THE IMPERIAL RAJ:

COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANIZATION

PREFACE

The extent of the complicity of missionaries in the imperial project is complex and much debated. Colonial

occupation of the world made political and territorial

unification a possibility. India, by contrast was never a

single political unit until the period of colonization, but a

collection of hundreds of petty kingdoms, with diverse

languages, multiple faiths and numerous ethnicities who were

often at odds with each other. This made it difficult for

local missionaries to cross boundaries and proclaim the new

faith. Harriet Wilder, citing a village missionary tellingly

overviews how the Divine hand still controlled Indian history.

For centuries, Hindu rule in India brought no blessing to the people, the village preacher said, and for that reason God willed that they should be supplanted by the Mohammadan[sic] rulers who are monotheists and…therefore better thanthe Hindus… When the Mohammadans were weighed in the balance and found wanting the British were sent by God so that they might present Christ and Him crucified to the people of this country.1

1 Harriet Wilder, A Century in the Madura Mission 1834-1934 (New York: Vantage Press, 1998), 40.

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As the village preacher perceived, the British conquest

of India came when India was already a subjugated country. The

Hindu majority had been ruled by the Mughal Empire 2 from 1526.

The juxtaposition of the Muslim minority rulers with the Hindu

majority subjects had its many problems. While Hinduism was

intrinsically polytheistic, as they worshiped idols and cows,

the relatively new religion of Islam was monotheistic, and did

not worship idols, and ate beef. The Mughal Empire was

particularly weakened by the intolerant Aurangzeb3, who even

2 Babar, a descendent of the Genghiz Khan, came to India in 1526 at the request of an Indian governor to fight against Ibrahim Lodi, the last head of the Delhi Sultanate. Babar defeated Lodi at Panipat, and so came to establish the Mughal Empire in India. Babar ruled until 1530, and was succeeded by his son Humayun, who gave the empire its first distinctive features. But it is Humayun's son, Akbar the Great, who is conventionally described as the glory ofthe empire. Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605, and extended his empire to Afghanistan in the west, and as far as the Godavari River in the south. Akbar, was a tolerant ruler, and started a new faith, Din-i-Ilahi, an attempt to blendIslam with Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, and other faiths. He won over the Hindus by naming them to important military and civil positions, and by marrying a Hindu princess. Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir. In his reign (1605-1627), Jahangir consolidated the gains made by his father. Shortly after his death in October 1627, his son, Shah Jahan, succeeded to the throne. Shah Jahan’s chief legacy is the Taj Mahal. the controversial Aurangzeb his sonsaw further expansion in the early years of his long reign (1658-1707), but by the seventeenth century the empire was beginning to disintegrate. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, many of his vassals established themselves as sovereign rulers, and began the period of "successor states".The Mughal Empire survived until 1857, but its rulers were, after 1803, pensioners of the East India Company. The last emperor, the senile Bahadur Shah Zafar, was put on trial for allegedly leading the rebels of the 1857 mutiny and for sedition.

3 Aurangzeb Alamgir’s ("World Conqueror"), reign of forty-nine years wascharacterized by vigorous military campaigns to extend the frontiers of the Mughal Empire. The common people were heavily taxed. His harsh treatment of Hindus, was the reversal of the liberal religious policies of his predecessors,particularly Akbar, have been cited as principal reasons for the disintegrationof his empire from

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placed a tax on Hindus for their religion. This weakened

national situation set the stage for the British conquest. The

context was therefore conducive and ripe for the spread of the Gospel, as Wilder

has graphically observed.

Among some possible reasons for the conquest of India by

the British are, the decline of the Mughal rulers. The better

technology of the British army. The Superior sea power, which

not only enabled military strength, but also allowed the

British economic resilience. And the esprit de corps among the

British soldiers, a sense that destiny that rewards the

adventurous. India was the “Jewel in the Crown” of the stately

British Empire 4. As more countries came under British rule,

the concept grew that the British were destined to rule by a

moral superiority. The British Empire was the first genuinely

global empire, an empire that ranged, at times, from the

American colonies in the West, Australia, and New Zealand in

the East, Canada and her dominions in the North and huge

portions of Africa in the South, including Egypt and Rhodesia.

Richard, John F. The Mughal Empire of the New Cambridge History of India. Vol. I, Part 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.246.

