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
1
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. Selfdenial 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
2
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 nineteenthcentury, 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
3
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
4
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
3rd grade
Rs. 5
2nd grade
Rs. 10
Catechist
Head Catechist
Rs. 20
Rs. 30
Rs. 15
Rs. 25
Rs. 40
(after 15 years
(After 10 years
(After 10 years
of service)
of service)
as
catechist,
and
only
(after
CMS
CMS
Missionary
Missionary
(married)
(single)
passing
examination for
reader)
1st grade
Rs. 203
Rs. 138
if
possessing
knowledge
of
English)
Allowance
per
Rs. 1
Rs. 2
Rs.2
for
Rs. 6
Rs. 6
Rs. 6
for
Rs.
Rs. 7 and 8
Rs. 7 and 8
annas
annas
Rs. 12
child
Allowance
horse
Allowance
horse and cart
Conveyance
7
annas
and
8
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.
5
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
6
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 anticolonial 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 centuryxxii 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
7
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.
The much-studied struggles over caste in Indian churches and its ultimate prohibition
by European Protestant authorities in the mid-19th century were part of that broader
question of what precisely were the cultural, social and moral correlates of Christian
confession. In his detailed study of the split of the SPCK’s Tanjore congregation in
1829, and the excommunication of the Christian poet, Vedanayagam Pillai, Denis
Hudson has suggested a conflict between different ways of being Christian – a
western one and a Malabarian one. In a ‘Humble Address’ to the missionary
authorities in London, Pillai did comment on the wrong-headedness of the ‘reformist’
missionaries and their obsession with what he saw as irrelevant social customs. He
criticized those ‘who should preach on the faith of the Son of God [but] preach now
all the day long more than ten times upon the subject of eating with the Pallar and
Parayer promiscuously’.xxiii
Although the periods of their scholarship overlapped, Krishna Mohan belonged to a
different socio-moral universe. Whereas Pillai’s defense of caste may be seen as the
product of a tenacious traditional social vision, Banerjea began and ended his career
by denouncing caste and in this he may be said to be of a piece with reformist
Hindus who all agreed in theory that distinctions based on birth alone were
illegitimate, although they varied widely on the extent to which they might idealize or
contest it. And yet, Krishna Mohan also found it imperative to re-embrace parts of
Sanskritic philosophical heritage in his theological writings. This was not a converts’
unshed intellectual baggage – it was a very deliberate intellectual move, one which
Banerjea came to formulate over the course of his long career.
In his earlier works, Krishna Mohan attempted to argue rather traditionally that
Sanskrit Scriptures possessed no external proof of veracity, that the schools of
Sanskrit philosophy were mutually contradictory and partially derived from heterodox
Buddhist doctrine, and that there was little connection between the abstract doctrines
and social behavior in India. Thus when the Evangelical Scotsman, James
Ballantyne, principal of the Benares Sanskrit College between 1845 and 1861,
8
attempted to prove to his Brahmin students that the Siddhantic astronomical textsxxiv
logically led on to the truth of European science and from thence to Christianity, xxv
Krishna Mohan wondered whether the elements of truth in Sanskrit philosophy could
really be uncovered from underneath the piles of rubbish that covered them. xxvi
However, in one of his last publications, The Arian Witness, published 1875, he
asserted that the crucial elements of Christian revelation had been recorded and
preserved in the Sanskrit scriptures, even though their true meaning had been
forgotten. Thus the self-sacrifice of the Purusa in the RigVeda Samhita,xxvii
prophesied the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In The Relation between
Christianity and Hinduism published 1881, he came to argue that the forefathers of
Hindus had an equally valuable foresight of ‘the great mystery of Godliness’ as the
Jewish seers themselves, hence they could and should embrace the Jesus of the
New Testament as the perfect Prajapati of the Vedas.xxviii
Krishna Mohan’s ideas look superficially like early fulfilment theology, a classic late19th century missiology which proposed that all religions consisted of partial
revelation that may be perfected by Christianity, but there is a twist here. In reaffirming the Sanskritic heritage, not only did he have an argument against Indian
criticisms of cultural deviation, he also had a historicist argument against those that
may claim Christianity as a Western gift to India. Several times, he attempted to
establish the equivalence of Indian and Jewish precursors to Christianity.
Krishna Mohan’s ideas were borrowed and reiterated several times over the next
hundred years, his historicist strategy being repeatedly used to question the
European conflation of Christian confession with specific dogmas, liturgy, church
structure, and social standards. In the twentieth century, Pandipeddi Chenchiah
(1886-1959), an alumnus of the Madras Christian College and later a judge, rejected
the historical relation between the Old and New Testaments outright, saying ‘Why
should it be necessary to understand the Old Testament to grasp the Sermon on the
Mount? … Why should a Hindu understand the complicated Pauline theology to
follow Jesus? … I can pick up material for an Old Testament in Hinduism making
selections in the light of what Jesus said and did. That was exactly what early
Christians did and later Hindu converts ought to do.’xxix
9
If the historical argument enabled a decoupling of Christian faith from its allegedly
non-essential and historically specific correlates produced by the specific trajectory
of European history, this paved the way for questioning some very fundamental
aspects of the way in which Christianity was presented in India by Euro-American
missionaries.
