The political theology of Indian Christian citizenship: Krishna Mohan Banerjea to K.T. Paul
Nandini Chatterjee
History, Plymouth University
Introduction
Good afternoon everyone. Many thanks to the Henry Martyn Centre and the Centre of South Asian Studies for inviting me to speak here; it is an honour to do so.
The problematic of minority rights – and minority self-formation
Writing in April 1947, in the run-up to Indian independence, Rev. Canon M.A.C. Warren, the general secretary of the Church Missionary Society, discussed the problems and prospects of Indian Christians as citizens of a newly liberated country in which they formed a small minority of people. Appearing in The East and West Review, Warren’s article framed the Indian situation as part of a global problem regarding the status of minorities in recently liberated countries, which had weak or non-existent political, legal and social traditions capable of securing religious freedom. Warren pronounced the prospects to be bleak and prophesied an inevitable period of suffering for such minorities – ranging from social discrimination to persecution and genocide. His recommendation however was that Indian Christians should focus on religious freedom as a general principle and not on specific rights or privileges for themselves. This is because Indian Christians, according to Warren, were the only real Indians in a nation that was hardly a nation – rent as it was by cultural and religious divisions. Indian Christians on the other hand, because of their ‘non-communal’ outlook, did not have to battle any deeper instincts in order to profess loyalty to the Indian nation. Thus it was their true destiny, according to Rev. Warren, to seek religious freedom not as protection against the state but as a common good.[i]
On its own, this article could be dismissed as wishful thinking about Christian regeneration of a world that seemed to be going the other way, and irresponsible recommendation of self-sacrifice to fellow Christians situated at a comfortable distance. Its importance, however, lies in its summary of a political and religious attitude that had become extremely common among a key segment of the Indian Christian leadership of the period. I will call this attitude the political theology of ‘Indian Christian citizenship’ – and suggest that it was an unusual, but coherent and historically explicable answer to the question of how to be a minority in a plural society aspiring to be a democracy.
Superficially, this was a quixotic idea, suggesting, as it did that service and suffering, not rights and protection, and idealistic general leadership rather than defensive minority status should be their aspiration. This noble and high-minded concept, like all such pieties, had very large blind spots. In the Indian context, this emphasis on suffering and selfless service implied a paternalistic and non-combative approach to social inequality – especially that of caste. Given that the vast majority of Christians in India came from dalit, or the most oppressed caste background, this was serious obtuseness. It also had crucial overtones of repression – both of male and female sexuality – which became explicit over discussions about Christian family law. Self-denial and self-control also provided models of political rectitude which specifically delegitimized an emphasis on community-specific rights.
It is relatively easy to see why such an approach to being Christian would accord very well with broader nationalist trends. What is less obvious, and hence what this paper will attempt to explain, is why such ideas began to take shape long before nationalism itself had taken recognizable political form in India, leave alone win a significant following. In line with the excellent if still slim literature on Muslim Congressmen, it is worth examining the ideas of Christian sympathisers of nationalism, to understand how they reconciled their religious and political identities, and what specific imperatives shaped such reconciliation.
Institutional racism
The first of these imperatives, I will suggest, is the need felt by elite Indian converts to Christianity, to claim their religion as their own, contesting the prolonged tutelage that European and American missionaries expected of ‘their’ disciples. Here was a serious conflict of perception. Some of the best known nineteenth-century Indian Christians belonged to same radical social milieu as the metropolitan literati – in that they combined social rebellion with religious experimentation and frequently travelled from one to the other. It is clear from personal narratives that many of those who became Christian saw their conversion in terms of their personal intellectual and spiritual journey, baptism marking their attainment of an elevated spiritual state,[ii] rather than being born again into an infantile state requiring prolonged instruction. This explains the shrillness with which they disputed any aspersion on their capacity – professional or spiritual, and these two matters were constantly associated.
