HISTORY, they say, is written by the victors. After an address at the synod of the Church of South India, I was asked how I understood the First War of Independence. I only just stopped myself asking “Do you mean the Indian Mutiny?”
David Gilmour’s book hardly touches on the 1857 uprising, which he calls “The Rebellion”, because this is not so much a political history as an account of how British people lived in India from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
Gilmour knows the landscape, and, from a mass of first-hand accounts, he lets people from governors to soldiers and merchants to missionaries tell their own story. It is a remarkable combination of archival research and flowing prose, and even-handed in its conclusions: he leaves us to evaluate how the British who created India lived, and what they left behind.
Britain did not go to India to bring European knowledge and know-how, nor to spread the Christian faith, although some of these things came later. The overriding purpose of the East India Company (EIC), created at the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, was trade. Its royal charter gave it governing and judicial authority, with an army that, at its height, exceeded a quarter of a million.
Anything that hindered trade was resisted, which is why the Company refused entry to missionaries, fearing that they would disturb people of Hindu and Muslim faith. Only chaplains to the British were allowed. But, when the EIC Charter was renewed in 1813, pressure from Parliament forced them to lift the ban: according to William Wilberforce, the conversion of India was even more important than the abolition of the slave trade. At the same time, the Church of England was properly constituted, with the first bishop (later, Metropolitan) in Calcutta.
csas, cambridgeA baba (infant) carried by dandy-wallahs, c.1900 (Hudson Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge)
In 1876, Queen Victoria became Empress of this country that she never visited, and imperialism played a vocational part, both arrogant in its belief in Western superiority and benevolent in bringing employment, education, and medical relief. The missionaries were as mixed: they brought schools and hospitals, but many scorned other religions and their so-called heathen practices.
The book rightly questions some of their motives, but does not give due recognition to the way in which the Christian Churches have drawn in people of lower caste.
Gilmour reminds us that, at the end of A Passage to India, E. M. Forster seems to suggest that the English Mr Fielding and the Indian Aziz cannot become friends — or, at least, not yet. I was reminded of the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, when V. S. Azariah, who would go on to be the first Indian Anglican bishop, made his plea for friendship rather than colonial control. It is good that, today, the (united) Churches of North and of South India are full members of the Anglican Communion.
I have one unanswered question. How apocryphal is the story, which I’ve heard in India and Britain, that the East India Company in Madras asked for the removal of the Magnificat from evensong, lest the promise to “put down the mighty from their seat” unsettle the natives?
The Rt Revd Michael Doe is Preacher to Gray’s Inn and a former General Secretary of USPG.
Allen Lane £30
(978-0-241-00452-4)
Church Times Bookshop £27