Unsurprisingly, one such aspect was the disciplining role of the Christian churches
and Christian sacraments. Baptism was one such sacrament. Krishna Mohan was
initially unconvinced of its necessity, and when he did eventually seek baptism from
Alexander Duff, he explicitly asked to be baptized at Duff’s home rather than in the
church,
consciously
choosing
personal
discipleship
over
denominational
membership.xxx The two earliest entirely indigenous Protestant churches in India –
Christo Samaj of Bengal and National Church of Madras did not use baptism for
initiation into exclusive membership.xxxi In the 20th century, a Gujarati convert from
Vaishnavism, Manilal Parekh, although baptized in the Anglican church, rejected its
value in a sermon he delivered in 1924, saying that where baptism should create the
adhikara or right of bearing witness and being an acharya or prophet, it merely
created membership in a community that was distanced from society and antinational.xxxii
Parekh may have been extreme, but A.J. Appasamy, theologian, professor of
Bishop’s College Calcutta, and later bishop of Coimbatore in the Church of South
India, reported with approval his father’s exasperation with the uninspiring church,
and his exploration of Yoga as a spiritual exercise. Apart from its foreignness there
was fragmentation – into dozens of denominations, replicating the missionary
societies. The idea that a truly Indian church could arise out of these struck
Pandipeddi Chenchiah as a ‘capital joke’.xxxiii Deeply influenced by Aurobindo,
Chenchiah recommended that in place of the church there should be local religious
communities, or ashrams, centred around a spiritual teacher or guru.xxxiv
In the early twentieth century, a small number of European and American
missionaries began to agree. The American Methodist missionary, Eli Stanley Jones,
suggested in his 1925 book The Christ of the Indian Road that the only way to
preach Christ’s universal message in a time of cultural and political conflict was to let
10
go of the ‘very long line – a line that stretched from Genesis to Revelation, on to
Western civilisation and to the Western Christian Church’ and instead ‘take [one’s]
stand at Christ.xxxv However, even if such anti-ecclesiastical Christo-centrism may
have been applauded by the avant-garde new generation among the missionaries, it
generally found little welcome from the established Christian hierarchy. Thus, in spite
of the monastic tradition within the Catholic church, Brahmabandhav Upadhyay’s
efforts to create Christian ashram came to nought. And when Sadhu Sundar Singh, a
Sikh convert to Christianity and a travelling ascetic preacher made his appearance,
he was wildly fêted by the who’s who of Indian Christianity, but was delicensed by
the Anglican church for his inability to conform to denominational boundaries in his
preaching.xxxvi
Liberal theology itself took a downturn in Europe in the 1930s with the rise of
theological neo-orthodoxy. In the eve of the World Missionary Conference at
Tambaram, near Madras, a group of lay Tamil Christians found themselves
preparing to rebut the argument that the Gospel message was complete and
unalterable, universally applicable in the same form irrespective of differences in
culture. They were specifically reacting to a book written by Hendrik Kraemer,
professor of history of religions at Leiden, called The Christian message in the nonChristian world, xxxvii which repeated Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy. xxxviii The Rethinking
group, as they came to be known, urged that the Indian church should be able to
think for itself. While it celebrated the reforming influence of Christianity on Hinduism
and Hindus, it denounced the domination of Christianity by missionaries, who they
accused of obstructing the development of a genuine Indian expression of
Christianity. They denied that they were relativistic to truth, and asserted that their
aversion to the contemporary church structures arose not from their social snobbery
but their dislike of foreign domination.xxxix
Christian citizenship: family, community and nation
How did this syncretic approach to faith and culture translate into the shaping of
Christian political identity? Chandra Mallampalli, pointing to the stark difference in
the attitudes of Protestants and Catholics of Madras Presidency towards nationalism,
has proposed a straightforward connection between the Sanskritized theology of the
Protestants and their inclination towards a Sanskritized i.e. Hinduised nationalism.
11
Actually, while Mallampalli is correct about the Catholic-Protestant political divide,
Protestants varied hugely in their political choices. There were sharp divides on key
issues relating to community rights and nationalist politics even among the
Rethinking Group. Liberal theology did not make a nationalist. However, the reverse
is true – those Indian Christians who were the most sympathetic towards
nationalism, and those who, partly as a result, emerged as national-level leaders of
the Christian community between the 1920s and 1940s, did share the religious
trajectory just described, and it formed a coherent intellectual basis for their nonsectarian approach to religious identity. I will now offer you a glimpse of the political
debates that animated the Protestant leaders of the Christian community in India,
showing how in spite of vigorous arguments to the contrary, a political attitude that
denied the need for special legal protections came to characterize them. In doing so,
I shall pay close attention to the personal and theological formations of the key
exponents of this view.
