EFFORTS TO ESTABLISH ANGLICANISM IN INDIA BEFORE 1813

In 1813, the Church of England won a great victory: Parliament established Anglicanism in India, installing a bishop in Calcutta and archdeacons in Madras and Bombay.Footnote ²⁰ This was a victory long in the making. Many prominent Anglicans had begun advocating new colonial bishoprics from the early decades of the eighteenth century, fearful that English colonists in America and elsewhere were at grave risk of losing their religious moorings (and by implication their Englishness). Yet, it was only after the American Revolution that imperial officials began to heed such calls.Footnote ²¹ Prominent Anglicans blamed the American colonial debacle on British sinfulness and contended that only a “national reformation could retrieve Britain from further shame.”Footnote ²² Imperial officials, on the other hand, vowed never to repeat what they perceived as the American colonial mistake of allowing colonies to develop too independently from the metropole. These two ideas converged by 1787, when Parliament appointed the first new colonial bishop (for Nova Scotia), followed four years later by another in Upper Canada. Both were colonies where large numbers of American Loyalists had resettled after 1783.

Efforts by prominent Anglicans to imbed Anglicanism within the empire intensified further in the 1790s with the coming of the French Revolution. Against both the “godless” French revolutionary threat and the radical threat some Nonconformists posed at home, the Church of England positioned itself as one of Britain's chief conservative bulwarks.Footnote ²³ Many Nonconformists had initially sympathized with the French Revolution and supported the colonists during the American Revolution. Indeed, for decades, Anglicanism had faced a renewed threat from rapidly growing Nonconformist sects, led by Methodism, which finally broke from the Church of England upon John Wesley's death in 1791. These newer Nonconformist sects emphasized personal salvation and evangelization, and they reached the urban working classes and other communities ill-served by the established church through unorthodox methods such as prayer meetings and open-air itinerant preaching.Footnote ²⁴ This was particularly the case in the burgeoning industrial towns of northern England and in Wales, where the Anglican Church was slow to provide new parishes or Welsh-speaking priests, respectively.Footnote ²⁵ Both “high church” and Evangelical clergymen redoubled their efforts in the two decades after 1790 to assert Anglican primacy within Britain and its empire. They emphasized Anglicanism's role as “one of the agents of a connectedness” between Britain and its imperial peripheries, including colonial India, as well as the importance of maintaining social and political order.Footnote ²⁶

It is within these broader contexts that Company chaplain Dr. Claudius Buchanan's efforts to establish Anglicanism in colonial India in the years before 1813 should be largely understood. As an Anglican Evangelical who believed strongly in the need for India to be Christianized, and unlike other churchmen, Buchanan was very supportive of missionaries and willing to work with Nonconformists.Footnote ²⁷ For example, he helped William Carey, a Baptist missionary, obtain a position as a language professor at the newly established College of Fort William. More generally, Buchanan defended the Baptist missionaries at Serampore against the Company's Bengal government, which suspected them, not without some reason, of “having Jacobin sympathies.”Footnote ²⁸ Geoffrey Oddie and Brian Pennington have also shown that Buchanan and Baptist missionaries agreed on the concept of “Hinduism” as a religious system and shared critiques of Hindu religious practices such as sati or the worship of idols at such sites as Jagannath.Footnote ²⁹

Yet despite these examples of a shared religious outlook between Buchanan and the Serampore Baptists, Buchanan was generally sectarian. In 1805, he called it a “positive offence against Christian institution” for the East India Company to lack an Anglican church establishment in India. It was dangerous to “dismember” the connection between church and state in a colony such as India where Britons were surrounded by “[p]agan superstitions, and a voluptuous and unprincipled people.”Footnote ³⁰ Eight years later, he wrote that it was the “national duty of the British” as a “Christian nation” to provide the correct form of Christianity to India. It ought not to be left to the “casual exertions of individuals, and of private societies” such as the Baptist- and Congregationalist-dominated London Missionary Societies then operating in India.Footnote ³¹

Buchanan's religious vision for colonial India was, therefore, one of a “paternalistic Church of England that directed all Christian efforts in India.”Footnote ³² Under plans he outlined in 1813 for a colonial ecclesiastical establishment, Nonconformists in India would only receive the limited religious toleration that Protestants who subscribed to the Trinity had enjoyed in England since 1688.Footnote ³³ In addition to advocating that the English religious status quo be exported to colonial India, Buchanan employed mostly conservative arguments in his tracts and sermons for why India needed a large Anglican establishment. First, such an establishment would ward off “atheism,” republicanism, and any “disaffection for the mother country” among colonial expatriates.Footnote ³⁴ Secondly, it would stop Britons from further “going native” and thereby endangering imperial prestige. Too many Britons in India, Buchanan warned in his tract, particularly those stationed at mofussil (“upcountry”) settlements, were neglecting their Christian duties. In particular, he noted how the Christian Sabbath generally went unobserved: “The Hindoo works on that day, and the Englishman works with him.”Footnote ³⁵ This, he contended, was doing untold harm to the moral foundations of British rule in India. Only by establishing the national religion in India and showing Indians that they “do it honor, and do not despise it,” Buchanan predicted, would Britons create new reservoirs of loyalty to their rule that did not presently exist.Footnote ³⁶

