British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861

By Sutapa Dutta

‘British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861’ looks at the arrival of the early British women missionaries in Bengal, especially when travelling to India or working in missions was neither a spontaneous nor an acceptable career decision for white women. The book aims to throw light on a key moment in colonial contact, a new interface between two races, religions and ways of life. From a hesitant beginning as ‘helpmeets’ to a more confident phase of mission activities in the form of setting up formal educational institutions, writing books and so on comprise a long legacy of white women’s participation in overseas colonial encounters. Historicizing imperial feminism will enable those who choose to use the past to locate and interrogate its ramifications on more ‘modern’ notions of feminism. The advent of the Baptist missionary William Carey in Bengal in 1793, followed by others, significantly altered how mission activity was perceived in India. From Hannah Marshman, who helped her more famous missionary husband Joshua Marshman to open schools for girls, to Mary Ann Cooke, the first single British woman missionary to come and work in India, to Hannah Mullens’s contributions to zenana education, were all part of a long journey which helped professionalize women’s missionary work in the colonies. With the death of Hannah Mullens in 1861, the ‘early’ phase of missionary work came to an end and then began a more proactive phase of evangelization and missionary activity in India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783087280

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British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861

British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861

Sutapa Dutta

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2017

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Sutapa Dutta 2017

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-726-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-726-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Ma and Baba

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I. ON A DOUBLE MISSION

1.Merchants, Mercenaries, Missionaries

2.Representing ‘Otherness’ and the Agenda of Reform

Part II. FEMALE AGENCY

3.‘Helpmeets’ and Wives of Missionaries (1793–1820)

4.‘Mothers’ and Single Women Missionaries (1820–40)

Part III. INTERTWINED IMAGES

5.‘Ladies’ and the Zenana (1840–60)

6.The ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’ Sisters

Notes

Index

FIGURES

1.1Fort William, Calcutta, 1760

1.2India, 1819, a map illustrative of the Baptist Missionary Stations

2.1Suttee, 1826. From James Peggs’s 1828 essay, The Suttees’ Cry to Britain

3.1Hannah Marshman’s School for Girls, established in 1818, as it stands today

3.2The tomb of the Marshman family, Serampore

4.1The Serampore College, established in 1818, one of the oldest colleges in the country that is still functional

4.2Tabular view of schools

5.1A Calcutta Zenana, from Woman in India by Mary Frances Billington (1895), depicts a bold Bengali ‘lady’ with her daughters, surrounded by maids. London: Chapman & Hall, 1895, 72

6.1A page from Hannah Catherine Mullens’s Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran, 1852

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was begun at a very difficult and unhappy time as I saw my mother battling and losing out to a difficult illness. The months after her death were a vacuum, a hard reality in which writing this book has been as much an exercise in self-realization as it has been cathartic. As someone who inspired her daughters to realize their worth, I owe everything to her.

It is a happy coincidence that many women have helped me write this book on women missionaries. To begin with, I am greatly obliged to the missionary sisters and the nuns who were responsible for moulding my formative years in school and college. I have only tried to emulate their dedication, discipline and devotion to work. The book is a grateful acknowledgement of their teaching and service to others.

An Early Career Fellowship provided by the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) and Manchester University greatly facilitated the process of writing this book. It provided a stimulating academic environment where discussions with like-minded colleagues from all over the world forged deep bonds of the mind and heart. I am specially grateful to Penny for her intellectual input and encouragement. A chapter written for a book edited by another special friend, Christina Smylitopoulos, forms the basis of the first chapter of my book. A conference organized at Oxford University by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) further provided me with a grant and a platform to read out a paper on this topic. The book was to eventually develop from this conference paper. I am thankful to the publishers for commissioning this book, to the unknown reviewers for their valuable suggestions and to the editorial department, especially Abi and Vincent, who have always responded with alacrity and professionalism.

My students and colleagues, former mentors and teachers have been pillars of strength, with their suggestions, research materials or just emotional support whenever I needed it. I am particularly indebted to Dr Meenakshi Jain, with whom the long sessions of discussions would frequently spill into hours in the corridors and even parking lots. Her knowledge on the subject and the intellectual stimulation she provided have often been the most exciting reasons for the extended hours of stay in the college. Above all to my former teacher and mentor, the late Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, I am grateful for stimulating my interest in Indian literature. The seed of the last chapter was sown by her many years back.