The first of these leaders, inevitably, was Krishna Mohan Banerjea, who had
occasion not only to subscribe to worthy nationalist causes such as opposition to the
Vernacular Press Act, but also to comment on the specific civil disabilities suffered
by Indian Christians. Two common deprivations suffered, from the point of view of
upper class and caste men converted to Christianity, was the loss of control over
wives and children, and over inheritable property. Krishna Mohan himself supported
the passing of a specific law in 1850 known as the Caste Disabilities Removal Act, or
the Lex Loci Act, which provided as a general principle that a change of religion
leading to loss of caste, would not affect civil rights otherwise possessed, especially
the right to inheritance. However, when it came to reclaiming undeniably communityspecific rights, Krishna Mohan, who himself had to ‘rescue’ his wife from his family
with the help of a British magistrate, took a different approach. Reacting to the Native
Converts’ Marriage Dissolution Bill of 1866, which would dissolve the marriage of a
convert to Christianity if the unconverted spouse refused to resume conjugal
relations within 3 months, Krishna Mohan Banerjea said rather harshly to the
Government’s Select Committee that the law was entirely the creation of
missionaries who were totally unrepresentative of Indian Christians and who treated
the latter as their serfs.xl Krishna Mohan’s point of view was that such a law would
remove the possibility of slow reconciliation of deserting spouses, and by extension,
12
of winning over Hindu society in general. Banerjea was being unfair: the missionary
Rev. R. Winter of the (S.P.G.) mission to Delhi similarly stated that he didn’t know of
any Indian converts ‘panting’ to be re-admitted to marital life.xli On the other hand,
Rev. W.T. Satthianadhan, of Madras, an Indian clergyman, responded to Banerjea
(and Winter) that the scale of religious conversions in south India made the legal
measure essential, implying that the righteous moral posture of north Indian and
Bengali Christians arose from their being acquainted with an unrepresentatively
small number of conversions.xlii
A similar debate over who best understood the interests of Indian Christians
animated the All India Conference of Indian Christians, formed in 1914, which was
the first nation-wide political forum of Indian Christians. In reality, and in spite of
periodic recruitment drives which mirrored that of the Congress, the AICIC was
essentially a Protestant association. It was also purely Indian in membership – unlike
all other bodies of similar territorial reach. Although not a political party, it tried to
present itself to the government as the mouthpiece of Indian Christians and was
accepted to be at least one of the most important ones. One issue that constantly
divided the members of this organization is whether politically representation of
Indian Christians would be best secured by a general electorate, or through the
implementation of community specific electorates whereby only Christians could
elect Christian leaders to reserved parliamentary seats.
Between 1914 and 1947, this matter was constantly debated within the AICIC, with
the non-sectarian view gaining a precarious dominance in the 1920s, mainly under
the leadership of a man called Kanakarayan Thiruselvam Paul - a Tamil Protesant
layman from Salem, who in his career and ideas brought together all those features
of Indian Christianity that we have discussed so far – resentment of foreign
missionary control, a rejection of racial and cultural inferiority, a service orientation
and a non-confrontational approach to other religions. K.T. Paul’s entry into public
life began with his co-option by the YMCA in 1905, and in 1916 he became the first
Indian national general secretary of this organization. xliii
Paul was also a founder member of the AICIC in 1914, and its President in 1923. He
represented the Indian Christians in the First Round Table Conference in London on
13
Indian constitutional reforms in 1930. When Paul died, tributes from leading Indian
politicians, including Gandhi, applauded his ability to prevent his faith from diluting
his nationalism.xliv
Let us tarry awhile and trace the outlines of K.T. Paul’s career and ideas. Speaking
to the Calcutta Missionary Conference of 1912, (that is the fourth decennial
gathering of most Protestant mission societies in India), Paul pilloried foreign
missionaries for behaving like hyper-organised dominators, rather than true gurus.
He deplored the separation of mission and church, the automatic exclusion of
Indians from ‘missions’ and the expectation that that the Indian church would ‘receive
and shepherd proselytes secured by the Mission, and … conduct a little fancy ‘Home
Mission’ in its neighbourhood’. In an indirect reference to dalit Christians, Paul
acknowledged that the Indian church was drawn from such social strata as lacked
such leadership qualities. And yet, he pointed out, the Madras University had
produced 1200-1300 Indian Christian graduates, and in Sadhu Sundar Singh, Indian
Christians in the south and north had a leader par excellence. The most urgent
problem, he argued was that of race. xlv
As for Paul’s religious views, he was also founder member and director of the
National Missionary Society,xlvi an indigenous missionary society formed in 1906 with
YMCA support, through which Paul no doubt sought to fulfill his ambition of the
Indian church leading missions rather than the other way round. However, by 1916,
K.T. Paul confessed his doctrinal perplexity in a letter to a friend. After the World
War, he said:
I feel now that though my conviction is strong enough to determine my own conduct I cannot
propagate it to others. The entire ethical standards are so essentially in the melting cauldron
and volcanic water that while my own feet shall be on the rock ledge which I feel below me, I
shall not preach my faith to others…They know too, they are sincere too, they have Christ as
well. Who am I here. Let me act in sweetness and confidence, in service…Is this “illogical”? Is
this a “compromise”?. Not indeed. To abstain from proselytizing is no compromise. It may be
due to a true humility.xlvii
Paul’s correspondent was Leonard Elmhirst, another YMCA man recruited by
Rabindranath Tagore to create Sriniketan, or the first agricultural education college
under nationalist auspices. Like Elmhirst, Paul found himself more drawn to non14
sectarian social work, in his case within the YMCA’s ‘Rural department’ of which he
was in charge from of 1914.