4 Appendix I gives a map depicting the British Empire’s global dominion.In terms of global territory, the British Empire; stretched from American to Australia, and New Zealand to Canada and Africa.

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These colossal lands, and many other smaller islands, were to

be shaped, controlled, and brought under the dominion of a

nation.

That the Imperial British Empire significantly kick-

started the world into the modern era, and gave the world a

unifying language is not really in dispute.

However, the truth and the ugly reality behind the ever-

polished and very-rarely challenged veneer of respectability

of the British, and hence the Missionaries of the Empire in

the Imperial project, is far from the rosy picture of a benign

and benevolent undertaking, that an unlearned person might

suppose. This paper therefore involves both a Historical and a Missional

interpretation regarding the degree of the collusion of missionaries in the

Imperial Project, attempting to trace the attitude of the people toward the

Government and their attitude toward the Christian Mission.

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRE IN INDIABritish presence in India dates back to the early part of

the seventeenth century. On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth5,

the then monarch of the United Kingdom, agreed that a royal

5 Queen Elizabeth and other British Heads of State and British Prime Ministers are given chronologically in Appendix IV

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charter be given to a new trading company, "The Governor and

Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East Indies."

Between 1601-1613, merchants of the East India Company6 took

twelve voyages to India, in 1609; William Hawkins arrived at

the court of Jahangir to seek permission to establish a

British presence in India but was rejected. Later Sir Thomas

Roe, in 1617, was successful. Two years afterward, Roe gained

Jahangir's permission to build a British factory in Surat, and

in 1639, this was followed by the founding of Fort St. George,

Madras.

In 1757, on account of the British victory at Plassey7, where a

military force led by Robert Clive8 defeated the forces of the

6 The East India Company, a merchandise Company, had the distinction of ruling an entire country. From when, Sir Roe gained for the British the right to establish a factory at Surat to the Gradually eclipsing of the Portuguese, amassive expansion of trading operations was established with numerous trading posts along the east and west coasts of India, around the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Despite their trade and revenue increase, the Company found itself burdened with military expenditures chiefly of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and its destruction seemed imminent. Major victories were achieved against Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the Marathas, and theconquest of the Sikhs in a series of Anglo- Sikh Wars led to British occupationover the entirety of India. Among the many Generals who engaged in the ruthlessBritish territorial expansion were Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, Lord Wellesley, and Lord Dalhousie.

7 The Battle of Plassey began on June 23, 1757 in a small village mango grove between Calcutta and Murshidabad. The outcome of the battle had been decided long before the soldiers came to the battlefield.The “battle” lasted nomore than a few hours.

8 Robert Clive was a civil servant of the East India Company; and was later transferred to the military service. Clive, who was known also as the “conqueror of India”, laid the foundation of the British Empire in India.

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Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah9, the East India Company found

itself transformed from an association of traders to rulers

exercising political sovereignty over a largely unknown land

and people.10 Less than ten years later, in 1765, the Company

acquired the Diwani 11of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. Warren

Hastings12 then consolidated British rule after initial

military victories, which got rid of the Sovereignty of the

Mughal Emperor. Hastings also made the British more acquainted

with Indian history, culture, and social customs; but upon his

return to England, he would be impeached for high crimes and

misdemeanors. His numerous successors, though fired by the

ambition to expand British territories in India, were also

faced with the task of governance.

In a paradox that is so typical of God, the Lord used Governor-general

William Bentinck (1828 to 1835) from the peripheries as a Key Leader to awaken

elite Hindu minds regarding the stifling and oppressive effect traditional Hindu 9 Siraj-ud-daulah was the Nawab of Bengal in April 1756 at the age of

27. He was known for his cruelty and depravity. 10 The paper includes appendices of Maps of British possessions of the

Indian sub continent before and after 1947 Partition11 The right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal Emperor12 Warren Hastings was the first Governor-General of India from 1773 to

1784. His parting with British financial resources to Indian rulers was seen asan act of extortion and became the basis of Hastings' impeachment in the British Parliament after he had resigned his position in India in 1784 and returned to Britain. His impeachment proceedings lasted for nearly ten years; though Hastings was vindicated, he was financially ruined.