The research would not have been complete without the assistance of librarians and archivists, some of whom have gone out of their way to help me. Emily Burgoyne was extremely helpful during my brief stint at the Baptist Missionary Archive, Angus Library in Oxford and continued to track down elusive materials even after I had returned to India. Bennie Crockett gave me permission to reproduce images from the William Carey Center, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA, and Phaedra Casey at the Brunel University London Archives very graciously allowed me to access research materials pertaining to the British and Foreign School Society. I am equally grateful to the staff of India Office at the British Library in London; the John Rylands Library in Manchester; the Sahitya Akademi, Delhi; the National Archives of India; the Asiatic Society, Calcutta; and Carey Library and Research Centre, Serampore.

Finally, the work was sustained by the help, support and encouragement of my family and friends. My sister Sujata has been the first sounding board for my ideas, and like in every point of my life, has been my best friend and critic. To Ayan and Pinku I am grateful for their patience and understanding, and above all I owe everything to my parents, who would have been very proud had they been here.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The role of the British missionaries has been perhaps the single most important factor related to the long existence of the British in India. The involvement of missionaries in establishing educational institutions and the dissemination of materialist and humanist learning has enabled generations of Indians to have benefited from scholastic intercourse. Missionary activities in a colonial context have time and again been criticized for the ulterior motives of evangelization and conversion.¹ In India, missionaries have been either the target of vitriolic attacks or are regarded as the face of a benevolent imperialism that introduced a ‘modern’ way of life. It is precisely because of such contrasting reactions that more scholarly insights are required to gauge the importance of missionaries in reforming indigenous lives in India. Of course, evangelization and conversion have remained inextricably entwined to colonization and empire building. At the same time, I can vouch, having studied in a ‘convent’ school and college (an indigenous lingo for educational institutions run by missionaries) that the overall general feeling towards missionaries is undoubtedly of appreciation for having enriched the intellectual and moral life of Indians.

In spite of their positive input, missionaries remain largely unacknowledged, themselves preferring to remain in the shadows. Missionary activity in India has been one of the largest colonial ventures, but there are very few scholarly writings that throw light on this crucial encounter. Though a lot of writings exist by the missionaries themselves, there is a surprising lack of writings on them. One obvious deterrent to any study on missionaries in India is the sheer size and scope of such studies. My effort has been to limit the study to Bengal. Bengal was the place where at the end of the seventeenth century Job Charnock pitched his tent on a marshy piece of land and made an empire from it. It was again the place where, a century later, William Carey landed with his family, tired and battered after a long journey from England, hoping to establish an evangelical mission. Both men were hugely successful. Evangelization remained an intrinsic part in the establishment of the British Empire in India, and their mutual dependence paved the success of the British existence in India. What remains a disconcerting thought, though, is that apart from a handful of scholars and missiologists, there is a general lack of awareness regarding the involvement of the missionaries in laying the bedrock of the Indian education system. Some of the more prominent names like William Carey, fondly remembered as Carey Saheb, Alexander Duff and Robert May remain etched in the memory of Bengalis of the older generation. Sadly, these names and their contributions have hardly any reverberation in the minds of the present generation of Indians. It is important therefore to chronicle the contributions of missionaries in Bengal, not just for a deeper appreciation of their efforts but also, more importantly, to reassess their mark upon the historiography of the British Empire in India.

In the study of British relations with India, missionary writings have been a major source of information which has largely shaped the way the West has perceived India. As many of the missionaries were vocal and scholarly, their opinions, views and representations of India mattered a great deal in influencing not just the opinion of Englishmen but also educated elite Indians. While most studies have given credit to male missionaries, the women who joined the missions have remained practically in oblivion.² Many of them led extraordinary lives as partners to their more famous husbands, yet their contributions to the establishment of missions in India have either been ignored or dismissed. It is only recently that scholars have realized the importance of female missionaries’ contribution in fashioning an imperialist image.³ Most of such works focus on the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the scenario was to change perceptibly with an increasing number of women missionaries working in established and structured educational and healthcare missions in India.

This book focuses on the participation of British women in mission work in Bengal, and the challenges faced by them between 1793 and 1861, especially when travelling to India or working in missions was neither a spontaneous nor an acceptable career decision for white women. The advent of the Baptist missionary William Carey in Bengal in 1793, and later the others who followed him, significantly altered the ways mission activity was perceived in India. From Hannah Marshman, who helped her more famous missionary husband, Joshua Marshman, open schools for girls, to Mary Ann Cooke, the first single woman missionary to go and work in India, and finally to Hannah Catherine Mullens who began working in the zenanas, was a long journey which helped professionalize women’s missionary work in the colonies. The year 1861 seems an appropriate year to end the study of the ‘early’ phase of missionary work, as a more proactive phase of evangelization and missionary activity in India was to begin thereafter. That year, as Ernest Payne observed, ‘marked a dividing line in the great Victorian era’.⁴ In India, the year 1861 witnessed a notable birth and a death. Rabindranath Tagore was born, and with his stupendous literary and artistic contributions he reshaped a new face of India. It was also the year that saw the death of Hannah Mullens and the end of an era of the early contributions to education and proselytization by women missionaries in India.

