05-19-2006, 05:39 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Which Good Book? Missionary Education and Conversion in Colonial India</b>.
Semeia; 1/1/2001; Seth, Sanjay
ABSTRACT
The following essay in postcolonial criticism narrates the tale of how an attempt to accommodate to colonial "difference" led to a slippage of meaning, which in turn produced an outcome altogether different from that which had been intended. Though the history of Europe is frequently narrated as one in which science came into conflict with and triumphed over religion, in colonial India it was missionaries themselves who came to see Western science as an ally in their proselytising efforts. Given the "natives" stubborn attachment to his own religions, they concluded that here the prelude to conversion would have to be the introduction of Western science and learning, which would serve as a solvent of Hindu and Islamic belief, thus paving the way for the introduction of the true Word of God. This view yielded a corresponding strategy, namely, the extensive involvement of Christian missionaries in education. However, missionary efforts to educate the native led, not to a weakening of old values and their replace ment by new ones, but (in the view of some) to a nihilism so alarming that it led many colonial officials to advocate as a solution the introduction of instruction in the religions of India into the very schools and colleges that, it was once hoped, would be the solvents of such false religions.
Colonialism was always more than the ruthless exploitation of natural resources, labour, and captive markets, though it was always that. It was also a process of "export" (of peoples, of social processes, and of technologies, even of viruses and diseases) and exchange, albeit highly unequal exchange undertaken in coercive circumstances. In this process, that which was exchanged assumed new forms and meanings in changed circumstances. It has often been observed that economic and social forms that were part of the history of Europe, when introduced to the colonies, often had entirely different and unexpected consequences; for instance, the long debate within the colonial administration in Bengal on the system of land ownership and revenue collection to be instituted in Bengal did not result in measures that facilitated the emergence of a class of improving landlords and a yeoman peasantry, as desired, but rather produced a rentier feudal landlord class and rack-rented peasantry. The significance of widely cited examples such as this, however, is sometimes misunderstood. It was not that in the colonies things had unexpected consequences simply because the different (colonial) "conditions" meant certain processes were bound to have different effects, in the same way that light travels at different velocities in different media. In this example, it is not just that the permanent settlement in Bengal had the results it did because systems of land tenure were very different in India, thus frustrating and falsifying the intentions of the authors of the permanent settlement. Such an understanding of history treats "event" and "process" as lying outside of "meaning" and "language." In fact, the enactment of changes in land ownership, the introduction of technology, the despotic nature of colonial rule--these were never simply events or processes that existed independent of the significations and meanings they carried and that were ascribed to them. For the transfer of institutions, structures, and processes, and the enactm ent of intentions and desires in the colonies, required that they be cast in the "idiom" (in the linguistic as well as extralinguistic sense) of the colonial theatre. This always created the possibility of a slippage of meaning, of a sign coming to signify something other than, or in excess of, its intended meaning; and such misreadings were characteristic, even constitutive, of the colonial encounter. The colonial theatre was not where the intentions of the colonized were calmly enacted (civilization exported, capitalism transplanted), nor where the "cunning of history" did its work, with the dialectic producing outcomes opposite to those intended by the rulers. Rather, it was the site where dissemination and displacement occurred, where processes and tales of Western provenance were enacted with a slippage.
An essay in postcolonial criticism, this essay examines one such displacement. One of the artefacts that Europe sought to export to the colonies was Christianity. Here there was no question but that what was being introduced was a matter of meanings, ideas, and belief. As this essay seeks to document, the agencies responsible decided that in India the revelation of God's word would follow a distinct trajectory; for it to be heard and embraced the recipients of it had first to be remade so that they were in a position to appreciate it. Education was to be the means of this. Such education was not, however, to be entirely or even principally religious. In the "special conditions" of India, secular learning, the relation of which to religion was a matter of debate in Europe, was unambiguously seen as an ally of Christianity, indeed, as an essential preparatory phase for the reception of Christianity. In India science and enlightenment came to be seen as the handmaidens of true religion. But India proved to be ev en more "different" than missionaries had allowed for; Western education paved the way, not for conversion to Christianity, but rather--or so at least missionaries and many others came to believe--to scepticism and impiety. The hoped-for outcome was deflected because the meaning and significance of Western learning was absorbed in an unauthorized, "mistaken" way. Western education, the answer to the riddle of how to spread the message of Christianity in India, came to seen as part of a new problem, that of educated Indians losing their moral bearings, to which problem instruction in their own religions was, ironically, advocated as a solution.
CHRISTIAN LEAVENING
Apart from a few Christian communities in south India, left behind from contacts with Christianity in earlier centuries, the progress of Christianity in India was intimately tied up with the activities of its British rulers. British rule facilitated Christian and missionary activity indirectly in a host of ways, and directly through the sometimes sympathetic intervention of colonial officials. Yet it was one of the peculiarities of the Raj that in its official capacity the British Indian government resolutely refused to champion Christianity. From the mid-eighteenth century, when the East India Company went from being a trading monopoly to also becoming ruler over a large and growing territory, it pronounced a policy of religious neutrality and social noninterference--it sought the obedience of its subjects, but not any transformation in their beliefs or practices. Even if on occasion the colonial authorities--usually with great reluctance--could be prevailed upon to outlaw certain practices, such as sati or widow-burning, they repeatedly professed their religious neutrality. After the Mutiny, when the British Parliament took over direct administration of India, the Queen's proclamation assured her subjects that their faiths would continue to be respected. As long as her subjects paid and obeyed, those subjects could profess whatever they chose; even the civil law under which they were administered was for a long time Hindu and Muslim law, as interpreted by British-established courts.
Indeed, until 1813 missionaries could only operate on Company-controlled territory with Company permission, and subject to many constraints. One of the earliest missionary bodies, the Baptist Missionary Society, active in India since 1793, chose to found its chief mission at Serampur, then under the control of the more welcoming Danish authorities, rather than in British India. It is true that the powers Company officials had to limit and if need be prohibit missionary activity were not always vigorously exercised; in fact, many a devout colonial official assisted those propagating the faith. But at other times the prohibitions were strictly enforced, as for instance after the mutiny of native troops stationed in the southern Indian city of Vellore in 1806, a mutiny widely attributed to a reaction against overzealous and insensitive missionary activity.
The charter of the East India Company was renewed--and revised--by Parliament at twenty-year intervals. In 1793 efforts by the Clapham sect evangelists to insert a "pious clause" requiring Company support for missionary activity was rebuffed, but the renewal of the charter in 1813 was accompanied by missionary bodies being given a free hand to carry out their activities, as well as the establishment of a bishopric and of archdeacons for the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. The revised charter also committed the Company to accept some responsibility for the education of its Indian subjects, even if initially only to the tune of a miserly one lakh (sc. 100,000) of rupees a year. Both measures in their different ways marked the advance of the idea that British rule was to be justified not just for its economic benefits to Britain, nor even for the peace and law and order allegedly provided to Indians, but that the ultimate and "providential" reason why Britain had been granted India was to ensure the "moral and material progress" of India, soon to be charted in annual "Moral and Material Progress" reports.