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rituals. Certain Indian religious practices that the British

found offensive were banned, such as Sati13 in 1829. Systematic

operations were undertaken against inherited Hindu practices

that were obscene. Under Bentinck, Company employees were

encouraged to dissociate themselves from Hindu ceremonies and

involvement in the administration of temples. Passive

tolerance was shown publicly to native religions. A handbook

of advice for young officers, published in 1833, suggested

that they would have to show forbearance towards native

religions even though they were unwholesome.14 Systematic

measures were also adopted to eradicate Thagi.15

In the 1840s and 1850s, under the Governor-generalship of

Dalhousie and then Canning, more territories were absorbed

into British India, either on the grounds that the native

rulers were corrupt and indifferent about the welfare of their

subjects, or that since the native ruler had failed to produce

a biological male heir to the throne. Such was the fate of

Sambalpur (1849), Baghat (1850), Jhansi (1853), Nagpur (1854),

and Awadh [Oudh] (1856). In 1874 Benjiman Disraeli, 13 The deliberate burning of the wife in her husband’s funeral pyre based

on Hindu Tradition.14 Dennis Judd, The British Raj (Avon, England: Wayland Pub., 1972) 56.15 The Hindu cult of assassin-priests who preyed on travelers.

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ridiculously observed, "In olden days, and for a considerable

time - indeed, until I would say the last ten years - the

principle of our government of India, if I may venture to

describe it in a sentence, was to respect Nationality." 16

Shortly after the annexation of Awadh, the Sepoy Mutiny17,

more appropriately described as The First War of Independence18

of 1857-58, broke out. Within the space of a few weeks large

territories in the Gangetic plains fell to the mutineers. The

Indians understood that they could not be held in submission

forever. Delhi was recaptured by British troops in late 1857,

the Emperor Bahadur Shah, last of the Mughals, was put on

trial for sedition and convicted, and by mid-1858 the

16 James Lawrence, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Abacus, 1998) 220.

17 On May 10, 1857, Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army, drawn mostly from Muslim units of Bengal, mutinied in Meerut, and plunged much of north and central India into a year-long insurrection against the British. The uprising that seriously threatened British rule in India was caused by the British blunder of using rifle cartridges that were allegedly greased with animal fat, which was offensive to the religious beliefs of Muslim and Hindu Sepoys. The rebellion fired the imagination of the nationalists for whom, the rebellion represented the first Indian attempt at gaining independence.

18 The Sepoy Mutiny has been called many names by historians, including the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Mutiny, and the Revolt of 1857; many people in South Asia, however, prefer to call it India's first war of independence. The telling of History depends on, from which side one sees an event. The history of the Revolt of 1857 is, to this day, an ongoing battle between two competing narratives, the history belonging to the British that won the war, and the history claimed by the Indians who were defeated.

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Resistance had been entirely crushed. The East India Company

was then annulled.

India became a Crown colony, governed directly by

Parliament. Responsibility for Indian affairs fell upon a

member of the British cabinet, the Secretary of State for

India, while in India itself the man at the helm of affairs

would continue to be the Governor-General, or the Viceroy of

India. The proclamation of Queen Victoria ushered in the final

phase of the British Raj. The Queen pledged to work for the

welfare of her Indian subjects. In 1885 the Indian National

Congress, was founded in order that educated Indians might

gain a voice in the governance of their own country.

A SURVEY OF MISSIONARY UNDERTAKING DURING THE RAJAmong the multiplicity of motives that underlay the

British penetration into India such as commerce and security,

for the Missionaries the spiritual welfare of the people was

chief. India was opened for missionary activity. Home-based

mission Modalities consolidated Christian mission expansion through their

respective Soladities by providing both endurance and durability. Though they

served quite efficiently as a supply structure, they could do little to check and

balance, power hunger missionary imperialists. The BBC documentary

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Missionaries succinctly sums up the paradox: “Britain was in

the process of transplanting a religious ideology throughout

her empire in which the majority of those at home had already

ceased to believe”.19

The contributions of the Serampore Trio, Carey, Marshman,

and Ward, of the late eighteenth century -- provided enough

inspiration for future generations. The missionary impact on

India through publishing, schools, orphanages, vocational

institutions, dispensaries, and hospitals was unmistakable.