This study traces missionary work by women belonging to various Christian denominations and affiliations like the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), London Missionary Society (LMS) and Church Missionary Society (CMS). Dorothy Carey, Hannah Marshman, Mrs Yates, Mrs Mundy, Mrs Pearce, Miss Bird, Elizabeth Sale, Marianne Lewis, Miss Mary Ann Cooke and Hannah Catherine Mullens were exemplary women, even if some were to only suffer silently and others were more active in their mission to ‘educate’ and ‘reform’ native women. They rendered invaluable service in running schools and boarding houses for girls, and providing shelter and security to the widows and orphans in the missions. Their work was a pioneering step which helped build a defining space and agency for women’s activities within a patriarchal colonial society.

Their role and responsibilities have greatly shaped our understanding of the ‘woman question’ and future mission activities by women and for women in our society. Unfortunately, the utter paucity of any documentation of their work makes any interpretation more challenging. And whatever little is available, these women missionaries in true Christian spirit of selfless devotion to work, are modest of their achievements and seldom if ever voice their complaints and frustrations. Most of the information that is available to us comes from the private correspondence they had with their family, relative and friends in England. Ironically, information on women missionaries can be gathered more from the memoirs of male missionaries, which reveal bits and pieces of information on their female co-workers in missions. In fact, the Christian evangelical societies did not even recognize these women as ‘missionaries’. Missionary activity was largely a male domain, and women were merely ‘helpmeets’. Needless to say, except for a few ‘famous’ ones, the rest of the lives of female missionaries and their works have not been documented nor was even thought worth preserving. In interpreting missionary writings and correspondence, one has to therefore depend on the underlying meanings, silences and gaps. As J. Cox emphasized, ‘Interpreting missionary records requires constant attention to the multiple levels of exclusion in the narratives’.⁵

The period under study saw a remarkable efflorescence of political, social and religious changes brought about by the advent of the British in India. From the initial military success of the East India Company in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, until Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India in 1858, the British image had largely altered from a mercantile company to one of the most powerful empires in the world.⁶ Within a span of a century, Bengal had witnessed dramatic changes. No longer was it the endless expanses of ‘new mud, old mud and marsh’.⁷ The European representations in Bengal were marked by hectic economic activity with the intention of gaining permanent territorial rights. The Dutch, French and Danes chose the right bank of the river Hooghly, while the English fortified the already anglicized Calcutta (derived from Kalikata) on the left bank. In place of the old Fort William, the new fort in Calcutta became emblematic of British power in India.⁸ It was recognized as a symbol of British military power, and the College of Fort William became one of the foremost centres of scholarly activity.⁹ The printing of textbooks, the translation of vernacular books, the establishment of schools and universities, churches and hospitals indicated that the British meant to settle in Bengal for a good period of time.

As more women from England began arriving to join their men serving in the Company, a vast array of infrastructure began to be set in place. Calcutta was fast becoming an imperial city.¹⁰ Some of the newly arrived memsahibs, Mrs Kindersley, Mrs Fay and the anonymous author of Hartly House, wrote avidly of the splendour of magnificent buildings in Calcutta, a ‘City of Palaces’ where horse racing, boating on the Hooghly, visits to the theatres, ball dances and parties were becoming common.¹¹ Not everyone was living in opulence, as these writings seem to imply, but unfortunately there was no one to write for the others. Nor do such chronicles mention the lives of the native Bengalis,¹² who mostly lived huddled in a segregated area far from European settlement. But there was a distinctly rising elite mercantile class of Bengalis who were growing richer on the bounties shared with the British ruling class.

As the British established themselves in Bengal from the late seventeenth century, they had to draw upon a range of ideas that would alter their image from mercenary mercantilists to benevolent imperialists. The ideas included defining a ‘civilized’ and ‘superior’ image of the English, and under the governance of men like Warren Hastings, Cornwallis and Wellesley, Bengal soon became an enviable centre of learning. The intellectual foundation upon which the British constructed their rule in India legitimized their governance, and consequently there was not much difficulty in convincing either the English back at home or the Indians that the imposition of their governance would be the most beneficial thing.¹³ The initial hesitation of the government in permitting evangelization may have delayed the arrival of the British missionaries in India. But by 1813 it was quite evident that in spite of differences between the Orientalists and the Anglicists,¹⁴ all roads were being paved for welcoming the missionaries. British policies of governance and evangelization in India began to be greatly influenced by the series of evangelical reforms in England and Europe which generated an active enthusiasm to introduce them for the moral improvement of Britain’s Indian subjects. Chapter 1 explores the governance and evangelical policies that enabled a handful of merchants to become the undisputed rulers of India.

