On the Richter scale of English national affection, the King James Bible (KJB) is way at the top like the late Queen Mother. The lovers of the KJB often lapse into quasi-spiritual terminology when extolling its virtues and achievements. Listen to the words of William Canton, the passionate historian of the Bible Society: “The blind had a new world opened to them. Hospitals were supplied with small volumes suitable for the sick-wards, and many a little book was afterwards found under the pillow of the dead. In prisons, penitentiaries, workhouses, the Bible wrought wonders.” Those of a generation that knew the Bible would have readily recognized this as a reworking of what is now known as the Nazareth Manifesto recorded in Luke’s gospel (Luke 4:16–21). The reported words of Jesus have been re-sacralized in order to applaud the emancipatory potential of the English Bible. A new and intimate contact with the divine has been established through the real presence of the KJB. The Galilean has found his voice again in this English book, and the sterling liberative program of Luke’s Jesus is now seen as the work of the Englishman’s book.

Before the Victorian search for the life of Jesus started in earnest in the late nineteenth century, there were two ‘lives’ of Jesus compiled from the four gospels; they preceded these scholarly endeavours and have gone unnoticed by historians of biblical studies. One was The Precepts of Jesus by an Indian, Raja Rammohun Roy (1774–1833), and the other was The Life and Morals of Jesus by the second President of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson (1734–1826). Significantly, both publications came out in the same year, 1820. Motivated by practical needs, and scarcely interested in defending the authenticity of the scriptures, the Indian and the American attempted to retell the story of Jesus in a way that would reconfigure him as simply an expounder of moral precepts – a retelling that would trouble the received notions of Jesus and prove to be unpalatable to the religious establishment of the time.

Rammohun Roy and Thomas Jefferson were men of exceptional calibre. One was part of a new ‘native’ elite emerging as a result of colonialism, and the other was a member of the founding generation of a newly independent colony. Significantly, both paid attention to religion. They were in varying degrees tantalized, inflamed, tormented and stimulated by it.

If the first casualty of war, as the cliché goes, is truth, the second casualty to sustain heavy collateral damage is text. In war, along with truth, texts of various kinds, ranging from reports of the battle to religious texts that justify it, also fall victim to the hands of both proponents and opponents. This chapter is about the misuse of biblical texts when they were conscripted by Victorian preachers and employed as potent textual weapons during the Indian insurrection of 1857.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a passionately fierce and violent reaction against the penetration, presence and powerful influence of the British in India. Hindus and Muslims fought side by side, their collective outrage directed at their common enemy, the British – in the form of the East India Company – who were blamed for disrupting both the religious and the political traditions of the country and intensifying the suffering of the people. This rebellion, or mutiny, was an affair mainly restricted to the northern states of India.

This chapter focusses on the employment of the Bible in two colonial novels: Sydney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) and Akiki K. Nyabongo's Africa Answers Back (1936). Sydney Owenson (1783–1859), who later became Lady Morgan through marriage to a knighted English physician, Charles Morgan, was an Irish literary figure. Her literary production extended over six decades; it included novels, poems and travel and political writings. She was a complex personality. She championed the cause of Irish nationalism but was reluctant to support women's participation in politics. Nyabongo, an African chief from Uganda, was educated at Yale and Oxford and played a critical role in Uganda before and after independence. Besides his political involvement, he was visible in international literary guilds and acted as the editor of African Magazine.

Both novels, The Missionary and Africa Answers Back, were shaped by a confused mixture of religious enthusiasm, colonial attitudes to people, and the forces of modernity which came in the wake of colonialism. The Missionary takes a Eurocentric view of India and of colonial practices, in which identities of both the colonizer and the colonized are questioned and reframed. Africa Answers Back, on the other hand, takes a nativist view of colonialism and seeks to invoke through the main character the uneasiness and uncertainty of the colonized ‘other’. Both novels expose intra-Christian differences which have implications far beyond Europe.

When a Christian from Manchester asked Gandhi to read the Bible, he accepted his advice and got himself a copy. This is how Gandhi recollected his experience:

Godfrey E. Phillips, in his enquiry into the use of the Old Testament in the mission field, captures another example of this uneasiness about the Old Testament, this time experienced by a Chinese Christian:

As a way of bringing this volume to a close I offer, a few thoughts on the present status of empire and the Bible. Both the Bible and the empire are trying to stage comebacks and are undergoing vigorous makeovers to meet their changing contexts. Both are being refurbished and reinvented. The old territorial empire has now given way to an informal one which is as menacing as the one which it is trying to replace. The earlier empire's biggest export – the English Bible, on which it was said at the time, ‘the sun never sets’ – is assuming new forms in the new situation. It is no coincidence that the current boom in books on empire and the Bible is taking place at a time when America is trying to assume the role of a new imperialist.

The old empire was engaged in a civilizing project of bringing light to dark places. The new imperium is about righting wrongs. The old empire spoke in terms of eradicating ignorance and enlightening the benighted natives with Christian values. The new empire is also on a mission, but sees its task as removing erring rulers who undermine corporate authority (read American authority), violate human rights and threaten American financial interests. Tony Blair spoke of the new empire in missiological terms.

