original emphasis. Ibid. Charles Williams, The Missionary Gazetteer (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1828), 135–36. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 139. Missionary Register, 1828, 82–84. Mary Edwards Weitbrecht, Memoir of the Rev. John James Weitbrecht, Comprehending a History of the Burdwan Misssion, by His Widow (New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1857), 127–28. Mary Weitbrecht, Female Missionaries in India, Letters from a Missionary’s Wife Abroad to a Friend in England (London: James Nisbet, 1843), 134. Chapman, Hindoo Female Education, 147. 20th Report of BFSS, 1825, 99–100. 25th CMS report (1824–5), in Formation of a Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education, in Calcutta and its Vicinity, 93. Quoted by M.  A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 137. John Statham, Indian Recollections (London: Samuel Bagster, 1832), 55. Ibid. Ibid., 56–57. A sketch of her life appeared for the first time in the Christian Observer for March 1835. This has since been printed and circulated, a copy of which is inserted in Foreign Missionary Chronicle, Pittsburgh, May 1837, 65–69. For a biography of Miss Bird, see also Mrs Weitbrecht’s The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana, 164–72, and Timpson’s Memoirs, 139–51. Mary Edwards Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (London: James Nisbet, 1875), 164. Originally in Christian Intelligencer, June 1834. Included in Foreign Missionary Chronicle. Pittsburgh: May 1837, 66. Weitbrecht, Women of India, 167. J. Richter, History of Missions in India, 175. Ibid., 184. George Smith, The Life of Alexander Duff (New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1879), 1:150–51.

5 ‘Ladies’ and the Zenana (1840–60) 1

2

James Long’s reply to Osburn, 22 March 1849, quoted in Geoffrey A.  Oddie, Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism: James Long of Bengal 1814–87 (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 35. The caste system among Hindus is a social stratification which divides them into four hierarchical orders, beginning with the Brahmins, then the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas and

167

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8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

167

the Shudras. The Hindu’s actions are determined by his caste, with the high castes enjoying more social and religious privileges than those lower in the social order. To adopt the religion or ways of the Christians was to have become ‘polluted’ and ‘impure’, an act that involved being disowned by the community. Rev. Edward Storrow, Our Indian Sisters (London:  The Religious Tract Society, 1898), 166. Ibid., 7. Julius Richter, A History of Missions in India, tr. by Sydney H. Moore (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908), 329. Romila Thapar, A History of India (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1966), 1:302. For early British missionary opinion on the zenana, see Mrs [Mary] Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (1875); Storrow, Our Indian Sisters (1898); Mrs C. B. Lewis, A Plea for Zenanas (unpublished document, 1866). Richter, History of Missions in India, 329. A number of women from royal families participated in the Revolt of 1857, notably Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh. See Rosemary Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands: British Missionary Women in Asia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), 18. Storrow, Our Indian Sisters, 207. Mrs Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (London: James Nisbet, 1875), 135. Priscilla Chapman, Hindoo Female Education (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1839), 88. Richter, History of Missions in India, 335. Calcutta Christian Observer, March 1840, 127; original emphasis. Ibid., 124; original emphasis. Rev. Thomas Smith, ‘On Missionary Education’, in Conference on Missions held in 1860 at Liverpool, 118–29 (London: James Nisbet, 1860), here 119. Calcutta Christian Observer, March 1840, 122; original emphasis. George Smith, The Life of Alexander Duff. 2  vols. (New  York:  A. C.  Armstrong, 1879), 2:55. Ibid., 57. Rev. Edward Storrow, India and Christian Missions (London:  John Snow, 1859), appendix, 126. Duff, Female Education in India, 30; original emphasis. Bethune College, as it was later named, remains today as one of the premier educational institutions for girls in Calcutta (Kolkata). Daughters of rich and influential families received their liberal education and were instrumental in initiating the reform movement in Bengal. Weitbrecht, Women of India, 69. See George Smith, Twelve Pioneer Missionaries (London: Thomas Nelson, 1900), 80–83, and Storrow, Our Indian Sisters, 213. History of the LMS, 248, and Storrow, Our Indian Sisters, 213. Smith, Twelve Pioneer Missionaries, 82. Ernest A.  Payne, Marianne Lewis and Elizabeth Sale:  Pioneers of Missionary Work among Women (London: Carey Press, n.d.), 11. Earnest Payne quotes Dr Underhill, the Secretary of the BMS, who often stayed with the Lewis during his stay in India. In Marianne Lewis and Elizabeth Sale, 7.

