Ph D Synopsis

REVISITING MISSIONARY EDUCATION IN INDIA: ATTITUDES

AND PROGRAMMES OF LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY IN

COLONIAL MADRAS PRESIDENCY

By

SAMRAJ N

ZAKIR HUSAIN CENTRE FOR EDUCATIONAL STUDIES

SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

NEW DELHI.

Introduction

It has frequently been argued that disadvantageous groups in South India, who on account of their poor

social plight had always attracted a great deal of scholarship around the world cutting across

disciplines. The study assumes greater significance as the political landscape of India is undergoing a

dynamic transformation through a dialectical process of social engineering. In this process, education

has been an inevitable part of life throughout human history. At all times society has been interested in

entering into new avenues of knowledge and the knowledge thus gained by the means of social change.

These have been the source for various revolutions that took place in history, especially in the

reformation of the Christian church. Any person or group, who attempted social reform, used education

to the fullest possible extend. During the colonial era, the grandiose attempts were made by a small

group of innovators, such as missionaries to implement radical changes upon a massive population.1

Missionaries, some of them, highly-gifted with literary, cultural, educational and above all religious

pursuits, focused their attention towards the respective interested fields, getting to know the Indians and

Indian society.... Missionary schools and institutions were started not only to give Biblical instruction

to the newly-converted Christians, but also to educate the millions, including people of all religions and

castes, and girls, who had no opportunity to attend a school during their life time. The missionaries of

the London Missionary Society, who started their work in South Travancore, were not exception to

this. One of the main reasons for the success of the LMS missionaries was their involvement in the

field of education and using it as a means of change.

Purpose of Study / Research Questions

In the nineteenth century, the English Protestant missionary societies in India, as well as in other

countries, used education as a missionary tool. This study examines the reasons for doing so and the

missionaries’ efforts to bring in educational ideas of the West, and to implement various educational

strategies, and the way in which the missionaries adjusted to their new context and thier relationship

with the government and with the local culture. The study examines the missionaries’ educational aims,

which were some extent formulated in diologue with the government, though the missionaries and the

government had significantly differed in their educational policies.

The main purpose of this study is to explore the progress and impact of English and modern education

on Indian society, on the arrival of missionaries, primarily from the London Missionary Society, and

the different stations the LMS missionaries settled, the schools and other educational institutions started

for primary, secondary and higher education, and the missionaries’ attitude towards women and

depressed masses in India, particularly in colonial Madras Presidency from the beginning of the

nineteenth century to the Partition.

The study will focus on how missionaries, in the absence of government sponsored schools, excelled in

providing education, and how this notion of modern education played a vital role for acquisition of

1 Beidelman, T .O, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982., p. 2-3.

knowledge, and slowly and steadily, this knowledge opened up vistas for the emergence of indigenous

leaders to question the existing order, socially and politically vibrant community came into being,

nevertheless, their conversion agenda failed miserably. Attention is paid to draw the distinction

between the education aimed at the nation’s elite through English education and the missionaries’

attempt to educate the rural mass in the vernacular language, and how the missionaries succeeded in the

latter.

The pedagogy by examining the infrastructural shortcomings and instructive contexts in which these

schools operated. In particular, it links the infrastructural deficiencies of pedagogy with larger trends of

secularization which were fashioned by both missionaries and Indians. Furthermore, the study tries to

find out the reason behind missionaries’ initial purpose of founding schools and colleges, though

intervened in the middle, they could make their strategy at the end.

Among those who had studied the problem of the depressed classes in the perspective of social change,

some have based their work in rural areas, while others based their studies on urban dwellers. Most of

them have studied social pattern, customary practices, behaviour and levels of aspiration. However,

none of the studies mentioned, provide sufficient information with special reference to depressed

classes of South India, in the context of education and its socio-economic implications, changes in the

customs, practices and beliefs of masses, missionary perspective of women empowerment through

female education.

Literature Review

Ringeltaube, in his journal (1806) wrote a letter to his friend in London to represent and impress the

Board of Directors of the LMS to obtain a sum of $100 for him towards building a church in

Travancore and erecting small buildings for a Seminary where the selected most-intelligent and

talented students from the congregations would be educated. Furthermore, he writes about the setting

up of a Boarding school. 2 In 1813, there were 188 boys studying in his schools which all had Indian

schoolmasters.3

Robert Eric Frykenberg (1967, 1987, 2009), who is an authority on missionaries, conversion,

missionary education in Modern India, exhorts through his articles, books and edited volumes, how 2 Jacob, John A, A History of the LMS in South Travancore 1806-1959, Nagercoil, 1959, p. 32; also see C. M. Agur, Church History of Travancore, 1903, p. 509 ; William Robinson, Ringeltaube, the Rishi , CLS, Madras, 1908, p. 95. 3 Ringeltaube’s letter, dated, Mayiladi, 4 January 1813, South India General, Box 2, F 1, J A, CWWA, quoted in

Gladstone, Protestant Missionaries and People’s Movement in Kerala, Seminary Publications, KUTS, 1984, P. 70.

missionary societies stepped in to Indian soil, established the mission centres, started schools for the

depressed and underprivileged, particularly in Madras Presidency.4 He points out that the origins of

Modern Education in South India lay in Northern Europe, and it was there that new techniques evolved

for building radically new social institutions came from the inspiration of August Hermann Francke

(1663-1727), Philip Jacob Spencer's disciple that personal enlightenment, spiritual vitality, and moral

transformation by means of a proliferating network, paved the way for German Pietism, which was

influenced by the missionaries, and that in turn promoted educational work in India.

Dick Kooiman (1989), in his seminal work, Conversion and Social Equality in India : The London

Missionary Society in South Travancore in the nineteentyh Century, delineates the extreme level of

caste oppression on the lower castes and untouchables; they were denied access to public roads, courts

and schools; they could not carry umbrellas, and worst of all, lower caste women were to present

themselves in public bare-breasted as they were prohibited to cover their bosom.5 The social

transformation witnessed by Travancore in the interface between the LMS which set foot in Travancore

in the first decade of the nineteenth century...............

Koji Kawashima’s (1999) Missionaries and a Hindu State : Travancore 1858-1936 explores how a

self- declared Hindu State Travancore changed itself into a modern state by introducing Modern and

English Education, and the way the state used LMS and other Christian Missionary organizations, who

had a completely different religious position from itself, during the process of state-building; and how

the British authorities were concerned in this process.6

Duncan Forrester (1980) who worked tremendously on caste, depressed classes, conversion,

Christianity and missionaries, exemplifies that the issues continue to have not only intellectual

significance but an integral relation to questions of value and of action.7 Duncan Forrester (1977,

1980) in his works, The Depressed Classes and Conversion to Christianity, 1860-1960, Caste and

Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missionaries in India, worked

tremendously on caste, depressed classes, conversion, Christianity and missionaries, and exemplifies

that the issues continue to have not only intellectual significance but an integral relation to questions of

4 Frykenberg, Robert Eric, “Modern Education in South India, 1784-1854: Its roots and Its Role as a Vehicle ofIntegration under Company Raj”. The American Historical Review, Vol.91, No. 1, Feb 1986, p. 41.

5 Kooiman, Dick, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London Missionary Society in South Travancore in the Nineteenth Century, Manohar, New Delhi, 1989.

6 Kawashima, Koji, Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858-1936 . Oxford, New Delhi, 2003.7 Forrester, Duncan B, Caste and Christianity : Attitudes and Policicies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in

India, Curzon Press, London, 1980.

value and of action. Forrester narrates not only the early English Dissenters such as the Serampore

Baptists came for the most part from the ranks of the ‘skilled machanics’8, but also believes that the

egalitarian orientation which they had developed as a result of their resentment at the restraints of class

in England, brought a difference of emphasis relating to the different backgrounds of Scottish

missionaries like, Alexander Duff, Wilson and John Anderson. He also summarises the incompatibility

of Caste and Christianity, as caste sometimes appears, as part of a motley collection of practices which

are certainly strange to westerners, and also found to be an obstacle to their efforts to convert

individuals to Christianity, as caste and the Hindu religion were so intimately wrought together that

the one could not barely be distinguished from the other

E. Daniel Potts (1967), in his work, British Protestant Missionaries in India, 1793-1837: the History of

Serampore and its Missions contributes the British Baptist Missionaries’ work on sevaral Indian

languages, translations, dictionaries, grammar books, vernacular prose-writing and journalism. Potts

also talks about the pioneer work in printing, botany and agriculture; and the missionaries’ role in

mobilizing the conscience of government and public opinion against social abuses.

Christopher Fuller’s work on Nayars and Christians in Travancore exhorts the feudal life of the land-

owning castes in Travancore, their culture, religious traditions, .........................

David Mosse, in his D.Phil Dissertation Caste, Christianity and Hinduism : A Study of Social

Organisation and Religion in Rural Ramnad discusses one of the most powerful autonomous

seventeenth-century cult centres, the shrine of Lord Yagappan at Suranam, in the heart of the Marava

dominated poligar country of easrtern Ramnad.

Dennis Hudson in his Ph.D Dissertation The Life and Times of H. A. Krishnapillai (1827-1900) : A

Study in the Encounter of Tamil Sri Vaishnava Hinduism and Evangelical Protestant Christianity in

Nineteenth Century Tirunelveli District9 ...........................................................................

Susan Bayly (1980), in her work Popular Christianity, Caste and Hindu Society in South India, 1800-

1915: A Study of Travancore and Tirunelveli stresses the depth and resilience of South India’s

indigenous religious traditions in the encounters with the faiths of foreign missionaries and also

8 Forrester, Duncan B, Caste and Christianity : Attitudes and Policicies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India, Curzon Press, London, 1980, p. 193-202.

9 Hudson, Dennis, Protestant Origins in India

narrates that converted Christians were never isolated from the world of indigenous cult devotion

among both Tamil and Malayali Christians. In her another work titled Saints, Goddesses and Kings :

Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900 she vividly analyses the nature and origins

of religious conversion and the status of religious minorities,10 their social organization and

practice.........................

Hugald Grafe (1990) talks on the the growth and establishment of various Protestant and Catholic

missions in Madras Presidency, particularly in the Tamil region since 1800. Apart from talking about

the conversion of Tamil groups – Nadars, Vellalas, Adidravidas and Brahmains, he explains the

misssionary activities among the peopole groups in different parts of Tamilnadu, forming and

establishing Christian Villages in Southern Tamil Nadu, where mass conversion happened largely, and

the LMS missionary Ringeltaube, who was persuaded by the local Protestant convert Vedamanickam

from Mayiladi, near Kanyakumari, to establish a mission station there.11

Hayden Bellenoit (2007) examines the precolonial foundations upon which both Orientalist

scholarship and comparative religious debate were based. In particular, he examines, vibrant, extant

traditions of religious debate and appropriation, which were picked upon by eighteenth century

Orientalist scholars, who normally studied India, China and Persia, and later on, missionaries

themselves. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism

can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the orient- dealing with it by

making statements about it, authorising views of it : in short, Orientalism as a western style for

dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient.

Bellenoit also delineates how missionaries engaged with pre-existing studies of Hindu theism and how

they moulded to fit their own agenda. Furthermore, the nuts and bolts of pedagodgy by examining the

infrastructural shortcomings and instructive contexts in which these schools operated. In particular, it

links the infrastructural deficiencies of pedagogy with larger trends of secularization which were

fashioned by both missionaries and Indians. It also addresses acquisition of knowledge, though reacted

to the western curricula and contested on comparitive religion, and also the rise of affective

knowledge, that paved the way for Indian patriotism, and at a larger level, Indian nationalism. There

were not simply irregularities but an integral part of the mission ideology, which enabled the British to

react flexibly to changing colonial parameters and to ‘improve’ the means and mechanisms. The

10 Bayly, Susan, Saints, Goddesses and Kings : Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900 ; Popular Christianity, Caste and Hindu Society in South India, 1800-1915: A Study of Travancore and Tirunelveli

11 Grafe, Hugald, The History of Christianity in India, Part IV. CHAI, Bangalore, 1990, pp. 28-29.

educational enterprise certainly did-like most other modern educational regimes, reproduce elite Indian

ethos. Education in mission schools was an attempt to socially reproduce values and morals.12

Research Methodology

The study of ethnic and religious diversity has become a major leitmotif in recent Indian

historiography. Considering the current political reality, understanding the events of the past which led

to the empowerment of the communities needs to be historically expounded and explicated with a view

to reconstruct the history of modern India in the light of the emerging new theories, evidences and

tools. In this context, the construction and re-construction of Tamils’ history through missionary

writings, translations and missionary periodicals, available in repositories like National Archives of

India, New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Serampore Missionary Archives,

Vidya Jyoti Seminary, New Delhi, Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai, United Theological College

and its Church History Archives of India, Bangalore, Gurukkul Theological Seminary and Archives,

Chennai, Madras Christian College Archives, Chennai, Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, Madurai,

Stephen Neill Study and Research Centre, have now become probative and prodigious mainly due to

missionaries’ cutting-edge effort to study the attitudes and programmes with special reference to

education.

