Ghazals, Bhajans and Hymns: Hindustani Christian Music in Nineteenth-Century North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-165
Author(s):  
Alan M. Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
North India ◽  
Emerging Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Indigenous Music ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Muslim Culture

When American missionaries from the Methodist Episcopal Church arrived in India in the middle of the nineteenth century, they very soon published hymn-books to aid the Christian church in worship. But these publications were not solely the product of American Methodists nor simply the collection of foreign songs and music translated into Urdu. Rather, successive editions demonstrate the increasing participation of both foreigners and Indians, of missionaries from various denominations, of both men and women, and of even those not yet baptised as Christians. The tunes and poetry included were in both European and Indian forms. This hybrid nature is particularly apparent by the end of the century when the Methodist press published a hymn-book containing ghazals and bhajans in addition to hymns and Sunday school songs. The inclusion of a separate section of ghazals was evidence of the influence of the Muslim culture on the worship of Christians in North India. This mixing of cultures was an essential characteristic of the hymnody produced by the emerging church in the region and was used in both evangelism and worship. Indian and foreign evangelists relied on indigenous music to draw hearers and to communicate the Christian gospel.

African American Religions in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

Institutional Genesis

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
Anilkumar Belvadi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Attendance ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Statistical Review ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Government Grants ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Set Up

Chapter 4 traces the logic American missionaries employed in advocating Sunday schools as a suitable answer to their problem of finding audiences for their message. Bazaar-preaching did not produce many converts. Missionaries tried to expand the notion of itinerant preaching: rather than merely present Christianity as a personal path to a secure afterlife, they attempted holding out prospects for a better standard of living for all in this world if they accepted Christianity. The responses usually were those of admiration for the material facts they presented about “Christian countries,” but accompanied by an assertive rejection of any notion of Christian causality. The recalcitrance of their ill-educated adult interlocutors frustrated missionaries and their attention thence turned to children. However, thanks to the availability of government grants-in-aid after 1854, there was increased competition in education from non-Christian groups wanting to set up government-approved secular schools. It was in this context that missionaries felt that Sunday schools, being independent of government funds, could teach Christian doctrine without fear of interference. Further, they expected thousands of non-Christians, eager for any education in English, to attend Sunday Schools, disregarding the evangelical intent of the schools’ sponsors. The India Sunday School Union was formed in 1876 following extensive pan-denominational missionary discussions on the need for a formal organization patterned after “modern” Western bureaucracies, educational systems, armies, and so forth. The chapter details the methods, including the use of advertising, small bribes, and favor-seeking with influential, Christian-minded colonial officials, by which missionaries assembled students. The chapter ends with a statistical review of Sunday school attendance in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

The Legacy of Anna E. Hall, African American Missionary to Liberia

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-103
Author(s):  
Jenny McGill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Missionary Service ◽  
Free African Americans

This article, which tells the life story of Anna E. Hall, highlights the significant role that this African American missionary played in Liberia for the US Methodist Episcopal Church in the early twentieth century. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw increased migration of free African Americans as ministers . . . and missionaries overseas, especially to Africa. Standing as a paragon in missionary ventures, Anna E. Hall represents one of many who were responsible for the resurgence of Christianity in Africa and provides an exemplar for missionary service.

From Sasstown to Zaria: Tom Coffee and the Kru Origins of the Soudan Interior Mission, 1893–1895

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65
Author(s):  
Tim Geysbeek
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The People ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
The Impact

This article 1 underscores the key role that Tom Coffee, an ethnic Kru migrant from Sasstown, Liberia, played in founding the Soudan Interior Mission (SIM). Coffee journeyed with Walter Gowans and Thomas Kent up into what is now northern Nigeria in 1894 to help establish SIM. Gowans and Kent died before they reached their destination, the walled city of Kano. SIM's other co-founder, Rowland Bingham, did not travel with his friends, and thus lived to tell his version of their story. By using materials written in the 1890s and secondary sources published more recently, this work provides new insights into SIM's first trip to Africa. The article begins by giving background information about the Kru and Sasstown and the impact that the Methodist Episcopal Church had on some of the people who lived in Sasstown after it established a mission there in 1889. Coffee's likely connection with the Methodist Church would have helped him understand the goal and strategy of his missionary employers. The article then discusses the journey Coffee and the two SIM missionaries took up into the hinterland. The fortitude that Coffee showed as he travelled into the interior reflects the ethos of his heritage and town of origin. Coffee represents just one of millions of indigenous peoples – the vast number whose stories are now not known – who worked alongside expatriate missionaries to establish Christianity around the world. It is fitting, during SIM's quasquicentennial, to tell this story about this African who helped the three North American missionaries establish SIM.

The Post-Civil War Racial Separations in Southern Protestantism: Another Look

1977 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth K. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Public Office ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scholars who have assessed the racial attitudes of southern Protestants in the late nineteenth century have strangely neglected the pronouncements of two outspoken bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Affirming in the 1880s that white southerners would “never tamely and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored men into places of trust and profit and responsibility,” Bishop George Foster Pierce insisted that blacks had no “right on juries, [in] legislatures, or in [other] public office.” And he frowned equally on their pursuit of higher learning; advanced schooling instilled expectations of advancement “far above the station he [the Negro] was created to fill,” the churchman felt, including hopes for interracial mating. Nor was the succeeding senior Southern Methodist bishop more liberal in outlook.

Alcohol, Opium, and the Methodists in Singapore: The Inculturation of a Moral Crusade

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-162
Author(s):  
David W. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Negative Impacts

Abstract The Methodist Episcopal Church was strongly committed to the temperance movement in nineteenth-century America. This commitment rested on assumptions about the negative impacts of alcohol and was expressed through campaigns for personal moral reform and political prohibition. When Methodist missionaries arrived in Singapore in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a society in which opium was the most commonly abused drug. In this new context, Methodist missionaries adapted their concerns about alcohol and their methods of opposing the liquor trade and applied these concerns and methods to opium and the opium trade instead. This case study raises important questions about the inculturation of morality as an aspect of the missionary enterprise, a topic which is insufficiently addressed in literature on theological inculturation.

Indian Christians and the Appropriation of Western Civilisation in the Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
North India ◽  
Emerging Church ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Indigenous Church ◽  
The Face ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Western Civilisation

While the western Christian missionary desire to ‘civilise’ Christians from other cultures has been well documented and researched, the desire of local Christians to appropriate western civilisation in the face of missionary resistance to such appropriation has not been critically studied. This article examines debates in nineteenth-century North India missionary conferences between Indian Christians who wanted to adopt many accoutrements of western civilisation, and missionaries who wanted Indian Christians to retain as much of their Indian culture as possible. The article also looks at parallel cases in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that local Christians were extracting and employing materials from European civilisation and culture to create new religious and social identities for themselves in their own particular contexts. This argument provides a counterpoint to Homi Bhabha's view of hybridity and mimicry as processes imposed by foreign western imperial regimes on subject peoples. In the process of creating new communal identities, local Christians clashed with missionaries who were at least partly motivated by the ideal of a native and indigenous church, but who also were worried about losing their authority to westernised Asian and African Christians in the emerging church. Local Christians also clashed with other members of their own society who wanted the former to keep their low social status. Indian Christians’ understandings of what counted as indigenous – which could include foreign influences – differed in significant ways from missionary and some Indian views of indigeneity.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.

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