Indigenous Mission as National Expression
Indigenous Mission as National Expression
Azariah's second indigenous missionary enterprise owed more to national political developments, and particularly to the swadeshi movement, than had the IMS. The National Missionary Society (NMS) was born near the center of the political crisis that followed the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the rise of anti-foreign activities. It was established on 25 December 1905 in Serampore College near Calcutta by 16 Indian delegates from seven political divisions in India and Ceylon, representing five denominations and speaking eight Indian languages.54 Once again, it was the brain child of Azariah and Eddy, who was the only non-Indian delegate at Serampore.
Azariah was elected the society's first General Secretary, and served in this capacity until 1908, with K. T. Paul as its first Treasurer. The Constitution adopted by the founders stated:
The NMS restricted membership to Indian Christians (others would be honorary members or members of a European Advisory Board) and forbade solicitation of funds outside India. The elderly Vice-President, Kali Charan Banerji, persuaded the society to remain institutionally linked with established churches rather than to create a new sectarian organization. In 1887, he had tried to build a more authentically Indian Christianity by establishing a transdenominational church, the Calcutta Christo Samaj; but he recognized that the Samaj had merely become another sect within Christianity, and he urged NMS delegates not to commit the same error. The society aimed to facilitate inter-church cooperation and to draw divided churches closer together.
Azariah played an interestingly mixed role in the discussions that founded the society. He sided with the older conservatives (President Raja Sir Harnam Singh and Vice-Presidents K. C. Banerji and S. Sathianadhan) on the issue of organization, but with the younger radicals on the issue of finances. He advocated adopting a western-style organization like the IMS with elected committees in opposition to those favoring a less formal structure and a more `spiritual expression.'57 At the same time, he challenged his colleagues to resist soliciting financial support from non-resident westerners and, instead, to raise funds from less wealthy indigenous churches and individuals on the subcontinent.
Azariah's decision to reject less centralized, more Hindu-type models of organization later led to the criticism that the NMS was `too well organized, too respectable, too much in harmony with western institutions that are controlled by some machine in some centre.'58 A western member of the Advisory Board answered this criticism by demonstrating that many indigenous Hindu models were themselves highly organized. Azariah's own consistent preference for western organizational models prevailed not only in his structuring of the IMS and NMS but also in the administrative apparatus he was to establish later in the Dornakal Diocese.
The NMS received enthusiastic support from Christian journals, churches, and missionary societies throughout India and abroad. Azariah spent much of the three and a half years after its foundation traveling the length and breadth of India promoting the NMS cause, establishing a hundred society branches in 1906 alone. Largely because of his efforts, by the close of the first five years, scarcely a local church in all India had not listened to the message of the NMS.'59 The National Missionary Intelligencer (NMI) and five vernacular papers helped to publicize the society's work. Azariah recruited the society's first missionary, James Williams, from among the Indian delegates attending the 1907 World Student Christian Federation Conference in Tokyo to begin work in the predominantly Muslim village of Fazlabad in the Punjab in August of that year. The society's second and third missionaries were sent in 1909 to Okara in the Punjab and to Nukkar Tehsil in the United Provinces respectively. By 1910, missions had also been established in the Omalur Taluk, two hundred miles west of Madras, and in the Karjat-Karmala Taluks in the Bombay Presidency.