Though education was predominantly left to the charge of

Indians who imparted instruction in the vernaculars, in 1813,

the British became convinced to awaken the Indians by exposing

them to British literary traditions. William Bentinck, the

governor-general from 1828 to 1835, introduced the English

language as the medium of instruction. English replaced

Persian in public administration and education.

Missionaries built Primary Schools where initially the

medium of instruction was the local language. Later High

Schools introduced English as the language of instruction. As

19 Julian Pettifer and Richard Bradley, Missionaries, BBC TV Series (London: BBCBook, 1990) 216.

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the British began building universities in India from 1857,

several Indian leaders of that era, who were seen as the new

elite supported the English language and were seen as the new

elite. Many new English schools were established. India as a

colony of Britain adopted English as the legal, financial,

educational, and business language. High caste Indians,

especially the Brahmans were used as mediators to help in the

administration. This also created a Class who could think like

the British, or as it was said then in Britain “Indians in

blood and color but English in taste, in opinions and morals

and intellect”20. The British also established in India

universities based on British models with emphasis on the

English language. Additionally, a few Indians got their

education in British universities and there was a consequent

increase in English-language journalism. Even after India’s

independence, though it was supposed to terminate after 15

years of Independence. English remains the main language of

India.

20 Lawrence, the British Empire, 300.

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British intellectuals, including Christian missionaries,

sought to bring Western cultural innovations to India. The

Hindu English-educated minority spearheaded many social and

religious reforms either in direct response to government

policies or in reaction to them. Western-educated Hindu elite

sought to rid Hinduism of its much-criticized social evils:

idolatry, the caste system, child marriage, and Sati.

Christian expansion in Tradition- fettered India provided a

fresh and penetratingly contrasting understanding of the

liberating power of the Gospel. Shackled Hinduism served to

highlight the meaning of Life Christ freely gives. Issues of

social emancipation were dealt with, such as Female Education,

Widow Remarriage, the Age of Consent for Marriage, and more

generally the Status of Women. For example, Religious, and

social activist Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), who founded the

Brahmo Samaj in 1828, displayed a readiness to synthesize

themes taken from Christianity, and enhanced the possibility

of effecting broad reforms of societal values or religious

practices. These reform movements served as a catalyst to

awaken the conventional Hindu mind. The movement saw the

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emergence of amazingly new and unexpected leadership patterns

for ministerial training.

Missionaries translated the Bible into the vernaculars,

taught company officials local languages, and, after 1813,

gained permission to evangelize within the company's

territories. Renewal and Expansion often began on the periphery of the days

Ecclesiastical Structure. There were instances when entire groups of

people embraced Christianity, such as the Nayars in the south

or the Nagas in the northeast.

THE MAGNITUDE OF COLONIAL DOMINANCE IN INDIA: A CRITIQUE India provided commercial reasons for establishing

Imperial presence through the hugely rewarding spice trade.

From the sixteenth century, European ships could make fortunes

carrying exotic foodstuffs from India back to the cities and

peoples of Europe. A combination of European rivalry and

technical expertise over India made the extension of Imperial

control possible and commercially desirable. The Dutch,

Spanish, French, and Portuguese all strived with Britain for

access to these rich commodities that could often fetch their

weight in gold in the European market. Textiles, cotton,

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indigo, pepper, yarn, sugar, silk, tea, and opium would

provide economic incentives for trade throughout the

eighteenth, nineteenth and even up to the twentieth century.

Control over the sources of these commodities and naval bases

in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta revealed that Imperial control

was economically and strategically necessary. India was the

most commercially successful area of Imperial endeavor21.

The History of the Imperial Raj would be incomplete

without mentioning the positive side. The 1850’s witnessed the

introduction of the three "engines of social improvement".

They were the railroads, the telegraph, and the uniform postal

service, inaugurated during the tenure of Governor-general

Dalhousie. The first railroad lines were built in 1850 from

Howrah (Haora, across the Hughli River from Calcutta)22. This

grew into a vast railway system, which more than anything else

unified India. The three different presidency or regional

postal systems merged in 1854 to facilitate uniform methods of

communication at an all-India level. The structures of this

remarkable Postal system, has survived until today. The

21 David Ludden, Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996) 48

22 Dennis Judd, The British Raj (Avon, England: Wayland Pub., 1972) 148

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increased ease of communication and the opening of highways