Arrival of missionaries in colonised countries has always been portrayed by Western scholars as one of

the intended results of power-hegemonic relationship. Antonio Gramsci illuminates the relations of

culture and power through the useful insight that the cultural domination works by consent and often

precedes conquest by force. Power, operating concurrently at two clearly distinguishable levels,

produces a situation where “the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as

domination and as intellectual and moral leadership…. It seems clear… that there can, and indeed must

be hegemonic activity even before the rise to power, and that one should not count only on the material

force which power gives in order to exercise an effective leadership.”13

Unquestionably, the interference of missionaries in day-to-day activities of the people in Madras

Presidency opened up vistas for the so-called depressed classes to have public spaces. Michel

Foucault's notion of a discourse, as described by him in the 'The Archeology of Knowledge' and in

12 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860-1920, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2007.

13 Quoted in Gauri Viswanathan, “Currying Favor: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813-1854, Social Text, no. 19/20, Autumn, 1988, p. 85.

'Discipline and Punish' to identify Orientalism, as it also tries to show that European culture gained in

strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground

self. Foucault talks about knowledge, which is power. Knowledge, which is consigned with a group,

who are powerful. Foucault’s work is, to challenge to the empirical dogma that we speak of that

which we see, and that words and things bear an essential referential interrelation. Foucault talks on the

theory of power as a web of force relations. These force relations are, by definition unstable, variable

and constantly in a state of evolution.

Bourdieu’s reproductive and theoretical template offers useful insight. The rhetoric of morality and

religious pluralism clouded Indian desires to reproduce their own social distinctions, especially when

zamindars, pundits and rajas served as patrons of ‘progressive’ and modern institutions. The social,

economic and moral context, which allowed the emergence of a north Indian educational enterprise, the

ascendency of a market form of education, which came into being during the later half of nineteenth

century. From the beginning of the colonial rule in India, the British regarded the country and its

people as subjugated by political regimes that they characterised as 'oriental despotism', written by

officials of the East India Company during early British historiography. The notion of 'improvement of

human kind' was prevalent, among the political and economic elite of Great Britain during the last

decades of the eighteenth century, and extended to the moral and material improvement of British

India; in both societies, the British elite regarded betterment as a mandate to civilize the masses.

However, the colonies in general, and India in particular, became a kind of vast laboratory where the

ideology of a civilizing mission towards an ‘uncivilised’ people was worked out by various groups and

individuals, who dominated the public and political spheres of both the metropolis and the colonial

periphery.

The colonial conquest underlined the weaknesses of the traditional order and the need for reform and

regeneration of its institutions. An alternative, however, was not entirely found in the Western model

presented by colonial rule, particularly because of the apprehension aroused in Indian mind by the

cultural and intellectual engineering by colonial state as a part of its strategy of political control. While

traditional culture appeared inadequate to meet the challenge posed by the West, colonial

hegemonisation tended to destroy the tradition itself.14

Historical interest in Indian Christians has so far been almost entirely fixed on foreign missionaries,

and on the process of conversion that they supposedly inaugurated. In other words, a transition to

14 K. N. Panikkar, “Culture and Ideology: Contradictions in Intellectual Transformation of Colonial Society in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 22, no. 49, December, 5, 1987, p. 2115.

Christianity is primarily situated in the initiative of the Western missions rather than in the experience

and sensibility of Indian converts. The horizon of enquiry is largely filled up with questions about the

consequences of conversion, especially the extent of continuity or break with an anterior religious

identity. The degree of embeddedness of Indian Christians in surrounding Hindu society thus emerges

as a central concern. A second set of preoccupations revolve around the agents behind conversion:

whether the hidden hand of the colonial state was more responsible for it, or it was the social

advancement that the missionaries provided with their educational, and self-improvement schemes.15

Historical introduction to Christianity: Protestantism, Pietism, Enlightenment and Missionary

Societies

The philosophy of the Enlightenment gave new direction in Europe, where society exists out which was

readily amenable to empirical observation; the knowledge of society can be objective and universal and

hence cumulative and progressive; this knowledge is different from and superior to ideological

distortions and religious beliefs and is positively useful for the restructuring of human society.

The Reformation in Germany and other countries since 1516, after Martin Luther’s protest against the

authority and corrupt practices of the Church, and his proclamation of 95 Theses in Gutenberg, paved

the way for the idea of ‘Protestantism’ in Europe, and the following centuries Europe underwent a lot

of changes in the springing out of many kinds of ideologies, when ‘German Pietism’ and

‘Enlightenment’ made big impact in the thinking of the people. The pietists in Germany were more

interested in education, and their leading representative Spener and his disciple August Hermann

Francke, started planning and propagating the ideas of modern education throughout the world.

Meanwhile, John Amos Comenius, a Moravian bishop, self-styled pansophist and pedagogue,

considered to be one of the founders of modern schools proposed a twelve grades of compulsory

learning.16 The ‘evangelical revival’ in the Great Britain, which was at its helm of affairs during the

last decade of the eighteenth century, envisaged the formation of missionary societies among the

various protestant groups. Obviously, Baptist Missionary Society (1792), London Missionary Society

(1795), Church Missionary Society(1799) etc., were formed and missionaries were sent to different

parts of other countries.17

Christianity in India

15 Tanika Sarkar, “Missionaries, Converts and State in Colonial India,” Studies in History, vol. 18, no. 1, Sage Publications, 2002, pp. 121-122.

16 Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism, David Mckay Company, New York, 1967, p. 4.17 Richard Lovett , The History of the London Missionary Society, London, 1899 ; Robert Eric Frykenberg, Modern

Education in South India, 1784-1854; See also

India’s engagement with Christianity is believed to have started as early as the beginning of the

Christian era. St. Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ, landed at Kodungallur, in Kerala, on

the West coast of South India in A.D.52. After 20 years of religious activity in the country, he was

murdered, it is believed, at Little Mount, in Chennai (Madras). A new epoch in the history of India may

be said to have begun when Vasco De Gama, the first Portuguese sailor, reached Calicut in A. D.1498.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come to the Malabar coast on 24 December 1500.18 Sixteen

centuries later, St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), one of the founding priests of Society of Jesus, an

International Religious Institution, serving particularly in the field of education, was in India for

Missionary work, St. John de Britto (1647-1693), also belonging to the Society of Jesus, followed

him a century later.19 While the Christian missionaries from the west, worked in India for more than

four hundred years, stand for the peaceful penetration of western culture, the various European powers

- the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English - who vied with each other for political hegemony and

territorial aggrandizement in the Indian subcontinent, symbolize the violent imposition of culture from

above through colonization and regimentation. The different denominational churches that were long

engaged in religious, educational and medical work in the colonial context have left some productive

impressions upon the life and thought of the people of India in general and that of the Madras

Presidency in particular.20

Early Initiatives in Education in India

Education in some form or the other did exist in India as early as the Indo-Aryan Scripture – the Vedas

and the Upanishads. As a result of this, learning and a particular mode of training for brahmins

regarding priestly functions,21 was needed either in one way or the other. Brahminic education was the

earliest traceable programme of education in the ancient India.22 Three types of schools were

functioning in Travancore when missionaries arrived.23 The first among them was ‘Ezhuthupalli’24 or

pyall school, Kalari25 and Vedic schools.26

18 J M Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, Vol.1, Church History Association of India, Bangalore, 1989, p. 356.19 S Viswanathan , “Memorable Mission,” Frontline, 28 July, 2006, P. 84.20 S. Manickam, Studies in Mission History, The Christian Literature Society, Madras, 1988. p.1. 21 Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, Orient Longman, 1978, New Delhi, p. 140.22 Santhosh Kumar Das, The Educational System of the Ancient Hindus, Calcutta, 1933, p. 18.23 A Sreedhara Menon, Kerala Gazateers, Trivandrum, p. 649.24 where alphabets were taught; the children wrote on ground and then an ‘ola’ was given and the students memorized

devotional pieces and simple arithmetic. ‘Ola’ is a dried piece of Palmyra leaf used for writing, ‘olei’ in Tamil.25 Kalari was a private school run by high caste people, where physical education was taught by a ‘guru’. The students,

generally called ‘shishyas’ lived with the guru,until he finished his studies and gave fees either in kind or cash. 26 Vedic schools taught vedas, sastras, upanishads, and other such classics. ‘They were the Ujjains of ancient Kerala’ says

Sreedhara Menon. The students resided in ‘salais’, where they were given free boarding and lodging. The students

The state of education in the mid-sixteen and early seventeenth centuries India was quite different from

the situation in Europe. James Smith, one of the mission officials opines that, “we, in India, have

traditional educational system, venerable and hoary. These may be characterized in a word as a device

for cramping the intellect and preventing people from thinking. I refer to such indigenous schools as

vedashala and padashala. No ray of light, civilization or knowledge shines in the home, the street, the

field or the town”. Meanwhile, while explaining the traditional educational system in India, Livingston

argues in the following lines: “In India, there were three kinds of traditional schools in the early

sixteenth century. The first one is the highest rank, where learned pundits devote their life to the work

of education, with a patience and industry beyond all praise. But they are very thinly scattered over the

country. The other is the extreme in the scale that is the lowest rank of schools. Class room is verandah

of the temple of the houses of some one of the more comfortable inhabitants of a town or a village. The

intermediate class of schools is more difficult to represent and the want of system and design to middle

classes is the third category.27

Religion, Education and Colonial Government

The close association between religion and education has been a common phenomenon in all societies,

until the predominance of secularization in modern ones. The corresponding affinity between these two

sub-systems of society and even the dependence of the educational one on the religious is not

surprising. The earliest teachers in society were first the medicine-men, later education become more

formalized with brahmans and monks being teachers and eventually education was institutionalized in

ashrams and monasteries.28 Though the East India Company wished to follow the policy of religious

neutrality in India, for obvious reasons it was not practicable. Lord Wellesley pursued a policy of his

own, ordered for regular and official church attendance29

Though the church and the school were not always on friendly terms, the early Christian movement

was indifferent to education,when not hostile to it.30 Education was naturally left out of account the

earliest Christian schools, which were catachumenical and catechetical and designed for the training of

the converts, and later developed into the cathedral and monastery schools, with no attempt to impart

purely secular knowledge, for at the Synod of Catharge in 398 A.D. all Bishops were forbidden to read

memorised brief portions from the vedas, upanishads and other hymns, and was really in the ‘true tradiotiion of Gurugula ideal.’ See A Sreedhara Menon, Kerala Gazateers, Trivandrum, p. 650.

27 Daniel Jeyaraj, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg: The First Protestant Missionary to India, Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, New Delhi, 2006, p. 5.

