A Pedagogical Testament

Chapter 5 describes the efforts of American missionaries in putting together a philosophy of education for the new institution they intended to create in India. Since their views, materials, and organizational model were borrowed from the American experience, the chapter first reviews the functioning of the Sunday school in America. Between 1827 and 1838, beginning in Massachusetts, public schools came to be secularized. With the teaching of the Bible effectively proscribed in public schools, the American Sunday School Union, organized in 1824 and supported by several Protestant denominations, found that by 1838, it was obliged to work outside of the public-school system. As an institution dedicated to Christian and moral education, and, around the time of the Civil War as a public counseling center, it enjoyed broad support. By 1872, American Sunday school leaders had created a bureaucratized organization patterned after the very secular forces they had fought, as well as an elaborate seven-year curriculum, the Uniform International Lesson System. American missionaries imported these into India. They soon found, however, that their system could not be implemented in toto in the Indian context given the “heathen” home backgrounds of Indian children and the absence of suitably trained teachers. The chapter discusses missionary thinking on reaching out to the youngest children, using the latest “universal,” “scientific,” child-education and teacher-training methods, and locating all that was “modern” in the Bible itself. Creating a “philosophy of childhood,” and an institution with “form and system,” Sunday school missionaries transformed themselves into professional educators.

Institutional Genesis

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 Creators of Sunday Schools

Chapter 3 situates American missionaries in the colonial Indian context. When they arrived in India (legally after 1833), annual missionary salaries, as early as in the 1840s, were in the range of $700 to $1,000, or thirty-five times average Indian earnings. They wrote of their large personal household establishments, which included spacious villas, retinues of several categories of servants, and transportation by way of palanquins or horses. Further, they socialized with British officers and their families. The chapter shows that missionaries were a part of the powerful ruling colonial elite, their caritative commitments and message of Christian humility notwithstanding. They reconciled these contradictions by offering their listeners the rationale that Christianity led to prosperity and a higher state of civilization. They observed the simultaneous existence of agricultural productivity and peasant poverty, and were unable to provide for themselves an explanation for the starkness of the contrast. As the evidence shows, missionaries attributed to the material depredations of the Indians their moral failures rather than the rapacious logic of colonial rule. This causal analysis provided missionaries with the justification for extending their evangelical message to a broader program of civilizational reform. Every element of their interaction with the poverty-stricken population around them began to be seen as an opportunity for moral and spiritual correction. Missionaries began to look upon themselves as builders and transformers of society rather than as mere carriers of a personal, religious message. The chapter ends with an American missionary’s reflections on finding systematic ways of educating Indians on the need for civilizational change.

Pre-Victorian Colonial Education

Chapter 2 is a retelling of nearly two hundred years of pre-Victorian Indian colonial education, presented to aid interpretations of American missionary action in the Victorian period. The chapter shows how, despite their “universal” Christian intent, mission schools were closely allied with colonial authority and deeply racialized in their functioning. Extensive archival data (1708–1849) is used to describe the typical composition of the student body, syllabi, classroom techniques, and examination methods in mission-run schools. Missionaries used the very “heathen” curricular material and pedagogical practices they denounced. And they deliberated over the advantages of establishing schools that would further the interests of the East India Company. In the other direction, British parliamentary papers show official colonial thinking on how Western education could serve the colonial cause, and on whether a part of the teaching endeavor could be delegated to Christian missionaries. The chapter summarizes the decline of indigenous education under colonial rule as reported by Company officials just as evangelicals, chiefly, educated and ambitious middle-class people in Britain and America, began to express interest in Indian education. Between 1833 and 1854, mission schools were widely established, filling the void in indigenous education. The chapter considers the problematic of the language of education, recounting the Anglicist/Orientalist debate. It then discusses the “Woods Despatch” of 1854, the new education law, which called for a secular curriculum and for inspections to be instituted in private schools seeking government grants-in-aid. The chapter ends with a discussion of American missionary thought and practice of exploring new ways of attracting student audiences to the evangelical cause.