Many of these disputes were petty quarrels over pay and managerial authority in churches and missions. But as Elizabeth Elbourne has shown, with reference to even more petty quarrels within the London Missionary Society in Cape Colony, such seemingly petty disputes could enfold much larger understandings regarding the proper relationships between European missionaries and their African co-workers, and explain the growing distance between the LMS and African aspirations.[iii]
In India, one such persistent bone of contention was over the distinction between the realms of the church and the mission. This was a racialised division sustained by a number of other reasonings. To take the example of the Church of England in India, the division was based on the purported purpose of the church and the mission, respectively. The Indian Ecclesiatical Establishment, paid for by the Government of India, primarily existed for providing religious services to British expatriates. From 1813 this establishment was headed by the Bishop of Calcutta, the Metropolitan of India. Missions to ‘natives’ on the other hand, were not paid for by the government, on the principle that the religions of the ‘natives’ were not to be interfered with. Crucially, the principle of not patronizing missions was extended to ‘mission churches’ or Indian congregations gathered by the missionaries as well. This made the Indian priests entirely dependent on the missionary societies – in the Anglican case the Society for Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society – which themselves depended on private subscriptions.[iv] In the early nineteenth-century, a young Bengali Christian called Krishna Mohan Banerjea, found the situation unacceptable.
Krishna Mohan Banerjea was among the first upper caste Bengali converts to Protestant Christianity,[v] and among the most important Indian Christians of the nineteenth century. He was a prolific journalist, a Sanskrit scholar, a member of the Asiatic society, fellow of Calcutta University and a founding member of the nationalist Indian Association. His literary work was also vital in producing early Christian Scriptural translations and exegesis in Bengali, and as professor of the Bishop’s College, he trained several Indian priests in theology.[vi]
Krishna Mohan was notoriously ostracised by his family for permitting a group of friends to organize a beef eating party in the family home. When he eventually converted to Christianity, the CMS rescued him from destitution by finding him a job as a schoolteacher in 1832. By 1836, however, he was in irreconcilable conflict with his employers. He refused to serve a period of probation away from Calcutta, on grounds of his ill-health, his wife’s advanced pregnancy, his having already served an adequate probation, the inadequate salary proposed, and also because he was under instructions from the Bishop of Calcutta to remain in Calcutta to study for his upcoming ordination. In particular, Krishna Mohan questioned the authority of a partly lay missionary committee over him, a candidate for ordination under the sole authority of the bishop.[vii] After several bitter exchanges, the CMS Calcutta (Corresponding) Committee felt that it could not in good conscience support the ordination of a native Christian who would not prove his obedience by serving his period of probation, and dismissed Krishna Mohan Banerjea from the CMS’s employment.[viii]
Banerjea did have sufficient patronage from the Bishop to be ordained, as he had desired, and he was found a as pastor of a native church under the SPG.[ix] None of this addressed the pervasive assumption that Europeans and ‘natives’ were different and ought to be treated as such. Inevitably therefore, Krishna Mohan managed to disappoint his patron, Bishop Daniel Wilson by refusing the post of canon in the new Cathedral at Calcutta, because he was offered a lower salary than European canons.[x] Bishop Wilson urged that the Indian church could not afford an expensive clergy; Krishna Mohan responded that the Anglo-Indians and poor Europeans could similarly not afford their European chaplains, and were nevertheless supplied with them.[xi] Finally Krishna Mohan found suitable employment as professor in the Bishop’s College, where he worked for fifteen years, from 1852 to 1867.[xii]
Not all were as talented and fortunate as Krishna Mohan – in general, the salaries of Indian mission employees remained abysmally low, as can be seen in the table on CMS mission salaries in north India, in 1866-67.
Reader / Catechist / Head Catechist / CMSMissionary
(married) / CMS
Missionary
(single)
3rd grade / Rs. 5
2nd grade / Rs. 10
(after passing examination for reader) / Rs. 20 / Rs. 30
1st grade / Rs. 15
(after 15 years of service) / Rs. 25
(After 10 years of service) / Rs. 40
(After 10 years as catechist, and only if possessing knowledge of English) / Rs. 203 / Rs. 138
Allowance per child / Rs. 1 / Rs. 2 / Rs.2 / Rs. 12
Allowance for horse / Rs. 6 / Rs. 6 / Rs. 6
Allowance for horse and cart / Rs. 7 and 8 annas / Rs. 7 and 8 annas / Rs. 7 and 8 annas
Conveyance / Rs. 17
Table 1: Relative salaries of European missionaries and Indian mission employees of the CMS, c. 1866-67; Sources: 15th meeting of the Agra district mission conference, 10th and 11th Sept 1866, CI 1/O4/1/14, ; North-India salaries: memorandum for use of sub-committee, 1867, CI 1/L7, pp. 123-4, CMS Archives.