Although he had been consistently voicing similar sentiments from much earlier, Paul
fully expounded his theory of Christian citizenship, in his Presidential speech to the
AICIC in 1923. ‘Christian citizenship’ according to Paul, was not simply a matter of
being Christian by confession, for Europe, which was Christian, had failed to
demonstrate Christian statesmanship in the World War, and even if all Indians
became Christians they would not necessarily thereby become Christian citizens. It
was certainly not about seeking relief for community-specific grievances – indeed
Indian Christians had no such grievances to complain of. Christian citizenship was
about assuming ‘national stewardship’, it was about actively reconciling Hindus and
Muslims, about using local government positions for social service in the spirit of
nishkama karma – that is performance of duties without expectation of returns or
rewards, for oneself as well as for the community. ‘The sooner we get off the stilted
pedestal of rights and begin to climb the rugged steep of responsibility, the truer will
be our perspective of the situation and of the relative values of our various
opportunities. In front of the enormous needs of our country and of the gigantic work
yet waiting to be done unto her uplift, all talk of the fishes and loaves becomes utterly
untenable.’xlviii
Paul had support within the AICIC – for the organization did vote in favour of his
ideas.xlix However, the matter was extremely fraught and in a blunt and angry
message, the President of the U.P. Indian Christian Association, J.M. David,
expressed the hope that ‘YMCA views’ would not prevail. ‘Spectacular YMCA views
are one thing,’ he said, ‘and practical politics and preservation of one's very
existence another.’l
In spite of David’s warning, in subsequent years it was the YMCA types that
continued to dominate the AICIC, and indeed national-level Christian politics, and
they claimed to represent not just the view of Protestants but of Indian Christians in
general. Paul represented Indian Christians during the First Round Table
Conference in London in 1930, and was replaced because of his sudden death, by
15
S.K. Datta – another YMCA general secretary, a medical doctor, and one-time
principal of Forman Christian College, Lahore.
Datta came of a family of Bengali Brahmos converted to Christianity and settled in
the Punjab over several generations. He was of the opinion that the sectarianism of
Indian Christians arose from two principal reasons – their small number, and the fact
that ‘Protestantism in India was foreign-missionary-ridden.’li
At the Round Table Conferences, Datta was in complete accord with Gandhi’s
position, both on minorities and Depressed Classes. He found his Catholic and
separatist counterpart – Rao Bahadur Pannirselvam - distasteful, and deeply
resented being asked to represent the Christian position (and opposed to the general
Indian view) on anything. Datta epitomized the attitude of the successful Indian
Christian politicians of the mid-twentieth-century – they may have been moderate in
their nationalism, but extreme in their rejection of a sectarian identity.
During the Constituent Assembly debates, Christian members gloried in the fact that
they asked for no special privileges, and from this basis even caste-based
reservations as anti-national. The Christian Congressman, H.C. Mookerjee, member
of the Minorities Advisory Committee and Vice-President of the Assembly, said that
the masses of India needed food, shelter, medical aid and good roads, not political
reservations, such demands arising from the ambitious middle to upper class
persons alone. He acquiesced in the House’s decision to reserve seats in parliament
for Scheduled Castes with reluctance, urging that this measure should be limited by
time.lii
The YMCA in India (and London)
For all its obtuseness, the strength and sincerity of this political vision is best
revealed at the level of working institutions led by such men. An opportunity for such
a case-study is provided by the YMCA itself, which produced all these YMCA types
that the north Indian Christian leader had so deplored.
In a study of the YMCA in Singapore, Robbie Goh has noted how although, perhaps
because, it was very successful in attracting official and business patronage, the
16
social functions of the Singapore YMCA remained extremely limited and
conservative. Catering mostly to British expatriates and a very small number of
suitably Anglicised Straits Chinese gentlemen, this was Goh, says, essentially an
organization to ‘reculturize’… ‘vulnerable white men’ ‘in a recreated milieu of
European society’ allowing them to ‘sublimate their desires in a variety of European
sports and recreations.’ This racial and political orientation was radically challenged,
in particular by Dr Chen Su Lan, a medical doctor, Methodist, critic of the colonial
government and crusader for social reform in the Chinese community, who in
aftermath of the Japanese withdrawal, orchestrated the formation of separate
Chinese YMCA in 1946.liii
The Indian YMCAs, established from the 1850s onwards, functioned very similarly to
the old Singapore YMCA, that is, until the 1910s, when a radical transformation took
place in the composition, management and social functions of this organization. This
transformation was closely correlated with the appointment of Indian secretaries –
including K.T. Paul. In the 1910s the YMCA in India adopted an ambitious social
work programme centred on rural uplift, which was both an ameliorative answer to
dalit Christian poverty and a meeting ground with the nationalists.
