Studies in World Christianity

American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836-1870

Arun W. Jones

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781481307314
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The firstChristian communities were established among the population of Hindi- and Urdu-speaking North India during the middle of the nineteenth century. The evangelical North American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries who arrived in what were considered the Hindu heartlands discovered a social and religious landscape far more diverse than expected. With its Hindu majority and significant Muslim minority, the region also proved home to reform and renewal movements both within and beyond Hinduism. These movements had already carved out niches for religious difference, niches where Christianity took root. In Missionary Christianity and Local Religion Arun Jones documents the story of how preexisting indigenous bhakti movements and western missionary evangelicalism met to form the cornerstone for the foundational communities of North Indian Christianity. Moreover, while newly arrived missionaries may have reported their exploits as totally fresh encounters with the local population, they built their work on the existing fledgling gatherings of Christians such as European colonial officials, merchants, and soldiers, and their Indian and Eurasian family members. Jones demonstrates how foreign missionaries, Indian church leaders, and converts alike all had to negotiate the complex parameters of historic Indian religious and social institutions and cultures, as well as navigatethe realities of the newly established British Empire. Missionary Christianity and Local Religion provides portrayals and analyses of the ideas, motivations, and activities of the diverse individuals who formed and nurtured a flourishing North Indian Christian movement that was both evangelical and rooted in local religious and social realities. This exploration of new Christian communities created by the confluences and divergences between American evangelical and Indian bhakti religious traditions reveals the birth and early growth of one of the many incarnations of Christianity.

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The Religious Context in North India

Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity

American missionaries to India arrived in a religiously rich and pluralistic society. Moreover, it was a society that was rapidly changing in many ways, including its understandings and practices of religion. Missionaries’ knowledge and opinions of the richness and the malleability of the religions of the communities where they landed varied. Yet missionary perceptions and attitudes alone did not determine how American Christianity was received in India. The nature of existing Indian religious traditions had a profound impact on the ways in which this new American Evangelicalism was interpreted and situated in Hindi North India.

One important characteristic of Indian religion in the nineteenth century is that the boundaries between various traditions could be highly porous.1 There were Muslims who observed caste, and Hindus who venerated a Muslim saint or a saint’s tomb. Hindus and Muslims could be found living together in the same village, influencing each other’s beliefs and practices.2 Various sects combined Hindu and Muslim beliefs in creative ways, while the Brahmo Samaj had been deeply influenced by Protestantism in its reconstruction and practice of Hinduism.3 Thus while one needs to identify important markers and characteristics of various religious traditions in nineteenth-century Hindi North India, it is important to keep in mind that religious crossing and borrowing were common features of life.

Hinduism

Hinduism in India, with its vast philosophical, theological, textual, ritual, and social apparatus, along with the great variety of its manifestations, resists any easy description, and even its characterization as a single religion has been much debated.4 In fact, missionaries recognized the great diversity of what was termed Hinduism, even as they were highly critical of it. “[The Hindu religion] is a huge conglomeration of philosophical speculations, poetical fancies, ancient traditions, morality, and immorality; some traces of an original revelation, mixed with a thousand jarring opinions of hundreds of different sects, all jumbled together in confusion, and varied into countless forms by vulgar prejudices and local superstitions,” wrote one nineteenth-century Presbyterian missionary in Saharanpur.5

For Christians of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most striking contrast between their own and Hindus’ notions of the divine was the latter’s acceptance of “the polytheistic imagination.”6 The religion of the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, is “decidedly polytheistic,” and the deities number in the thousands, even millions.7 Missionaries noted with despair this feature of Hinduism: “Heathen temples are all around us, and every day we witness the idolatry of the people.”8 The importance granted to any particular divinities varied not only from area to area but from group to group and even person to person. Local village divinities—and in the nineteenth century the great majority of Indians lived in villages—were very important to rural people. One missionary described a village shrine of deities as “stones on a low platform of earth.” They were given libations of water in the morning and “strewn with an offering of flowers.”9

Yet along with noting the profusion of divinities in India, Christians also acknowledged that at least theologically knowledgeable Hindus believed in what the former variously termed as one “Supreme Being” or “Divine Spirit” or “one self-existing and all-pervading spirit . . . [who] is Brahm.”10 According to missionary sources, this divine unitary principle or spirit was most widely manifest in three deities: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Each of these gods had a corresponding consort or wife: Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati/Durga/Uma, respectively.11 Among these divinities, Brahma had only one temple (in Rajasthan), so he was not offered ritual worship; the other deities and their avatars, or incarnations, were popular and worshiped all over North India.12 In the nineteenth century, at least one Hindu reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj, took up the worship of Brahma as a way to advocate for monotheism.13

In North India the most familiar pan-Indian gods were Vishnu and Shiva, with their respective consorts Lakshmi and Devi. Vishnu had many more followers than Shiva in the Gangetic Plains, and Vishnu was best known in the region as his avatars of Krishna and Rama, in part because the religious sites most associated with these two avatars are found in Hindi North India.14 The forested area of Vrindavan, northwest of Agra on the road to Delhi, is where, according to tradition, Krishna grew up, and stories abound from his childhood and youth. The great king and god Rama, central character of the epic Ramayana, was born in and had his capital at Ayodhya, where he reigned (after great travails) with his queen Sita. Ayodhya is eighty-five miles east of the city of Lucknow, capital of the kingdom of Awadh during the first half of the nineteenth century. Shiva, on the other hand, was said to reside in the city of Benares (Varanasi or Kashi), the city holiest to Hindus. His consort Shakti or Devi is also prominent in the region’s pantheon. Among village deities, those associated with disease and fertility—both human and agricultural—were very influential in people’s lives. These included Shitala, the goddess of small pox, and the divine mothers, or matrkas, who are connected with childbirth and childhood.15 Most North Indian Hindus, of whatever religious tradition or group, did not see the need to worship one particular deity exclusively, even though special worship and veneration could be accorded to one deity or a certain configuration of deities. As one missionary observed, “[T]hough each person worships more particularly some one or more of the deities, they generally acknowledge the existence and power of them all.”16