168

168 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 Ibid., 10. The Angus Library at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, has a 1866 bound volume of Baptist Zenana Mission documents which includes Mrs C. B. Lewis of Calcutta, ‘A Plea for Zenana’, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Ibid., 7. For a record of the life and character of both father and daughter, see the consecrated volume Brief Memorials of the Rev. Alphonse Francois Lacroix, by his son-in-law, Joseph Mullens, and Brief Memorials of Mrs. Mullens, by her sister (London:  James Nisbet, 1862). Ibid., 450. [Hannah Catherine Mullens], The History of Phulmani and Karuna (Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran) (Calcutta:  Calcutta Christian Tract and Book Society, 1852), preface (in English), 3. Brief Memorials of Mrs. Mullens, 452. Weitbrecht, Women of India, 198; and in Brief Memorials of Mrs. Mullens, 453. Mrs Mullens [Hannah Catherine], The Missionary on the Ganges: or, What is Christianity? (Calcutta: The Calcutta Christian Tract and Book Society, 1856), 19. Microfilm original available in the British Library, London. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 23; original emphasis. Smith, The Life of Alexander Duff, 2:53. Storrow, India and Christian Missions, 72–73. Ibid., appendix, 123. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 66–67. Quoted in The History of the LMS, 716. Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), 68. James Kennedy, Preface to Rev. E. Storrow, The Eastern Lily Gathered: A Memoir of Bala Shoondoree Tagore (London: John Snow, 1856), vii–viii. The Late Mrs Mullens [Hannah Catherine], Life by the Ganges, Or, Faith and Victory. Preface by John W. Dulles (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1867), 3. Ibid., 22 Hartly House, Calcutta, published anonymously and later credited to Phebe Gibbs. (Dublin: 1789), 18–19. Mullens, Faith and Victory, 84. Ibid. Mrs Colin Mackenzie, Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana, or Six Years in India. 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1854), 1:212; original emphasis. Jane Haggis, ‘Professional Ladies and Working Wives:  Female Missionaries in the London Missionary Society & its South Travancore District, South India in the 19th Century’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1991), 109. Mrs Weitbrecht, Women of India, v.

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NOTES 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

169

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 32. Haggis, Professional Ladies, 110. Weitbrecht, Women of India, 1. Ibid., 40–45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243–61, here 243. Autumn special issue: ‘Race, Writing and Difference’. Spivak has explored the ways in which dominant construction of normative gendered subjectivities have continually shaped stereotypic representations of women. Weitbrecht, Women of India, 39. Ibid., 47. Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity:  The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century examines closely the effects of colonial representation of masculinity in colonial and nationalist politics in late 19th century India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Weitbrecht, Women of India, 47–48. Quoted in Geoffrey Oddie, Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism, 94. Ibid. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 86. Storrow, Our Indian Sisters, 5. Ibid., 58–59; emphasis added. Storrow, Eastern Lily Gathered, 28. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 105. See Jacques Lacan’s lectures under the title ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for their concept of the ‘gaze’. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E.  Barnes. (New  York:The Philosophical Library, 1993), 257. Mrs Weitbrecht, Christian Woman’s Ministry to the Heathen Sisters of India (London:  J. Nisbet, 1874), 4–5; emphasis added. Mackenzie, Six Years in India, 1:204. Ibid., 200. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 103. Haggis, Professional Ladies, 102. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 103. Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (Berkeley:: University of California Press, 2011), 122.