In 1919, the Indian YMCA established an overseas project, in the form of an Indian
student union and hostel in London. This was something of a personal project of K.T.
Paul’s, who was apparently approached by the students themselves. Paul’s
biographer noted that Paul wanted this institution to be a space where Indians and
British people could meet under conditions of equality. This would have made it a
unique place indeed, for Shompa Lahiri has described the desperation of Indian
students in London in particular over funding and housing problems, subject as they
were to the prejudices of landlords, some of whom apparently offered informal
surveillance services to the Indian student department, set up in 1909. liv Of the
approximately 1500 students in Britain as a whole at the time, the YMCA hostel
housed around 100 and affiliated a total of 435 in 1920.lv
The hostel was initially housed in a building called ‘Shakespeare Hut’ behind the
British Museum. It was financed by the Indian YMCA, which also retained the right to
nominate the secretary and the Warden of the hostel.lvi The institution proved to be
17
the site of an extraordinary role reversal – the several Europeans on the managing
committee constantly pleading with the National Council of Indian YMCAs and
especially K.T. Paul, for seconded staff, and money.
Was this an institution of outsourced surveillance? Edwyn Bevan, the first chair of
the managing committee, was a professor of Hellenic civilisations at King’s College,
and had sympathetic views of Indian nationalism. He did initially appear sensitive to
the possibility of unsavoury propaganda by external lecturers – and his closely
supervise their selection led to some stiffness with the first warden, M.N.
Chatterjee.lvii This appeared to clear up and in the 1920s the students organized
lectures and debates on topics ranging from whether Indians should wear purely
Indian dress abroad to the merits of Katherine Mayo’s book and whether nonviolence was the only legitimate political option. Soon after the last debate in 1927,
however, in which a guest speaker from the Cambridge majlis (Indian students’
association) argued strongly in favour of violence,lviii the management committee
required a compulsory re-election of the student committee. This led to a lengthy
period of tussle between management and the students, with the latter demanding
eventually a new constitution that would give them 50% representation on the
management committee. Students asserted that the S.K.Datta, the general secretary
of the Indian YMCA, had himself promised such a course of action. Datta was forced
to issue a clarification, and the students were reminded that the YMCA’s
management did have to be Christian, besides having a lower turnover than students
could provide.lix
Datta was under pressure from several ends. In 1927, the European Association of
Calcutta had passed a general resolution denouncing the increasing politicization of
the Indian YMCA, their allegedly socialist leanings and their stridently anti-British
attitude. Evidence of its anti-Britishness was found in its publications which
blasphemously compared Gandhi to Christ, its backing by Americans and the
increasing Indianisation of its staff. The YMCA appointed an enquiry committee,
headed by a British judge, which found most of these allegations baseless, and
some, such as Indianisation, rather desirable developments.lx
18
In the aftermath of these challenges however, there appear to have been fewer
ringing calls for militancy on the YMCA hostel’s premises in London, but in a process
which we could call the culturalisation of nationalism, there was a regular programme
of visits and receptions of eminent Indians, including Gandhi in 1938.
The rationale of the YMCA hostel was questioned again in the 1940s by London
University, which proposed that to overcome segregation, Indian students should be
housed with all other students, while the YMCA Indian students’ hostel evolved into
an international hostel. The Indian National YMCA strongly rebutted this proposal –
arguing that segregation was due not to the hostel’s policies but the attitudes of
British students – for whom a third of the places had been kept from the very
beginning, with no takers.lxi
Clearly then, the Indian YMCA of London was no India House – that other student
hostel which housed the subsequent revolutionary terrorists Shyamji Krishnaverma
and V.D. Savarkar.lxii On the other hand, it appeared to be a physical, social and
cultural haven for Indian students in London, where they could escape the position of
being a marginal and misrepresented minority and feel sufficiently at home to be
self-reflexive,
for
example
by
discussing
Indian
social
problems
without
embarrassment, What is remarkable is this ambassadorial institution was run by
Indian Christians, minorities in India themselves. Rather than run a community selfhelp organization, as minorities may be expected to do, the leadership of Indian
Christians felt themselves more fit to play the role of selfless servants of the nation
as a whole.
Conclusion
Selflessness as a political orientation inevitably reeks of false consciousness, or of
hypocrisy. And yet, in explaining the apparently conservative disavowal of rightsbased feminism by many women activists in modern India, Rochona Majumdar has
pointed to their affirmation of tyag or sacrifice as a virtuous act worthy of modern
women who were authentically Indian. She has argued forcefully that such illiberal
claims of virtue enabled both social critique and political empowerment.lxiii
19
In an unusual reversal of gender roles, elite Protestant Christian men in nineteenth
and twentieth-century India attempted to similarly construct virtuous political selves
by denying the boundedness of their community and by extension, by rejecting legal
safeguards intended for vulnerable minority communities. Like the women activists
Majumdar has discussed, they too deployed Indian tradition in making such claims.