Finally, Buchanan drew upon long-standing theological arguments that emphasized England's special status as an “elect nation” and its corresponding national duty to set a moral example for the rest of the world.Footnote ³⁷ In numerous publications, he asked why God had preserved Britain while “smashing” other nations. In his 1809 sermon, “The Star in the East,” Buchanan exhorted Britons to support the establishment of Anglicanism in India as a crucial first step in India's eventual moral salvation. “If it be the divine pleasure” to save the British Empire, Buchanan insisted, it will only come as a result of that empire “being an instrument of good in the world.”Footnote ³⁸

When Parliament renewed the East India Company's charter in 1813, it inserted a “pious clause” stating that it was the Company's duty “to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India … as may tend to the introduction of them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement.”Footnote ³⁹ The enactment of this “pious clause” generated immense public debate, both in India and in Britain, and resulted in the largest mobilization prior to that moment of British public opinion, dwarfing the campaign against the slave trade in 1807.Footnote ⁴⁰ By contrast, Anglicanism was established in colonial India with little debate. Buchanan had proposed an establishment of three colonial bishops in India, three archdeacons, forty European chaplains, sixty country chaplains, and one hundred catechists and schoolmasters while Parliament ultimately opted for a more modest establishment, with a bishop of Calcutta and two archdeacons for Madras and Bombay.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Parliament's passage of the 1813 Charter Act represented a clear triumph for Buchanan's efforts to establish Anglican hegemony and, accordingly, a very English vision of the empire in colonial India.

By contrast, the Charter Act of 1813 placed other British denominations at a comparative disadvantage. Despite the insertion of the “pious clause,” Nonconformist missionaries in India remained under the East India Company's licensing system. They still possessed no automatic legal right to be in India and the company continued to deny permits or otherwise place limits on their activities during the following two decades while its licensing system remained in operation.Footnote ⁴² The law also made no provision for Roman Catholics who already constituted close to a majority of the European soldiers stationed in India.Footnote ⁴³

The Church of Scotland, the United Kingdom's other established church, was left in an even less clear position as a result of the new law. Scottish legislators had attempted to amend the law to also establish Presbyterianism in India. These amendments were removed, however, following informal assurances from company directors that they would provide a Presbyterian chaplain and a church for each of the three presidencies in India and otherwise “afford all proper means to assist in the promulgation and exercise of their faith.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This informal arrangement led to a bitter fourteen-year dispute between Dr. James Bryce, the Presbyterian chaplain for Bengal, and company officials over church establishment in India and provided a crucial context for Bryce's alternative vision of Britishness.

JAMES BRYCE'S ALTERNATIVE VISION OF BRITISHNESS

Tension between the chaplain and the East India Company arose from almost the moment that James Bryce arrived in Calcutta in early 1814. The colonial Bengal government, while at war with Nepal, had delayed constructing the promised new Scottish church for nearly two years. Bryce finally protested in February 1815 that the continued delays placed his congregation “in the situation of Sectaries and Dissenters from an Established Church.” Two months later, with no indication that construction would start any time soon, Bryce threatened not to perform divine services. The Bengal government in response threatened his dismissal, and Bryce in turn renewed his vow to resign, although he did not carry it out. Such was the general nature of the relationship between Bryce and the Bengal government over the following thirteen years.Footnote ⁴⁵

Even when the Bengal government finally agreed to begin construction of St. Andrew's Church the following winter, there remained much controversy. Bryce and the appointed committee tasked with drawing up designs declared that they would need a total of 200,000 rupees (about £25,000) to build a proper Scottish kirk, with a steeple and galleries. They pledged they would raise 50,000 rupees privately from the local Scottish community, hoping that the East India Company would donate the remaining 150,000 rupees (£18,750). The Bengal government, on the other hand, was only willing to contribute 100,000 rupees (£12,500), a standard donation set by company directors back in London.Footnote ⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Lord Middleton, the Anglican bishop of Calcutta, interjected himself into the dispute by questioning the right of Presbyterians in India to build steeples on their churches. As he explained to the governor of Bombay, steeples were “never granted to the Scots in London nor in any Diocese in England” but only to Anglican churches, being the established religion of the country. Bombay officials asked Hugh George Macklin, their advocate-general, to determine whether the Church of Scotland was legally established in India and, thus, entitled to church steeples. Macklin ruled that the Church of Scotland was only established in Scotland itself and nowhere else in the United Kingdom or the empire; it could not also “be established without changing the meaning of the terms.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In reply, Clow stated that a steeple was an absolutely crucial part of a Scottish church. Without one, he asserted, a “mark of inferiority hitherto unknown” in India would be “set upon” Presbyterians, who would be considered “a peculiar and inferior Class” akin in English eyes to “Dissenters” and in Indian ones as belonging to “some obscure or hereditical [sic] sect.” He also appealed to the Company's general policies of religious toleration toward both Christians and non-Christians in India.Footnote ⁴⁸ These arguments won over the Bengal government, which overruled Middleton and Macklin's objections and allowed the building of steeples to proceed. At the same time, it refused to increase the standard donation of 100,000 rupees per presidency the Company would expend toward construction of Presbyterian churches in India.

