4 - Missionary writing in India

Summary

… the literary labours of missionaries in India

In 1852, Reverend Joseph Mullens, a key LMS missionary in Calcutta who would later become the foreign secretary of the society, lauded the ‘missionary literature’ pouring out of India in the first half of the nineteenth century. Missionaries in India, he boasted, ‘have done much towards drawing the attention of the Christian world to the claims of Hindustan upon their sympathies and prayers’ (40). Such literature joined publications by other British personnel in India – the travel narratives, journals, letters, and histories written by East India Company officials and their dependents – but Mullens argues that

to missionaries we are indebted for full accounts of the religious systems professed by the people; of their religious rites, their religious errors, and their social condition; of the character of their priesthood, their caste system, their debasing idolatry, the ignorance and vice which every where prevail, and the great difficulties in the way of the peoples' conversion.

(41)

Not only were these authors significant in Anglo-Indian literature, but they were exemplary in missionary literature: ‘While but three or four such works describe the religious condition of China, or of the South Sea Islands, or South Africa, or the West Indies, we can name at least thirty works written about India by missionaries, or containing the lives of missionaries who have died in the country’ (41).

Without doubt, textual representations of missionary work in India influenced both British imperial policy and missionary society practice.