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Communications Between Cultures: Difficulties in the Design and Distribution of Christian Literature in Nineteenth-Century India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Graham W. Shaw
Graham W. Shaw*
Affiliation:
The British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections
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Extract

The nineteenth century, saw the heyday of Protestant missionary activity in the Indian subcontinent. South Asia – even then with one fifth of the world’s population – was such a magnet for Christian missionaries that it was estimated that one-third of all such ‘labourers in foreign lands’ were operating there. This was despite the deliberate policy of the East India Company to discourage missionary activity in India (used throughout this paper in the old sense of ‘undivided India’) as liable to foment unrest and therefore upset the economic health of the country which from the Company’s perspective was of paramount importance, not its spiritual well-being. This antipathy was the reason, for instance, why William Carey and colleagues founded their famous pioneering mission in 1798 not in Calcutta in the Company’s territory but further up the Hooghly river in the tiny settlement of Serampore then under Danish rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 38: The Church and the Book , 2004 , pp. 339 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 See Richter, Julius, A History of Missions in India (Edinburgh and London, 1908), 128–9 Google Scholar.

2 See Potts, E.D., British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837: the History of Serampore and its Missions (Cambridge, 1967 Google Scholar).

3 See Shaw, Graham W., ‘The Cuttack Mission Press and early Oriya printing’, British Library Journal, 3 (1977), 31 Google Scholar.

4 Table taken from Joseph Mullens, A Brief Review of Ten Years’ Missionary Labour in India Between 1852 and 1861 (1863), 175.

5 On the efforts of British pioneer linguists in India see, for instance, Kopf, D., British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Calcutta, 1969 Google Scholar).

6 Conference on Urdu and Hindi Christian Literature, held at Allahabad, 24th and 25th February, 1875 (Madras, 1875), 7.

7 See Powell, Avril A., Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India, London Studies on South Asia, 7 (Richmond, 1993), ch. V–VI Google Scholar.

8 Mullens, Brief Review, 163.

9 Ibid., 153.

10 Sutton, Amos, A Narrative of the Mission to Orissa (Boston, 1833), 282 Google Scholar.

11 See Robinson, Francis, ‘Islam and the impact of print in South Asia’, in Cook, N., ed., The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia (Delhi, 1996), 66–9 Google Scholar.

12 Murdoch, John, Hints on the Management of Tract Societies in India (1870), 14 Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 15–16.

14 Ibid., 16–17.

15 Ibid., 17–18.

16 Sutton, Narrative, 273.

17 Murdoch, Hints, 53–4.

18 Driberg, J.G., Report on the Nurbudda Mission (Calcutta, 1847), xli–xlii Google Scholar.

19 Mullens, Brief Review, 156.

20 Duverdier, Gerald, ‘L’Imprimerie protestante en Inde (1712-1850)’, Revue française d’histoire du livre, 43 (1984), 367 Google Scholar.

21 Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference held at Lahore in December and January, 1862-63 (Lodiana, 1863), 269.

22 Ibid., 283.

23 Ibid., 285.

24 Ibid., 277.

25 Ibid., 289.

26 Ibid., 283.

27 Murdoch, John, The Indian Missionary Manual: or, Hints to Young Missionaries in India, 2nd edn revised (1870), 462 Google Scholar.

28 Report on Colportage in the Methodist Episcopal Church Mission, USA., in India, for the Year 1866 (Lucknow, 1867), 13.

29 Ibid., 24.

30 Ibid., 23–4.

31 Animal Report of the Dacca Mission, for the Year MDCCCLIV (Dacca, 1855), 14.

32 Report on Colportage, 28. See also John Murdoch, Mission Book-Shops, in Connection with Bazar Preaching (Calcutta, 1864).

33 Report on Colportage, 11.

34 Ibid., 28.

35 Ibid., and Murdoch, Indian Missionary Manual, 463.

36 Report on Colportage, 11.

37 John Murdoch, Hindu and Muhammadan Festivals (1904), [11].

38 Sutton, Narrative, 41.

39 Report on Colportage, 5–6.

40 Ibid., 19.

41 Ibid., 22.

42 Ibid., 9.

43 Ibid., 11.

44 Ibid., 24.

45 See Sir H. Vcrncy Lovctt, ‘Education and missions to 1858’, in Dodwell, H.H., ed., The Indian Empire, 1858–1918, with Chapters on the Development of Administration, 1818–1858, The Cambridge History of India, 6 (Delhi, 1964), 117–20 Google Scholar.

46 Murdoch, John, The Idolatrous and Immoral Teaching of Some Government and University Text-Books in India (Madras, 1872), 4 Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., 5.

48 Ibid., 7.

49 Ibid., 11.

50 Ibid., 16.

51 Ibid., 19.

52 Ibid., 9.

53 Ibid., 24.

54 Duvcrdicr, ‘L’lmprimeric protestante’, 368.

55 Report on Colportage, 7.

56 ibid.

57 Mullens, Brief Review, 168–9.