6 The ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’ Sisters 1

2

The line is attributed to the Mughal ruler and poet Bahadur Shah Zafar. Quoted in Nazir Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror: A Tale of Domestic Life in Delhi Forty Years Ago. Original Mirat-ul-Arus (1869) (in Urdu), trans. G. E. Ward (London: Henry Frowde, 1903), 52. The footnote mentions that the original is from a composition by the last king of Delhi. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute of 2 February 1835, in Speeches by Lord Macaulay with his Minute on Indian Education. With introduction and notes G. M. Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1935/1952), 359.

170

170 3

4

5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861 Hannah Catherine Mullens, Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran (Calcutta: Calcutta Christian Tract and Book Society, 1852). All translations from the original Bengali have been done by me and quotations are indicated by page numbers in the text. Meenakshi Mukherjee considers this as the first novel to be written in Bengali. See her Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters:  Europe and the Native Caribbean (London:  Methuen, 1986), 186. Late Mrs [Hannah Catherine] Mullens, Life by the Ganges, Or, Faith and Victory. Preface by John W. Dulles (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1867). Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), 96–105. Jane Haggis, ‘Professional Ladies and Working Wives:  Female Missionaries in the London Missionary Society & Its South Travancore District, South India in the 19th Century’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1991), 20. For the Victorian glorification of women, see Carol Christ, ‘Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House’, in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus, 146–162 (London: Methuen, 1977/1980) and Coventry Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel in the House’ (1854). Mrs Colin Mackenzie, Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana, or Six Years in India, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1854). Rev. E.  Storrow’s The Eastern Lily Gathered:  A Memoir of Bala Shoondoree Tagore (London: John Snow, 1856). Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, published in late eighteenth-century England, catered for the taste of the new reading public by providing instructive and entertaining tales based on evangelical principles of Christian faith. These were instantaneously popular, and by 1797, over two million copies had sold. M. G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 142. Jones, Hannah More, 195. The Works of Hannah More, vol. 2, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, and Essays on Various Subjects (New York: Harper, 1835), chap. 14, 79. Ibid., 83; original emphasis. See the introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, by Mary Wollstonecraft (London: J. Johnson, 1792). Works of Hannah More, 79. Sermon originally delivered at Bristol, 25 February 1827. Reprinted in The Christian Observer, vol. 31. July 1831. London: J. Hatchard, 1832, 385–392, here 389. Charles H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 7. Rammohun Roy, Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females (Calcutta: Unitarian Press, 1822), 7. Ibid., 15. Nemai Sadhan Bose, The Indian Awakening and Bengal (Calcutta:  Firma K.  L. Mukhopadhyay, 1969), 71. Calcutta Gazette, 16 May 1831. ‘Hindu Female Education’, Calcutta Christian Observer, March 1840, 128. A rare copy of this is available in the British Library, London. The cover page provides an English title:  An Apology for Hindoo Female Education, Containing evidence in favour of

17

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27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