28 Rudolf C. Heredia, “Education and Mission: School as an Agent of Evangelization,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 37, September, 16, 1995, p. 2332. 29 Hutten, W. H, Indian Rulers, Oxford, 1897, p. 126.30 J. M. Powis Smith, The Church and Education, The Journal of Religion, vol. 4, no.1, January 1924, p. 46.

any non-biblical literature, due to the fear lest acquaintance with that learning should corrupt the

Christian mind, and this attitude prepared the way for the ‘dark ages’31 From the seventh to the end of

the twelfth century the monks practically controlled all education, then followed the period of

scholasticism lasting till the end of the fifteenth century, during this period the great universities of

Europe were founded and controlled by the church and their faculties were made up almost wholly of

either Franciscan or Dominican friars.32

Missionaries as Civilizing Mission33 in Colonial India

From the beginning of the colonial rule in India, the British regarded the country and its people as

subjugated by political regimes that they characterized as 'oriental despotism', written by officials of the

East India Company during early British historiography. In the early seventeenth century, King James

advocated the British missionaries for schooling Indians in America to promote ‘civilization’ and

Christianity.34 The notion of 'improvement of human kind' was prevalent, among the political and

economic elite of Great Britain during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and extended to the

moral and material improvement of British India; in both societies, the British elite regarded betterment

as a mandate to civilize the masses. However, the colonies in general, and India in particular, became a

kind of vast laboratory where the ideology of a civilizing mission towards an ‘uncivilized’ people was

worked out by various groups and individuals, who dominated the public and political spheres of both

the metropolis and the colonial periphery. Christianity underlay the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism

at many different levels, as there was indeed a strong Christian component of ‘civilizing’ as evinced in

Europe an science and technology and their assaults on the puranas and Hindu mythology.35

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centurties, Protestant missionaries with the support of

allies in India and England, took the initiative in advocating a number of social reforms in Hindu

Society.36 They drew attention to practices such as infanticide, sati and devadasi. However, Indian

society in the nineteenth century was caught in a vicious web created by religious superstitions and

social obscurantism. Hinduism, as Max Weber observes, had become a compound of magic animis and

superstition and abominable like animal sacrifice and physical torture had replaced the worship of god.

31 J. M. Powis Smith, The Church and Education, The Journal of Religion, vol. 4, no.1, January 1924, p. 47.32 J. M. Powis Smith, The Church and Education, The Journal of Religion, vol. 4, no.1, January 1924, p. 47.33 Michael Mann, Colonialism as Civilizing Mission.......34 Carel Devens, “If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race”: Missionary Education of Native American Girls, Journal of

World History, Vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall, 1992) p. 221. 35 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, p. 84.36 Geoffrey A Oddie, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms 1850-1900, Manohar,

New Delhi, 1979, p. 1.

The priest exercised an overwhelming and, indeed, unhealthy influence on the minds of the people.

Idolatry and polytheism helped to reinforce their position.37

Missionaries and Orientalism

The vibrant, extant traditions of religious debate and appropriation, which were picked upon by

eighteenth century Orientalist scholars, who normally studied India, China and Persia, and later on,

missionaries themselves.38 The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a

place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences, and

Orientalism connotes the high- handed executive attitude of nineteenth century and early twentieth

century European colonialism.39

Missionaries’ profession as religious interpreters to their students, combined with their intimate

knowledge of India and In terms of pedagogy, (BELLENOIT)

Tentative Chapterisation

Chapter-I Introduction

The missionary enterprise in India and in other countries, where the Western missions influenced the

authorities and people, what Gramsci called the idea of ‘cultural hegemony’, by imparting and

implementing the policies of modern education through political influence and interference on the

people and land, to make the place in to a ‘civilized’ one. This concept of cultural hegemony led to the

development of ‘critical pedagogy’(Paulo Freire) and mass education. The missionaries established

schools, colleges, technical institutes and other institutions, so that they could facilitate the new

movements among the illiterate population.

Missionary Education

It has frequently been argued that education was a necessary missionary tool,40 and so education

formed an essential part of the missionary programme, and for the most of the colonial period the

missions were almost the only agency for education among the depressed classes and tribes. The effect

37 Chandra, Bipan, History of Modern India, New Nelhi, 1971, pp. 84-85.38 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, 39 Edward Said , Orientalism, New York, 1978, p. 4.40 C. P. Williams, ‘Not Quite Gentlemen’ : an Examination of ‘Middling Class’ Protestant Missionaries from Britain,

1850-1900, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 31, No. 3, July 1980, pp. 301-315.

of this educational activity is reflected in the contrast between literacy and educational programmes

among Christians as opposed to non-Christian members of these communities.41 Mission schools aimed

to be vibrant spiritual centres, in which religion and spirituality were comparatively discussed. 42 This

was all done with the aim of persuading Indian students that Christianity was the ultimate manifestation

and progeny of their civilization’s religious and moral evolution.43 In terms of pedagogy, this religious

factor effectively ensured that missionaries and mission schools were neither Anglicist nor

Orientalists,44 but a quizzical admixture of both. 45

The missionaries’ intervention in social lives of the masses had not only brought Christianity to this

part of the world, but also substantially altered and reshaped the intellectual and cultural life of the

Indian society in the period. Education, one of the great legacies of missionaries, gained its true

recognition and identity through the zeal and efforts of the missionary enterprise, as vast amount of

knowledge were transformed into textual forms such as encyclopedias and extensive archives that were

deployed by the colonial state in fixing, bounding and setting India.46 The cultural self sufficiency and

the linguistic salience of Indian masses were aptly brought to the fore by the indefatigable efforts of

Catholic and Protestant missions across European and American continents. While mission schools

were established in coastal Nigeria, the missionaries did not enter northern Nigeria because of the

existence of a network of Koranic schools.47

Catholic - Jesuit Early Initiatives in Education in India

Roman Catholic missions had been operating in India since the early sixteenth century.48 The Catholics

had started missionary efforts among the fishing population on the coast at a much earlier date.49 In

1511, the enlightened Portuguese governor, Afonzo de Albuquerque, who was so kind enough to teach

the Portuguese children, requested the King of Portugal to help him educate the children. The

41 J. H. Beaglehole, “The Indian Christians - A Study of a Minority,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1967, p. 61. 42 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, p. 88.43 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, p. 88.44 Lynn Zastoupil, M. Moir, The Great Education Debate: Documents Related to the Orientalist-Anglicist Conroversy,

1781-1843, Curzon, Richmond,1999, quoted in Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2007, p. 87.

45 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2007, p. 86.

46 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p.8.47 Aparna Basu, Colonial Education: A Comparative Approach., Presidential Address , Indian History Congress,

Gorakhpur, p.348 Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920, OUP, Delhi, 1974, p. 3.49 Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India- London Missioary Society in South Travancore, Manohar

Publications, New Delhi, 1989, p. 5.

Governor, engaged a Portuguese gentleman, Afonzo Alvares, who got married in Cochin, to teach

boys to read and write. The school started at Cochin in 1511 was the first school by the Portuguese in

the East. The boys attending it, came from all classes; boys belonging to the high caste mingled with

those belonging to the low caste.50 There were about 100 boys in the school, among whom there were

children of the panikkars and other nobles. The children were seemed to be very clever and quickly

picked up what was taught to them.51 King Manuel in 1512, sent primers in the fleet of that year.

Among the Protestants, “the first missionaries to start regular schools in India for general education

were the Danes working at Tranquebar in Madras Presidency.”52

Chapter II : Charter Act, Protestant Missions and Colonial Government

The Protestant missions had made a small beginning in the eighteenth century. King Frederick IV

invited two young Germans, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and his friend Heinrich Plutschau, to go to

India and they established in Tranquebar the first Protestant Halle- Tranquebar Mission in 1706, 53

which in turn played a crucial role in laying the foundation for Protestant Missions in South India. The

Baptist Missionary Society, formed in 1792, sent its first missionary, William Carey to India in 1793 at

Serampore, near Calcutta. But the missionary activities expanded rapidly after the passing of the

Charter Act of 1813.54 Accordingly, an amount of one lac rupees is to be allocated for the education of

the people of India, and also the miossionaries were given permission to enter in to India for

proselytization.55

Christian mission societies from Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Canada and the United States of

America have since reached India through the services of missionaries, teachers, doctors, nurses and

social workers,56 and for the missionaries the unfinished work of evangelism amongst the millions in

India seemed a staggering task when living and working with a small minority of Christians. 57

50 J. M. Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, vol.1, Church History Association of India, Bangalore, 1989, p. 356.51 Quoted in J. M. Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, vol. I, Church History Association of India, Bangalore,

1989, p. 368; Also see A de Silva Rego, ed. Documentacao para a Historia das missioes…… India, I, p.149: Letter of Albuquerque dated, Cochin, 1 April 1512.52 Rudolf C. Heredia, “Education and Mission: School as an Agent of Evangelization,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 37, September, 16, 1995, p. 2333. 53 Brijraj Singh The First Protestant Missionary to India Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, OUP, New Delhi, 1998, p. 87; Also

see Daniel Jeyaraj, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg: The First Protestant Missionary to India, Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, New Delhi, 2006, p. 5.

54 Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920, OUP, Delhi, 1974, p. 3.55 The pioneers, who stood and supproted strongly in the British Parliament to pass the Charter Act were, mainly,

Palisbury Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, who also fought for the emancipation of Black Slaves, and Charles Grant, former Colonial Official and later one of the Directors of East India Company in London

56 D Christudas, Tranquebar to Travancore., ISPCK, New Delhi, 2008, p. xvii57 C. R. H.Wilkinson, Missionary Service in North India., American Theological Library Association, p.186.

Furthermore, by prescribing Christian morality, means for justifying the British occupation as the

harbinger of civilization. In other words, Christianity was presented as a necessary appendage to the

process of modernization, promoting a progressive outlook and contributing to alternative models of

social behaviour.58

Missionaries and Colonial Government

In the days when the East India Company was unwilling to accept a direct responsibility for the

education of the Indian people, the Christian missionaries came forward and established some of the

earliest modern schools and colleges. Later on the Company did accept the responsibility for education,

but the extension of government effort was so slow before 1854 that the needs were largely met by

missionary institutions.59 The English East India company never showed any interest in missionary

work.60 After the report of the Indian Education Commission of 1882, the missions generally

gave up plans for extension and decided to concentrate on the efficient maintenance of a few

institutions.61 Missionary educationists also underscored Indian patriotism by pitting themselves against

larger imperial prerogatives,62 when Lord Curzon’s punishing educational reforms of 1904

comprehensively marginalized missionaries.63

.

The missionary enterprise in the field of education in Madras Presidency, seemed to be a commendable

one, as the missionaries influenced almost every source available during that time; they influenced the

British Residents, the Dewans (Prime Minister), the Maharajas and all other officials of the ruling class

to sanction permission, for the establishment of mission centres and institutions for the inculcation of

western education and modern science. This education made the under-privileged and depressed people

‘knowledgeful’ and led them into the Foucaudian model of ‘powerful’, which in tern, helped them to

stand for their right in asking their societal liberation.

Modern Education in British India

The firm conviction of the early Protestant missionaries and of English administrators that ‘scientific

training and the English knowledge’64 would enable the Indians awake from slumber. India was seen

58 R.S. Sugirtharajah comments on India, quoted in Anna Johnston, The Book Eaters: Textuality, Modernity, and the London Missionary Society, American Theological Library Journal , Semeia, p. 32.

59 Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920, OUP, Delhi, 1974, p. 3.60 Dick Kooiman, Conversion........., p.3.61 Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920, OUP, Delhi, 1974, p. 3.62 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, p. 174.63 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, p. 56.64 Thomas Pothancamury, Studies, An Irish Quarterly Review, vol.34, no.136, Dec 1945, p. 468. ‘Preparatio Evangelica’

was the main purpose of the missionaries what they applied to evangelize India, and the policy of English education and scientific training, the missionaries thought, would enable the Hindu to think logically, realize the inconsistencies of his

as being capable of being changed through British beneficence. They had created the conditions for the

Indians’ advance up the social evolutionary ladder by introducing the ideas of modern education. 65

Missionary institutions had their part to play especially as training centres, schools and colleges, and

brought learning to hundreds who would not have had the opportunity of getting an education.66

Though missionary schools could not make much headway in Vietnam or in India,67 unlike Africa, it

made a big impact on Indian soil.