This dispute was about far more than steeples; it went directly to Scotland's social and cultural status within Great Britain and the broader empire, which was still being negotiated a full century after the Act of Union of 1707 between England and Scotland. As J. G. A. Pocock has observed, the English during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often considered their Celtic neighbors not as their “British equals” but rather as “their provincials,”Footnote ⁴⁹ which naturally led to much resentment among Scots. In the case of the Bombay steeple controversy of 1816, there was also a national church to defend, one of the few enduring symbols of Scottishness after 1707.

Despite the Bengal government's insistence on its 100,000-rupee donation as the upper limit of its monetary contribution to the Church of Scotland in India, Bryce believed that by obtaining the right to build steeples on its churches, Presbyterianism had obtained “co-established” status in India with the Church of England. Thus, Bryce asked in 1817 that the East India Company build him a parsonage with public funds. Upon realizing that the Bengal government was spending more money each month subsidizing the Anglican cathedral, St. John's, in Calcutta than his church, he complained to the Court of Directors.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1821, however, when Company directors finally replied to Bryce's multiple requests for further church support, they reminded Bryce of his “mistaken views” concerning his church's status in India. Drawing upon Macklin's earlier legal advice, they stated that only the Church of England was established in India or anywhere else in the British Empire. Whatever public support it received, therefore, was not to be the “standard by which boons given to other churches are to be measured.” The Court of Directors simultaneously ordered the Bengal government to stop paying the 234 rupees toward the monthly upkeep of Bryce's church; payments ceased in October 1822. Indeed, the only “boon” that Bryce managed to wrest from Company directors between 1814 and 1828 period was the appointment of an additional Presbyterian chaplain per presidency in India after 1822.Footnote ⁵¹

Bryce's struggles with the East India Company over its stance towards Presbyterianism supports Andrew Mackillop's questioning of the Company's Britishness, even though it employed large numbers of Scots and Irishmen. He argues the Company sought to “replicate the municipal, social, professional, and religious norms of England” in its colonial possessions.Footnote ⁵² Religious policies between 1813 and 1833 were indeed closer in spirit to Buchanan's vision of Anglican hegemony than the pan-Protestant “Britishness” argued by Linda Colley and other scholars. Yet, Bryce fought back against the company's efforts to treat Presbyterians as little better than Dissenters, and he argued for the Scottish kirk's right, or Scotland's “national” religion, to be treated equally with England's. In doing so, Bryce privileged a certain vision of Scottishness. There were strategic reasons why the Church of Scotland's historic rights were invoked: with his audience almost exclusively members of Britain's political and religious establishments, particularly before the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic Emancipation the following year, Bryce framed his appeal largely in terms of church establishment. Thus, shortly after the East India Company had stopped its monthly payments for his church's upkeep, he requested that the Bengal government provide salaries for four positions besides himself and his assistant chaplain: a session clerk, a sexton, a precentor, and a verger. Without a session clerk, he reminded colonial officials, his church's proceedings would cease being legal within the Church of Scotland. He also renewed his request for Company help to liquidate the construction debts on the church, which had by now risen to over 80,000 rupees (£10,000). He warned it would be a pity were the building to be “alienated to any other purpose than that of Divine Service according to the forms of the Church of Scotland.”Footnote ⁵³

This appeal worked, and the Bengal government offered either to restore the 234 rupees of monthly church establishment or lend the church 80,000 rupees at 6 percent interest, pending further instructions from the Court of Directors in London, to pay off the remaining debts on the building. The kirk session opted for the latter, but the Court of Directors refused to sanction the loan. The kirk session, it declared, had foolishly overspent on constructing an “ornamental part of the Building” (the steeple). They ordered the Bengal government to sue for repayment of the loan, which, after three further years of resistance from Bryce, it finally did in March of 1827.Footnote ⁵⁴ Later in the year, after the Bengal government informed Bryce that it would not make any emergency repairs on the crumbling church's exterior until the debts owed to the government were repaid with interest, the kirk session managed to repay the Bengal government the sum of 103,786 rupees (£12,973 5s.), which included back interest.Footnote ⁵⁵