In doing so, they may indeed have empowered themselves in a certain fashion – not
least by seeking and securing an activist space beyond the restrictive tutelage of
European and American missions. This activist space was not restricted to the
political success of a small number of individuals, but the much larger Christian
social presence in Indian society, which, even in the much altered milieu of today,
goes far beyond the expected role of a minority community. Anybody aware of the
educational landscape of modern India would recognize this point. On the other
hand, by conflating themselves with their community, these leaders may well have
failed to address the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of dalit Christians,
both within the churches and outside them. Dalit Christians, unlike all other dalits,
remain excluded from the benefits of the affirmative action policies of the Indian
government. Whether by endorsing a more restrictive view of religion and community
belonging, their elite leaders may have secured such rights for them, is another
question.
20
NOTES
i
M.A.C. Warren, ‘Religious freedom in India’, The East and West Review, 13: 2
(April, 1947), pp. 47-50
A sense of this journey is offered by Avril Powell, ‘Processes of Conversion to
ii
Christianity in Nineteenth Century North-Western India’, in G.A. Oddie, Religious
Conversion Movements in South Asia Continuities and Change, 1800-1900
(Richmond: Curzon, 1996), pp. 15-55. Also see the biography of another Bengali
convert, Golaknath Chatterjee, written by an admiring grandchild, based on
Golaknath’s own account. In this story, Golaknath emulates an Indian spiritual
seeker, akin to a Hindu Yogi or a Muslim Sufi, undertaking perilous journeys,
undergoing much suffering, preaching to ordinary people on the way and finally
seeking baptism in Christianity of his own initiative, immediately proceeding to
preach it to others. H.G., Golak: the hero (Bombay, 1932), pp. 56-87. The point was
explicitly stated by Manilal Parekh, whose views we shall discuss later in this paper.
Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Whose gospel? Conflict in the LMS in the early 1840s’ in John
iii
de Gruchy ed. The London Missionary Society in Southern Africa: historical essays
in celebration of the bicentenary of the LMS in Southern Africa 1799-1999 (Cape
Town: David Phlip, 1999), pp. 132-155.
iv
For a detailed discussion of these arrangements, see Nandini Chatterjee, The
Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830-1960 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2011), Chapter 6.
Mahesh Chandra Ghose, whose baptism preceded Banerjea’s by two months, did
v
not live long.
vi
Ramachandra Ghosha, A biographical sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea (2nd edn.,
Calcutta, 1980).
vii
File: Correspondence with K.M. Banerjea, C I1/ O66/15, CMS Archives,
Birmingham University Library
viii
Calcutta Corresponding Committee to Secretaries, Church Missionary Society,
London, 20 March 1837, and 3 August 1837, in File: Reports of the Calcutta
Corresponding Committee, 1823-1878, C I1/ O2/8-9, CMS Archives.
ix
Ramachandra Ghosha, A biographical sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea (2nd edn.,
Calcutta, 1980), pp. 22-4.
x
J. Bateman, The life of the Rt. Rev. Daniel Wilson (2 vols., London, 1860), II, 285.
21
xi
M.E. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India (New Delhi: ISPCK, 1972), p. 180.
xii
Ramachandra Ghosha, A biographical Sketch of the Rev. K.M. Banerjea, p. 36.
xiii
Revised prospectus re training and pay of ordained Indian graduates 1918, G2 I7
L9, pp. 285-8, CMS Archives, and M.E. Gibbs, The Anglican church in India, p. 362.
‘Payment of Indian workers’ in Report of the Church Missionary Society’s
xiv
delegation to India, 1921-22 (London, 1922), pp. 105-7.
xv
Proceedings of the fifth meeting of the National Missionary Council, held at
Benares, 1918, pp. 13-19.
xvi
Lal Behari Day, one of Alexander Duff’s students, ordained in 1855, was refused a
position in the Scottish Free Church’s Mission Council, although European
missionaries held such membership automatically. Day’s teachers argued that this
was not a violation of Presbyterian principles, because the mission council was not a
church organization. As a lay organization controlling funds donated from Britain, it
could co-opt missionaries as ex-officio members, but not the ‘native brethren’,
presumably because British donors would feel nervous about placing their money in
native hands. G. Macpherson, Life of Lal Behari Day: convert, pastor, professor and
author (Edinburgh, 1900), p. 29 and Introduction by Dr. Thomas Smith, who justified
this policy.
xvii
A native church for the natives of India, giving an account of the formation of a
native church council for the Punjab mission of the Church Missionary Society and of
the proceedings at their first meeting at Umritsur, 31 st March to 2nd April 1877
(Lahore, 1877), pp. 53-63.
xviii
Madras Ecclesiastical Proceedings, 4 October 1909, No. 68, pp. 2-3, P/8256,
APAC, British Library, and Susan Billington-Harper, In the shadow of the Mahatma:
Bishop V.S. Azariah and the travails of Christianity in British India (Michigan, 2000),
especially pp. 122-33.
xix
Geoffrey Oddie, ‘Indian Christians and National Identity, 1870-1947’, The Journal
of Religious History, 25: 3 (2001), pp. 346-66.
xx
Lionel Caplan, ‘Fundamentalism as Counterculture: Protestants in Urban South
India’ in Caplan ed. Studies in Religious Fundamentalism (London: Macmillan, 1987)
xxi
Anthony Copley, Religions in conflict : ideology, cultural contact and conversion in
late colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)’ Oddie, ‘Indian Christians
and National Identity’.