The Origins Modern Education in South India lay in Northern Europe. It was there that new techniques

evolved for building radically new social institutions and, therewith, for releasing unpredictable social

energies. Precedents for ‘mass’, ‘national’, ‘public’, even ‘popular’ education came out of apocalyptic

dreams and millenarian visions. From the inspiration of August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), Philip

Jacob Spencer's disciple, came actual experiments. Emphasis was placed on personal enlightenment,

spiritual vitality, and moral transformation by means of a proliferating network of small training groups

(collegia philobiblica). German Pietism, form its outset, generated radical impulses. The movement,

advanced by August Hermann Francke from Halle University, spread to the royal houses of Denmark

and Hanover and the Court of St. James and helped generate the Society for Promoting Christian

Knowledge (SPCK), which in turn promoted educational work in India.68 The first Protestant

missionary to have landed in India, Bartolomaeus Ziegenbalg and his colleague Heinrich Plutschau,

both Francke’s students, brought his ideals to Tranquebar in 1706.69

Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg opened five schools- two Tamil schools, a Portuguese school, a Danish

school and a school for girls in 1707-1708 in Tranquebar. This school for girls seems to have been the

first of its kind to be set up in India, for prior to that no school devoted entirely to the education of girls

had existed.70 In 1717, the Governor Joseph Collet, wrote to the directors in London that by

arrangement the German missionaries had established a charity school at Fort St. David at Cuddalore,

with one master to teach Tamil and another for Portuguese; at the same time two schools had been

started in Madras- one Portuguese school in the White town, and one for Tamil in the Black Town. 71

The system of ‘Benevolent Institution’ and the ‘Monitorial System’ into the school , had been first

own religion and accept readily the Christian faith.65 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 121.66 C R H Wilkinson, Missionary Service in North India., American Theological Library Association., p. 186.67 Aparna Basu, Colonial Education: A Comparative Approach., Presidential Address , Indian History Congress,

Gorakhpur, p. 3.68 Robert Eric Frykenberg , “Modern Education in South India, 1784-1854: Its roots and Its Role as a Vehicle of

Integration under Company Raj”. The American Historical Review, Vol.91, No. 1, Feb 1986, p. 41.69 Brijraj Singh, The First Protestant Missionary to India Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, OUP, New Delhi, 1998, p.87; Also

see Daniel Jeyaraj, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg: The First Protestant Missionary to India, Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, New Delhi, 2006, p. 5.

70 Brijraj Singh, The First Protestant Missionary to India Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, OUP, New Delhi, 1998, p.87. 71 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India 1707-1858, CUP, London, 1985, p. 41.

developed by Andrew Bell, chaplain at Madras and Superintendent of the Male Military Asylum(1789-

1796),72 who started to use the senior boys as monitors to teach their juniors. He returned to London

and published an account of his method which attracted great interest. Meanwhile, Joseph Lancaster

had simultaneously developed a similar system in England, and also received much public support.73

From Tranquebar, where a Tamil printing press eventually turned out a steady stream of basic

materials, such schools gradually spread northward to Madras, inland to Tanjore and Trichinopoly, and

southward to Palamcottah. By the 1780s schools run by Christian Friedrich Schwartz and his

associates (John Z. Kiernander, Daniel Joseph Jaenicke, Christian Wilhelm Gericke, John Kasper

Kohloff, Philip Fabricius, among others) were attracting non-Christian students, especially Brahmans

and Vellalars, who hoped that the new learning would better quality them for positions within the

rapidly expanding establishments of the Company.74

Missionaries and English Education

Alexander Duff, the firebrand Sottish missionary, who reached Calcutta, after a voyage of two

shipwrecks in the late 1820s, had made the most impressive contribution to Indian Education through

the introduction of the English language75 as the teaching medium from the bottom to the top of the

educational ladder and the use of Western science and literature as the subjects of study. Duff’s

methods were imitated all over India and finally English was adapted as the medium of higher

education all over the country.76

Formation of London Missionary Society

The London Missionary Society (hereafter LMS), was formed in 179577 in London under the leadership

72 M. A. Laird, The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1837., Bulletin of SOAS, University of London,Vol.31, No.1,1968, p.95

73 M. A. Laird, The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1837., Bulletin of SOAS, University of London,Vol.31, No.1,1968, p.95

74 Koji Kawashama, Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858-1936 . Oxford, New Delhi, 2003, P. 75 Gauri Viswanathan, Mask of Conquest, OUP, 1989, New Delhi.76 D. H. Emmott, Alexander Duff and modern Education in India, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol.13, No.2.,

May 1965, p. 168.77 Sometime during the spring of 1794 the founding fathers of what soon to become the London Missionary Society met at

the Dissenter’s Library, Red Cross Street in London, to discuss missions in general and Melville Horne’s letter, Letters on Missions: Addressed to the Protestant Ministers of the British Churches, in particular. The men had been called together were- David Bogue, Thomas Haweis, John Eyre, Alexander Waugh, James Steven, John Love, Matthew Wilks -at Baker’s Coffee House in London formally to plan the new organization and form its first committee. By September 1795 the Society became a reality and was named as ‘Missionary Society’, and was renamed into ‘London Missionary Society’ on the 25th General Meeting of the Directors held in London on Thursday, 14 May 1818. The Fundamenrtal Principles of the London Missionary Society was added to the society’s ‘by-laws’ on 9 May 1796. See Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1819, p.1; Roger H Martin, The Place of the London Missionary Society in the Ecumenical Movement, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 31, No. 3. July 1980, pp. 285-291. Also see, J. Morrison, The Fathers and Founders of the London Missionary Society, London 1839; William Ellis, The History of the London Missionary Society, London 1844; C. S. Horne, The Story of the LMS, London 1895; Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, London 1899.

of Thomas Haweis, as an undenominational organization78 by members from various denominations

such as, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians and the Methodists.79 The society was formed for the

propagation of evangelisation among the non-Christian countries and the enthusiasm of spirituality and

commonsense were the basic qualifications80 enough for becoming a missionary. The LMS mission to

the Pacific, Central Asia, India, China, Ceylon and West Indies in the early nineteenth century,

arguably, the most widely published missions of the Evangelical Protestant society.81 The LMS

missionaries believed they would in some senses, travel back in time to the ‘noble savages’ imagined

by Rousseau and many others, and gradually bring them, through study of the Bible, forward to modern

times.82 In promoting its activities, the LMS openly acknowledged the importance of the late

eighteenth-century enthusiasm for the adventures of Captains Cook, Bligh, and Wallis.83

Arrival of LMS Missionaries in India

The first batch of LMS missionaries84 William Tobias Ringeltaube,85 Augustus Desgranges and George

Cran reached Tranquebar on 5 December 1804.86 Ringeltaube, a German Lutheran, after residing there

for sometime, learned Tamil and decided to go to South Travancore on the invitation of

Vedamanikam,87 a newly convert from Mayiladi,88 a tiny village, near Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin)

and reached there on 25 April 1806.89 Augustus Desgranges and George Cran travelled northwards

from Madras and reached Vizakapatnam(at present vishakapattanam or vizag) and founded a mission

78 L. E. Elliot-Binns, Religion in the Victorian Era, Lutterworth Press, London,1946, p. 377.79 Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858-1936 . Oxford, New Delhi, 2003, p. 54.80 Tim Dowley, Eerdman’s handbook to The History of Christianity, Eerdman’s Publishing Company, Michigan, USA,

1977, p. 552.81 Anna Johnston, The Book Eaters: Textuality, Modernity, and the London Missionary Society, American Theological

Library Journal , Semeia, p. 13.82 Anna Johnston, The Book Eaters: Textuality, Modernity, and the London Missionary Society, American Theological

Library Journal , Semeia, p. 31.83 Kirsteen Murray, In the Shadow of the Missionary Captain: Captain James Wilson and the LMS Mission to the Pacific,

International Bulletin for the Missionary Research , vol.31, no. 2, p. 73.84 The LMS missionary Nathaniel Forsyth, who came in 1997 without proper prior permission from the East India

Company, stayed little period in the Danish settlement at Chinchurah in Bengal and left, and so this is the true batch with proper permission.

85 Ringeltaube, the first LMS missionary to Madras Presidency, was a German, born at Silesia in 1770 and educated in Halle. In 1797 he went to Calcutta as a missionary of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Literature (SPCK), but soon returned to England. In 1803 he joined the LMS and again came to India as a missionary in 1804.

86 Richard Lovett, The History London Missionary Society, Vol. II, London, 1899, pp. 18-19; see Samuel Mateer, Land of Charity, pp. 258-70 ; also see R.N Yesudas, The History London Missionary Society, p. 26.

87 Vedamanickam (Maharasan before conversion) was a devout Hindu, went to a pilgrimage to the holy Saivite temple at at Chidambaram in Tanjore to receive spiritual enlightenment, but on his way back turned to a church, where his relatives were attending, and embraced Christianity. He met Ringeltaube at Tranquebar and invited hiom to come to South Travancore. See J.W. Gladstone, Protestant Missionary and Peoples Movement in Kerala, 1850-1936, Seminary Publications, KUTS, Trivandrum, 1984, p. 58-59.

88 I. H. Hacker, A Hundred Years in Travancore, London, 1908, p. 20. Also see William Robinson, “Where the Peacocks Dance – The Story of Maharasan”, The Chronicle of the LMS, May 1903, p. 107.

89 Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858-1936 . Oxford, New Delhi, 2003, p. 55.

in 1805. Cran could learn the native language Telugu 90

Background of the LMS Missionaries

C. P. Williams (1980) vividly explains that many missionaries in the nineteenth century came from the

lower middle and artisan classes, the petit bourgeoise, and the newly professionally conscious, neither

middle-nor-working class but was composed of those who felt society deprived them of deserved status

and privilege and who constantly sought rectification by way of radical social change, and so ‘not quite

gentlemen’, and often called ‘middling class’, especially in its less well-educated sections though the

recruiters wanted persons from well-educated and respectable families, ideally the clergy, but were

faced by a general reluctance to respond to their appeals.91 But this was refuted and no longer true of

those recruited for India during the second half of nineteenth century, for, prior to the joining of the

LMS, about one-fifth in the sample of sixty candidates were young men studying in college.92 Most

missionaries were ordained and that itself was a mark of status of ‘wordly advancement’ and the

society directors appealed to have little prospect of achieving the educational standards necessary for

ordination and the candidates were offered free education.93

It was sometimes said that missionaries were of a lower standard than those accepted for the home

ministry and candidates had to answer detailed questionnaires, to provide referees who could be

closely examined and to be personally interviewed. In 1869, the LMS unveiled an ambitious training

programme which could take five or six years to complete and this was all quite important and it would

be quite wrong to think of missionary training as being specialist and mission-oriented. In fact the LMS

stopped paying full training grants precisely because it felt that the existing arrangement produced too

much enfeebling dependence. And the process of employing laymen as missionaries in its earliest

missionary efforts had not been notably successful.94 The LMS stationed its missionaries at Madras,

Chengalpat, Nellore, Kurnool, Cudappa, Ananthapur, Vizakapatnam, Ganjam, Godavari, Krishna,

Bellary, Bangalore, Jeypur (Goorg), South Canara, North Canara, Malabar, Arcot (North), Arcot

(South), Salem, Coimbatore, Nilgris, Tanjore, Tinnevelly, Nagercoil, Neyyur, Marthandam, Parassala,

90 David Bogue, A Sermon on the Death of the Reverend George Cran, Augustus Desgranges and Jonathan Brain, Missionaries in India from London Missionary Society, preached at Gosport, 17 March, 1811, American Edition, Boston, p. 23.

91 C. P. Williams, ‘Not Quite Gentlemen’ : an Examination of ‘Middling Class’ Protestant Missionaries from Britain, 1850-1900, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 31, No.3, July 1980, pp. 301-315.

92 LMS Candidates Papers, 1796-1899 and Anewerws to Printed Questions, Boxes 26-28, quote din Oddie, Geoffrey A, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms 1850-1900, Manohar, New Delhi, 1979, p. 12. Also see Kooiman,

93 Richard Lovett, History of the LMS, Vol.II, pp. 668-670.94 Richard Lovett, History of the LMS, Vol. I, p. 64, 67-73, 127.