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the Education of Hindoo Females (Calcutta: Calcutta School Book Society’s Press, 1824). The author’s name is not mentioned. The preface, by Brajendranath Bandopadhyay, corroborates that the author is Gourmohan Vidyalankar. All translations from the Bengali are mine. The Zenana Opened, or a Brahmin Advocating Female Emancipation (Calcutta: Encyclopaedia Press, 1851), 54–55. A  rare copy of this is available in the Asiatic Society Library, Kolkata. The Bengali bhadramahila and her male counterpart, the bhadralok, were the equivalent of an English lady and gentleman. For a more detailed study on the influence of Brahmo Samaj in shaping the identity of the bhadramahila after 1860, see Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1984). Saraswati Sen’s essay on ‘Bhadramahila’ between 1880 and 1889. Quoted in Borthwick, Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 56. See Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 127–179 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Ibid., 130. Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, 7. Also see Meenakshi Mukherjee, Twice Born Fiction: Indian Novel in English (1971) and The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (2000). Cited in Peary Chand Mitra, The Spoilt Child: A Tale of Hindu Domestic Life, Original Alaler Gharer Dulal, trans. G. D. Oswell (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1893), i. Ibid., x. See Sipra Mukherjee, ‘Conversion without Commotion:  Rev. Lal Behari Dey’s Candramukhir Upakhyan (Story of Candramukhi)’, in Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency and Indigeneity, 1600’s to the Present, ed. Richard Fox Young and Jonathan A. Seitz (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 194. Rev. Lal Behari Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal (London: Macmillan, 1883), viii. Pandit Gauri Dutt Sharma, Devrani Jethani ki Kahani (Meerut: Lohia Press, 1870). Cited in the preface to Devrani Jethani ki Kahani. C. M. Naim, ‘Prize Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahabad Government Notification’, in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 292–93. Quoted in the afterword by Frances W.  Pritchett for the Permanent Black, 2001 edition of G. E. Ward’s The Bride’s Mirror. Nazir Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror: A Tale of Domestic Life in Delhi Forty Years Ago, trans. G. E. Ward (from Urdu) (London: Henry Frowde, 1903). Ibid., Translator’s Note. It is significant that even after the Mutiny of 1857, women were not included in the nationalist movement. A new journal for women, begun in 1857, clearly stated, ‘We will not discuss political events and controversies because politics would not be interesting or intelligible to women in this country at present.’ Cited in Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 122.

173

INDEX Ahmad, Nazir 169n. 1, 171n. 40 Banat-un-Nash 146 The Bride’s Mirror 146, 148 Mirat-ul-Arus 146–8. See also The Bride’s Mirror Taubat-un-Nasuh 146 Alexander 36 Anglican 25, 27, 86 Anglicists 4, 28, 30, 47, 152n. 14, 156n. 80 Aristotle 36 Armenians 25 Arnold, Edwin Hitopadesha, Heetopadesa 23 Aryan classification 136 derivation 136 Asiatic Society of Bengal 18, 43 Atmiya Sabha 140 Bandopadhyay, Krishnamohun 141 Banerjea, Krishna Mohan 102, 108 Baptist 29f. 1.2, 65–6, 85, 151n. 2, 155n. 59, 160n. 92, 160n. 95, 161n. 10, 161n. 19, 161n. 24, 162n. 39, 163n. 76, 164n. 20, 164n. 21, 164n. 8, 168n. 30 Bible translation 27 church 49, 67 Mission 76 missionaries 2, 5, 26, 32, 50, 62, 65, 87, 111 schools 82, 95–6 writings 86 Baptist Female Society, Calcutta 68 Baptist Missionary Society xi, 3, 25, 52, 59, 75–6, 113, 161n. 24, 164n. 20

Baptist Zenana Mission xi, 113 Basu, Ramram 21 Battle of Buxar 42 Battle of Plassey 3, 16, 25, 42 Benevolent Christian School Society 76 Benevolent Institution, Calcutta 76 Bengali bhadralok, bhadramahila 143 British perception of Bengalis 121 Christian native Bengalis 128 first novel 128 intellectuals 140 social practices 140 Bentinck, William 30 Bernier, Francois 36, 157n. 13 Bethune, Drinkwater 109, 167n. 22 Bethune Institution, Calcutta 110 Bhabha, Homi 38, 116, 157n. 18, 157n. 4, 168n. 48 Bible teaching 109, 114 translations 25, 27, 50, 63, 75, 109 Bird, Mary 3, 100–101 Black Hole 16, 41, 154n. 20 Bodin, Jean 36 Brahmin 31, 89, 106, 109, 143, 171n. 26 Brahmo Samaj 102, 140, 171n. 27 British and Foreign Bible Society xi, 75 British and Foreign School Society ix–x, 81, 88, 92, 98, 98f. 4.2 Brown, David 21 Buchanan, Claudius 21, 35, 47 Calcutta School Book Society 28, 142 Calcutta School Society xi, 28, 88–9, 96, 140