22
xxii
On which, see Vincent Cronin, A pearl to India: the life of Roberto de Nobili
(London, 1959); for an analysis of intellectual differences between Nobili and his
chief detractor in the same mission, Gonçalo Fernandes, Ines G. Zupanov,
‘Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth Century
Madurai Mission’ in Representations, No. 41. (Winter, 1993), pp. 123-148, and also
her Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in
Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Vedanayagam Sastri, ‘Humble address’, dated 18 January, 1829, first in the six
xxiii
essays collectively titled ‘Sadeterattoo’ (Explaining Caste), which themselves form
an English introduction to the Tamil manuscript ‘The foolishness of amending caste’,
OR.11,742, ff. 8-9, APAC, British Library. For identification as well as analysis of this
source, I am reliant on Denis Hudson, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical
Christians, 1706-1835 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Ferdmans, 2000), pp. 148157.
xxiv
Principally
the
Surya
Siddhanta,
composed
around
400
C.E.
and
Bhaskaracharya’s commentary on it, the Siddhanta Siromani. Ballantyne was not
alone in his enthusiasm for the Surya Siddhanta, the translation of this text caused
much excitement among missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century. See for
example, Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, ‘Translation of the Surya-Siddhanta, a textbook of
Hindu astronomy; with notes, and an appendix’, Journal of the American Oriental
Society, 6 (1855), 141-498.
xxv
C.A. Bayly, ‘Orientalists, Informants and Critics in Benares, 1790-1860’ in Jamal
Malik (ed.) Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History 1760-1860
(Leiden, 2000), pp. 97-127; M.A. Dodson, ‘Re-presented for the pandits: James
Ballantyne, “useful knowledge” and Sanskrit scholarship in Benares College during
the mid-nineteenth century’.
xxvi
No. 404 (26 April 1855), J.R. Ballantyne to J. Thomason, dated 20 Oct 1852, BL,
OIOC, NWP GP, P/215/43; Michael Dodson, Orientalism, empire and national
culture: India, 1770-1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 111.
xxvii
‘Purusa-Sukta’ Book 10, hymn 90, in Ralph T.H. Griffith (ed.), The hymns of the
Rigveda: translated with a popular commentary (2nd edn., 2 vols., Benares, 1897),
pp. 517-20.
xxviii
K.M. Banerjea, The relation between Christianity and Hinduism (London, 1882).
23
xxix
Quoted in Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology (Madras:
Christian Literature Society, 1969), p. 158.
xxx
India Review, 1843.
xxxi
Kaj Baago, ‘The first independence movement among Indian Christians’, Indian
Church History Review 1: 1 (1967)
Manilal Parekh, ‘The spiritual significance of baptism’, National Christian Council
xxxii
Review, 44: 9, pp. 324-8
H.L. Richard, ‘Gospel ferment in India among both Hindus and Christians:
xxxiii
rethinking “Rethinking”’, International Journal of Frontier Missions, 19: 3 (Fall, 2002),
pp .7-17
xxxiv
Robin Boyd, An introduction to Indian Christian theology, pp. 159-63.
xxxv
Eric Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian road (London, 1925), p. 16.
xxxvi
C.F. Andrews, Sadhu Sundar Singh: a personal memoir (London, 1934), pp. 94 -
5. Andrews himself was an exceptional personality. He came to India as a member
of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, and remained to become an activist supporter of
Indian nationalism. In his opinion, thought the Bishop’s decision on the Sadhu’s case
was narrow and ‘unlooked-for’.
xxxvii
Preface in Hendrik Kraemer, The Christian message in a non-Christian world
(London, 1938).
xxxviii
Barth was led to his theological position from the shock of finding his theological
teachers aligned with the German cause in the First World War. Liberal theology’s
celebration of ethnic and national characteristics in religious expression apparently
left it morally incapable of criticizing any negative aspects of national culture or
nationalist politics. Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: attitudes and
policies of Anglo-Saxon Protestant missions in India (Oxford, 1980), 175.
xxxix
xl
G.V. Job, et. al., Rethinking Christianity in India (Madras, 1938).
From the Lord Bishop of Calcutta to the Viceroy of India, forwarding Krishna
Mohan Banerjea’s printed pamphlet, as well as letters from Tara Chand and Rev. R.