Quilon and Trivandrum. 95

Public Re-action to Missionary Endeavours

The feeling of orthodox Hindus against the new religion were visible from the conversion of

Maharasan. But he was identified as a friend of the ‘white men’ and Velu Thampi. The Dewan, during

the Travancore war ‘sent a force of sepoys to capture and kill him’, but he was able to hide himself till

the end of the war.96 Velu Thampi’s opposition towards a new religion was expressed in his famous

‘Kun dara Proclamation’97 during the war in 1809, but immediately after the war the Travancore

Government not only granted permission to erect a church at Mayiladi but also ordered the local

government officials to supervise its construction.

It is well-known that the first LMS missionary to South Travancore, Ringeltaube, was immensely

helped by the then British Resident Col. Macaulay by granting him permission not only to cross the

boundary in to Travancore but also to continue the mission work.98 Col. Munro, Diwan99 and

Resident100 of Travancore and Cochin, was a devout Christian of the evangelical school, and he

thought it his duty to do all he could for the Christians and decided three needs of the church were

paramount: the clergy must be given an adequate and efficient education, the scriptures must be

translated and distributed in the vernacular, and discipline within the church must be strictly

enforced.101 The LMS missionaries, directly through the British Resident, established a position of

influence with the authorities and courts as representatives of culture and political order and made it a

system throughout India.102 The Ranee of Travancore, Gauri Lakshmi Bai, contributed 300 trees and

offer the usage of elephants for carrying timbers and rocks, as the school building was constructed of

rock stones.103 The Rajah of Cochin presented an amount of Rs. 5000/- for the purchase of paddy fields,

and the boarders could be fed by the yielding.104

Chapter III: Modern Education : Primary, Secondary, Higher and Industrial Education95 From the Reports of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held in the second week of May every

year in London. 96 C M. Agur, Church History of Travancore, pp. 544-45. Also see William Robinson, “Where the Peacocks Dance – The

Story of Maharasan”, The Chronicle of the LMS, May 1903, p. 109. 97 Shangoony Menon, Thiruvithamcore Charithram (Malayalam Translation), p. 261.98 Samuel Mateer, The History of Travancore, The Indian Evangelical Reviev, April 1881, p. 439.99 Dewan was Prime Minister100 British Officer appointed by the Colonial Government who worked as an agent between the Governor of a Colonial

State and the Princely States Travancore-Cochin. 101 Leslie Brown, The Indian Christians of St.Thomas – An Account of the Ancient Syrian Church of Malabar, CUP, 1982,

p. 132. 102 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 140.103 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 11 May 1820 in London, p. 55.104 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1819 in London, p. 55.

The modern education system in India is deeply indebted to the work of the western missionaries

during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Educational work had been undertaken by almost all the

missionary societies in India in their respective areas of work. The success of the decision to use the

English language as the medium of instruction stimulated many schools and colleges to do the same 105

and it was received by the elites. With the arrival of the first protestant missionary Ringeltaube in

1806, the foundation was laid for the implementation of modern education and thousands of people got

attracted towards the missionary efforts by attending the institutions.

The LMS missionary Loveless established a Missionary Free School in Madras in 1815 where 75 boys

studied, where as a Female school was also started in the same year.106 The English high schools were

supported by public contributions, school fees, and grand-in-aid although larger than what is fixed for

native schools is inadequate, and were scales fixed still insufficient for reasons.107 John Hay, the

misionary at Vizakapatam, spent forty-two years and established schools.108 LMS missionary John

Hands founded a Central English School in 1816, for the promising bright students ‘to qualify them for

public office as writers and copyists.’109 C.M. Agur says, “at the end of the nineteenth century there

were 1897 schools and 36652 students in Travancore itself and it is highly gratifying that the present

day Travancore schools stand for in advance of other parts of India including native schools in the

matter of female education.” 110 Bernard S Cohn says, “The schools became the crucial civilizing

institutions and sought to produce moral and productive citizens”111

Missionaries and Higher Education

The missionaries were in the forefront to establish colleges for higher education in India. Though it was

the efforts of Warren Hastings, then Governor General of India, to have established the Calcutta

Madrassa for higher education in early 1780s, and the colonial officer Jonathan Duncan, who had

founded the Benaras Sanskrit College in 1792, the missionaries could establish many colleges in the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Governor General Lord Wellesley founded Fort William

College to train the British civil servants in Indian laguages and law at Calcutta in 1800.

Christian colleges were among the first to bring Western ideas of education to India,112 and the

105 D. H. Emmott, Alexander Duff and modern Education in India, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol.13, No.2., May 1965, p. 163.

106 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 9 May 1816 in London, p.361. 107 Sarah S Gostling, Education in India: ‘ Why it takes more to cure a European of ignorance than it does a native’, LSE

Selected pamphlets, 1885, p. 3. 108 C S Horne, The Story of the LMS, London, 1895, p. 293.109 James Hough, History of Christianity in India, 1837, p. 101.110 C. M. Agur, Church History of Travancore, Trivandrum, p. 771.111 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 3.112 Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920, OUP, Delhi, 1974, p. 3

Christian influence in education through schools and colleges was at its zenith from 1858 to 1904. 113

By 1914, an increasing number of foreign missionaries were devoting themselves to the education of

the six thousand youth, studying in the 38 missionary colleges, besides those in the 127 Normal

Training Schools, the 160 Industrial institutions, the 4 Medical colleges, and the 13500 Elementary

Schools. In all these institutions 550,000 youth were being trained for life and service under the

inspiration of a host of a wide-awake missionaries114 By the year 1945, the Protestant Missionaries

established 34 colleges in India, of these 13 were in Madras Presidency with an enrollment 4911.

Catholics started 12 colleges in South India by1944. 115

Scott Christian College

At a time, people of South Travancore never heard of higher education and the higher educational

institutions, the LMS missionary Ringeltaube made an indelible mark in the annals of Education in

Madras Presidency by establishing an English School at Mayiladi, near Kanyakumari in 1809 for the

bright students.116 One of the key factors of the educational development in South Travancore was the

shifting of this English School to an ideal place at Nagercoil by Charles Mead, the charismatic LMS

missionary who came after the departing of Ringeltaube in 1818 and was made into a Seminary and

was named South Travancore Seminary.117 The seminary was started on the Christian principles for

giving training to the 30 most intelligent boys among the Christians selected from the different

congregations and youth of other sects and imparting them English Education.118 Right from the

beginning, studies in the Seminary had been carried on chiefly through the medium of the English

language, no distinction being made between boarders intended for mission work and day-scholars

pursuing their studies with a view to obtaining better paid secular employment for which English was

becoming an important qualification.119

Not only the missionaries kept a high standard of teaching and learning in the renowned institution, but

also they made it to accommodate pupils from different caste groups and religions. Tamil, Malayalam,

English and Sanskrit were taught to all students.120 The Seminary taught not only Indian and foreign

classical and other languages, but also inculcated modern science to the scholars. Though the other

113 Thomas Pothancamury, Studies, An Irish Quarterly Review, vol.34, no.136, Dec 1945, p. 470.114 J. P.Jones, The Protestant Missionary Propaganda in India, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol.8, No.1, Jan 1915, p.

32.115 Thomas Pothancamury, Studies, An Irish Quarterly Review, vol.34, no.136, Dec 1945, p. 470.116 Agur, C M., Church History of Travancore, Trivandrum, 1903.

117 Ringeltaube’s Journal......... 118 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1819 in London, p. 55.119 Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India- London Missioary Society in South Travancore, Manohar

Pblications, New Delhi, 1989, p. 112.120 Report (30th) of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1824 in London, p. 85.

colleges LMS established- Wardlaw College, Bellary(1846),121 Ramsay College, Almora (1886), and

Bhownipur Institution, Calcutta (1837)122- were given up later, the LMS promoted the Nagercoil

Seminary. The Seminary underwent tremendous changes when James Duthie took over. During his

furlough in England in 1889, Duthie pleaded with the Directors of the society and got their sanction to

upgrade the Seminary into a second grade college and appealed for funds for such an institution. The

Seminary was raised into a second grade college, and affiliated to the Madras University and started

functioning as the Christian College, Nagercoil from February 1893. In Nagercoil, extensions were

needed for the college, and through the munificence of Septimus Scott, a director of the society and a

great friend of Duthie in London,123 a building was erected and was opened in August 1899, and the

college was renamed in to Scott Christian College.124

Industrial Education

As early as 1821, the LMS missionary wife Mrs. Mault who had some knowledge in lace-making,

began to teach this industry to a few girls at Nagercoil.125 Missionary wives Mrs. Abbs and Mrs. Baylis

began the Embroidery Industry. Lace industry was carried on steadily in Nagercoil and Embroidery

Industry in Neyyoor, Marthandam, Parassala and Trivandrum. The workers in these industries were

paid a reasonable salary and the surplus was used mostly in building up institutions intended for

women.126 A school was established for promoting useful arts, in which several boys made progress in

printing and book-binding. One boy was learning the art of tanning and currying leather.127

Chapter IV: Conceptualising Missionary Engagement: Vernacular Education and Intellectual

Consciousness in Madras Presidency

Nobody in the early stages of the development of Indian languages paid greater attention to the study of

native languages than the missionaries.128 The existence of a lingua franca round the Eastern shores of

the Mediterranean has always been recognized as a primary factor in the success of the first gentile

mission.129 This chapter demonstrates how the eminent missionaries like Robert Caldwell, G. U. Pope, 121 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held in 1847 in London, p. 75.122 Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions in India 1707 to 1881., London., 1884, p. 109.123 Septimus Scott was one of the then Directors of LMS.

124 Dick Kooiman; R. N. Yesudas; Jacob ; Samuel Mateer; 125 R.N Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore, Kerala Historical Society, Trivandrum,

1980, p. 82.126 R.N Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore, Kerala Historical Society, Trivandrum,

1980, p. 82.127 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 15 May 1823 in London, p. 71.128 M A Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions in India 1707 to 1881., London., 1884, P. 465. 129 Imperial Latin played a part almost as important as Imperial Greek in the building of the church further West. Beyond the area of such common languages, the capacity of the church to expand and to establish a living tradition appears to have been proportionate to its care for the transition of its Scriptures and Liturgical books into vernacular. It may be

particularly the LMS missionaries John Abbs, John Hands, Benjamin Rice, James Duthie’s effort led

to the establishment of Vernacular schools in different parts of Madras Presidency. This in-depth study

aptly underscores the crucial roles played by Western missionaries’ modern, socio-religious reform

movements through vernacular education and the emergence of intellectual consciousness in the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with an historical understanding.

To the missionaries, education was the vehicle to spread Christianity, an objective also in accord with

the official one. Since it was easy to translate the Bible into the vernacular tongues than to teach the

masses in English, the missionaries promoted the cause of vernacular education. An exception was

Alexander Duff, the Scottish missionary, who argued that it was better to educate the few first in

English and allow them to teach the masses.130 Mountstuart Elphinson, Governor of Bombay and Sir

Thomas Munro, former Governor of Madras, had outlined plans for mass education in the vernaculars.