Indians, by definition could not be missionaries. As late as the1910s, owing to shortage of European personnel, a few highly educated Indian Christians were employed as missionaries, with a European missionary’s salary,[xiii] but this limited experiment was discontinued following the recommendations of the CMS delegation to India in 1921-22. Henceforth, the native church, and native church councils, were made solely responsible for the salaries of the Indian Christian university graduate priests. This measure was represented as giving independence to the Indian churches.[xiv]
This was not an independence that thrilled the first Indian Anglican bishop, V.S. Azariah appointed in 1913. He complained against such mission-church divide, saying that mission work was dominated by mission councils sporting the token Indian, while the Indian church councils were left in charge of impoverished Indian congregations.[xv]
It is worth mentioning here that Anglicans were not in the least isolated in maintaining the common-sense racial division of labour between missions and church – very similar patterns were seen in the Scottish as well as American missions. [xvi]
It was not even clear that the native churches could be allowed to be fully independent. In the first meeting of the Punjab Native Church Council, constituted under directives issued by the CMS in 1876, Indian Christians associated with the CMS asked questions which may have showed their ignorance of basic episcopal principles, or perhaps their alienation from them. Abdullah Athim, a government servant from Amritsar, suggested that all church officials, including the bishop, should be elected by the members of the church.[xvii]
Clearly, Athim’s idea was considered too silly to even merit discussion, but when in the 1910s it was proposed to appoint V.S. Azariah the first Indian Anglican bishop by a more traditional route, his appointment threatened the neat racial division which separated British clergymen of the government’s ecclesiastical department, from the Indian clergymen tending to Indian flock. In the end, Azariah could only have an assistant bishopric with the special proviso that he would not officiate in the Bishop’s absence, and would only exercise episcopal authority over the poor Telugu area of Dornakal – thereby sidestepping the possibility of Indian authority over Europeans.[xviii]
The question now is, how did such experience colour the attitudes of Indian Christians? Geoffrey Oddie has suggested that this experience of discrimination may have pushed at least some of the early elite converts to Christianity towards anti-colonial nationalism, a move further facilitated by the liberalism of the early Indian National Congress.[xix] While this appears very plausible – I think that there is a more direct connection between the experience just described and a widely observed feature of Indian Christian culture, its theological liberalism. It is to the politics of that liberal theology that I turn next.
Translations and hierarchy
The liberalism of Indian Christian theology, in the sense of its active toleration, respect and incorporation of key concepts and possibly doctrines from other religions, especially Sanskritic Hinduism, has been commented on by several scholars. Lionel Caplan, in studying the reasons for the recent success of Pentacostal missions in Madras, commented on the alienation of the vast majority of Indian Christians from the dominant liberal theology of the Church of South India,[xx] the ecumenical Protestant church in communion with the Church of England. Dalit theologians since the 1980s have stridently denounced this ‘Sanskritic theology’ which has failed to address the aspirations and needs of the vast majority of Indian Christians. Anthony Copley and Geoffrey Oddie have seen it as symptomatic of a broader cultural process – the effort by elite upper caste converts to Christianity to reconcile India with the West, and to assuage a guilt born of abandoning their intellectual and spiritual roots.[xxi] Today, I will wonder out loud whether this marked pattern of affirming of a decidedly Hindu past by these admittedly elite Indian Christian thinkers may not also be read as a protest.
The issue of religious translation, and of politics over it, is of course a broader one. Roberto Nobili’s brush with the Inquisition in the seventeenth century[xxii] had revealed both the necessity and dangers of culturally relocating doctrine, but too little attention has been paid to the crucial but precarious role performed in this process by those cultural intermediaries, the class of ‘native assistants’ to which Krishna Mohan belonged. These people often had very different imperatives to the ones that motivated their missionary employers.