The changes wrought in 1813 marked increased tolerance and even a limited measure of support for missionary activity, but not, the government avowed, a retreat from its policy of religious neutrality. Government now allowed missonaries to operate freely, but government itself remained neutral. For instance, the schools it established after the revision of its charter did not permit religious instruction, and it continued to resist all efforts to make state-supported education a vehicle for the propagation of Christianity, as when the Court of Directors in London disallowed a proposal from Madras to permit the use of the Bible in class in government schools, declaring, "We cannot consider it either expedient or prudent to introduce any branch of study which can in any way interfere with the religious feelings and opinion of the people." (1)
In missionary ranks the idea that education would be a powerful and even predominant aspect of the mission to win over souls was taking firm root. By the early decades of the nineteenth century conversions had been few, and those overwhelmingly among low castes, outcastes, and tribal groups; the "heartlands" of Hinduism remained not simply unconquered, but almost untouched. Caste in particular seemed to be an insuperable barrier to conversion, for conversion meant placing oneself outside of caste and thus severing most social ties and forms of social intercourse. Time and again missionaries complained that the institution of caste, and a stubborn attachment to their own "superstitions," made the work of winning over natives all but impossible. Thus, the Abbe Dubois, who had spent a lifetime in India, went so far as to declare that if the Hindus went to Europe to win converts to Siva and Visnu they were more likely of success than missionaries in India (73). Even those who had not, like the Abbe, despaired of success, found that street preaching, "exposing" the fallacies of Hinduism and Islam, and engaging in controversies with votaries of these religions--among the standard forms of proselytising activity (2)--succeeded in drawing audiences, but they were largely ineffective in securing converts. The Herculean efforts of the Serampur missionaries in translating the Bible into Indian languages--it was fully translated into six (including Sanskrit), and partly translated into another twenty-nine--was widely admired in England and seen as proof of the advance of the Christian cause. However, in India the quality of the translations was much criticized (Bryce, 1839:100-103), and more importantly, scepticism was widely voiced over the efficacy of such means in spreading the Word. The Abbe Dubois, for instance, prophesied that "these soi disant translations will soon find their way to bazaar streets, to be sold there, as waste paper, to the country grocers, for the purpose of wrapping their drugs in them" (112).
It was because a measure of disenchantment with prevailing methods had manifested itself that the idea of education as a means to conversion came to be accorded greater importance. This did not derive from the commonplace idea of "getting them young," for most champions of Christian education agreed that its potential did not principally lie in the prospect of numerous individual students converting. Rather, the importance accorded to education derived from the conviction that because Hindu society was particularly resistant to conversion, in India the saving of souls might have to proceed along a more time-consuming, and circuitous, path. The first bishop of India, T. F. Middleton, wrote in 1818, "The minds of the people are not generally in a state to be impressed by the force of argument, still less to be awakened to reflection by appeals to their feelings and to their fears .... [W]hat is further required seems to be a preparation of the native mind to comprehend the importance and truth of the doctrines proposed to them; and this must be the effect of education" (qtd. in Neill: 206). In a somewhat similar vein Bishop Cotton pronounced in 1860: "The general clearing away of ignorance, folly and superstition effected by education are as likely to pave the way for Christ's spirit as the plan of hurrying from village to village, preaching for a day or two, and not reappearing" (qtd. in Metcalf: 131).
The Reverend Miller, Principal of Madras Christian College, itself an outcome of this emphasis on education, went even further and told the Allahabad Missionary Conference of 1872 that conversions were not the measure of the success of Christian education, nor even what it principally aimed at: such education sought instead "a change of thought and feeling, a modification of character and formation of principles tending in a Christian direction ... to leaven the whole lump of Hinduism," aiming "not directly to save souls, but to make the work of saving them more speedy and more certain than it would be without it" (qtd. in Mathew: 56).
Most missionaries involved in the provision of education did hope to effect individual conversions; but, like Miller, they saw the chief value of education as lying in the fact that it served as a "leaven," acting upon Hindu society so as to gradually, in a molecular fashion as it were, transform it and "prepare the people at large, for the general ultimate reception of Christianity" (Duff, 1839:351) There was opposition as well--mission societies back home were wont to wonder why their emissaries were expending so much energy and resources on teaching rather than preaching--but from roughly the 1830s on many of the missions in India came to see the provision of education as one their chief tasks, especially in urban areas. The notion had taken hold that educating the young was necessary to prepare the minds of Hindus for later receptiveness to the Word of God--that education was, in a phrase often used at the time, a "praeparatio evangelica."
SCIENCE AS SOLVENT
The Scottish Church was especially active in educational work, and none more so than its first Indian missionary, Alexander Duff. Duff's General Assembly Institution opened in Calcutta in 1830, aiming to provide the boys of native gentlemen with religious instruction as well as with a grounding, through the medium of the English language, in Western arts and sciences. Duff was emphatic that education had to be at advanced rather than elementary levels, and in English rather than the vernaculars, if it was to have the desired transformative effect; and it had to be directed at the upper classes of native society if its impact were to flow through Hindu society as a whole, rather than be confined to its immediate recipients. His school began with much fanfare, with more applicants for admission than it could accommodate, and in subsequent years, as it expanded, it never experienced difficulty in filling new vacancies.
A demand for English education was developing among metropolitan elites in this period, a demand that grew at a rapid rate after 1835 when the British Indian government decided to patronize English over Oriental education and also began to make government employment increasingly dependent upon possession of educational qualifications. In 1854 the government announced that it would make government funds available to private (including missionary) schools and colleges, and thereafter there was a rapid growth in the numbers of schools and colleges offering Western education. The prestige attached to the conqueror's language, the access it gave one to the emerging colonial public sphere of courts, local and provincial councils, and the like, and, not least, the fact that it aided in what was many an urban middle-class colonial subject's highest aspiration--a goverment job--all combined to make English education a highly sought after commodity.
Mission schools and colleges provided this commodity, and some of them were thought to provide it exceedingly well. Such institutions were sought out by parents despite, rather than because of, the religious instruction they provided. Of course, missionaries were well aware of this, as the Scottish Church's James Bryce acknowledged of Duff's school:
The native youths do not come to it to obtain religious or Christian instruction, nor is that the object for which their parents send them there. What they are seeking is that education which is best to qualify them for earning a future livelihood; and they only do not refuse to take at the same time the instruction which you offer them, or rather, which you make an express condition of their receiving, in order to get the secular education which they want. (Bryce, 1856:23-24).
Thus there followed a cat-and-mouse game in which the missionary institution offered the bait of an English education, while the student and his parents sought to take the bait without swallowing the hook. Lal Behari Day, a Brahmin who had attended Duff's school, reported that his father answered friends who urged him against sending his son to a missionary school by saying that "he did not intend to make of me a learned man, but to give me so much knowledge of English as would enable me to obtain a decent situation; and that long before I was able to understand lectures on the Christian religion, he would withdraw me from the Institution, and put me into an Office" (Day: 474). Occasionally conversions did occur--Lal Behari Day was one such--but when "a conversion does occur," as a colonial official observed in 1859, "it is well known that the school is at once emptied, and only by slow and painful degrees that it attains anything like its former condition." (3) More often, parents succeeded in getting their sons an education without the disaster of conversion befalling them.