174

174

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861

Carey, Anna 85 Carey, Dorothy 3, 62–6, 72, 161n. 18 Carey, Esther 79 Carey, Eustace 75, 79, 161n. 14, 161n. 16, 163n. 68, 163n. 80, 163n. 87, 163n. 89 Carey, Felix 62, 75 Carey, Jonathan 85 Carey, William 1–2, 21, 26, 47, 49–50, 59–60, 62–7, 69–71, 74–5, 77, 79–80, 85, 105, 140, 151n. 4, 154n. 38, 155n. 64, 156n. 71, 159n. 75, 161n. 14, 161n. 16, 161n. 19, 161n. 23, 163n. 68, 163n. 70, 163n. 80, 163n. 87, 163n. 89, 164n. 20, 167n. 27 appointed to Fort William College 27 his correspondences 71 An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians 26, 59 on female education 77 school 33 textbooks 27 Catholic missions 24 Chaffin, Ann 85–6 Chandernagore 13, 15 Chapman, Priscilla viii, 91–2, 98, 108, 165n. 47, 165n. 53, 165n. 60, 166n. 73, 167n. 12 Charnock, Job 1, 14, 153, 153n. 4 Charter Act 1793 24 Charter Act 1813 24, 27, 74 Chattopadhya, Bankimchandra 148 Chinsurah 15, 27, 32, 77, 93–4, 96, 113, 166n. 64 Christian Missionary Society 82 Church Missionary Society xi, 3, 6, 25, 28, 32, 89–90, 92, 96–7, 100, 105, 113, 120, 163n. 79, 166n. 75 Church of England 22, 24, 48 Clive, Robert 16–17 Colebrooke, Henry Thomas 21, 43, 45–7 Cooke, Mary Ann 2–3, 32, 88–93, 96, 100, 105, 107–8, 110, 142 Cornwallis, Charles 4, 19, 42, 48 Creighton, Henry 27 Deb, Radhakanta 32, 140 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian 141, 144

Descartes, Rene 139 Dey, Lal Behari 141, 145–6, 171n. 35 Chandramukhir Upakhyan 145 Folk-Tales of Bengal 145–6 Dow, Alexander 41 History of Hindostan 40 History of India 41 Duff, Alexander 2, 55, 83, 91, 101–2, 108, 110, 141 baptising Hindus 109 female education 109, 119 school 28, 31, 111 Dutta, Michael Madhusudan 144 Birangana Kavya 144 Meghnad-badh Kavya 144 East India Company xi, 3, 13, 15, 17, 19, 38, 100, 154n. 33, 155n. 51, 155n. 52, 155n. 54, 156n. 67, 156n. 85, 159n. 65, 159n. 66 Evangelicals 24, 61 Fay, Mrs 4 Female Juvenile Society of Calcutta 32 First War of Indian Independence 34, 107. See also Mutiny of 1857 Fordyce, John 110–11 Forsyth, Nathaniel 27, 77 Fort William 4, 14–16, 17f. 1.1, 25, 41–2, 152n. 8, 152n. 9, 153n. 16, 153n. 17, 154n. 19, 154n. 35, 154n. 36, 154n. 39 College 20–2, 26, 46 Fountain, John 65, 67 Fountain, Mary Tidd 65 Friend of India 54 Fry, Elizabeth 88 Gilchrist, John Borthwick 21, 47 Grant, Charles 21, 23–4, 28, 65, 160n. 105 Observations on the State of Society 23, 47–8 A Proposal for Establishing a Protestant Mission 23, 47 western education 47–8 Grose, John Henry 39–40, 158n. 25, 158n. 30 A Voyage to the East Indies 39