By early 1828, tensions between Bryce and the East India Company finally reached their breaking point. Bryce once again threatened to not perform his clerical duties unless the Bengal government provided the funds necessary for his church's establishment, as well as refunded the church “arrears” since October 1822. Again, as in 1815, the Bengal government informed Bryce that it would recommend his dismissal to the Court of Directors if he carried through with his threat.Footnote ⁵⁶ By contrast with 1815, though, the East India Company's charter was soon due to expire. By the late 1820s, free traders had launched a concerted attack on the company's remaining commercial rights such as its monopoly over the Chinese tea trade, an assault that would succeed in 1833. Bryce calculated that the company would want to avoid a fight over religion during its delicate negotiations with the government and parliament over the terms of its new charter.

Bryce thus pressed his advantage by writing two memorials, one addressed to company directors, and in all likelihood members of the Board of Control who would be reading the correspondence, and another to Presbyterian church authorities.Footnote ⁵⁷ Bryce declared that the East India Company had withheld support from Presbyterians over the previous thirteen years in a manner inconsistent “with the rank and respectability of the National Church of Scotland.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, his memorial to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland outlined all the disputes between himself and East India Company officials over the preceding fourteen years that had negated the understanding many Scottish members of parliament had reached with company directors in 1813.Footnote ⁵⁹

Bryce's memorials had their desired effect. During the debates over the renewal of the East India Company's charter in 1833, Scottish members of parliament demanded that Presbyterianism be coestablished along with Anglicanism in India, which, unlike 1813, was enacted into law.Footnote ⁶⁰ In August 1834, when the new charter came into effect, company directors ordered the Bengal government to refund the sum of 80,000 rupees it had originally lent to the church in 1823.Footnote ⁶¹ It took the Bengal government nine months to refund the kirk session of St. Andrew's Church in Calcutta, at which time it resumed its monthly subsidy toward the church's establishment that it had suspended in October 1822.Footnote ⁶² After two decades, Bryce had succeeded in establishing the Church of Scotland as a coequal imperial church in the empire's most important colony. In the process, he forced company officials to recognize his more inclusive vision of Britishness. Efforts by Irish Catholic priests in India during the next two decades to attain similar confessional equality, however, would not be so successful.

SEEKING CONFESSIONAL EQUALITY ACROSS THE PROTESTANT-CATHOLIC DIVIDE

By the standards of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and, later, British “confessional state,” the East India Company's policies toward Roman Catholicism in India were among the most progressive in the British Empire. Although seventeenth-century Maryland, under the proprietorship of the Catholic Calvert family, could also lay a claim to religious toleration toward Roman Catholics, this toleration was short-lived and came to an end soon after the Glorious Revolution in 1688. In the metropole it was illegal to practice Roman Catholicism until 1791; the harshest Penal Laws in Ireland only started being repealed in the 1770s. From 1668, when the East India Company took possession of Bombay as a result of Catherine of Braganza's wedding dowry, it was obligated by treaty to protect the religious rights of Catholics in India. Carson has shown that from as early as the 1720s, company directors were sponsoring Catholic missionaries to India, demanding from them only that they swear loyalty to the new Hanoverian regime.Footnote ⁶³ In the chaotic months during 1756 and 1757 immediately following the fall of Calcutta and its prompt recapture by Lord Robert Clive, company officials in India overreacted to their anti-French paranoia by temporarily banning Roman Catholic worship in the city. Company directors harshly condemned this action a year later; aside from this instance, relations between the East India Company and the Vatican were generally warm and productive throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁴

The East India Company's accommodation of Roman Catholics gained further impetus after the 1770s. During the American Revolutionary War, the British Army monopolized recruitment of British and continental Protestant soldiers such as Hessians, prompting the company to enlist large numbers of Irish Catholic soldiers into its European regiments. By the end of the eighteenth century, nearly half of all European soldiers in India were Irish Catholics, making Roman Catholicism Company India's “largest religious subculture.”Footnote ⁶⁵ By the early nineteenth century at the latest, the Company began paying monthly stipends to local Catholic priests to minister to Catholic soldiers, although these sums were paid on an ad hoc basis and at lower levels than the monthly salaries received by Company chaplains. The company also disbursed monies to build or repair Catholic churches throughout India, particularly at stations where there were numerous Irish Catholic soldiers, although less generously than it provided for Anglicanism or even Presbyterianism.Footnote ⁶⁶