The secular education provided by mission schools and colleges was not included in the curriculum simply as a carrot dangled in front of Indian parents. It was seen as having a critical role to play in preparing the minds of India's elites for the ultimate reception of Christianity. Alexander Duff provides an enthusiastic and revealing description in his mammoth India and India Missions of how he came to the important discovery that the "truths of modem literature and science" could function as "the handmaid of true religion." He recounts how soon after the opening of his school he was conducting a junior class in which he asked, "What is rain?" A student replied that it came from the trunk of the elephant of the god Indra. Pressed for his source, he replied that he learnt this from his guru, whose authority in turn was a Shastra, a Hindu text. Instead of directly contradicting the student, Duff describes how he led his students through the everyday example of rice boiling in a pot: the rising of steam, conde nsation, the re-formation of water--at each point explaining the process and gaining the assent of students for the explanation. Assent is spontaneously given--heat causes the evaporation of water in the form of steam, and so on--until suddenly one boy, "as if ... finding that he had ... gone too far" manifests alarm and exclaims, "Ah! What have I been thinking? If your account be the true one, what becomes of our Shastra?" (560). The explanation, Duff writes, introduced the first doubt, the first suspicion, regarding the truth of the Hindu faith, and thus was the first step in "a mental struggle, which, though painfully protracted ... only terminated in the case of some, with the entire overthrow of Hinduism" (560). If this encounter with Western scientific knowledge was a revelation for his student, the incident was also, Duff declares, something of a revelation for himself. Literature and science were taught at his school because they were adjudged as "indispensable to an enlarged and liberal education." B ut this incident revealed to Duff a further, and more compelling, reason: "It now seemed as if geography, general history, and natural philosophy,--from their direct effect in destroying Hinduism,--had been divested of their secularity, and stamped with an impress of sacredness. In this view of the case, the teaching of these branches seemed no longer an indirect, secondary, ambiguous part of missionary labour,--but, in a sense, as direct, primary, and indubitable as the teaching of religion itself" (563).
This was close to the view of senior English officials like Macaulay and Trevelyan, who had been responsible for the introduction of Western education in India and had thought that it would ultimately pave the way for the triumph of Christianity. Western science--and English literature, as Gauri Viswanathan notes and argues in an important study--would, it was thought, be corrosive of Hinduism and thus would serve to disseminate and secure not only the colonial power's hegemony and legitimacy but also its religion. Here too it was recognized that India was different from Europe, and thus by undermining faith in Hinduism Western education might initially lead to scepticism, or the embrace of deism or various forms of "reformed" or Protestantized Hinduism, rather than a direct embrace of Christianity. Some thirty years after Macaulay penned his famous Minute, his nephew and biographer, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, judged that while very few educated Hindus had become Christians, his uncle's expectations had not b een falsified, for "an educated Hindoo almost inevitably becomes a Deist" (202), and once sufficient numbers of Hindus had forsaken "Brahminism" for deism, "we may trust that the majority of cultivated Hindoos will not be averse to accept the creed of their rulers" (204).
There was, however, an important difference between this and the position of Duff and most other missionaries, for to accept the legitimacy of the secular education provided in government schools was to accept a very secondary role for missions and missionaries, and moreover was directly counter to debates that were to rage in Britain over denominational education. Most missionaries were critics of what they described as the "godless" education provided in government schools, and they campaigned to overturn the exclusion of religious instruction from such schools. In a related manner, they insisted that even if it were the case that Western education led to some form of deism or to scepticism, the decoupling of loss of faith from discovery of another, or of "destruction" from "construction," was a danger rather than something to be welcomed. As Duff told a House of Lords Committee in 1853, "it is certainly not good simply to destroy," and thus his institution aimed "to combine as it were together, in close, i nseparable and harmonious union, what has been called a useful secular, with a decidedly religious education" (Mahmood: 72). Western science and literature were negative and preparatory, for they destroyed Hinduism and paved the way for the true faith. Christian teaching was positive; it replaced what had been destroyed. Secular knowledge on its own could be harmful; religious preaching to those unprepared for the gospel could never be harmful, but it could prove inefficacious. They were joined together in a properly Christian education, where each could do its work simultaneously with the other and act upon the youth of the educated and influential classes, whose example and influence might then act as a "leaven" upon Indian society.
Duff and others found confirmation in this view of things in the controversy surrounding Hindu College. The college was established in 1817 by some of the leading upper-caste Brahmins in Calcutta as a nondenominational centre for the teaching of the new, European knowledge. It was to become the home of a rationalist and sceptical "movement" led by a young and charismatic teacher, Derozio. Although it never had more than a handful of students, "Young Bengal" scandalized Calcutta society by its mocking of established convention (including through the eating of beef and consumption of alcohol) and religious beliefs, and its espousal of agnostic and atheistic doctrines. The commotion caused in respectable Calcutta society and the resultant dismissal of Derozio from the college staff led to endless speculation and denunciation of the immoral and "sceptical" effects of Western education or, at least, of secular education. Missionaries were often to use the example of Hindu College as an example of the "dangers" of secular education, and Duff very often presented his Institution as an alternative model to that provided by Hindu College, and even as a measure to "reclaim these wanderers, whose education and worldly cirumstances invest them with such mighty influence among their fellow-country-men." (4) But while Hindu College provided missionaries with a useful example of the dangers of secular education, and an opportunity to extol the virtues of their own schools and colleges, nonetheless there was still a very real sense in which government secular education was seen as an ally in their struggle (Viswanathan: 62), even if one much inferior to the desired alternative of Bible-teaching government schools. Reverend Summers told an international conference of Protestant missions in London that "90 per cent of the Hindu youth trained in Government colleges have ceased to believe in Hinduism and have become sceptics.... God be praised for such a beneficient result and [may] he lead them on through scepticism to a reasonable faith in Christ" (qtd. in Mathew: 68). James Bryce wrote indulgently,"'Young Bengal'... are indulging the very silly, but not perhaps unnatural pride, that their 'little learning' is carrying them beyond... priestcraft, as they designate all religious belief whatever. Teach them to drink a little deeper of the stream, and they may bend submissive to the apostles of the Cross" (1856:9). And even Duff approvingly quoted the editor of the Inquirer newspaper, a former student at Hindu College and a convert to Christianity, to the effect that "the Hindu college ... has ... destroyed many a native's belief in Hinduism.... No missionary ever taught us to forsake the religion of our fathers; it was Government that did us this service" (1850:88).
A STALLED TRANSITION
The relative confidence of this earlier period--that Western education would eventually lead to more and more of the educated classes being weaned from their own religion and, perhaps via detours through reformed Hinduism such as the Arya Samaj or the Hindu-Christian eclecticism of the Brahmo Samaj, would be won over to Christianity--began to give way to concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The concern was fueled by a number of developments. One was simply that the hoped-for transition to Christianity did not seem to be in the offing. Most of those who became dissatisfied with existing forms of Hinduism and joined reformed versions such as the Arya Samaj treated them not as staging posts in an onward journey, but as the terminus. Morever, from the latter half of the nineteenth century the Arya Samaj became more aggressively anti-Christian and even began to make efforts to reconvert Hindus who had converted to Islam or Christianity (Jordens). More importantly, however, the fear of "Scepticism, " initially raised partly as a bogey against "godless education," became part of a more generalized and widespread concern, and complaint, about educated Indians-that they were undisciplined, had lost faith and all the restraints that went with it, and that they were morally "adrift," with no strong sense of right and wrong.
