Cultural Encounters in India

The Local Co-workers of Tranquebar Mission, 18th to 19th Centuries

Heike Liebau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351470650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The book is an English translation of an award winning German book. The history of social and religious encounter in 18th century South India is narrated through fascinating biographies and day to day lives of Indian workers in the Tranquebar Mission (1706-1845). The book challenges the notion that Christianity in colonial India was basically imposed from the outside. Liebau maintains that significant contributions were made by the local converts and mission co-workers who played an important role in the Tranquebar Mission.

CHAPTER ONE

History of the Tranquebar Mission

The eighteenth century was an age of equilibrium between a small Europe and a large Asia.¹ Asia could be compared to Europe as long as Europe did not consider itself to be beyond comparison.²

Every Christian mission has several histories. Depending on the perspective and the research interest of the historian it is the history of the mission in its place of origin or, rather, the histories of missionary encounters in places where the mission society was active. If one foregrounds those responsible for the mission, their motives, their work and the results of their work, the histories of mission encounters can be perceived and reconstructed as part of the history of the missionizing society. If attention is directed at the society and people whose conversion was the aim of missionary activity, these encounters can be seen as a part of the history of the missionized. In this case one must ask how these people dealt with the mission, how their lives were impacted by missionary work but also how they used their changed identities to influence missionary work.

An important condition for such an approach is to view Christian mission as a reciprocal phenomenon in which the missionizing and the missionized are part of a process of communication in whatever form this may be. Since the end of the 1970s secular historians have been increasingly making use of mission sources for research on regional histories. In these works missionary activity is perceived as a multi-dimensional process of convergence and demarcation, and sometimes ‘the pivotal role of the local “co-workers” becomes the focus of interest’.³ Along with the exploration of mission history in the literal sense missionary sources are also used to study non-European Christian history or the history of the Church,⁴ whereby especially adherents of a contextual history of Christianity take into account the connection between religion and society⁵ and increasingly emphasize socio-historical methods. Thus, a study of mission history also brings the social history of a region into focus.

While it is true that research on mission history still predominantly studies the one-sided perception of the non-European world by European Christians, there have been, since the 1980s, analyses—in different forms and with different concerns—of missionary encounters as a translocal and intercultural phenomenon.⁶ This also applies to the study of missionary work in India. For a long time the contact between European missionaries and the Indian population was studied exclusively from a European perspective. An important reason for this is that most of the relevant sources are stored in European archives and, as a rule, these documents are written in European languages. In his paper at the conference in Berlin on ‘Mission history—Church history—World history’ in 1994 Werner Ustorf stated that in recent publications mission historians had extended their research to the consequences of missionary presence in the relevant region and had brought the ‘other side’ into the focus of their studies.⁷ However, he felt that this new understanding of missionary work as a reciprocal process of understanding the other was slow in establishing itself.

Within the substantial research on questions concerning religious and social change in the South-Asian sub-continent there has been an increase in the number of studies that specifically study Christian groups and the correlation between Christianity and society. These studies have been initiated and primarily carried out by representatives of Christian communities as well as by church and mission historians. Some of the studies focus on the role of Christian churches or missions in their social environment,⁸ while other recent studies centre round the self-understanding of Indian Christians based on a study of prominent Indian Christian personalities.⁹ Such studies arise out of the need to explore the formation and development of Indian Christianity. Some studies, oriented towards religious or social history, look at the interaction between Christianity and Hindu-dominated society, especially the phenomenon of caste and Christianity.¹⁰ They represent a growing trend towards more comprehensive, problem-oriented, systematic studies of socio-historical questions in connection with the development of Christian communities in India.¹¹ More recent socio-historical studies regarding the question of religious identity-consciousness among Indian Christians find themselves increasingly committed to the conceptional approach defined by the project of the Church Association of India/Bangalore (CHAI) carried out since the 1970s to describe the history of Christianity in India as an integral part of the socio-economic history of the sub-continent and to focus on the self-conception of Indian Christians.¹² A longish section in the third volume of this series deals with the history of the Tranquebar Mission and, along with the religious context, the political and social conditions that influenced the development of the mission are also described.¹³ Furthermore, there are also increasing attempts to analyze the work of individual mission societies, their integration in and their interaction with the local society as well as their role in changing this society. This is accompanied by the attempt to outline the identity markers of converts and their changed social mobility.¹⁴ The authors proceed from an understanding of the role of Christianity as a mobilizing factor that leads to social change.¹⁵