175

INDEX Haggis, Jane 84–5, 90, 120, 125, 135, 164n. 19, 165n. 50, 168n. 58, 169n. 63, 169n. 84, 170n. 8 Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey 18 Hare, David 32 Hartly House 4, 32, 117, 152n. 11, 156n. 86, 168n. 54 Hastings, Warren 4, 17–20, 42–4, 48, 90, 117, 152n. 11, 154n. 26 Haughton, Graves Chamney A Glossary 23 Herodotus History 36 Hindu attitude to English education 105–6 British assessment of 19, 41, 43, 50–5, 121 caste discrimination 106, 145 converted to Christianity 93 domestic customs 149 female education 74, 82, 101, 108, 116 households 135 Islamic influences 106 laws 120, 140 practices 46, 86, 135 religion and scriptures 44–5 upper caste 100, 125 women 86, 120, 125, 140 zenana 107, 111–12, 114, 117, 120 Hindu College 32, 140–1 Hinduism 31, 53–5, 87, 121, 138, 140–1, 160n. 108. See also Hindu Hindustani 20–1, 100, 111 Hippocrates 36 Holwell, John Zephaniah 16, 41–2 Interesting Historical Events 41 Hurkaru 99 Johns, William A Collection of Facts and Opinion Relative to the Burning of Widows 85 Jones, William 18, 43–6 Kiernander, John Zachariah 26 Kindersley, Mrs 4 Kopf, David 18, 44, 152n. 14, 154n. 26, 156n. 81, 158n. 54, 159n. 59, 159n. 64, 159n. 77

175

Ladies School for Native Female Education 99 Ladies Society for Female Education 76 Ladies Society for Native Female Education 32, 92 Laird, M. A. 52, 151n. 2, 155n. 45, 156n. 76, 156n. 84, 156n. 87, 160n. 94, 166n. 76 Lawson, Mrs 32, 75, 77, 79 Lewis, Charles Bennett 111 Lewis, Marianne 3, 111–13, 151n. 4, 167n. 27, 167n. 28 A Plea for Zenanas 112–13 zenana work 113 London Missionary Society xi, 3, 6, 25, 27, 30, 55, 77, 86, 93–7, 99, 106, 109, 113–14, 164n. 19, 164n. 26, 166n. 64, 167n. 25, 168n. 49, 168n. 58, 170n. 8 Long, James 105, 122 Long, Mrs 105 Lutheran missionaries 25 Macaulay, T.B. 156n. 83, 169n. 2 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 31–2, 127 Minute of 1835 31, 102 Mackenzie, Colin 119 Mackenzie, Helen 119, 122, 124, 137, 168n. 57, 169n. 81, 170n. 10 Life in the Mission, Camp, and the Zenana 119 Marathas 15 Marr, Isabella 111 Marshman, Hannah 2–3, 32, 65–72, 69f. 3.1., 74–5, 79, 113 boarding schools 67 Memoirs 70 Marshman, John Clark The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward 21 Marshman, Joshua 2, 26–7, 32, 65–6, 68, 79, 105 Martyn, Henry 13, 27, 83, 153n. 1 May, Mrs 77 May, Robert 2, 26–8, 30, 32, 44, 67, 77, 88, 96, 98f. 4.2., 153n. 17, 162n. 33, 163n. 2, 163n. 70, 164n. 7, 165n. 39, 165n. 40, 165n. 41, 166n. 80, 166n. 82, 170n. 23