The nature of this complaint was so broad and amorphous, and the evidence for it so general and varied-indiscipline in the form of nationalist protest and criticism, a decay in manners, alleged impiety, growing disrespect for parents and other elders (5)--that it was voiced by a range of sources, not only by missionaries, but often by government and by many Indians. (Indeed, so varied and vague is the complaint that it is best treated as evidence for the existence of a generalized anxiety, rather than as evidence for the existence of the phenomena said to be causing anxiety.) With some important differences in inflection, the complaint and the explanation generally offered for it took the following form: through their contact with Western learning, educated Indians, it was argued, had lost faith in their religion and traditions and customs, without having found substitutes that were not so alien to their (not wholly abandoned) traditions that they could be grafted onto them. The transition from idolatry to Ch ristianity had dangerously stalled, the effect and symptoms of which were impiety, unrest, moral decay, and so on.
While addressing a conference, Governor Sir George Clark of Bombay adverted to "certain evils" to which the introduction of Western education had given rise, among them that "The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their power; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India. There has thus been a certain moral loss without any corresponding gain." (6) Keshab Chunder Sen warned that "In times of transition ... we always find that men for a while become reckless. The old faith is gone, and no new faith is established in its place. Society is unhinged and unsettled" (Murdoch: 3). By 1913 a Government "Resolution on Educational Policy" noted that "the most thoughtful minds in India lament the tendency of the existing system of education to develop the intellect at the expense of the moral and religious faculties" and described this as "unquestionably the most important educational problem of the day" (Indian Education Policy 1913: par. 5).
The density of this discourse on moral decline, and the relation of this idea of a "stalled transition" to one of the justifying premises of British rule-- namely, that this rule would facilitate a transition from decay to dynamism, from backwardness to civilization--warrants separate treatment elsewhere. What is significant here is that the symptoms of this failed transition were seen to manifest themselves especially acutely in the form of a moral crisis, a loss of moral moorings; and that from there it was an easy step to ascribe this to the absence of religious instruction which might accompany and temper the effects of the new education. Even the British Indian Government came to embrace this conclusion, at least in part. However, bound by its policy of religious neutrality in government schools, the "correctives" it proposed took the form of advocating the introduction of special "moral textbooks," exhortations to teachers to seek to exercise a moral influence over their charges, schemes for housing stu dents in hostels where good influences could be brought to bear and discipline instilled, and so on.
For others, not so constrained, the remedy was obvious-that religious instruction be a prominent feature of all schools, including government schools. The establishment of Hindu and Muslim "denominational" schools of a modern type, and the drive to establish colleges and universities that would combine Western learning with Hindu and Muslim religious instruction, made such arguments with great effect. For instance, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Congress politician and member of the (ultimately successful) movement to found a Hindu University in Benares, would refer to government acknowledgements that "moral education" was the Achilies heel of the educational system and suggest that "this is one of the strongest arguments in favour of a denominational university.... it will be able to make up an acknowledged deficiency in the present system of education" (29). Arguments of this type had of course long been used by missionaries to urge the teaching of Christianity in government schools; but now they were not the sole p reserve of missionaries, but were being used more assertively and effectively by those urging education in the religions of India.
DIFFERENCE
The missionary emphasis on the necessity of Western education as a praeparatio evangelica grew out of a recognition that India was "different" and that the manner in which the word of god was disseminated would have to be adapted to the specificities and peculiarities of India. Another measure of India's difference was that here, far more than in its European birthplace, secular learning was seen to be an ally of evangelization. But these attempts at adaptation and translation themselves underwent an unintended slippage. As we have seen, the Western education that was thought to be an aid in the dissemination of Christianity came to be widely seen as a source of irreligion and immorality. Nor was this by any means the only slip between intention and outcome, the only instance where a reproduction presented a distorted image of the original. Science itself never fully worked in the way that Alexander Duff anticipated, that is, to dispel "superstition" and undermine Hinduism. Gyan Prakash has powerfully argued that to wrest from Indians an acknowledgment of its authority, science had to be cast or staged in terms that made it accessible to the native, had to "dwell in the religious dispositions and literary writings of the 'natives'." But if this established science's authority, it was a "paradoxical legitimation," for Western scientific knowledge was thereby opened up to an indigenization, documented by Prakash, which assimilated it by finding its antecedents in an earlier, Hindu science--a curious case of "the establishment of science's power in its estrangement" (64). The mode by which Indians acquired Western knowledge through modern schools and education itself militated against the "proper" acquisition and absorption of this knowledge--for over a hundred years, virtually from the beginnings of Western education in India to Independence in 1947 (and beyond), it was to be a persistent lament that Indian students missed the point of and defeated the intent of the new knowledge by "learning" it in the "old" manne r, namely, by committing it to memory.
These examples bring us back to the point with which this essay began. Colonialism, precisely because it could only function by presenting metropolitan processes and structures in a "native" idiom, invited "mis"-understanding, appropriation, and hybridization. That Western education did not prove to be as potent in spreading Christianity as had been expected, but instead led--or so some believed--to many educated Indians being deprived of the certainties of an old world and its moral code and yet without any replacements, is but one of many instances of this. The irony to be savoured lies, then, not in the fact of falsified intentions, for examples of this abound, but in the fact that even some missionaries came to find themselves sympathetic to the teaching of Hinduism in schools and colleges. As early as 1879 a critic of the missionaries observed that "complaint is made that somehow or other this 'Young-India' has lost the moral control of the old religions, and has not adopted that of the new," and went on to note the curious fact that "Regret seems to be felt for the extinction of the Hindu religion"(Cust: 14). And in 1910 H. W. Orange, Director General of Education for the Government of India, observed that "it is curious to find that there is among Christian missionaries some movement towards religious instruction in the faiths of this country." (7) The feeling was shared in government circles, which early in the new century relaxed the prohibition against religious instruction, allowing (optional) religious instruction, out of school hours, in government schools in the United Provinces and Punjab--in full recognition of the fact that in most cases this instruction would be in Hinduism and Islam. This policy was extended to Burma in 1910, where the Burma correspondent of The Times welcomed the new policy enthusiastically on the grounds that "The sanctions provided by Hinduism and Buddhism, though, as we believe, greatly inferior to those provided by Christianity, are immeasurably better than none at all." ( 8) And thus Western education, the "solution" to a problem---how to disseminate Christianity in India--itself became the problem of impiety and moral decline, to which one widely advocated solution came to be that instruction in the religions of India be introduced into the very schools and colleges which, it was once hoped, would be the solvents of such false religions.
(1.) Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, no. 2 ("Papers relating to Public Instruction") Madras 1855, Appendix VV.
(2.) For a discussion of the experiences of street preaching of the Serampur missionaries based on their diaries, see Mani (ch. 3). For the Hindu responses in some of these early controversies, see Young. In a letter (30 July 1833), Duff said of the crowds which gathered to hear street preachers, "Those who attend are, for the most part, stragglers of the lowest orders of natives.... They come ... solely for the purpose of scoffing and blaspheming" (Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Papers, Ms. 7530, National Library of Scotland).
(3.) Correspondence Relating to the System of Education in the Bombay Presidency: 65.
(4.) Letter 15 October 1830, Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Papers, Ms. 7530, National Library of Scotland.
(5.) One gets a flavour of this from a letter (17 June 1908) of the Inspector General of Education in the princely state of Mysore: "Irreverence of all kinds and disrespect for authority have been on the increase. Modesty, self-restraint and good sense are largely at a discount, while presumption, vanity and unrestrained aggressiveness appear to be increasing" (Home Education, August 1910, 1-3[A], National Archives of India).
(6.) Report of the Proceedings of a Conference on Moral, Civic and Sanitary Instruction: 2.
(7.) Education Department 74-76A, Sept. 1911, National Archives of India.
(8.) Education Department 74-76A, Sept. 1911, National Archives of India.