Even in Bengal, William Adam was authorized in January 1835, to survey existing Vernacular

education and draw up a plan to build upon it,131 and Adam reported that education in the local schools

was ‘superficial and deficitive.’132

The Portuguese were the first to bring Western education in to India by establishing educational centres

at Malabar, Goa, Pondicherry, Mahe, Chandernagore etc., and those schools were generally in the

vernacular, at the elementary level. However, in 1684, in order to strengthen Portugal’s hold on Goa,

Konkani was banned by viceregal decree on June 27, and parish priests and school masters were

instructed to teach only in the colonial language.133 There had been scattered and discontinuous efforts

to learn Sanskrit, particularly by Catholic missionaries like Roberto de Nobili of Madurai in the

seventeenth century.134

In the late years of the eighteenth century, general British incompetence in Indian languages yielded to

noted that Cyril and Methodius of the ninth century Slavonic Mission, who went to China succeeded largely because they gave their converts a vernacular liturgy, reducing an unscripted language into writing for that purpose; and that the Nestorian Mission, went to China in the seventh and eighth centuries, failed largely because they did not concern themselves with vernacular literature. So, centuries later, when the Franciscans came to China they found stone crosses but no Christians.Max Warren (ed). The Triumph of God - A Series of Essays. Longmans, London, 1938, p. 326.130 John D Windhausen, The Vernaculars, 1835-1839: A Third Medium for Indian Education, Sociology of Educatuion,

vol.37, no.3 (Spring, 1964), p. 255.131 John D Windhausen, The Vernaculars, 1835-1839: A Third Medium for Indian Education, Sociology of Education,

vol.37, no.3 (Spring, 1964), p. 256.132 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 52.133 Rudolf C. Heredia, “Education and Mission: School as an Agent of Evangelization,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 37, September, 16, 1995, p. 2333.134 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 25.

a concerted effort to produce a set of texts – grammars, dictionaries, teaching aids- which were to make

the acquisition of a working knowledge of the languages of India available to those British who were to

be part of ruling groups in India.135 Throughout the colonial period the colonial officials felt the

knowledge of Indian languages was the means of gaining a more complex knowledge of the strange

customs, codes, and rules of the Indians, who were in most instances docile, cooperative, and quite

willing to obey the orders and commands of the sahibs,except when ignorance led the latter to offend

the prejudices of the natives.136 Though the translations of Ziegenbalg, William Carey, Joshua

Marshman and William Ward were very far from perfect, they are considered to be the pioneers in the

field, for translating many books in to vernacular and other European languages.137

Alexander Duff found that Brahmans and other caste Hindus who could afford to run vernacular

elementary schools with Bengali as the medium of instruction in Bengal, cooperated with each other to

form small one-teacher schools of their own, classes being held in the home of one of the boys’ parents

and the teacher being paid by the fees raised.138 The missionary attitude of ‘cultural hybridism’139 in

mixing both English and Vernacular schools was a perfect reflection both of the deep missionary

engagements with Indian society and the nature of the educational enterprise itself. For example,

Bishop Whitehead, on a visit to Lucknow in 1907, stated to an audience that English education had

deprived India of her glorious yet unrecognized vernacular literature and argued that what was needed

was not the replacement of one culture and language with another but a hybrid and assimilation of the

best of English and the vernacular.140

During the colonial period, throughout Madras Presidency the Dravidian languages were popular

among the masses, and vernacular education was in their own respective mother tongues. Apart from

Sanskrit, English, Portuguese and French, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tulu were the

most popular languages. Robert Caldwell, a Church of England missionary at Idiankudi in Tinnevelly

district applied the methods that had been so successful in constructing the history of the Indo-

European family of languages to the South-Indian languages, which he labeled as the Dravidian

language family.141 Samuel Mateer, of the LMS viewed that the languages of South India were not

135 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. xiii.136 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 42.137 M. A. Laird, The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1837., Bulletin of SOAS, University of

London,Vol.31, No.1,1968, p. 94. 138 D. H. Emmott, Alexander Duff and modern Education in India, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol.13, No.2.,

May 1965, pp. 160-61. 139 Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London,

2007, p. 86.140 UPSA, Advocate, Lucknow, 26 December, Selection from the Vernacular Newspaper, ‘The Future of Indian

Christianity, by the Bishop of Madras’, The East and the West, 1905, pp. 9-21, quoted in Heyden J A Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial Empire, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2007, p. 86.

141 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 54.

derived from Sanskrit.142 Though there was no proper evidence to say what kind of educational system

was in operation in colonial Madras Presidency, it was sure that education was also controlled by the

castes and was permitted only to the high caste people. T. K. Velupillai says, “it is not possible to date

the beginning of vernacular education143 in Travancore.

From 1860, however, greater emphasis was laid upon Tamil studies and the LMS expressed the view

that English should be regarded as subordinate to the language of the Tamil speaking areas. In 1862, a

decision was taken to stop gradually all teaching in English as far as those educated at the expense of

the LMS were concerned. In support of this decision, the official reports referred to the availability of

a sufficient number of Tamil language class books to pursue studies with advantage solely in the

vernacular and to the need of their countrymen, amongst whom they would be sent for labour.144 The

LMS had developed master plan, and master’s plan for the schoools started in various locations of the

Presidency. The master’s salary was made dependent not only on the number of pupils he had, but on

whether they had written down and could recite from memory the prescribed amount from the

textbooks, to the satisfaction of the Superintendents on their monthly visits.145

Missionaries and Printing

The invention of printing press in the 15th century, and heavy intellectual demand made by the

Reformation and the Renaissance, conspired together to produce a new high level of literacy in north-

western Europe which prepared the way for the printing expansion of the East. According to

Jawaharlal Nehru, “The advent and the use of the printing press gave a great stimulus to the

development of the popular Indian languages146......and the printing of books and news papers broke the

hold of the classics and immediately prose literature in the provincial languages began to develop. The

early Christian Missionaries helped in this process greatly”.147 India received printing serendipitously in

1556, just about a hundred years after printing with movable type was developed in Germany, add was

sent to India in a Portuguese ship that came to Goa.148 Though , ititially it was a monopoly of the

Jesuits, printing became an enterprise of the Protestant missionaries in the eighteenth century.149

142 Samuel Mateer, Land of Charity- Travancore and its People, London, 1870, p. 128-9.143 T. K. Velupillai, The Travancore State Manuel, Vol. III, Government of Travancore, 1940, p. 691.144 Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India: London Missioary Society in South Travancore, Manohar

Publications, New Delhi, 1989, p. 112.145 M. A. Laird, The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1837., Bulletin of SOAS, University of

London, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1968, p. 104.146 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India., Calcutta, 1945, p. 266.147 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India., Calcutta, 1945, p. 266.148 Subbiah Muthiah. Giving India the Printed Word in Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India,

Vol. III., (ed) Andreas Gross et. al., Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle, 2006., p. 1241.149 The Jesuits, who dominated the missionary field in the Tamil country since the arrival of St. Francis Xavier almost 200 years before, expanded their territories throughout South India and by 1700, sources claim that 45000 Christians were under the pastoral care in the fishery coast alone; by 1750, one reliable source claimed a total of

The Lutherans, with the support of the Danish crown and later the London- based Society for the

Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), set up the first printing press on the east coast in 1711.

Within 20 years, the industrious Lutherans had produced more than a 100 books, including the first

ever Tamil translation of the Bible; by the end of the century, they had printed a total of 338 separate

books (Bibles, gospels, catechisms, grammars, dictionaries, almanacs, etc). A few were printed in

German, Dutch, Latin and Danish, many in Portuguese, others increasingly in English, but most of their

books were in Tamil. In the first eight years alone (1712-1720), the Lutherans printed a total of 65

books in all languages, and another 52 in the next decade. By the end of the 18th century, the Lutherans

had produced a total of 338 books, making the Tranquebar press the long-lived and most prodigious of

any in India during the century.150 By 1800 A. D. however, the total number of Tamil publications had

reached 266. This increase was part of a rise in printing throughout India, which saw the number of

printing books grow from a mere 19 in the 16th century and 40 in the 17th century, to 1712 new books

printed in the 18th century.151

Printing in India was to be revived 152- and survive enjoying a thriving life today only early 18th

century. The Danish East India Company, formed in 1616, sought a foothold in a treaty in 1620 with

Rajah Raghunatha Nayak of Tanjavur, by which the Danes were granted the 25 square mile coastal

territory of Tranquebar (Tarangambadi) .153 For a good 125 years of Danish settlement, Tranquebar

played a role that only to modern India. For it was here that modern printing was revived and then

spread throughout India. Moreover, King Frederick IV invited two young Germans, Bartholomaeus

Ziegenbalg and his friend Heinrich Plutschau, to go to India and they established in Tranquebar the

first Protestant Halle- Tranquebar Mission in India, which in turn played a crucial role in laying the

foundation for Protestant Missions in South India. Slowly and steadily, the missions made an indelieble

mark in their educational endeavours.

350,000 Catholics in all South Indian Jesuit missions. More alarming to the Jesuits, the Lutherans had also usurped that other Jesuit specialization, printing in Tamil; although pioneered and controlled by the Jesuits, in the 18th century, Tamil printing became a Lutheran enterprise.Hugald Grafe. The History of Christianity in India, Part IV. CHAI, Bangalore, 1990, pp. 25-26.

150 Stuart Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2003, p.27.151 Ibid., p. 44.152 The Danish East India Company, formed in 1616, sought a foothold in a treaty in 1620 with Rajah Raghunatha Nayak of Tanjavur, by which the Danes were granted the 25 square mile coastal territory of Tranquebar (Tarangambadi).

See Subbiah Muthiah, op.cit., pp. 1242-1243.153 Subbiah Muthiah, op.cit., pp. 1242-1243.

By now, the use of the printing press as an adjunct of missionary work is well established in India.154

The Serampore Trio established the first Bengali newspaper Samachar Darpan and released the first

issue on 31 May 1818,155 and the first printing press in Travancore was installed by the LMS

missionary Charles Mead at Nagercoil156 in 1819. The LMS missionary at Bellary, John Hands

obtained a press and Canarese types from Madras and installed in the mission garden in 1821.157 The

missionaries not only printed the school books, but also used the Christian Literature Society, which

was founded at Madras in 1858, as a channel of print communication.158

Missionaries, Bazar159 Schools and Adult Education

While non-Christian parents were found to be unwilling to send their children to the mission compound

schools, missionaries had to find new ways to get these children. The LMS missionaries constructed a

new building in a public place, near a bazar, in Nagercoil, which was a convenient place for people of

all religions to meet. The Bazar school was started in 1821 and considered to be one of the four

important schools under the mission, and was well attended by Hindus, brahmans and Muslims.160 In

1822, there were 40 children161 and in 1823 the number increased to 50, and the missionaries started

similar schools in different places. Charles Mault, the LMS missionary at Nagercoil writes, “The Bazar

school continues to be examined every week, so likewise do six more out of our immediate

neighborhood...”162 The Bazar schools, perhaps vanished, as there were emerging Evening schools and

Night schools. Now, the missionaries turned their attention towards adults, and the adult literacy work

in the villages enabled many more to learn how to read163 and write. Therefore the Bazar schools might

have been converted into evening schools. The first school evening was opened in 1861, and by 1864

there were 11 such schools in operation and most of the neo-literates were pariahs164

Missionaries, Textbooks and Public Libraries

As early as 1840, the LMS missionary Benjamin Rice at Bangalore, started writing tracts and 154 Ernest De Witt Burton and Alonzo Ketchem Parker, An Professional Reading Course on the Expansion of Christianity

in the Twentieth Century, IV, The Biblical World, Vol. 41, no.5 (May 1913), p. 331. 155 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India 1707-1858, CUP, London, 1985, p. 202.156 R.N Yesudas, A History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore., Kerala Historical Council,

Thiruvananthapuram, p. 151.157 LMS Directors’ Report, 1821, p. 56. See also, Lovett, History of the London Missionary Society, Vol. II, 1899, p. 89.158 Max Warren (ed), The Triumph of God - A Series of Essays. Longmans, London, 1938, p. 330.159 Bazar means market160 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1824 in London, p. 86.161 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 15 May 1823 in London, p. 71.

162 Evangelical Magazine, Nov 1826, p. 490. Extract of Mault’s letter. 163 Wilkinson C R H, Missionary Service in North India., p. 186. 164 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 12 May 1864 in London, p. 94 & 96.

statements of the doctrines of Christianity on the same subjects. He wrote a series of school books, and

an instrumental in establishing a School Book Society in Bangalore, and to which he offered the books

after labouring several years. Rice emphasized the need for a much more extended use of the printing

press, because it was the only means by which a small body of workers can reach and influence the vast

multitudes of a country like India, as India had a population at the end of the 19 thC equal to five times

that of all the rest of the British Empire put together. There were said to be 15,000,000 readers in India

in 1895, and the extension of education was increasing that number year by year. It is also to be stated

here that the LMS had its credit to have started a public library at Nagercoil in 1820.165

Chapter V: London Missionary Society and Women's Education

The educational facilities were very poor for women in India and till the end of the eighteenth century

sufficient attention was not given to them. The high caste people never interested to send their girls out

of the house. The only training available even to the women of the upper caste was elementary moral

instruction and basic lessons on music and dance when they were small girls.166 Even before the

colonial government envisaged the idea of giving education to untouchable girls, the missionaries were

able to open the eyes of the government and compelled them to enter the field. The missionaries

understood clearly that education of women and children were the paramount importance in any

society,167 and liked to put an end to the deplorable state of womenfolk.168

The work done by the wives of the missionaries among the womenfolk needs special consideration.