Simultaneously, early British representations of India in their writings, memoirs and letters facilitated and consolidated the evangelical project of ‘educating’ and ‘improving’ the natives. Locating the exotic, the pagan and the vast ungovernable excesses of India became a means to represent and formulate opinion about India and its people. Chapter 2 looks at some of the representative writings on India by British administrators, travellers and missionaries. The purpose is to indicate not only how India was imagined and represented but also how particular tropes of representation were used to demonstrate English superiority and control. The chapter examines some of the early writings roughly between 1760 and 1860 and looks at the embodiment of ‘otherness’ in the ways the British represented India. It does not claim to be exhaustive, given the vast array of writings available, nor does it purport to identify the complex determinants of ‘otherness’. The purpose is to trace some representative samplings of narratives and discourses which were imminent in shaping or changing perceptions. At the same time, such writings which generalize and sometimes stereotype social, cultural and gender characteristics, can be seen disregarding the sociocultural contexts and numerous other parameters that define the multiplicity of native identity. It is argued that the various ‘imaginings’ of ‘India’ were transformative in nature, using rhetorical strategies and tropes of discovering a nascent India which could be shaped and moulded according to colonial fantasies. The purpose of such colonial discourses was to diagnose what was lacking and to rectify it by playing what Promod K. Nayar calls ‘an interventionary and transformative’ role.¹⁵

The second part of the book chronicles and historicizes British women missionaries’ early contribution in Bengal. Chapter 3 deals with the participation of the wives of missionaries, particularly the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and Calcutta from 1793 to 1820 and their position typically as ‘helpmeets’ providing support and encouragement to their husbands. At a time when not many were willing to accompany their husbands to an alien land that was perceived as hostile in every possible way, these women came to India to be ‘useful’ to their husbands, and subsequently went on to establish orphanages and educational institutions for women. In fact, most missionary men travelling to India were actively encouraged to bring their families, as mission homes were to exemplify an alternative form of female agency and domesticity. This chapter looks at the challenges, both physical and emotional, as they sought to establish themselves and their work in Bengal. I discuss further the apparent contrast and conflict between two dissimilar, contradictory sets of familial and marital relationships, as it was perceived – the ‘ideal’ British Protestant Victorian family life, organized domesticity and exemplar marital unions versus ‘heathenish’, ‘amoral’, multiple, dysfunctional native partnerships. At the same time I argue that the early missionary wives regarded as ‘empowered’ guardians and benefactresses of society, can be seen struggling to fit into the construed ideal role, often resulting in anxiety, mental illness and death.

From the 1820s onwards, the education of females was envisaged to be instrumental as a particular agenda of ‘civilizing’ the colonies. The participation of women was not to be restricted just to a limited domestic sphere. Women’s work had obviously now greater potential. It was necessary therefore to mobilize women in order for women to alleviate the suffering of womankind. The result was a flurry of writings highlighting what the West perceived to be the pathetic and disgraceful condition of women in India, with volumes being published from India and England and having dramatic titles like A Collection of Facts and Opinions Relative to the Burning of Widows with the Dead Bodies of Their Husband; An Earnest Appeal to British Humanity in Behalf of Hindoo Widows and The Suttees’ Cry to Britain.¹⁶ Again, tracts like The Importance of Female Agency in Evangelizing Pagan Nations encouraged British women’s participation, to lessen the suffering of their Indian sisters.¹⁷ Chapter 4 focuses on the contributions made by female missionaries, especially single women missionaries who began arriving in the period from 1820 to 1840. These women worked under the aegis of the BMS, LMS and CMS, though they were still not officially recognized by these societies as ‘missionaries’. But for all practical purposes their work for the missions was no less than that of their male counterparts. The transition from ‘wives of missionaries’ to ‘missionary women’ was one of negotiation – a negotiation of women’s position within a very constricted patriarchal colonial framework. Their ‘natural’ characteristics as women and mothers were projected as qualities that differentiated them from not just men but also from ‘heathen’ women. In contrast to the limited freedom of women in contemporary Britain,¹⁸ these English women in India exercised the power to open schools, teach, instruct, discipline and impose social, cultural and moral norms and standards of behaviour. In trying to lessen the burden of their ‘other’ sisters, the white women were successfully empowering themselves. As agents of emancipation these women inadvertently opened a similar liberating space for themselves.

The third part analyses the mutual control and influence that such