and waterways networked and accelerated movement. The roads

network of India. The transportation of raw materials and

goods to and from the interior, and the exchange of commercial

information. With the expansion of the government, larger

numbers of Indians joined government service. Economic

progress was made in the areas of communication, agriculture,

and education. Schools, colleges and hospitals, roads,

railways, and telegraph wires symbolized the irreversible

march of progress. However, all these were not really meant

for the welfare of India, but for the Empire to better

administer the colonies. Edward Said in his book, Orientalism,

historiographically explains how Colonialism was made

possible, and sustained and strengthened, by technology as it

was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that

first established power in India.23 Though his argument

regarding the economic logic of colonialism may be correct, I

believe a distinction must be drawn between the Imperial

project and the missionaries who came to India during that

time period to avoid the danger of analyzing the British State

23 Said, Orientalism, Western Conceptions. 76-83.

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as a monolithic. Though one is forced to wonder if the British

left India with any understanding, any inkling of the

greatness of the country they had lived with for two

centuries.

Colonialism also brought serious negative consequences.

Culturally, India underwent exacting abuse. The thousands of

art treasures, the diamonds, the priceless statues, stolen,

which now adorn the houses of the rich in England, or the

Queen's private collections. That the British still do not

feel the need to hand back these treasures to India is a

shame. The ecological exploitation of India is also a fact:

the tens of thousands of tigers needlessly shot, the great

massacre of trees and forests. and the razing of old forts and

houses. The British also neglected and even hindered the

development of the fledgling Indian drug industry especially

Ayurvedic and Unani enterprises who suffer from the lack of

global publicity 24.

24 Lawrence, James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. (London: Abacus, 1998), 220-300.

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THE DIALECTIC OF IMPERIAL MISSION AND MISSIONARY IMPERIALISMThe history of India since 1600, as chronicled by the

British, was a steady ascent from the depths of ignorance and

backwardness towards the heights of peace and material

progress. Yet, one wonders how Christian missionaries with

deep convictions about personal worth could agree with such an

Authoritarian Empire, which ultimately rested on force.

Imperialism as defined in the Webster's dictionary is “the

state policy, or practice of extending power and dominion of a

nation, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by

gaining indirect control over the political or economic life

of other areas.”

Scholars like Brian Stanley, while providing an overview

of missionary history, attempt to absolve missionaries from

imperial complicity on the grounds that their motives were

fundamentally distinct from imperialists like military

officers, government officials, merchants and scholars.25 I

would argue that it is not a matter of motivation but of

orientation, in that the person and not the system affected

it. Stanley’s theory gives the impression that the ‘rest’ as

25 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries (Leicester: IVP-Apollos,1990), 40-62.

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he calls them, namely, military, government officials and the

like, were not Christians, though many of them were indeed

likely to have been practicing the faith. Therefore, I wonder,

if they followed two different versions of the same faith: one

altruistic, the other imperialistic. R.E. Frykenberg likewise

argues that in India “[at] no time were the majority

missionaries predisposed in favor of colonialism.”26 Could he

be implying that missionaries meekly followed the footsteps of

the conquerors and that they could have regarded the imperial

project, providential? Geoffrey Oddie reasons that with a

“deeply Christian view of the world”, it is impossible for

missionaries to have colluded with imperialist.27 The question

is, which ‘world’, whose ‘world’? The missionaries definitely

had a “deeply Christian view” of their world – the civilized

world of Europe. To them, the Orient was the ‘other’ world –

unredeemed and unregenerate. That everything religious outside

the Christian West needed to be resisted and overcome.

26 R. E. Frykenberg, A World History of Christianity, ed. Adrian Hastings (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)183. That an American scholar should be commissioned to write on India for this particular resource in 1999, when eminent Indian Christian historians and missiologists could have been asked, is highly revealing and contributes to my thesis.

27 Geoffrey O. Oddie, Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism: James Long of Bengal 1814-87 (London: Curzon, 1999), 24-29.

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Colonialism and the Oriental “other”

Experts like Edward Said, on the other hand, assert that

“one cannot be neutral about imperialism: either one is for it

or against it.”28 This is a comment on the neutral posture of

political correctness of which missionaries were clearly

guilty. Subaltern scholar Ranajit Guha maintains that

missionaries were one of the “dominant foreign groups”, and

that as such “were comprised of ‘British officials’ of the

colonial state and foreign industrialist, merchants,

financiers, planters, landlords and missionaries.”29 These

dominant foreign groups used the construct of the "White Man's

Burden" to help justify their colonization of foreign lands.