These ladies did not occupy any official position or salaried post, but as a labour of love, they devoted

a good deal of their time to the supervision of institutions started for the welfare of women. 169 The girls

were educated in schools and prepared for home life.170

In Travancore, the first women’s school 171 was founded by Mrs. Mead at Nagercoil172 in 1819, but to

the surprise of the missionaries, not more than few girls turned up because of the general tendency

existed against women’s education. The LMS’ Bellary mission took the pioneer lead in the education

165 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 10 May 1821 in London, p. 65. 166 R. Narayana Panikkar, History of Travancore, Trivandrum, 1933, p. 287.167 Susan Smith, Moari and Mission Sisters in New Zealand Since 1865: Changing Approaches, International Bulletin for

the Missionary Research , vol.31, no. 2, p. 77.168 Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, London, 1899, p. 151.169 R.N Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore, Kertala Historical Society, Trivandrum,

1980, p. 82.170 Wilkinson C R H, Missionary Service in North India., American Theological Library Association., p. 186.171 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1819 in London, p. 55. It was

realized by the missionary couple Charles Meads to start a school for the most intelligent girls at Nagercoil, to be selected from the other schools. Mrs. Mead, who from her missionary habits, knowledge of the language, proved herself to be a worthy school teacher.

172 Today it is called ‘Duthie Girls School’ in Nagercoil with more than 2000 girl students.

of females by establishing a Female school in 1826173 and was supervised by the missionary wife Mrs.

John Hands. The missionaries published pamphlets and other literature to create awareness and public

support for women’s education174 The missionary women took special interest in the education of girls

by establishing boarding schools175 and they established 15 women’s schools by 1838 and 47 by 1865

including 6 boarding schools. The medium of instruction in the women’s schools was the vernacular

languages. Though the primary importance was given to religious education, subjects like history,

geography, arithmetic and elements of natural philosophy were taught,176 apart from knitting, lace-

making and sewing.177

Missionaries and Medical Education

Allopathic medicine was introduced by the British during the mid- eighteenth century to essentially

cater to the needs of their civilian and military population. The medical missions entered the Indian

subcontinent during the late eighteenth century mainly in those regions which were directly under

British rule. The pioneers of Christian missionary work belonged to both British and American medical

missions. Missionary hospitals in India appear to be better distributed in those states which had

comparatively good institutional and infrastructural facilities. The earliest among them was the LMS

which started work in the early nineteenth century in the Madras Presidency.178 Medical missionaries179

from Zanana Missionary Medical College came to India during nineteenth century and served at

different parts, including Neyyur in South Travancore in the erstwhile Madras Presidency.180 It was

commendable and well received the hundreds of missionaries devoted themselves to medical work

connected with the 610 mission hospitals and dispensaries, where more than three million patients were

annually treated.181

Chapter VI : Education, Depressed Classes and Formation of Alternative Ideology

173 K. Ingham, Reformers in India, Cup, 1956, p. 87.174 C. M. Agur, Church History of Travancore, p. 769. Here, Agur publishes an extract from a 12 page tract titled ‘On the

Advantage of Female Education’. 175 R.N Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore, Kerala Historical Society, Trivandrum,

1980, p. 83.176 John Jacob, A History of the London Missionary Society from 1806 to 1956, Nagercoil, 1959, p. 102.177 C. M. Agur, Church History of Travancore, p. 766.178 Rama Baru, Missionaries in Medical Care, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 34, no. 9 (Feb 27- Mar 5, 1999), p. 521.179 The term ‘medical missionary’ had been used in reference to those ladies,who had not taken the five years’ course, but

had passed successfully a ‘two years’ diploma course and had been working as “missionaries with medical knowledge” in India, China, Burma, Ceylon, Africa, Syria and all those countries where women only were allowed to treat women and their children. See De G Griffith, Medical Missionaries, The British Medical Journal, vol.2, no.1714, 4 Nov 1893, p. 1026.

180 De G Griffith, Medical Missionaries, The British Medical Journal, vol.2, no.1714, 4 Nov 1893, p. 1026. 181 J. P.Jones, The Protestant Missionary Propaganda in India, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol.8, No.1, Jan 1915, p.

33.

Christian missions in India began as an uphill battle especially as it critiqued and challenged the social

evils that lurked so graphically in the establishment of time. They protested the operation of slavery as

an institution and the immolation of widows on the pire of their diseased husbands.182 The Madras

society, like any other society was a caste-ridden society. Referring to the Sangam literature, E. Kunjan

Pillai writes, “Casteless society was the life of Dravidian culture”.183 Only during the tenth and eleventh

centuries when the brahmins established their supremacy over the state, caste system crept into the life

in South Indian society and, since then, brahmins controlled the social structure of the community and

became powerful.184 Nairs, Vellalas were from the Sudra caste, and Nadars,185 Ezhavas, Mudaliars,

Vokaligas etc., enjoyed a social status between the high caste Sudras and the low caste or outcaste

untouchables. European observers of the nineteenth century regarded the caste system of Malabar in

general and Travancore in Particular as the most rigid in the subcontinent.186 The missionary agenda, in

addition to conversion, was to free the people from what they saw as the thralldom of ‘the heathen

caste system’187

Caldwell describes the Nadars as “belonging to the highest division of the lowest class or lowest of the

middle classes, poor, but not paupers”188 and Rajah Rama Rao describes them as “inferior to sudras and

superior to parayas.”189 The lowest section of the society was occupied by the slave caste which was

composed of mainly the parayas, pulayas, pallars, malas, madigas etc., with very poor living conditions

and were treated worst by the caste people.190 Severe taxes were imposed on the lower caste people for

conducting marriages and other functions;191 their presence anywhere in the vicinity of a brahman was

considered to be polluted; and they were not permitted to construct homes and were asked to live in

the fields always. Samuel Mateer, who was an LMS missionary at Pareychaley (Parassala) says, “So

dreadful is the ignorance of the people through want of education .....the ignorance of the Pariahs and

Pulayas, who could never read proclamations themselves, nor ordinary approach the places of public

resort where Government notices are proclaimed”.192 By 1870, half a million low-caste people

constituting no less than one-third of the whole population of Travancore, should be educated,

182 Victor A Raj quoted in D Christudas, Tranquebar to Travancore., ISPCK, New Delhi, 2008, p. xv. 183 Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, Keralam Anchum Arum Nootandukalil (Malayalam Translated), Kottayam, 1924, p. 189. 184 Samuel Mateer, Native Life in Travancore, London, 1883, pp. 31-32.185 Robert Hardgrave., Nadars of Tamil Nadu, OUP, Bombay, 1969, p. 21.186 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 139.187 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 140.188 Robert Caldwell., Tinnevelly Shanars, SPCK, London, 1850, pp. 4-5.189 Rajah Rama Rao., Ramnad Manuel, Madras, 1889, p. 36.190 R N Yesudhas., A Peoples Revolt in Travancore, Kerala Historical Society , Thiruvananthapuram, 1975, p.33.191 Samuel Mateer, Native Life in Travancore., W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1883, p. 333. 192 Samuel Mateer, Native Life in Travancore., W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1883, p. 24-25.

enfranchised, invested with the rights and liberties of citizenship.193 The destitute children of Anglo-

Indian at Bellary were found to be ‘literally naked, merely starved and almost ignorant as brutes’ when

they were taken to Fort Charity School, which was founded by John Hands in 1811, who provided

education with free boarding and clothing. 194

The poor classes were predominantly illiterate, while the middle classes were educated in a proportion

equal to that of countries which were socially and economically much more highly developed195 The

extreme poverty of the masses, the inadequate means of communication, the purdah, child marriage,

child widowhood, the conflict of communal interests and ambitions and the seemingly unbridgeable

chasm between rural and urban life; all of which had operated to prevent the growth of a desire for

education among the masses which were largely rural and agricultural.196

The rapid and astounding success of the Protestant Missions in certain parts of the country was mainly

due to the remarkable facilities they offered for the educational advancement and vocational training of

the poor and depressed classes.197 Guari Viswanathan argues that historically, missionary schools

opened their doors to socially excluded groups, while the schools run by the colonial government had

as their main clientele students from the upper castes. Yet precisely because missionary schools were

so closely identified with lower-caste education, missionaries found their aims compromised by their

desire to lure the upper castes to their schools.198 One of the main reasons for the success of the LMS

missionaries was their involvement in the field of education and using it as a means for change. The

missionaries entered into all areas of society, and their encounter with the intellectuals developed a new

line of thinking and their involvement in the life of the poor and identification with the oppressed gave

the people a new hope.199

George Mc Guire has argued that without missionary schools there would have been no schooling.

People would not have learned to read and write Knowledge is power- it builds bridges it irrigates

fields it saves lives - missionary education did not oppress people. It liberated them.200 Humayun Kabir

has suggested that Christian missionaries in India were the catalysts for a rebirth of learning and

intellectual aspiration. Paul C Quamnia, Secretary of the Fundamental Baptist school Board in Trinidad

193 Samuel Mateer, Land of Charity- Travancore and its People, London, 1870, p. 68.194 Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held May 1820 in London, p. 161.

195 George Allen Odgers, Education in British India, The Phi Delta Kappan, vol.8, no. 2, (Oct., 1925), p. 2.196 George Allen Odgers, Education in British India, The Phi Delta Kappan, vol.8, no. 2, (Oct., 1925), p. 2.197 Thomas Pothancamury, Studies, An Irish Quarterly Review, vol.34, no.136, Dec 1945, p. 468.198 Gauri Viswanathan, Literacy in the Eye of India’s Conversion Storm in Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (eds.)

Conversion: Old Worlds and New, University of Rochester Press, New York, 2003, p. 280. 199 L Sahanam, The Contributions of LMS missionaries in the Field of Education in South Travancore- A Historical

Enquiry., Unpublished M. Th Dissertation submitted to United Theological College, Bangalore, 1976., p.1.200 Clayton G MacKenzie, “Demythologizing the Missionaries: A Re-Assessment of the Functions and the Relationship of

Christian Missionary Education under Colonialism,” Comparative Education, vol. 29, no. 1, 1993, p. 45.

and Tobago has insisted that “missionary schools supported the efforts of ordinary people to arrive at a

free and just society in the face of colonialism.”201 The missionaries undertook the tedious task of

uplifting the depressed classes, made it a policy to establish schools with other organizations.

Charles Mead, the LMS missionary at Trivandrum writes, “in every place where we have a

congregation, a school is also established, principally for the education of illiterates, and it is open to

all.” The LMS missionaries followed a policy of vigorous proselytizing with an educational and

economic programme aimed at changing the economic and legal position of dependable of their low-

caste followers. They established a school for Nadar girls at Nagercoil in which they were trained in

European- style lace making.202

Breast-Cloth Controversy203

The Nadars, among whom the LMS missionaries were to have so much success, are usually described

as palmyra tappers, some were also carters and semi-nomadic; others were agricultural laborers and

tenants of Nair landlords. They were concentrated in the Southern and South Western tip of India, some

in the Ramnad and Tinnevelly districts of Madras Presidency, and others across the border in South

Travancore.204 Nadar women could not carry pots on their hips nor could they cover the the upper part

of their bodies.205 In the case of Travancore, in order to support the depressed class Nadar women, who

were always oppressed by the upper castes like Nairs and Namboothiris, by not allowing them anything

to wear above their hip, the wives of the missionaries had designed and produced a loose jacket that

met their criteria for modest clothing that befitted them.206 Although permission to cover the upper part

of the person had been given to the lower castes, they were still by law restricted to the use of coarse

cloth.207 The controversy over breast cloth, which is narrated and analyzed by a number of historians

and writers, lives on and the battle waged by the Nadar women as a victory in the march of progress

against untouchable habits, customs, and privileges of orthodox Hindus, who were the representatives

of a pleasure loving feudal caste-culture.208

Unquestionably, the interference of missionaries in day-to-day activities of the people in Madras

Presidency opened up vistas for the so-called depressed classes to have public spaces. The chapter also

makes an attempt to critically analyze the attempt made by missionaries to create a powerful and

201 Clayton G MacKenzie, “Demythologizing the Missionaries: A Re-Assessment of the Functions and the Relationship of Christian Missionary Education under Colonialism,” Comparative Education, vol. 29, no. 1, 1993, p. 45.