Prior to Catholic Emancipation, the East India Company's limited provision for Roman Catholicism in India met with little complaint from the Catholics. It was only during the 1833 parliamentary debate over the renewal of the East India Company's charter that Irish Catholic MP Daniel O'Connell first questioned the company's unequal treatment of Roman Catholics compared to Anglicans and Presbyterians. O'Connell also criticized the establishment of Anglicanism and Presbyterianism in India. Drawing parallels between the Irish and Indian experiences, he argued that it was unfair to force Indians to pay taxes that supported religions to which they did not belong.Footnote ⁶⁷ Although Hilary Carey has argued that Parliament during the 1830s reduced Anglican establishments elsewhere in the empire, as well as in Ireland, it enacted the opposite policy in colonial India. Under the terms of the East India Company's 1833 charter, the Anglican archdeacons of Madras and Bombay were elevated to bishops, more Anglican and Presbyterian chaplains were appointed, and the Church of Scotland was coestablished in colonial India in large part due to Bryce's efforts.Footnote ⁶⁸

Nevertheless, the Court of Directors wished to avoid another fight over religion and soon after parliament enacted the 1833 charter ordered a review of the ad hoc stipends then paid by its presidency governments to Roman Catholic priests. Company directors discovered that the average monthly stipend paid to Catholic priests for ministering to Catholic soldiers was 53 rupees (£6 12s. 6d.) compared to 500 rupees a month (£62 10s.) the company paid assistant Anglican and Presbyterian chaplains, the lowest of three ranks of company chaplains.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time, Irish Catholic regiments throughout British India complained of the large number of Portuguese Catholic priests, who were often of mixed Indian and Portuguese backgrounds and did not speak adequate English but generally served as cantonment priests.Footnote ⁷⁰ Company officials were broadly receptive to these complaints, worrying about the growing assertiveness of Portuguese claims to spiritual authority over all Roman Catholics in South Asia.Footnote ⁷¹ They also insisted on the need to preserve British racial prestige in colonial India. Both imperatives came together in 1845 when the Court of Directors finally agreed to double the stipends to a minimum of 100 rupees (£12 10s.) a month and, in the cases of some prominent clerical diplomats, to 250 rupees (£31 5s.) a month. The directors instructed their Indian governments not to employ “ignorant individuals and low persons of Portuguese extraction,” as such persons of mixed-race descent could “be of little service to Europeans.”Footnote ⁷²

Yet, in addition to unequal pay, the East India Company alienated the Catholic community in British India on other matters. When the Madras vicar apostolic, Dr. Daniel O'Connor in 1839 requested company subsidies for the travel of clergymen to supply military stations, the Court of Directors overruled the support of the Madras government.Footnote ⁷³ The government of India even vetoed a request from Catholic soldiers at Madras in 1841 for special prayer books and moral tracts, as opposed to the Anglican King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer, pleading that it could not deviate from “the Regulations of Her Majesty's Service.” To claim that it could not disregard official British government policy toward Roman Catholicism when it had been doing so for a century and a half was rather peculiar and it demonstrated a lack of Company sympathy to Catholic appeals for greater confessional equality.Footnote ⁷⁴

A decade later, with the East India Company's charter due to expire again, Catholic priests in India grew more assertive in their demands for greater pay and benefits. In 1853, they demanded, first, that the Company appoint a permanent Catholic chaplain at every station where the number of Catholic soldiers was at least equal to the number of Protestants. They also revisited the thorny issue of pay and allowances for Catholic priests in India, asking for half the salaries paid to Protestant chaplains who, unlike Catholic priests, often had wives and families to support.Footnote ⁷⁵

Company directors, aware of the parliamentary debate over the renewal of the East India Company's charter returned the petition to the government of India for further study. Ostensibly they sought further information, but they may also have been seeking to procrastinate and thus perhaps defuse the controversy. Colonial officials eventually recommended that the Company remain resolute in rejecting any official recognition of Roman Catholicism as an “established” religion in colonial India. At the same time, they believed it expedient to meet many of the demands, recommending, for example, that the stipends for vicars apostolic be doubled to 500 rupees a month (£62 10s.). They also urged that the minimum salary paid to Catholic priests be set at 150 rupees a month (£18 15s.), 30 percent of the monthly salaries paid to assistant chaplains, and that Catholic priests in India be eligible for other benefits given to Company chaplains such as medical care and traveling allowances.Footnote ⁷⁶

By 1855, the Court of Directors agreed to nearly all of these recommendations with the sole exception of pay equity for vicars apostolic and assistant chaplains. They ordered instead that vicars apostolic receive 400 rupees a month, a stipend that they regarded as perfectly “adequate” but still codified discrimination between Catholic and Protestant clergymen in India. Indeed, the Court of Directors asserted that the “principle” put forth by the Roman Catholic priests, such as confessional equality between Protestants and Roman Catholics, was “inadmissible.” There the matter seemed to die, and with the Sepoy Rebellion putting an end to the East India Company's existence only three years later in 1858, Roman Catholics in India missed their last great chance to force a change in colonial religious policy.Footnote ⁷⁷

Why were Roman Catholic priests in India unable to win greater religious equality while James Bryce succeeded in his appeals for equal treatment of Presbyterians two decades earlier? First, Presbyterians possessed far greater clout back in Britain. Bryce was able to appeal directly to the Church of Scotland to intervene as one of the United Kingdom's established churches. This was never an option for the vicars apostolic in India as the official religion of Ireland, until William Gladstone disestablished it in 1870, was the hated Anglican “Church of Ireland.”