Winter of the S.P.G. mission to Delhi, in Report of the Select Committee on the Bill to
legalize, under certain circumstances, the re-marriage of native converts to
Christianity, and associated papers, Government of India, Bills and Acts, 1866,
L/PJ/5/8, APAC, British Library pp. 18-42.
xli
Ibid., pp. 43-5.
24
xlii
Ibid., pp. 51-4. On Satthianadhan and the history of this illustrious Tamil Christian
family, see E.M. Jackson, ‘Glimpses of a Prominent Indian Christian Family of
Tirunelveli and Madras, 1863-1906: Perspectives on Caste, Culture, and Conversion’
in R. E. Frykenberg (ed.), Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-cultural
Communication since 1500 (Michigan: W.B. Ferdmans, 2003), pp. 315-35.
xliii
H.A. Popley, K.T. Paul: Christian leader (Calcutta, 1938, 2 nd edition Madras
1987), p. 128.
C.F. Andrews, ‘Kanakarayan T. Paul: a great Christian leader’, a review of H. A.
xliv
Popley, K.T. Paul: Christian leader, newspaper clipping, K.T. Paul papers, United
Theological College Archives, Bangalore.
xlv
K.T. Paul, ‘Indian leadership in Mission and church’, in Calcutta Decennial
Missionary Conference, 1912, copy in KT Paul Papers.
xlvi
H. A. Popley, K.T. Paul, pp. 37-9.
xlvii
K.T. Paul to Leonard K. Elmhirst, Bangalore, 16.6. 1916, Dartington Hall Archives
(DHA), LKE/IN/13/G/5.
xlviii
K.T. Paul, ‘The presidential speech’, Report of the tenth session of the All India
Conference of Indian Christians, Bangalore (Cover missing, 1923), pp. 10-27, UTC
Archives, Bangalore.
xlix
B.L. Rallia Ram was a graduate of Lahore University, secretary of Y.M.C.A
Punjab, later National General Secretary of the YMCA of India, Burma and Ceylon,
and Chairman of the Students’ Christian Association of India, Burma and Ceylon,
and also Secretary of the Punjab Indian Christian Association. In 1931, he lamented
in an international journal that ‘primitive religiosity’ was standing in the way of
nationalism. In this he depicted the Christians to be as bad as the rest, and the proof
was their demand for separate electorates. Out of this moral torpor, he suggested
the lead of the ‘Sage of Sabarmati’. B.L. Rallia Ram, ‘Indian students and the
present situation’, Vox Studentium, 8 (July-September, 1931), 97-9.
The Rallia Ram brothers became closely associated with the Gandhian Congress in
the Punjab. Mrs. K.L. Rallia Ram was an important Punjabi helper of the Gandhian
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, daughter of Raja Sir Harnam Singh of Kapurthala, and Golak
Nath Chatterjee’s granddaughter. Mrs. Rallia Ram helped her organize Spinner’s
Associations in the Punjab and also the sale of khadi. She published a pamphlet in
1940, collecting documents regarding the negotiations for India’s independence in
25
the World War II years, with the clear intention of showing the justice of the
nationalist cause and the unfairness, oppressiveness, and racism of the British. The
Sage of Sabarmati, she said, was leading the country to peace based on moral order
and justice. Mrs. K.L. Rallia Ram, Why civil disobedience? (Lahore, 1940).
l
Ibid., p. 47.
li
Margarita Barnes, S.K. Datta and his people, Typescript, EUR MSS C576, APAC,
British Library
lii
Constituent Assembly Debates, Official Report (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat,
1950), vol VIII, pp. 269-355.
Robbie B.H. Goh, ‘Singapore’s Two YMCAS: Christianity, Colonialism and ethnic
liii
fault lines’, Crossroads, 18:2 (2007), pp. 27-61
liv
Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, race and identity,
1880-1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 128-9.
lv
Indian Y.M.C.A. London, Minute Book I, 1919-1925 (Consulted with permission of
the director, Indian YMCA), entry for 13 September 1920.
Apparently, this was done to allay Indian students’ suspicion about official
lvi
surveillance. H.A. Popley, K.T. Paul, pp. 107-9.
Indian Y.M.C.A. London, Minute Book I, entries for 12 April and 14 June 1920.
The student speaker in question was S.A. Rafique. Indian Y.M.C.A. London,
lvii
lviii
Proceedings of the Sutdents’ Union Society, 12.12.1928
lix
Indian Y.M.C.A. London, Minute Book II, (unpaginated) entry for 19 May 1931,
Minute Book III 9 June 1931.
lx
Young Men’s Christians Associations of India, Burma and Ceylon and European
Association, Central Administration, report of a committee of enquiry (Calcutta:
Y.M.C.A., 1927)
lxi
Indian Y.M.C.A. London, Minute Book IV.
lxii
On the India House, see Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian
encounters, race and identity, 1880-1930, p. 130.
lxiii
Rochona Majumdar, ‘ “Self-sacrifice” vs. “Self-interest”: a non-historicist reading of
the history of women’s rights in India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East, 22: 1&2 (2002), pp. 20-35
26