One of the celebrated colonial clichés is that the Bible and the gun go together and that they are almost inextricably linked. One story goes even further, in which the Bible and the gun are literally conjoined. William Colenso (1826–99), who worked as a printer in New Zealand and was a cousin of John Colenso, of whom we will hear later in this volume, picked up a cartridge fashioned out of pages from a Bible. The rolled-up paper came from 2 Samuel and bore the words ‘How long have I to live?’ (19.34). The cartridge of rolled-up biblical verses gives a slightly different meaning to the phrase ‘militant reading’, an idea later to be popularized in liberation hermeneutics.

This volume is about what happens to colonial artefacts such as the Bible, beer, a gun and a printing press, and especially, in our case, the Bible, when it is imposed forcefully on the ‘natives’, or offered to them for their benefit. It is about the Bible and its readers and their troubled journey through colonialism. It assembles essays which demonstrate how the Bible has been used in a variety of ways by both the colonizer and the colonized. It brings to the fore personalities and issues which are seldom dealt with within the parameters of mainstream biblical scholarship. It is an attempt to retrieve hermeneutical and cultural memories in both western and nationalist discourses.

This chapter is a follow-up to a promise I made in one of my earlier writings. While looking at the interpretative outputs of dissident Protestant missionaries like John Colenso, who proved to be awkward to the establishment but endeared himself to the colonized by taking up their grievances, I came across James Long (1814–87), in whose works I noted remarkable parallels with Colenso. To begin with, both sided with the oppressed – the Bengali indigo workers in the case of Long, and the Zulus in the case of Colenso. More remarkably, what was attractive to me was the way both of these Anglican missionaries marshalled and utilized the Bible for their Christian praxis. This chapter narrates and critiques their hermeneutical practices, and their often problematic entanglements with the colonial politics of the time.

At the outset, it should be said that in sheer volume of biblical work undertaken by these two missionary apostles Long is no match for Colenso. Colenso's output is enormous; his seven volumes on the Pentateuch run to more than five thousand pages, and the first volume went through several editions. Even more significantly, his work prompted a vigorous public debate. In today's world of academic star-rating, Long would have fared badly in the Research Assessment Exercise.

Let me bring this volume to a conclusion by making a few obvious observations. First, it is clear from the interpretative practices narrated here that reading is not a simple activity. A hundred years ago, faced with similarly bewildering reading and textual practices, Richard G. Moulton urged his readers to cultivate the simple habit of reading:

What is evident from these interpretations is that Moulton's noble call is not easy to follow. As long as there are texts and readers, reading will be a consciously manufactured activity. Texts are malleable and readers are manipulative. Neither the text nor the reader is a blameless partner in this venture. Either the texts seek to invade and transform the reader, thus making him or her a prey, or the reader imposes his or her power on the text.

The cultural and hermeneutical interaction between the colonizer and the colonized is a complex one. In examining this interaction, colonial discourses often tend to explore the ambivalence and anxiety of the colonized. The last chapter was an example of this. An under-examined aspect of this encounter is the nature of the response of the colonizer. However imperialist and hegemonic the colonizer's role may be, his perception is often sharpened and interrogated by the experience of the colonized Other. Ashis Nandy, the Indian social scientist, in his study of the impact of colonialism on the colonizer, has identified four such reactions: sanctification of institutionalized violence; production of a false sense of cultural homogeneity in colonizing societies; encouragement of religious and ethical theories as part of the colonial project; and imputation of permanence and omnipotency to the colonizer. A rare fifth case involves opting out of the colonial framework and positioning oneself against the hegemonic and expanding discourse of the time. This chapter will consider an example of this last reaction – a model of dissent, exercised in this case by a missionary bishop who engaged in an imaginative hermeneutical and political enterprise, modified and controlled by a colonial mode of thinking.

Along with gunboats, opium, slaves and treaties, the Christian Bible became a defining symbol of European expansion. The underlying purpose of this volume is to trace how the Christian Bible, the ur text of European culture, as Stephen Prickett calls it, has been transmitted, received, appropriated and even subverted by Third World people. It narrates the arrival of the Bible in precolonial days, through to its appropriation in the postcolonial context, both by the colonizer and colonized.

Some of the organizing terms in the volume may cause uneasiness and anxiety, hence they need elaboration and explanation. Firstly, the use of ‘Third World’ in the title: ever since the term gained currency in the public domain, invigorating discussions have been going on regarding its value and limitation. It was introduced by the French economist and demographer, Alfred Sauvy. His intention was to bring out two aspects – the idea of exclusion, and the aspiration of Third World people. He saw in that class of commoners the Third Estate of the French Revolution, which not only suggested exclusion but also stood for the idea of revolutionary potential. However, Sauvy did not see the Third Estate as being in a numerical hierarchy, below the French aristocracy and the clergy, but as being ‘excluded from its proper role in the world by two other worlds’. His contention was that ‘the Third World has, like the Third Estate, been ignored and despised and it too wants to be something’.