Secondly, the vicars apostolic could not have chosen a worse time to appeal for greater rights for Roman Catholicism in India. There was a major upsurge in British anti-Catholicism during the late 1840s and early 1850s. This began in 1845 with the parliamentary controversy surrounding the British government's continued sponsorship of Maynooth College in Ireland, which trained Roman Catholic priests.Footnote ⁷⁸ Also in that same year, leading Tractarian John Henry Newman left the Anglican Church to become a Roman Catholic, shocking many members of the politico-religious establishment. During the late 1840s, Ireland suffered from the Great Famine and large numbers of Irish victims resettled in Great Britain, further inflaming anti-Catholic prejudices. Finally, and most provocatively, Pope Pius IX restored the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850, establishing Roman Catholic dioceses for the first time since the Reformation. As John Wolffe has shown, this “papal invasion” generated an ugly anti-Catholic public backlash up and down Britain.Footnote ⁷⁹ In these various contexts, neither the British government nor Parliament were likely to support Roman Catholics in their renewal of the East India Company's charter in 1853.Footnote ⁸⁰

The efforts of Roman Catholic priests also fizzled out in the mid-1850s because they chose to make their appeal more about their pay and benefits rather than articulating an alternative and compelling vision of the nation and empire that might win them greater public support back at home and force the East India Company to change its policies. The Company was able to ignore many of the Roman Catholic priests' demands precisely because it could point to its long-standing history of accommodation of Catholics in India. There is little doubt that the East India Company treated Roman Catholicism worse than the two established state churches. Yet, when compared to its policies toward Protestant Dissent, its treatment of Roman Catholicism in colonial India was generally good.

Although Copland has highlighted some instances of productive cooperation between the East India Company and Dissenting missionaries during the latter decades of the company's rule, particularly regarding education, the Company's attitude toward Nonconformists was cool, at least before the 1830s.Footnote ⁸¹ Until 1833, for example, Europeans not employed by the East India Company had to possess a license to legally enter or reside in India. While the company generally had no problems issuing such licenses to Roman Catholics or Anglican missionaries affiliated with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel or the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it generally refused to sanction Baptists or Congregationalists, whose missionaries slipped into India covertly in the 1790s and dwelled in enclaves, such as the Danish town of Serampore near Calcutta, to avoid deportation.Footnote ⁸² Company officials questioned the right of Protestant Nonconformists, but not Roman Catholics, to marry Britons in India as late as the early 1840s.Footnote ⁸³ Finally, company directors consistently banned their governments in India during the first half of the nineteenth century from hiring Nonconformist missionaries, even on a temporary basis, as chaplains. As they wrote to Bombay officials in 1845, they held “very strong objections” to its Indian governments “connecting themselves, in any way, with the Servants of Voluntary Societies.”Footnote ⁸⁴

For much of the East India Company period, therefore, Protestant Nonconformists were generally religious outsiders in colonial India. It is largely from this oppositional space that Baptist missionaries in India during the 1820s and 1830s, foremost among them James Peggs, articulated a very different and compelling, distinctly religious, vision of Britain and its Indian empire. Arguments about the relative status of the various national churches were absent in Peggs's vision of Britishness. Indeed, like many other Baptists, he rejected church establishments altogether. Rather, Peggs demanded that the company, as the representative of a “Christian nation,” govern India in a consciously Christian manner and adopt a more belligerent stance against Hindu “idolatry.”

PURIFYING THE NATION AND ITS EMPIRE

In 1828, the same year that Bryce wrote his memorials to the Court of Directors and Presbyterian church officials, Baptist missionary James Peggs published India's Cries to British Humanity. In this tract, Peggs called attention to a number of East India Company policies that he regarded as “absolutely Antichristian” because it was motivated by profit. In so doing, he joined many nineteenth-century secular critics who accused the Company of neglecting “the interests of learning, morality, and religion,” while it squeezed as much revenue as possible out of India. Rather than being motivated by a Christian desire to ameliorate the condition of the people, Peggs asserted that many company officials were little better than Spanish conquistadores.Footnote ⁸⁵