176

176

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861

memsahib 4, 128–9, 131–3, 136 Methodism 22, 24, 155n. 57 Mill, James The History of British India 30, 48–9 Mitra, Peary Chand 141–2, 144–5 Alaler Gharer Dulal 145–6 Ramaranjika 144 Mohammedan 86–7, 117, 139. See also Muslim More, Hannah 22, 61, 88, 137–9, 143 Coelebs 137–8 More, Henry Divine Dialogues 40 More, Martha 22 Mughal 13–15, 18, 36, 41, 169n. 1 Aurangzeb 15, 41 Mullens, Hannah Catherine viii, 2–3, 113, 115, 123, 128, 130f. 6.1., 136, 168n. 37, 168n. 39, 168n. 40, 168n. 41, 168n. 42, 168n. 52, 168n. 55, 170n. 3, 170n. 6 boarding schools 114 Faith and Victory 115, 117, 134–7 Memorials 115 The Missionary on the Ganges 115 Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran 114, 128–34 Prasanna and Kamini 115 Mullens, Joseph 114 Mundy, George 93–4 Mundy, Louisa 3, 94–6 Mundy, Martha 22, 76, 79, 93–4, 155n. 46, 165n. 62, 166n. 63, 170n. 9 Muslim as assessed by the British 41, 43 female education 101 Hindu assessment of 125 Islamic influences 106 rule 18 zenana 119 Mutiny of 1857 34, 107 Nightingale, Florence 111 Orientalists 4, 18, 28, 30–1, 40, 43–4, 152n. 14, 156n. 67, 156n. 80, 158n. 45. See also Anglicists Anglicist-Orientalist controversy 44–8 Orme, Robert 41, 158n. 34

Pearce, George 76 Pearce, Mrs 3, 32, 76–7 Peggs, James 52–3, 53f. 2.1., 86, 160n. 96 India’s Cries 52, 86 The Suttees’ Cry 52, 86 Penney, Mr and Mrs 76 Persian 18, 20–1, 31, 40, 44, 106, 158n. 35, 158n. 50 Piffard, Miss 96 Pimenta, Nicolas 25 Pious Act 24, 27, 50 Potts, Daniel 51–2, 62, 66, 85, 151n. 2, 155n. 59, 160n. 92, 160n. 95, 161n. 10, 162n. 39, 164n. 21 Protestant 151n. 3, 166n. 71 family 6, 61 ideals 128, 134 missionaries 26, 49, 61, 101 nations 24 revival in Britain 47 Queen Victoria 3, 34 Raleigh, Walter History of the World 37 Richter, Julius 91, 106, 165n. 52, 166n. 84, 167n. 13, 167n. 5, 167n. 8 Roy Bahadur, Boidyanath 108 Roy, Rammohan 31–2, 102, 140–1, 156n. 66, 156n. 77, 170n. 20 Sale, Elizabeth 3, 88, 111, 151n. 4, 167n. 27, 167n. 28 Sanskrit 18, 21, 23, 28, 31, 43, 45, 52, 116, 136, 141, 155n. 47, 158n. 50 sati 46, 74, 85–7, 122, 140 Schools by Alexander Duff 28, 102 Charity Schools 22 by Europeans in Bengal 27–8, 76–7 for girls in Bengal 32–3 for girls in Britain 81 by Hannah Catherine Mullens 114 by Hannah Marshman 67–8 Kiernander’s Mission School, Calcutta 26 by Louisa Mundy 94 by Martha Mundy 94

17

INDEX by Mary Ann Cooke 90, 92 by Miss Piffard 96 Normal School, Calcutta 110–11 school societies in Britain 81 Sunday Schools 22 Schwartz, Christian Friedrich 25, 83, 95 Scottish Ladies’ Association 83, 108 Serampore 156n. 69, 156n. 71, 156n. 74, 159n. 82, 160n. 93, 161n. 19, 161n. 20, 161n. 21, 161n. 27, 162n. 49, 163n. 62, 163n. 70, 164n. 8, 165n. 31, 165n. 33 Bible translation 27, 75 Danish settlement 13, 15, 26, 49, 66 missionaries 5, 30, 62 printing press 26, 50 schools 27, 32, 67–8 Serampore College 52, 97f. 4.1. Serampore Mission 26, 30, 67, 72, 76, 156n. 69 Sharma, Gauri Dutt Devrani-Jethani ki Kahani 146 Siraj-ud-daullah 16 Smith, Thomas 110 ‘Hindu Female Education’ 108 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 22, 25 Society for Promoting Female Education in the East 107 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 25 Spivak, Gayatri 121, 169n. 66 Storrow, Edward 106, 121, 123, 138, 167n. 10, 167n. 20, 167n. 24, 167n. 25, 167n. 3, 167n. 7, 168n. 46, 168n. 51, 169n. 74, 169n. 75, 169n. 76, 170n. 11 The Eastern Lily Gathered 123, 137–8, 142 Our Indian Sisters 106, 123 Stuart, Charles (Hindoo Stuart) 54–5 A Vindication of the Hindoos 54 suttee 6, 52, 86. See also sati Tagore, Debendranath 111 Tagore, Dwarkanath 33, 140 Tagore, Rabindranath 2, 111 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 36 Terry, Edward 37, 157n. 15

