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.
1
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
2
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.
3
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
4
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.
5
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
9
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
12
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
14
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.
15
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.
17
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.
19
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.
20
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
22
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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