Peggs particularly objected to the East India Company's “connection … with Idolatry in India.” Since the 1803 conquest of the eastern state of Orissa, the Company continued the preexisting state funding of various Hindu pilgrimage sites, such as the temple of Jagannath, and collected taxes from pilgrims for their upkeep and security. This pragmatic policy of religious statecraft, aimed at conciliating non-Christians to the Company's rule, however, drew fierce criticism from Peggs, who considered it a prime example of immoral profiteering from false religion. The East India Company's collection of pilgrimage taxes demeaned the “Christian character” of Britain; the Company risked the wrath of God and endangered Britain's “elect” status. Indeed, Peggs warned, it would not be long “till the Christian character [of Britons was] scarcely distinguishable” from that of Indian heathens.Footnote ⁸⁶

In condemning the Company's policies as being antithetical to Britain's “Christian character,” Peggs was attacking its long-standing policies of religious accommodation, not only toward Protestants and Roman Catholics but also toward non-Christians. From the seventeenth century onward, the Company realized that it had to operate in a trading environment that was largely non-Christian and accordingly embraced a policy of religious accommodation that included both Christians and non-Christians. As early as 1662, for example, company directors ordered that there were to be no forced conversions of Indians or interference with Indian religious traditions; the killing of cows, thus, was forbidden in “Hindu areas.”Footnote ⁸⁷

These policies gained even further impetus when the East India Company became a colonial ruler after 1765. By the 1820s, the Company had nearly three hundred thousand Indian soldiers under arms, making its armies, collectively, the largest mercenary army in the world and one of the largest national armies.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Company sought to ingratiate itself with Indian elites by embracing caste dietary restrictions in military cantonments, as well as by facilitating sepoy participation in religious festivals, exempting sepoys and their families from pilgrim taxes.Footnote ⁸⁹ More broadly, the Company attempted to gain legitimacy by adopting common South Asian methods of statecraft. As Susan Bayly has argued, previous Hindu and Muslim Indian rulers alike had gained political legitimacy in prior centuries by “absorbing religion into state structures” through their stewardship of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain religious sites, and their participation in religious festivals.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thus, the Company followed preexisting Indian precedents when it opted, after 1803, to levy pilgrimage taxes for the temple's upkeep and to sponsor the annual chariot festival of ratha-yatra at Jagannath, which features an icon of Jagannath in a public procession.

For Peggs, however, it was no good for the East India Company, as the colonial representative of a Christian nation, to adopt preexisting South Asian modes of political statecraft when such practices violated basic Christian morality. Claiming that the company actively encouraged the festival by supporting the temple and levying taxes for its upkeep, and speculating that perhaps as many as twenty thousand Indians perished annually traveling to the festival, Peggs asserted that the Company collected an annual profit of 260,000 rupees (£32,500) from levying a pilgrimage tax that was “inhuman, impolitic, and unchristian.” For a British government to be “associated with idolaters in their scenes of revelry, vice, and misery” was “degrading to us as men, and derogatory to our character as Christian masters of this country.” The sooner the Company completely divested itself of its participation in Hindu religious festivals, the sooner it could begin the urgent task of moralizing India and helping to spread the light of Christianity to the country rather than impeding that important work.Footnote ⁹¹

Rather than aiming to conciliate non-Christians by respecting their religious customs, Peggs and other Protestant Nonconformist missionaries in the early decades of the nineteenth century advocated governing the empire in a more consciously Christian manner. First, they held a providentialist belief that God gave Britain a divine mission to spread Christian morality and civilization to India and other places in the world. “[T]o every European who places virtue in the fear of God, and a regard to men,” wrote Andrew Fuller, head of the Baptist Missionary Society, in 1808, it was of high “national importance” that the British introduce Christianity to India as soon and as fully as possible. Similarly, Baptist missionary William Ward asserted that it “must have been to accomplish some very important moral change in the Eastern world” that God had granted Great Britain its vast Indian empire. The nation had a “paramount duty” to place the elevation of the “mental and moral existence” of their Indian subjects well above commercial or political gain. He exhorted readers of his tract to join in Britain's national and divine mission of civilizing India. Never before “were such miseries to be removed—never was such a mighty good put within the power of one nation—he raising a population of One Hundred Millions to a rational and happy existence, and, through the illumination and civilization of all Asia!”Footnote ⁹²