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COPYRIGHT 2001 Society of Biblical Literature<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Semeia; 1/1/2001; Seth, Sanjay
ABSTRACT
The following essay in postcolonial criticism narrates the tale of how an attempt to accommodate to colonial "difference" led to a slippage of meaning, which in turn produced an outcome altogether different from that which had been intended. Though the history of Europe is frequently narrated as one in which science came into conflict with and triumphed over religion, in colonial India it was missionaries themselves who came to see Western science as an ally in their proselytising efforts. Given the "natives" stubborn attachment to his own religions, they concluded that here the prelude to conversion would have to be the introduction of Western science and learning, which would serve as a solvent of Hindu and Islamic belief, thus paving the way for the introduction of the true Word of God. This view yielded a corresponding strategy, namely, the extensive involvement of Christian missionaries in education. However, missionary efforts to educate the native led, not to a weakening of old values and their replace ment by new ones, but (in the view of some) to a nihilism so alarming that it led many colonial officials to advocate as a solution the introduction of instruction in the religions of India into the very schools and colleges that, it was once hoped, would be the solvents of such false religions.
Colonialism was always more than the ruthless exploitation of natural resources, labour, and captive markets, though it was always that. It was also a process of "export" (of peoples, of social processes, and of technologies, even of viruses and diseases) and exchange, albeit highly unequal exchange undertaken in coercive circumstances. In this process, that which was exchanged assumed new forms and meanings in changed circumstances. It has often been observed that economic and social forms that were part of the history of Europe, when introduced to the colonies, often had entirely different and unexpected consequences; for instance, the long debate within the colonial administration in Bengal on the system of land ownership and revenue collection to be instituted in Bengal did not result in measures that facilitated the emergence of a class of improving landlords and a yeoman peasantry, as desired, but rather produced a rentier feudal landlord class and rack-rented peasantry. The significance of widely cited examples such as this, however, is sometimes misunderstood. It was not that in the colonies things had unexpected consequences simply because the different (colonial) "conditions" meant certain processes were bound to have different effects, in the same way that light travels at different velocities in different media. In this example, it is not just that the permanent settlement in Bengal had the results it did because systems of land tenure were very different in India, thus frustrating and falsifying the intentions of the authors of the permanent settlement. Such an understanding of history treats "event" and "process" as lying outside of "meaning" and "language." In fact, the enactment of changes in land ownership, the introduction of technology, the despotic nature of colonial rule--these were never simply events or processes that existed independent of the significations and meanings they carried and that were ascribed to them. For the transfer of institutions, structures, and processes, and the enactm ent of intentions and desires in the colonies, required that they be cast in the "idiom" (in the linguistic as well as extralinguistic sense) of the colonial theatre. This always created the possibility of a slippage of meaning, of a sign coming to signify something other than, or in excess of, its intended meaning; and such misreadings were characteristic, even constitutive, of the colonial encounter. The colonial theatre was not where the intentions of the colonized were calmly enacted (civilization exported, capitalism transplanted), nor where the "cunning of history" did its work, with the dialectic producing outcomes opposite to those intended by the rulers. Rather, it was the site where dissemination and displacement occurred, where processes and tales of Western provenance were enacted with a slippage.
An essay in postcolonial criticism, this essay examines one such displacement. One of the artefacts that Europe sought to export to the colonies was Christianity. Here there was no question but that what was being introduced was a matter of meanings, ideas, and belief. As this essay seeks to document, the agencies responsible decided that in India the revelation of God's word would follow a distinct trajectory; for it to be heard and embraced the recipients of it had first to be remade so that they were in a position to appreciate it. Education was to be the means of this. Such education was not, however, to be entirely or even principally religious. In the "special conditions" of India, secular learning, the relation of which to religion was a matter of debate in Europe, was unambiguously seen as an ally of Christianity, indeed, as an essential preparatory phase for the reception of Christianity. In India science and enlightenment came to be seen as the handmaidens of true religion. But India proved to be ev en more "different" than missionaries had allowed for; Western education paved the way, not for conversion to Christianity, but rather--or so at least missionaries and many others came to believe--to scepticism and impiety. The hoped-for outcome was deflected because the meaning and significance of Western learning was absorbed in an unauthorized, "mistaken" way. Western education, the answer to the riddle of how to spread the message of Christianity in India, came to seen as part of a new problem, that of educated Indians losing their moral bearings, to which problem instruction in their own religions was, ironically, advocated as a solution.
CHRISTIAN LEAVENING
Apart from a few Christian communities in south India, left behind from contacts with Christianity in earlier centuries, the progress of Christianity in India was intimately tied up with the activities of its British rulers. British rule facilitated Christian and missionary activity indirectly in a host of ways, and directly through the sometimes sympathetic intervention of colonial officials. Yet it was one of the peculiarities of the Raj that in its official capacity the British Indian government resolutely refused to champion Christianity. From the mid-eighteenth century, when the East India Company went from being a trading monopoly to also becoming ruler over a large and growing territory, it pronounced a policy of religious neutrality and social noninterference--it sought the obedience of its subjects, but not any transformation in their beliefs or practices. Even if on occasion the colonial authorities--usually with great reluctance--could be prevailed upon to outlaw certain practices, such as sati or widow-burning, they repeatedly professed their religious neutrality. After the Mutiny, when the British Parliament took over direct administration of India, the Queen's proclamation assured her subjects that their faiths would continue to be respected. As long as her subjects paid and obeyed, those subjects could profess whatever they chose; even the civil law under which they were administered was for a long time Hindu and Muslim law, as interpreted by British-established courts.
Indeed, until 1813 missionaries could only operate on Company-controlled territory with Company permission, and subject to many constraints. One of the earliest missionary bodies, the Baptist Missionary Society, active in India since 1793, chose to found its chief mission at Serampur, then under the control of the more welcoming Danish authorities, rather than in British India. It is true that the powers Company officials had to limit and if need be prohibit missionary activity were not always vigorously exercised; in fact, many a devout colonial official assisted those propagating the faith. But at other times the prohibitions were strictly enforced, as for instance after the mutiny of native troops stationed in the southern Indian city of Vellore in 1806, a mutiny widely attributed to a reaction against overzealous and insensitive missionary activity.
The charter of the East India Company was renewed--and revised--by Parliament at twenty-year intervals. In 1793 efforts by the Clapham sect evangelists to insert a "pious clause" requiring Company support for missionary activity was rebuffed, but the renewal of the charter in 1813 was accompanied by missionary bodies being given a free hand to carry out their activities, as well as the establishment of a bishopric and of archdeacons for the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. The revised charter also committed the Company to accept some responsibility for the education of its Indian subjects, even if initially only to the tune of a miserly one lakh (sc. 100,000) of rupees a year. Both measures in their different ways marked the advance of the idea that British rule was to be justified not just for its economic benefits to Britain, nor even for the peace and law and order allegedly provided to Indians, but that the ultimate and "providential" reason why Britain had been granted India was to ensure the "moral and material progress" of India, soon to be charted in annual "Moral and Material Progress" reports.
