Duncan B. Forrester - Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India

First published in 1980 by Curzon Press Ltd

This edition first published in 2017

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1979 Duncan B. Forrester

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-22929-7 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-20179-5 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-63297-4 (Volume 2) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-63306-3 (Volume 2) (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-20791-9 (Volume 2) (ebk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

LONDON STUDIES ON SOUTH ASIA NO. 1

Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India

DUNCAN B. FORRESTER

CURZON PRESS

HUMANITIES PRESS

The area we have surveyed in this book is a small, but none the less significant part of a far larger encounter the meeting of India and the West. In this encounter Christianity in its various forms has provided one dimension which is not always easy to distinguish from other aspects of the western impact. But efforts such as we have made to tease out one strand in the interaction and subject it to detailed examination are necessary if we are eventually to have a clearer understanding of the making of modern India. It is, however, necessary to remember that interactions of the sort we are considering have an important element of reciprocity. In the encounter around the question of caste, for instance, Christian attitudes and policies were not introduced full-grown, as it were, from the West, and then proceeded to affect Indian social realities. Christian views and Christian behaviour were initially shaped and repeatedly modified in response to a wide range of factors, by no means all of them of European or American provenance.

It should be clear from all that has gone before that one cannot properly speak of the Christian understanding of caste, or even of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant view of caste; Christian attitudes were multifarious, and even if they bear family resemblances to each other, the differences between them, to which we have devoted considerable attention, are important whatever the roots of these differences may be. Family resemblances arise from the fact that all Christian views, in order to count as Christian, must recognize in the Gospel, however understood, some kind of ultimate criterion. But differences in the interpretation of the Gospel and the influence of a variety of other factors, whether consciously acknowledged or not, explain the diversity of attitude which the historian discovers.

Anglo-Saxon Protestant missionaries did not, of course, come empty-handed, or empty-headed, to India. The Bible which they brought, and quickly translated, was understood in the light of specific and conscious theological commitments, and beyond that they brought expectations, attitudes, presuppositions, hopes and prejudices, some of which seemed to them (but not to us, or to their Indian contacts) axiomatic, and of others of which they were usually unconscious. The early Anglo-Saxon Protestants had far less by way of a sophisticated and systematic theory of society and culture and their relation to religion than did the Roman Catholics or the Lutherans of the Leipzig Society, and this helps to account for elements of uncertainty, or even plain muddle, in their attempts to develop an understanding of caste. For the most part the early missionaries came with a rather simple evangelical theology, the social implications of which had to be worked out on the field, often without appropriate conceptual tools being easily to hand. Only gradually did they become aware that caste was a major and unavoidable issue.

We must also note the influence of the social and cultural backgrounds from which the missionaries came. The early English Dissenters such as the Serampore Baptists came for the most part from the ranks of the skilled mechanics, and called down upon themselves on this account the scorn of such as Sydney Smith. Why, he wondered with characteristic exaggeration, do such religious embassies devolve upon the lowest of the people? If a tinker is a devout man, he infallibly sets off for the East. Smith very accurately represented the fears of moderate and aristocratic English opinion at the dangerous social, religious and political consequences of allowing men from the lower ranks of society deeply infected with radical, eccentric, and Jacobin views to attempt to propagate the Gospel in India. He was correct in believing that the egalitarian orientation which they had developed as a result of their resentment at the restraints of class in England would predispose them to question the social order in India, although less right in regarding them as politically seditious to British rule in India.

The Scottish missionaries, both those who like John Wilson of Bombay came initially under the Scottish Missionary Society, and Alexander Duff and his successors who were sent by the established Church of Scotland, brought a difference of emphasis relating to their different background. Scotland, in contrast to England, was a more egalitarian society, in which emphasis was given to the importance of education and the need for open access to education for all ranks of society. For the Scottish missionaries the spread of enlightenment and the propagation of the Gospel were virtually indistinguishable, or at least continuous with one another, and their initial objections to caste arose from seeing it as an obstacle to the diffusion of enlightenment. They had a developed Calvinist theology which made them less individualist than either the English Dissenters or the early German Pietists of the Royal Danish Mission, and helped them to see evangelism as an historical process which necessarily involved a Christian reshaping of society.

The first Anglican missionaries came almost without exception from the Evangelical wing of the Church of England, which had already that commitment to social reform best shown in England in the so-called Clapham Sect. Particularly during Daniel Wilsons long tenure of the see of Calcutta (18321858) Anglicans in India had on the whole friendly relations with Dissenters. Theologically they had much in common. The Dissenters had been earlier in the field, and Anglicans benefitted from their experience and generally took over the Dissenters attitudes towards caste. Most American missions in India were Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Baptist, and therefore had a similar theology to the British missions discussed above; in their case the egalitarian emphasis in their thinking was strongly reinforced by American democratic notions.