Baptist missionaries in India were not the only ones to employ providentialist arguments about Britain's “elect” status to advocate for a more forthrightly Christian colonial policy in India. Claudius Buchanan also made use of similar arguments, but whereas he contended it was necessary to establish Anglicanism in India to avoid incurring the wrath of an angry God and risk losing Britain's “elect” status, Baptists Fuller, Ward, and Peggs demanded the freedom to proselytize in India and a colonial government whose policies and actions reflected Christian principles. This idea that Britain was an “elect” nation, moreover, was foundational to the vision of Britain and its empire held by Peggs and other Protestant Dissenters. For Fuller, the fact that Britain possessed the Indian empire at all was due solely to God's grace; therefore, it did not matter much what Indians thought of the East India Company's Christian policies. Certainly, colonial officials needed to stop worrying about offending Indians and get on with the urgent business of Indian moral improvement so as not to offend God and risk endangering Britain's “elect” status. Fuller's imperial thought was also free of concerns about maintaining British racial prestige, whereas this was one of Buchanan's chief reasons for the establishment of the Anglican Church in India. Rather, it was only through trust in God and by teaching Indians the Christian message that true bonds of loyalty and friendship would be built within the empire. Until then, Fuller predicted, the empire would rest upon “sandy” foundations.Footnote ⁹³

In 1833, Peggs achieved an important victory when Charles Grant the younger, the Evangelical president of the Board of Control, ordered the East India Company to end all involvement with Indian religions and its collection of pilgrimage taxes.Footnote ⁹⁴ This victory largely occurred because other evangelicals felt just as strongly as Peggs that the British should have no involvement in idolatry. Within the East India Company itself, several evangelicals worked behind the scenes in the decades leading up to 1833 to help change the policy. In the 1810s, for example, Bengal revenue official John Richardson thought it repugnant that a “Christian nation” should derive a significant amount of revenue from “Idolatrous worship.” Any true Christian should feel nothing but horror that the East India Company condoned such idolatry, let alone profited by it. In 1829, Bengal judge Robert M. Bird claimed that the Company's continued support of Hindu temples and religious festivals led many Indians to wonder whether the British were “utterly without any religion.” He insisted that the company ought only to provide Indians protection in the free exercise of their religious beliefs. Anything more than this would be entirely unbecoming of a “Christian Government.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Various colonial officials defended the East India Company's collection of pilgrimage taxes on the grounds that their abolition would needlessly alienate devout Hindus and possibly endanger British colonial rule.Footnote ⁹⁶ Governor-general Lord William Bentinck, who was sent to India to balance the books after two decades of financial profligacy, worried about compensating for the lost revenue from abolishing the tax.Footnote ⁹⁷ These arguments fell on deaf ears back in Britain for two related reasons. First, like Buchanan, Bryce, and the Roman Catholic vicars apostolic, Peggs and his evangelical allies took advantage of the prominent public debate over Indian colonial policy that resulted from the Company's required charter renewal by Parliament every twenty years. Secondly, in the 1833 debate, Peggs articulated a compelling vision of the nation and its empire that stood in contradistinction to the more technical arguments put forth by those wishing to retain the Company's existing policies.

The East India Company's various Indian governments delayed the full implementation of the ban on company sponsorship of Hinduism for eight more years, cautioning the need to proceed slowly so as not to unduly upset pious Hindus.Footnote ⁹⁸ As part of its efforts to calm Indian sensibilities, the Court of Directors repeatedly banned its Indian governments during the 1830s and 1840s from hiring Nonconformist missionaries, even on a short-term basis, to perform chaplain duties.Footnote ⁹⁹ Company directors feared that doing so might further antagonize Indians and feed into the then-growing belief that the Company's future aim was their forced conversion to Christianity. As Company directors wrote in 1852, colonial governments in India needed to avoid any official “connexion, however slight” between themselves and missionary societies lest Indian religious sensitivities be further incensed.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

It seems that Indians generally did not parse the Company's official statements of noninvolvement with missionary work from the active and growing efforts of British missionaries during these final decades of Company rule the way that Company directors would have wished. For one thing, as Copland has shown, this period saw a marked increase in company monetary support for mission schools, as well as generally closer relations between Company officials and missionaries.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But more broadly, as Oddie has contended, by the 1840s there was a growing sense among many Hindus of “resentment, humiliation, and outrage” regarding the outspoken attacks on their religion by Peggs and other British evangelicals in India.Footnote ¹⁰²

Carson has gone further, arguing that several of the seeds of the eventual “Great Rebellion” of 1857–58 were sown by these shifts in the Company's religious policies during the 1830s and early 1840s. She writes that the removal of Company patronage of many Hindu religious sites led to the abandonment in several, and to “neglect, mismanagement, and corruption” in others. Many Indian elites regarded the East India Company as having broken faith with them, and by the late 1840s anti-Christian meetings were being held throughout India, particularly whenever missionaries attempted to convert high-caste Hindus through their mission schools.Footnote ¹⁰³ This and other factors ultimately led sepoys and other Indians to revolt against British rule in 1857. The often strident rhetoric by Peggs and other British evangelicals in India during the latter decades of the Company period contributed to a growing cultural and social alienation between Britons and Indians during those decades that ultimately made the rebellion possible.Footnote ¹⁰⁴