Leaving aside bhakti communities, much Hindu worship, or puja, unlike Jewish, Christian, or Muslim worship, generally is not congregationally based. A visitor to a Hindu temple or other holy site could have been struck by the size of the throngs of worshipers and devotees. Yet they had not come together as one people to join in worship; Hindu worship was fundamentally a personal affair, transacted between the individual and the deity to whom one had gone for darshan, and to whom one offered gifts and sacrifices. One missionary noted that this different view of worship had resulted in different architecture for Christian and Hindu houses of worship: “The Hindu temples have no accommodation for a worshipping assembly, the great majority of them being only just large enough for the image they shelter and the priest to officiate at the altar.”17 The important exceptions to the personal nature of Hindu devotion were (and are) village festivals, where certain rituals—such as animal sacrifices—have been communal.

Darshan literally means “seeing,” and when Hindus come before a divine image, they wish to see and be seen by that divinity. What to Jews, Christians, and Muslims is idol worship is not so for Hindus, for the latter believe that the deity is actually present in the divine form before them.18 The personal nature of communion with the divine also holds true in other religious rituals, such as bathing in sacred waters or going on pilgrimage to sacred sites. While a person may have gone to bathe or on pilgrimage with many other people, those people were not crucial to the religious activity and transaction. It is the individual’s personal devotion and practice that affect her or his life and relationship with the divine. Public worship in temples and shrines can therefore take place whenever it is convenient for the worshiper and whenever the divine image is available for the worshiper’s devotion and sacrifice. That being said, most if not all religious ritual and worship are determined by and carried out in the context of one’s social group: one’s family, caste, and society. Patterns of ritual and worship are thus deeply governed by one’s social and geographical location.

Besides public worship, Hindus have engaged in domestic worship in their homes. For those of high caste or of wealth, these rituals may be highly elaborate and costly; one may hire a Brahmin priest to perform them on one’s behalf. As one nineteenth-century Christian author put it, “Piety of an exalted nature or such as is spoken of in the Hindoo Shasters is required only of the higher castes.”19 Or the rituals could be simple acts of worship and religious practice such as proper bathing and cleaning of oneself and one’s house or lighting incense before an image, acts that can be accomplished by the humblest person. Timing is more important in these household rituals than in visits to temples or shrines; certain acts have to be performed at certain times of day.20

Nineteenth-century missionaries made much of what they considered inhumane Hindu rituals; these the missionaries said simply proved the immorality of “paganism” or “heathenism.”21 One cause célèbre was widow immolation, known as sati, in which a widow climbed the funeral pyre of her husband to be burned to death. The British outlawed the practice in Bengal in 1829.22 Other frequently cited examples of religious cruelty were hook swinging, which involved swinging a religious devotee through the air by means of a large metal hook inserted in his back, and deaths at the yearly festival of ratha-yatra (literally, chariot journey), when a figure of the god Jagannath (literally, Lord of the Worlds), a form of Krishna, was pulled in a monumental cart through the city of Puri, where his temple is located. By accident and also due to devotional fervor, people were crushed under its wheels every year.23 Such rituals were deeply disturbing to evangelical missionaries, yet they made sense to the people who participated in them. Hindus believed that religious acts of mortification of the flesh—which are certainly known in Christian and Muslim traditions—assisted the “soul” (atman) in attaining “salvation,” which for them was liberation (moksha) from the cycle of transmigration. Regarding deaths during Jagannath’s ratha-yatra, one missionary argued, “Occasionally men have voluntarily cast themselves under these wheels [of the cart]; but it is because they are weary of life, and imagining that their sins are removed, and fearing lest on their return to ordinary life they should again do evil, they think that it is well to put an end to it at such a holy place.”24

The communal dimension of Hinduism has been most manifest in religious holidays and festivals. In the nineteenth century, these varied from region to region; it should not be assumed that the same festivals were important in Bengal as in the North-Western Provinces. In Hindi North India, the festival of Holi was perhaps the greatest religious holiday of the year.25 It is associated with Krishna and his “love-sport with the gopis,” and also with the vanquishing of the demoness Holika.26 In the nineteenth century, its most conspicuous public manifestation was celebrants throwing colored powder at passersby. Ishuree Dass, writing in the middle of the century, also reported that people lit bonfires as part of the celebrations, and he likened it to Christmas for Christians as far as the amount of celebration that occurs.27

The other festival that Dass explained at some length is that of Divali, “the festival of Lamps,” which he claimed “is celebrated in honour of Lakshmee, wife of Vishnoo, and the goddess of wealth and prosperity; and also in commemoration of a victory that Vishnoo had over a great giant.”28 He continued, “[W]hen the day arrives, [people] bathe themselves, put on clean clothes, and in the evening illuminate their houses with lamps.” Sweets are plentiful during Divali, and the festival “is particularly devoted to the goddess of wealth and prosperity, for which pooja is performed and invocations made.”29

One othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Religious Context in North India
• Chapter 2. The Religious Context in North India
• Chapter 3. The Missionaries
• Chapter 4. Indian Workers and Leaders
• Chapter 5. Theology in a New Context
• Chapter 6. Community in a New Context
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Places
• Index of Subjects and Names