The changes wrought in 1813 marked increased tolerance and even a limited measure of support for missionary activity, but not, the government avowed, a retreat from its policy of religious neutrality. Government now allowed missonaries to operate freely, but government itself remained neutral. For instance, the schools it established after the revision of its charter did not permit religious instruction, and it continued to resist all efforts to make state-supported education a vehicle for the propagation of Christianity, as when the Court of Directors in London disallowed a proposal from Madras to permit the use of the Bible in class in government schools, declaring, "We cannot consider it either expedient or prudent to introduce any branch of study which can in any way interfere with the religious feelings and opinion of the people." (1)
In missionary ranks the idea that education would be a powerful and even predominant aspect of the mission to win over souls was taking firm root. By the early decades of the nineteenth century conversions had been few, and those overwhelmingly among low castes, outcastes, and tribal groups; the "heartlands" of Hinduism remained not simply unconquered, but almost untouched. Caste in particular seemed to be an insuperable barrier to conversion, for conversion meant placing oneself outside of caste and thus severing most social ties and forms of social intercourse. Time and again missionaries complained that the institution of caste, and a stubborn attachment to their own "superstitions," made the work of winning over natives all but impossible. Thus, the Abbe Dubois, who had spent a lifetime in India, went so far as to declare that if the Hindus went to Europe to win converts to Siva and Visnu they were more likely of success than missionaries in India (73). Even those who had not, like the Abbe, despaired of success, found that street preaching, "exposing" the fallacies of Hinduism and Islam, and engaging in controversies with votaries of these religions--among the standard forms of proselytising activity (2)--succeeded in drawing audiences, but they were largely ineffective in securing converts. The Herculean efforts of the Serampur missionaries in translating the Bible into Indian languages--it was fully translated into six (including Sanskrit), and partly translated into another twenty-nine--was widely admired in England and seen as proof of the advance of the Christian cause. However, in India the quality of the translations was much criticized (Bryce, 1839:100-103), and more importantly, scepticism was widely voiced over the efficacy of such means in spreading the Word. The Abbe Dubois, for instance, prophesied that "these soi disant translations will soon find their way to bazaar streets, to be sold there, as waste paper, to the country grocers, for the purpose of wrapping their drugs in them" (112).
It was because a measure of disenchantment with prevailing methods had manifested itself that the idea of education as a means to conversion came to be accorded greater importance. This did not derive from the commonplace idea of "getting them young," for most champions of Christian education agreed that its potential did not principally lie in the prospect of numerous individual students converting. Rather, the importance accorded to education derived from the conviction that because Hindu society was particularly resistant to conversion, in India the saving of souls might have to proceed along a more time-consuming, and circuitous, path. The first bishop of India, T. F. Middleton, wrote in 1818, "The minds of the people are not generally in a state to be impressed by the force of argument, still less to be awakened to reflection by appeals to their feelings and to their fears .... [W]hat is further required seems to be a preparation of the native mind to comprehend the importance and truth of the doctrines proposed to them; and this must be the effect of education" (qtd. in Neill: 206). In a somewhat similar vein Bishop Cotton pronounced in 1860: "The general clearing away of ignorance, folly and superstition effected by education are as likely to pave the way for Christ's spirit as the plan of hurrying from village to village, preaching for a day or two, and not reappearing" (qtd. in Metcalf: 131).
The Reverend Miller, Principal of Madras Christian College, itself an outcome of this emphasis on education, went even further and told the Allahabad Missionary Conference of 1872 that conversions were not the measure of the success of Christian education, nor even what it principally aimed at: such education sought instead "a change of thought and feeling, a modification of character and formation of principles tending in a Christian direction ... to leaven the whole lump of Hinduism," aiming "not directly to save souls, but to make the work of saving them more speedy and more certain than it would be without it" (qtd. in Mathew: 56).
Most missionaries involved in the provision of education did hope to effect individual conversions; but, like Miller, they saw the chief value of education as lying in the fact that it served as a "leaven," acting upon Hindu society so as to gradually, in a molecular fashion as it were, transform it and "prepare the people at large, for the general ultimate reception of Christianity" (Duff, 1839:351) There was opposition as well--mission societies back home were wont to wonder why their emissaries were expending so much energy and resources on teaching rather than preaching--but from roughly the 1830s on many of the missions in India came to see the provision of education as one their chief tasks, especially in urban areas. The notion had taken hold that educating the young was necessary to prepare the minds of Hindus for later receptiveness to the Word of God--that education was, in a phrase often used at the time, a "praeparatio evangelica."
SCIENCE AS SOLVENT
The Scottish Church was especially active in educational work, and none more so than its first Indian missionary, Alexander Duff. Duff's General Assembly Institution opened in Calcutta in 1830, aiming to provide the boys of native gentlemen with religious instruction as well as with a grounding, through the medium of the English language, in Western arts and sciences. Duff was emphatic that education had to be at advanced rather than elementary levels, and in English rather than the vernaculars, if it was to have the desired transformative effect; and it had to be directed at the upper classes of native society if its impact were to flow through Hindu society as a whole, rather than be confined to its immediate recipients. His school began with much fanfare, with more applicants for admission than it could accommodate, and in subsequent years, as it expanded, it never experienced difficulty in filling new vacancies.
A demand for English education was developing among metropolitan elites in this period, a demand that grew at a rapid rate after 1835 when the British Indian government decided to patronize English over Oriental education and also began to make government employment increasingly dependent upon possession of educational qualifications. In 1854 the government announced that it would make government funds available to private (including missionary) schools and colleges, and thereafter there was a rapid growth in the numbers of schools and colleges offering Western education. The prestige attached to the conqueror's language, the access it gave one to the emerging colonial public sphere of courts, local and provincial councils, and the like, and, not least, the fact that it aided in what was many an urban middle-class colonial subject's highest aspiration--a goverment job--all combined to make English education a highly sought after commodity.
Mission schools and colleges provided this commodity, and some of them were thought to provide it exceedingly well. Such institutions were sought out by parents despite, rather than because of, the religious instruction they provided. Of course, missionaries were well aware of this, as the Scottish Church's James Bryce acknowledged of Duff's school:
The native youths do not come to it to obtain religious or Christian instruction, nor is that the object for which their parents send them there. What they are seeking is that education which is best to qualify them for earning a future livelihood; and they only do not refuse to take at the same time the instruction which you offer them, or rather, which you make an express condition of their receiving, in order to get the secular education which they want. (Bryce, 1856:23-24).
Thus there followed a cat-and-mouse game in which the missionary institution offered the bait of an English education, while the student and his parents sought to take the bait without swallowing the hook. Lal Behari Day, a Brahmin who had attended Duff's school, reported that his father answered friends who urged him against sending his son to a missionary school by saying that "he did not intend to make of me a learned man, but to give me so much knowledge of English as would enable me to obtain a decent situation; and that long before I was able to understand lectures on the Christian religion, he would withdraw me from the Institution, and put me into an Office" (Day: 474). Occasionally conversions did occur--Lal Behari Day was one such--but when "a conversion does occur," as a colonial official observed in 1859, "it is well known that the school is at once emptied, and only by slow and painful degrees that it attains anything like its former condition." (3) More often, parents succeeded in getting their sons an education without the disaster of conversion befalling them.