Conclusion

Chapter 7, the Conclusion, draws out the principal empirical findings of the study and argues that the instrumental reasoning missionaries adopted in the making of the Sunday school redefined the very values they sought to institutionalize. Missionaries bemoaned the secularization of schools, but readily copied the organizational forms of secular institutions; they deplored racism, but institutionalized racism in their own evangelical practice; they preached of the spiritual life, but displayed money-mindedness of an acute sort; they denounced “idolatry” and “heathenism,” but incorporated these very “defilements” as part of their schools’ functioning; and finally, they saw for themselves the disasters that British colonial rule brought upon an agrarian society, but justified its oppressions in the interests of Christianity. These were the workings of the “missionary calculus.” For “upper-caste” Indians, the organizational form that Sunday school missionaries brought to India offered them a new perspective on “modern,” systematic ways of representing belief and culture; and for “lower-caste” Indians, the Sunday school provided them with a social liberatory experience, an institution that was their very own, and for which they had legitimation from the most powerful forces in the land. In the absence of shared objectives, the Sunday school merely offered every group a platform for quid pro quo transactions. But in the making of their various compromises, participants, both Christian and non-Christian, showed that implicit in their actions were certain universal moral and educational values that transcended the doctrinal boundaries that Christian missionaries had prescribed for the Sunday school.

Mimicry as Rivalry

Chapter 6 is a detailed study of Sunday schools as sites of pedagogical practice in India. Guided by “tact” as a principle of conducting their work, Anglo-American Protestant missionaries, in order to secure and retain enrollment in their Sunday schools, jettisoned or substantially modified a number of clearly held Christian principles. They denounced racism, but closely allied themselves with a colonial militarist power that would not brook racial integration, and correspondingly instituted racial segregation in their Sunday schools. A second manifestation of “tact” was their borrowing of a number of schooling and cultural practices of the “idolatrous” Hindus, resulting in a type of Christian institution that began to look casteized even to Christian observers. Highly Sanskritized Sunday school hymns, Hindu religious musical forms, visual arts, and festive observances were made a part of the Christian Sunday school. All this benefited a number of Christian converts from the “lower castes” of Hindu society, inasmuch as they were able to acquire those symbolic resources traditionally denied them by the “upper castes.” But at the same time, the mimicking of such practices by Christian institutions underscored the prestige that certain Hindu traditions enjoyed. Also, and worryingly for missionaries, the “upper castes” began to organize their own Sunday schools without Christian doctrine, but mimicking elements of Anglicized, Christian Sunday schools that had seemed attractive to them to begin with. Further, to counter competition, missionaries expanded the Sunday school curriculum, but in the process mimicked secular institutions and undermined the evangelical thrust of their program. And finally, to solicit funds back home, missionaries sensationalized accounts of their work in India. Instrumental reasoning pervaded all aspects of their management of Sunday schools.

Introduction

Chapter 1 introduces the central argument of the book, namely, that the means Christian missionaries adopted in building certain evangelical institutions in colonial India modified the ends they sought to achieve through building them. Observing that there are no studies on colonial Sunday schools, the chapter notes that the relevant missionary archives have fewer records of doctrinal debates between Christians and non-Christians than of missionary concerns over the means required for institution-building. Consequently, in keeping with the data, the chapter proposes employing a methodology that entails studying “means” over “ends.” To do this, it proposes adopting the theoretical framework of sociologist Max Weber, which draws a distinction between “substantive” and “instrumental” rationality. In the present study, this pair of concepts is taken to denote the distinction between missionaries’ beliefs and worldview or values or “ends,” and the material and symbolic resources or “means” they deployed in building Sunday schools. Further, applying the theory of institution-formation presented by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, it proposes that Sunday schools were atypical institutions. Yet, such schools were built on compromise, with American Protestant missionaries taking the lead, and with different Indian social groups also taking an active part. The chapter foreshadows how the book presents the ends/means conflict among Sunday school builders throughout the Victorian colonial period (1858–1901), and how the compromises they reached signify universal values that transcended sectarian and national boundaries. The chapter situates the book among other approaches to colonial studies, and makes a case for its novelty.