In the case of the Tranquebar Mission¹⁶ attempts to write a history (histories) of the mission also focused mainly on the European mission society and its missionaries. Academic interest in the Mission began directly after its work in India came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century. Mission scholars, scholars of religion and church historians studied the history of the mission from various perspectives and with differing motives. Individual studies that went beyond the nature of edifying religious tracts, but which, to all intents and purposes, were meant to portray the exemplary function of the Mission or of individual missionaries, appeared already in the 1830s and 1840s.¹⁷ Studies by representatives of mission societies that followed the Tranquebar Mission analyzed both its missionary work in the narrower sense as well as the scholarly work of the Halle missionaries in South India.¹⁸

In the twentieth century scholarly interest in the Tranquebar Mission was relocated in the field of theology as well as in mission and church history.¹⁹ Questions of scientific history were also taken up, but these studies were selective and often remained rudimentary.²⁰ Socio-historical and political aspects of Christian missionary work were seldom examined in the context of the Tranquebar Mission.²¹ Very little has also been done in the last 150 years with regard to biographical research on missionaries or Indian mission employees. The biographical studies on Christian Friedrich Schwartz (1726–1798)²² or Johann Philipp Fabricius (1711–1791)²³ are, by now, in need of revision. Comprehensive individual biographies of personalities such as Benjamin Schultze (1689–1760), Christoph Theodosius Walther (1699–1740/41) or even Christoph Samuel John (1747–1813) are still not available. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg is the only missionary of the Tranquebar Mission who enjoys the continuous attention of scholars.²⁴

Parallel to the increasing study of missionary work as a form of intercultural encounter, new studies in the context of the history of the Tranquebar Mission have also moved away from a mission-oriented perspective and focus not only on the effects on Tamil society but partly also on the interaction between mission and society.²⁵

The search for the Indian Christian past also includes attempts to study the development of local congregations or the biographies of eminent Indian Christians. With reference to the Tranquebar Mission the interest in the European ‘fathers’ of the Lutheran Church is accompanied by the desire to reconstruct the Indian contribution to this development.²⁶ Historical research has been conducted in a systematic and focused manner, among other places, in the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, Chennai to study the Lutheran tradition in Tamil Nadu.²⁷ In preparation of the tercentenary of the first Protestant mission in India the Gurukul-college established a Lutheran Heritage Project. In co-operation with the Francke Foundations at Halle (Saale) workshops were conducted, some of which resulted in the publication of edited volumes.²⁸ In the anniversary year 2006 a three-volume publication was brought out with German-Indian co-operation which comprehensively documents the current international research in the area.²⁹

Despite all the changes in scholarly research on mission history in general and on the Tranquebar Mission in particular, many studies still have one thing in common: they are written from the perspective of the European founders of the mission with European-Christian concerns about missionary work in mind. The reasons for this and for other lacunae in research on the Tranquebar Mission can be found, on the one hand, in the narrow understanding of mission as part of religious and church history—an understanding that is evident in many studies and which does not allow one to consider mission history as part of the social history of a region.³⁰ On the other hand, access to the sources is important. Although mission archives are as accessible to a historian as the archives of other institutions, the structure and character of the sources do not necessarily suggest their use for research in social history. In addition, since the documents on the history of the Tranquebar Mission are largely in German, South Asian scholars often find it difficult to use them.³¹ As far as the DEHM is concerned, the work with the German original manuscripts of the eighteenth century requires a special knowledge of 18^th century language and script. The published mission reports³² are comprehensive but have been censored. Indexes are mostly incomplete or non-existent. Collections of documents that have been published till now do not take a potentially broader scholarly interest into account. They focus on the work of individual personalities, mainly from the early period of the mission.³³ Even the most recent editions of source materials remain within the traditionally dominant study of the early Tranquebar Mission.³⁴ The comprehensive efforts of the Francke Foundations in recent years to digitalize and catalogue its source materials will not only make it easier to access these documents in the future, but will surely also lead to new editorial projects.³⁵

A comprehensive and systematic study of the structure, formation, development and characterization of the group of Indian mission employees has remained a research desiderate. In most recent research on the Danish-English-Halle Mission we see first signs of an inclusion of local co-workers in the study. Even though, as a rule, the local employees still appear in the company of ‘their’ European missionaries, they are no longer merely the recipients of instructions, but persons whose actions could have, by all accounts, influenced the missionaries.³⁶

In its approach this study builds upon the now emerging attempts to change the dominant perspective in studies of mission history. In...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Approaches to an Intermediary Group
• Chapter 1 History of the Tranquebar Mission
• Chapter 2 Local Mission Workers
• Chapter 3 The Hierarchical Structure of the Mission Organization
• Chapter 4 Dialogue and Conflict
• Chapter 5 The Role of Local Mission Employees in Education
• Chapter 6 Women in the Tranquebar Mission
• Concluding Observations: Indian Mission Employees and European-Indian Cultural Contact
• Biographies of South Indian Country Pastors
• Abbreviations
• Maps, Illustrations and Tables
• Note on the Spelling of Indian Terms
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Sources
• Name of Persons
• Name of Places