177

A Voyage to East India 37 Thompson, Jemima 84, 86–7, 152n. 17, 162n. 60, 164n. 13, 164n. 25, 165n. 29 The Importance of Female Agency 84 Timpson, Thomas 57, 84, 152n. 17, 162n. 60, 164n. 12, 164n. 13, 166n. 80 Memoirs of British Female Missionaries 84 Tipu Sultan 19 Toogood, Eliza 110–11 Trawin, Mrs 96 Trimmer, Sarah 22 University of Calcutta 33 Vidyalamkar, Mrityunjay 21 Vidyalankar, Gourmohan 142 Vidyalankar, Mrityunjaya 140 Vidyasagar, Ishwarchandra 32, 141 Vidyavagish, Ramchandra 140 Voltaire 44, 141 Ward, William 21, 26, 28, 50, 52, 65, 67, 76–7, 79, 87–9, 96, 154n. 38, 156n. 71, 165n. 34, 169n. 1, 171n. 39, 171n. 40 Account of the Writings of the Hindoos 50, 86 education 32 Farewell Letters 88 petition for female education 87–8 printing press 26 publications 50–2 Weitbrecht, John James. 97 Weitbrecht, Mrs 55, 97–8, 110, 115, 120, 123, 160n. 109, 166n. 71, 166n. 72, 166n. 80, 166n. 81, 166n. 83, 167n. 11, 167n. 23, 167n. 7, 168n. 41, 168n. 59, 169n. 64, 169n. 67, 169n. 70, 169n. 80 Christian Woman’s Ministry to the Heathen Sisters of India 124 on native women 120–2 schools 97–8 The Women of India 55, 120 Wellesley, Richard 4, 19–21, 27, 46, 154n. 32 and Fort William College 20

178

178

BRITISH WOMEN MISSIONARIES IN BENGAL, 1793–1861

Wesley, John 61 Methodism 24 Wilberforce, William 24 Wilkins, Charles 18, 43, 158n. 51 translation of The Heetopades 43 Willberforce, William 24 Williamson, Captain Thomas The East India Vade Mecum 32, 38, 60, 156n. 85, 157n. 20, 157n. 22, 157n. 23 The Wild Sports of the East 38 Wilson, H. H. 31 Wilson, Isaacs 92 Wilson, Mrs See Cooke, Mary Ann Wollstonecraft, Mary 22, 138 Wood’s Despatch of 1854 32–3

Yates, Mrs 3, 76, 78 Yates, William 75, 78–9, 111, 163n. 67, 163n. 71, 163n. 73, 163n. 76, 163n. 81, 163n. 82, 163n. 83, 163n. 85 Memoir 75, 78 Young Bengal Movement 7, 141, 144 zenana 2, 7, 33, 55, 106–12, 117, 118f. 5.1., 122–5, 127, 139, 143, 160n. 109, 166n. 80, 166n. 81, 167n. 11, 167n. 7, 168n. 30, 168n. 57, 170n. 10, 171n. 26 education 114, 143 missions 113 as represented in missionary writings 117–20 Ziegenbald, Bartholomew 25