202 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 140.203 The term ‘Breast- cloth controversy’ was first coined by Robert Hardgrave 204 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 139.205 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 139.206 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 141.207 Samuel Mateer, Land of Charity- Travancore and its People, London, 1870, p. 67.208 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997, p. 142.

thought-provoking domestic force of socio-political reforms including Justice Party, Temple entry

movements, and self-respect movements led by a group of forward-thinking intellectuals who not only

promoted the learning of missionaries’ Western ideas but also advocated the adoption of Western

socio-political thinking. Reform minded intellectuals including Periar led an unrelenting campaign

criticizing traditional practices of the so-called superior community and introduced Western rational

ideologies and practices in a fairly systematic fashion to create a modern, middle class intelligentsia.

Chapter VII : Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Agur, C. M. Church History of Travancore, SPS Press, Madras, 1903.Buchanan, Claudius, Christian Researches , London, 1806.Caldwell, Robert , The Tinnevelly Shanars, Madras. 1849.Ellis, William, History of London Missionary Society, John Snow & Co., London, 1841.Hacker, I H, A Hundred Years in Travancore1806-1906. A History and description of the Work done

by LMS in Travancore. 1908.Holmes, T W, Ringletaube: Pioneer Missionary to India, London, 1900. Horne, C S , The Story of the LMS, London, 1895.Hough, James, History of Christianity in India, Vols. I-V, London, 1839.Hutten, W. H, Indian Rulers, Oxford, 1897.Lovett, Richard, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895, OUP, London, 1899.Mateer, Samuel, The Land of Charity – Travancore and its People with reference to Missionary

Labour, London, 1871.__________ , Native Life in Travancore, London. 1884.Mill, James Stuart, History of British India, London, 1825.Nagam Aiya, The Travancore State Manual, Vols. I-III, Trivandrum, 1903.Panikkar, R. Narayana, History of Travancore, Trivandrum, 1933Pillai, Elamkulam Kunjan, Keralam Anchum Arum Nootandukalil (Malayalam Translated), Kottayam,

1924.Rao, Rajah Rama, Ramnad Manuel, Madras, 1889.Richter, Julius, History of Protestant Missions in India, Edinburgh, 1908.Robinson, William, Ringeltaube, the Rishi, Sheffield, Sheffield Independent Press, 1908.Sherring, M A, The History of Protestant Missions in India, London, 1884.Velupillai, T. K. The Travancore State Manuel, Vol.III, Government of Travancore, Trivandrum, 1940.

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1900, CUP, London, 1989 ; Popular Christianity, Caste and Hindu Society in Sdouth India, 1800-1915: A Study of Travancore and Tirunelveli

Beidelman, T .O, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982.

Bellenoit, Hayden J A, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860-1920, Pickerring and Chatto, London, 2007.Blackburn, Stuart, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2003.Brown, Leslie, The Indian Christians of St.Thomas – An Account of the Ancient Syrian Church of

Malabar, CUP, 1982.Carnoy, Martin, Education as Cultural Imperialism, David Mckay Company, New York, 1967.Chandra, Bipan, History of Modern India, New Nelhi, 1971.Christudas, D, Tranquebar to Travancore., ISPCK, New Delhi, 2008.Cohn, Bernard S, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1997.Das, Santhosh Kumar, The Educational System of the Ancient Hindus, Calcutta, 1933Dowley, Tim, Eerdman’s handbook to The History of Christianity, Eerdman’s Publishing Company,

Michigan, USA, 1977,Elliot-Binns, L. E, Religion in the Victorian Era, Lutterworth Press, London,1946.Fisher-Tine, Michael Mann, Colonialism as Civilising MissionForrester, Duncan B, Caste and Christianity : Attitudes and Policicies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon

Protestant Missions in India, Curzon Press, London, 1980.Ghosh, S. C, The History of Education in Modern India 1757-1998, O0rient Longman, New Delhi,

2000.Grafe, Hugald, The History of Christianity in India, Part IV. CHAI, Bangalore, 1990,Grafton, Anthony, (eds.) Conversion: Old Worlds and New, University of Rochester Press, New York,

2003Hardgrave, Robert, Nadars of Tamil Nadu, OUP, Bombay, 1969.Hudson, Dennis, Protestant Origins in IndiaIngham, K, Reformers in India, Cup, 1956.Jacob, John A, A History of the LMS in South Travancore 1806-1959, Nagercoil, 1959.Daniel Jeyaraj, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg: The First Protestant Missionary to India, Indian Society

for Promoting Christian Knowledge, New Delhi, 2006.Kawashima, Koji, Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858-1936 . Oxford, New Delhi, 2003.Kooiman, Dick, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London Missionary Society in South

Travancore in the Nineteenth Century, Manohar, New Delhi, 1989.Mangan, J. A, (ed.) The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British colonial

experience, Routledge, London, 1993.Manickam, S, Studies in Mission History, The Christian Literature Society, Madras, 1988. Menon, Shangoony, Thiruvithamcore Charithram (Malayalam Translation), Trivandrum, 1968.Mundadan, J. M, History of Christianity in India, Vol.1, Church History Association of India,

Bangalore, 1989Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery of India., Calcutta, 1945.Neill, Stephen, A History of Christian Missions, CUP, London, 1964.Neill, Stephen, A History of Christianity in India from the beginning till 1707, CUP, London, 1984.Neill, Stephen, A History of Christianity in India 1707-1858, CUP, London, 1985.

Oddie, Geoffrey A, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms 1850-1900, Manohar, New Delhi, 1979.

Pathak, Sushil Madhav, American Missionaries and Hinduism, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 1967.Robinson, Rowena, Christians of India, Oriet Longman, New Delhi, 2001.Said, Edward, Orientaslism, New York, 1978,Singh, Brijraj, The First Protestant Missionary to India Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, OUP, New Delhi,

1998.Sreedhara Menon, A, Kerala Gazateers, Trivandrum.Thapar, Romila Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, Orient Longman, 1978, New

DelhiFisher - Tine, Herold, Michael Mann (eds.), Colonialism as Civilizing MissionViswanathan, Gauri, Mask of Conquest, OUP, New Delhi, 1989. ________________, Outside the Fold, OUP, New Delhi, 1998.Visvanathan, Susan, Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba , OUP, New

Delhi, 1999.Warren, Max (ed)., The Triumph of God - A Series of Essays. Longmans, London, 1938,Yesudhas, R N, A Peoples Revolt in Travancore, Kerala Historical Society , Thiruvananthapuram,

1975. Yesudas, R.N, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore, Kerala Historical Society,

Trivandrum, 1980, Zastoupil, Lynn, M. Moir (eds.), The Great Education Debate: Documents Related to the Orientalist-

Anglicist Conroversy, 1781-1843, Curzon, Richmond,1999

Articles

Baru, Rama, Missionaries in Medical Care, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 34, no. 9 (Feb 27- Mar 5, 1999).

Beaglehole, J. H, “The Indian Christians - A Study of a Minority,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1967Carel Devens, “If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race”: Missionary Education of Native American

Girls, Journal of World History, Vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall, 1992) pp. 219-137.Dunch, Ryan, Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global

Moderniy, History and Theory, Blackwell Publishing, Vol. 41, No. 3. (Oct 2002).Emmott, D. H, Alexander Duff and modern Education in India, British Journal of Educational Studies,

Vol.13, No.2., May 1965,Frykenberg, Robert Eric, “Modern Education in South India, 1784-1854: Its roots and Its Role as a Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj”. The American Historical Review, Vol.91, No. 1, Feb 1986.Gostling, Sarah S, Education in India: ‘Why it takes more to cure a European of ignorance than it does

a native’, LSE Selected pamphlets, 1885.Griffith, De G, Medical Missionaries, The British Medical Journal, vol.2, no.1714, 4 Nov 1893.Johnston, Anna, The Book Eaters: Textuality, Modernity, and the London Missionary Society,

American Theological Library Journal , Semeia,Jones, J. P, The Protestant Missionary Propaganda in India, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol.8,

No.1, Jan 1915.Laird, M. A, The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1837., Bulletin of

SOAS, University of London,Vol.31, No.1,1968

MacKenzie, Clayton G “Demythologizing the Missionaries: A Re-Assessment of the Functions and the Relationship of Christian Missionary Education under Colonialism,” Comparative Education, vol. 29, no. 1, 1993

Muthiah, Subbiah, Giving India the Printed Word in Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India, Vol. III., (ed) Andreas Gross et. al., Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle, 2006., Murray, Kirsteen, In the Shadow of the Missionary Captain: Captain James Wilson and the LMS

Mission to the Pacific, International Bulletin for the Missionary Research , vol.31, no. 2,Odgers, George Allen, Education in British India, The Phi Delta Kappan, vol.8, no. 2, (Oct., 1925).Rudolf C. Heredia, “Education and Mission: School as an Agent of Evangelization,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 37, September, 16, 1995.Pothancamury, Thomas, Studies, An Irish Quarterly Review, vol.34, no. 136, Dec 1945.Smith, Powis, The Church and Education, The Journal of Religion, vol. 4, no.1, January 1924.Susan Smith, Moari and Mission Sisters in New Zealand Since 1865: Changing Approaches, International Bulletin for the Missionary Research , vol.31, no. 2.Wilkinson, C. R. H, Missionary Service in North India., American Theological Library Association,Williams, C. P, ‘Not Quite Gentlemen’ : an Examination of ‘Middling Class’ Protestant Missionaries from Britain, 1850-1900, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 31, No. 3, July 1980, pp. 301-315.Windhausen, John D, The Vernaculars, 1835-1839: A Third Medium for Indian Education, Sociology

of Education, vol.37, no.3 (Spring, 1964).

Reports

1806 - Ringeltaube’s letter to his friend in London, requesting him to influence the Directors for sending $100 for the purpose of constructing the church and school buildings1809 - Ringeltaube’s letter to the Directors of LMS, London, after establishing the English school at

Mayiladi. Extract of the letter is seen in “Caldwell, R., Records of the Early History of Tinnevelly”, Madras, 1881, pp. 138-139.

1811- David Bogue, A Sermon on the Death of the Reverend George Cran, Augustus Desgranges and Jonathan Brain, Missionaries in India from London Missionary Society, preached at Gosport,

17 March, 1811, American Edition, Boston.1812 - Ringeltaube’s letters to his sister Redeppenning, living in Stettin, stating his work in South

TravancoreRingeltaube’s misison reports to the Directors in London.Missionary Records - Reports of the Directors of the LMS submitted in the Annual General Body Meeting (AGM) held in the second week of May every year since 1796 (the entire reports are with School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and Church History Archives and Library at United Theological College, Bangalore has reports (24 files) starting from 1818). Report of the Directors of the LMS in the Annual General Meeting held on 13 May 1819 in London.

Journals & Magazines

Church History ReviewChurch Missionar IntelligencerDesopakari (Tamil - startaed in 1862 at Nagercoil by LMS)Evangelical Magazine Friend of India

International Review of MissionsMadras MailMadras GazetteMadras CourierMissionary ChronicleOriental MagazineStudies in Church History

From Tranquebar, where a Tamil printing press eventually turned out a steady stream of basic materials, such schools

gradually spread northward to Madras, inland to Tanjore and Trichinopoly, and southward to Palamcottah. By the 1780s

schools run by Christian Friedrich Schwartz and his associates (John Z. Kiernander, Daniel Joseph Jaenicke, Christian

Wilhelm Gericke, John Kasper Kohloff, Philip Fabricius, among others) were attracting non-Christian students, especially

Brahmans and Vellalars, who hoped that the new learning would better quality them for positions within the rapidly

expanding establishments of the Company.209

209 Koji Kawashama, Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858-1936 . Oxford, New Delhi, 2003, P.