The secular education provided by mission schools and colleges was not included in the curriculum simply as a carrot dangled in front of Indian parents. It was seen as having a critical role to play in preparing the minds of India's elites for the ultimate reception of Christianity. Alexander Duff provides an enthusiastic and revealing description in his mammoth India and India Missions of how he came to the important discovery that the "truths of modem literature and science" could function as "the handmaid of true religion." He recounts how soon after the opening of his school he was conducting a junior class in which he asked, "What is rain?" A student replied that it came from the trunk of the elephant of the god Indra. Pressed for his source, he replied that he learnt this from his guru, whose authority in turn was a Shastra, a Hindu text. Instead of directly contradicting the student, Duff describes how he led his students through the everyday example of rice boiling in a pot: the rising of steam, conde nsation, the re-formation of water--at each point explaining the process and gaining the assent of students for the explanation. Assent is spontaneously given--heat causes the evaporation of water in the form of steam, and so on--until suddenly one boy, "as if ... finding that he had ... gone too far" manifests alarm and exclaims, "Ah! What have I been thinking? If your account be the true one, what becomes of our Shastra?" (560). The explanation, Duff writes, introduced the first doubt, the first suspicion, regarding the truth of the Hindu faith, and thus was the first step in "a mental struggle, which, though painfully protracted ... only terminated in the case of some, with the entire overthrow of Hinduism" (560). If this encounter with Western scientific knowledge was a revelation for his student, the incident was also, Duff declares, something of a revelation for himself. Literature and science were taught at his school because they were adjudged as "indispensable to an enlarged and liberal education." B ut this incident revealed to Duff a further, and more compelling, reason: "It now seemed as if geography, general history, and natural philosophy,--from their direct effect in destroying Hinduism,--had been divested of their secularity, and stamped with an impress of sacredness. In this view of the case, the teaching of these branches seemed no longer an indirect, secondary, ambiguous part of missionary labour,--but, in a sense, as direct, primary, and indubitable as the teaching of religion itself" (563).
This was close to the view of senior English officials like Macaulay and Trevelyan, who had been responsible for the introduction of Western education in India and had thought that it would ultimately pave the way for the triumph of Christianity. Western science--and English literature, as Gauri Viswanathan notes and argues in an important study--would, it was thought, be corrosive of Hinduism and thus would serve to disseminate and secure not only the colonial power's hegemony and legitimacy but also its religion. Here too it was recognized that India was different from Europe, and thus by undermining faith in Hinduism Western education might initially lead to scepticism, or the embrace of deism or various forms of "reformed" or Protestantized Hinduism, rather than a direct embrace of Christianity. Some thirty years after Macaulay penned his famous Minute, his nephew and biographer, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, judged that while very few educated Hindus had become Christians, his uncle's expectations had not b een falsified, for "an educated Hindoo almost inevitably becomes a Deist" (202), and once sufficient numbers of Hindus had forsaken "Brahminism" for deism, "we may trust that the majority of cultivated Hindoos will not be averse to accept the creed of their rulers" (204).
There was, however, an important difference between this and the position of Duff and most other missionaries, for to accept the legitimacy of the secular education provided in government schools was to accept a very secondary role for missions and missionaries, and moreover was directly counter to debates that were to rage in Britain over denominational education. Most missionaries were critics of what they described as the "godless" education provided in government schools, and they campaigned to overturn the exclusion of religious instruction from such schools. In a related manner, they insisted that even if it were the case that Western education led to some form of deism or to scepticism, the decoupling of loss of faith from discovery of another, or of "destruction" from "construction," was a danger rather than something to be welcomed. As Duff told a House of Lords Committee in 1853, "it is certainly not good simply to destroy," and thus his institution aimed "to combine as it were together, in close, i nseparable and harmonious union, what has been called a useful secular, with a decidedly religious education" (Mahmood: 72). Western science and literature were negative and preparatory, for they destroyed Hinduism and paved the way for the true faith. Christian teaching was positive; it replaced what had been destroyed. Secular knowledge on its own could be harmful; religious preaching to those unprepared for the gospel could never be harmful, but it could prove inefficacious. They were joined together in a properly Christian education, where each could do its work simultaneously with the other and act upon the youth of the educated and influential classes, whose example and influence might then act as a "leaven" upon Indian society.
Duff and others found confirmation in this view of things in the controversy surrounding Hindu College. The college was established in 1817 by some of the leading upper-caste Brahmins in Calcutta as a nondenominational centre for the teaching of the new, European knowledge. It was to become the home of a rationalist and sceptical "movement" led by a young and charismatic teacher, Derozio. Although it never had more than a handful of students, "Young Bengal" scandalized Calcutta society by its mocking of established convention (including through the eating of beef and consumption of alcohol) and religious beliefs, and its espousal of agnostic and atheistic doctrines. The commotion caused in respectable Calcutta society and the resultant dismissal of Derozio from the college staff led to endless speculation and denunciation of the immoral and "sceptical" effects of Western education or, at least, of secular education. Missionaries were often to use the example of Hindu College as an example of the "dangers" of secular education, and Duff very often presented his Institution as an alternative model to that provided by Hindu College, and even as a measure to "reclaim these wanderers, whose education and worldly cirumstances invest them with such mighty influence among their fellow-country-men." (4) But while Hindu College provided missionaries with a useful example of the dangers of secular education, and an opportunity to extol the virtues of their own schools and colleges, nonetheless there was still a very real sense in which government secular education was seen as an ally in their struggle (Viswanathan: 62), even if one much inferior to the desired alternative of Bible-teaching government schools. Reverend Summers told an international conference of Protestant missions in London that "90 per cent of the Hindu youth trained in Government colleges have ceased to believe in Hinduism and have become sceptics.... God be praised for such a beneficient result and [may] he lead them on through scepticism to a reasonable faith in Christ" (qtd. in Mathew: 68). James Bryce wrote indulgently,"'Young Bengal'... are indulging the very silly, but not perhaps unnatural pride, that their 'little learning' is carrying them beyond... priestcraft, as they designate all religious belief whatever. Teach them to drink a little deeper of the stream, and they may bend submissive to the apostles of the Cross" (1856:9). And even Duff approvingly quoted the editor of the Inquirer newspaper, a former student at Hindu College and a convert to Christianity, to the effect that "the Hindu college ... has ... destroyed many a native's belief in Hinduism.... No missionary ever taught us to forsake the religion of our fathers; it was Government that did us this service" (1850:88).
A STALLED TRANSITION
The relative confidence of this earlier period--that Western education would eventually lead to more and more of the educated classes being weaned from their own religion and, perhaps via detours through reformed Hinduism such as the Arya Samaj or the Hindu-Christian eclecticism of the Brahmo Samaj, would be won over to Christianity--began to give way to concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The concern was fueled by a number of developments. One was simply that the hoped-for transition to Christianity did not seem to be in the offing. Most of those who became dissatisfied with existing forms of Hinduism and joined reformed versions such as the Arya Samaj treated them not as staging posts in an onward journey, but as the terminus. Morever, from the latter half of the nineteenth century the Arya Samaj became more aggressively anti-Christian and even began to make efforts to reconvert Hindus who had converted to Islam or Christianity (Jordens). More importantly, however, the fear of "Scepticism, " initially raised partly as a bogey against "godless education," became part of a more generalized and widespread concern, and complaint, about educated Indians-that they were undisciplined, had lost faith and all the restraints that went with it, and that they were morally "adrift," with no strong sense of right and wrong.
The nature of this complaint was so broad and amorphous, and the evidence for it so general and varied-indiscipline in the form of nationalist protest and criticism, a decay in manners, alleged impiety, growing disrespect for parents and other elders (5)--that it was voiced by a range of sources, not only by missionaries, but often by government and by many Indians. (Indeed, so varied and vague is the complaint that it is best treated as evidence for the existence of a generalized anxiety, rather than as evidence for the existence of the phenomena said to be causing anxiety.) With some important differences in inflection, the complaint and the explanation generally offered for it took the following form: through their contact with Western learning, educated Indians, it was argued, had lost faith in their religion and traditions and customs, without having found substitutes that were not so alien to their (not wholly abandoned) traditions that they could be grafted onto them. The transition from idolatry to Ch ristianity had dangerously stalled, the effect and symptoms of which were impiety, unrest, moral decay, and so on.