Missionaries patronized the religious cultures of India to

their own peril, as did Thomas Macaulay, a member of the

Supreme Council of India when he said “Who could deny that a

single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole

native literature of India and Arabia?”30 Isaac Padinjarekuttu

is clear that during the early decades of the nineteenth

28 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), 25.

29 Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 8.

30 Arun Shourie, Missionaries in India : Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: ASA,1994), 61.

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century, British imperial interests and missionaries,

interests were identical.31 Drawing from disciplines such as

Politicals, Economics, and Theology, one can quite definitely

explain how religious convictions of the British and their

notions of Providence played an important part in their

Colonial rule. The religious beliefs of imperialist Christians

clearly shaped politics under the Raj.

The dualistic theological world-view of British

missionaries, tended to see the world in terms of the

Christian God in combat against the pagan gods. To the extent

that it was this philosophical bent that persuaded Christian

Missionaries to accommodate British Expansionism. In the words

of David Ludden,

Equating non-European cultures with non-European religions thus became a fixed cognitive routine in scholarship and colonial policy. This enabled Europeans to justify imperial expansion in both religious and secular terms: for Christians, European imperialism saved souls, and for modernists, it brought progress into a world of backwardness and tradition.32

Samuel Huntington, who plays the Christian West against

the Islamic, Sinic, and Indic civilizations, is forced to

admit that, “The West, however, has never generated a major 31 Isaac Padinjarekuttu, The Missionary Movement of the 19th and 20th Centuries and

Its encounters with India. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1995), 58. 32 Ludden, Making India Hindu, 9.

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religion. The great religions of the world are all products of

non-Western civilizations.”33 It is therefore understandable

why India was hesitant to accept a westernized gospel. Said

and those who postulate missionary complicity in the imperial

project use the scientific instrument of Orientalism34 to

demonstrates that Colonialism fabricated the "Oriental other"

to legitimate the dominance of the “Western self”. Orientalism

was the philosophy that fuelled by colonialism. It was driven

by a twofold agenda: It "proved" the irrational, immoral, and

backward nature of the Oriental (Eastern) world, and

routinized the active, rational, moral, and realistic nature

of the Occidental (Western) world. The logic of this

understanding implied that it was natural and beneficial that

the self (West) overcome the other (East) for the sake of

humanity’s progressive evolution. Thus, this theory is

integrally intertwined with power: to colonize, to dominate,

to educate, and to control. Where the Occidental (Self) tames

and names the unruly and unrulable Orient (Other).35 The

33 Samuel Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.(London: Simon & Schuster,1997), 54.

34 Orientalism, for Said, was, and largely still is, a collection of ideas about the Orient written by Europeans for Europeans.

35 Said, Orientalism, 25-38.

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colonial construction, of the "Indian identity" was therefore

a homogeneous, oriental identity, which "captured" varied and

differentiated peoples. And by taming and naming the unruly

and unrulable, it posited itself as the essence, which could

bind India together. British rule was justified, in part, by

the claims that the Indians required to be civilized, and that

British rule would introduce in place of Oriental despotism a

reliable system of justice, and the rule of law. In most

cases, British Missionaries emphasized the Pilgrim Principle

of Missions to the extent that it sometimes tended to

overwhelm the Contextual Indigenous Principle. Perhaps based

on the Imperial assumption that the Oriental, meant backward.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONIt seems quiet plain that Mission Sodalities carried on

their vocation with the implicit and tacit support of the

ruling British Government in India which often brought the

relationship of the two into question. Some historians like

Frykenberg, Stanley and Oddie suspect that the missionary

endeavor was significantly assisted by the relationship, while

others like Said, Guha, and Huntington argue that the converse

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could well be true, Missionary activity was certainly

inhibited to a considerable extent by its union to an

admittedly Christian Government.

It is therefore impossible to divide the attitude of the

people toward the Government from their attitude toward

Christianity. What might otherwise be expected to have been a

benefit, seemed to turn out to be harmful to the objectives

and purpose of the missionaries. For several, particularly the

upper classes, in refusing the idea of British rule in India,

they rejected Christianity as well.

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