While addressing a conference, Governor Sir George Clark of Bombay adverted to "certain evils" to which the introduction of Western education had given rise, among them that "The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their power; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India. There has thus been a certain moral loss without any corresponding gain." (6) Keshab Chunder Sen warned that "In times of transition ... we always find that men for a while become reckless. The old faith is gone, and no new faith is established in its place. Society is unhinged and unsettled" (Murdoch: 3). By 1913 a Government "Resolution on Educational Policy" noted that "the most thoughtful minds in India lament the tendency of the existing system of education to develop the intellect at the expense of the moral and religious faculties" and described this as "unquestionably the most important educational problem of the day" (Indian Education Policy 1913: par. 5).
The density of this discourse on moral decline, and the relation of this idea of a "stalled transition" to one of the justifying premises of British rule-- namely, that this rule would facilitate a transition from decay to dynamism, from backwardness to civilization--warrants separate treatment elsewhere. What is significant here is that the symptoms of this failed transition were seen to manifest themselves especially acutely in the form of a moral crisis, a loss of moral moorings; and that from there it was an easy step to ascribe this to the absence of religious instruction which might accompany and temper the effects of the new education. Even the British Indian Government came to embrace this conclusion, at least in part. However, bound by its policy of religious neutrality in government schools, the "correctives" it proposed took the form of advocating the introduction of special "moral textbooks," exhortations to teachers to seek to exercise a moral influence over their charges, schemes for housing stu dents in hostels where good influences could be brought to bear and discipline instilled, and so on.
For others, not so constrained, the remedy was obvious-that religious instruction be a prominent feature of all schools, including government schools. The establishment of Hindu and Muslim "denominational" schools of a modern type, and the drive to establish colleges and universities that would combine Western learning with Hindu and Muslim religious instruction, made such arguments with great effect. For instance, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Congress politician and member of the (ultimately successful) movement to found a Hindu University in Benares, would refer to government acknowledgements that "moral education" was the Achilies heel of the educational system and suggest that "this is one of the strongest arguments in favour of a denominational university.... it will be able to make up an acknowledged deficiency in the present system of education" (29). Arguments of this type had of course long been used by missionaries to urge the teaching of Christianity in government schools; but now they were not the sole p reserve of missionaries, but were being used more assertively and effectively by those urging education in the religions of India.
DIFFERENCE
The missionary emphasis on the necessity of Western education as a praeparatio evangelica grew out of a recognition that India was "different" and that the manner in which the word of god was disseminated would have to be adapted to the specificities and peculiarities of India. Another measure of India's difference was that here, far more than in its European birthplace, secular learning was seen to be an ally of evangelization. But these attempts at adaptation and translation themselves underwent an unintended slippage. As we have seen, the Western education that was thought to be an aid in the dissemination of Christianity came to be widely seen as a source of irreligion and immorality. Nor was this by any means the only slip between intention and outcome, the only instance where a reproduction presented a distorted image of the original. Science itself never fully worked in the way that Alexander Duff anticipated, that is, to dispel "superstition" and undermine Hinduism. Gyan Prakash has powerfully argued that to wrest from Indians an acknowledgment of its authority, science had to be cast or staged in terms that made it accessible to the native, had to "dwell in the religious dispositions and literary writings of the 'natives'." But if this established science's authority, it was a "paradoxical legitimation," for Western scientific knowledge was thereby opened up to an indigenization, documented by Prakash, which assimilated it by finding its antecedents in an earlier, Hindu science--a curious case of "the establishment of science's power in its estrangement" (64). The mode by which Indians acquired Western knowledge through modern schools and education itself militated against the "proper" acquisition and absorption of this knowledge--for over a hundred years, virtually from the beginnings of Western education in India to Independence in 1947 (and beyond), it was to be a persistent lament that Indian students missed the point of and defeated the intent of the new knowledge by "learning" it in the "old" manne r, namely, by committing it to memory.
These examples bring us back to the point with which this essay began. Colonialism, precisely because it could only function by presenting metropolitan processes and structures in a "native" idiom, invited "mis"-understanding, appropriation, and hybridization. That Western education did not prove to be as potent in spreading Christianity as had been expected, but instead led--or so some believed--to many educated Indians being deprived of the certainties of an old world and its moral code and yet without any replacements, is but one of many instances of this. The irony to be savoured lies, then, not in the fact of falsified intentions, for examples of this abound, but in the fact that even some missionaries came to find themselves sympathetic to the teaching of Hinduism in schools and colleges. As early as 1879 a critic of the missionaries observed that "complaint is made that somehow or other this 'Young-India' has lost the moral control of the old religions, and has not adopted that of the new," and went on to note the curious fact that "Regret seems to be felt for the extinction of the Hindu religion"(Cust: 14). And in 1910 H. W. Orange, Director General of Education for the Government of India, observed that "it is curious to find that there is among Christian missionaries some movement towards religious instruction in the faiths of this country." (7) The feeling was shared in government circles, which early in the new century relaxed the prohibition against religious instruction, allowing (optional) religious instruction, out of school hours, in government schools in the United Provinces and Punjab--in full recognition of the fact that in most cases this instruction would be in Hinduism and Islam. This policy was extended to Burma in 1910, where the Burma correspondent of The Times welcomed the new policy enthusiastically on the grounds that "The sanctions provided by Hinduism and Buddhism, though, as we believe, greatly inferior to those provided by Christianity, are immeasurably better than none at all." ( 8) And thus Western education, the "solution" to a problem---how to disseminate Christianity in India--itself became the problem of impiety and moral decline, to which one widely advocated solution came to be that instruction in the religions of India be introduced into the very schools and colleges which, it was once hoped, would be the solvents of such false religions.
(1.) Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, no. 2 ("Papers relating to Public Instruction") Madras 1855, Appendix VV.
(2.) For a discussion of the experiences of street preaching of the Serampur missionaries based on their diaries, see Mani (ch. 3). For the Hindu responses in some of these early controversies, see Young. In a letter (30 July 1833), Duff said of the crowds which gathered to hear street preachers, "Those who attend are, for the most part, stragglers of the lowest orders of natives.... They come ... solely for the purpose of scoffing and blaspheming" (Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Papers, Ms. 7530, National Library of Scotland).
(3.) Correspondence Relating to the System of Education in the Bombay Presidency: 65.
(4.) Letter 15 October 1830, Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Papers, Ms. 7530, National Library of Scotland.
(5.) One gets a flavour of this from a letter (17 June 1908) of the Inspector General of Education in the princely state of Mysore: "Irreverence of all kinds and disrespect for authority have been on the increase. Modesty, self-restraint and good sense are largely at a discount, while presumption, vanity and unrestrained aggressiveness appear to be increasing" (Home Education, August 1910, 1-3[A], National Archives of India).
(6.) Report of the Proceedings of a Conference on Moral, Civic and Sanitary Instruction: 2.
(7.) Education Department 74-76A, Sept. 1911, National Archives of India.
(8.) Education Department 74-76A, Sept. 1911, National Archives of India.
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