Azariah propelled this missionary activity forward by arguing that, because of India's great pluralism, `work among the Panjabis of the North is as much foreign service to the Bengalee or the Madrasee, as it is to the Englishman or American.'60 He pointed out that, although the missionary idea is novel to the Indian mind,'61 it is a universal obligation rooted in Christ's parting commission, `Go ye into all the world and make disciples of all nations.' He urged Indian Christians to familiarize themselves with the arguments uniformly used in stirring up the Western Churches to missionary duty,'62 and was not hesitant to quote western authors John Mott and Andrew Murray and London's Lambeth Conference in support of indigenous missions. The society's formula of `Indian money, Indian men and Indian management' was derived directly from nineteenthcentury western missionary statesmen Henry Venn (of the British CMS) and Rufus Anderson (of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, or ABCFM), and its constitution was adopted symbolically in the pagoda of Henry Martyn (1781-1812), the evangelical East India Company chaplain and missionary pioneer.63
More than the IMS, the NMS used the rhetoric of national aspiration to appeal to politically aroused students and to young people of India. The NMI described its `swadeshi missions' and suggested that in certain areas of India, such as the east coast of the Northern Circars, the society benefited from `the swadeshi aspect of the appeal.'64 Editorials claimed that NMS work contributed to `the common cause of our National Redemption,'65 which alone was capable of unifying the selfish communal divisions which handicapped any patriotic effort `to secure the advancement' of India.66 Azariah's NMS colleague K. T. Paul noted that, in winning support for the NMS from three Ceylonese Christian communities, `the Swadeshi responsibility is accepted on all hands and the Swadeshi privilege recognized.'67 N. C. Mukerji of Allahabad called on the Indian church to relate its faith more directly to political events by formulating `a body of teaching which would do for our nationalist movement what Christian Socialism has done for the Labour Movement in England.' Using the Christian notion of true brotherhood to condemn the British subjection of India, Mukerji urged the NMS to `let our countrymen feel that instead of being a hindrance, Christianity is an ally and an incentive to their national aspirations.'68 Clearly, the NMS generally wished to participate in the `nation's' development, and began to appropriate nationalist language to advance the society's interests.
Though the NMS was broadly influenced by the spirit of nationalism, it distanced itself from the negative, anti-British strain of political nationalism that it detected behind the emergence of terrorism in Poona and Bengal. At the society's opening meeting, some delegates opposed the use of the word `national' in the society's name because of its `political significance.' The title was accepted reluctantly and only after `all attempts to secure another satisfactory word which would be expressive of the essential indigenous character of the movement failed.' The report continued:
In 1907, the NMI journal denied an `imaginary' contention made in the Central Christian Advocate of Kansas City that the NMS was created by the national movement in order to reject European authority. An NMI editorial countered:
Reports in the NMI and the Christian Patriot denied that the society favored swadeshi and swaraj in their `degraded' aspects or that it was motivated by `the same jealousy of the foreigner that marks the sinister side of swadeshi.'71 The most detailed monograph on the subject also concludes that the NMS did not emerge from jealous or anti-foreign attitudes,72 although it describes the society as `Indian Christian nationalism in action,' with officers who were `sincere nationalists.'73 While many of its founders were generally sympathetic to the national movement, they were members of a relatively small and elite, western-educated group. (The Brahmin cast of NMS founders contrasts with the Nadar cast of the IMS founders.) The vast majority of Indian Christians came from rural depressed class backgrounds in South India whose close association with British missionaries and involvement in regional and lower-caste initiatives made them less interested in, and even hostile to, what many perceived as primarily a Brahmin political cause.
Westerners generally drew more links between indigenous missions and the national movement than did Indian Christians. The British missionary and Principal of the Church Missionary College in Tinnevelly, Rev. H. Schaffter, urged the IMS and, indirectly, the NMS to consider themselves as Christian expressions of `swadeshism' and to claim as their inheritance the mottoes, 'Bande Mataram, Swadeshi and Swaraj.'74 The 1908 New Year's Message to the NMS membership, penned by C. F. Andrews in the NMI, even suggested that `Christ loves India far, far more than the greatest Indian Patriot who has ever lived.'75 Both a CMS Report for 19056 and other western observers attributed the society's inspiration and strength to the influence of the national movement.76
The nearly total preoccupation with secular nationalism by westerners and western-educated Indians threatens to distort the historical reality that was experienced by the bulk of the NMS membership. The early issues of the NMI make frequent and repeated references not to Indian nationalists, but to the great western missionaries of Asia and Africa: Ziegenbalg, Carey, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, and Adoniram Judson.77 The Christianization of Korea was presented as an inspirational model for mission in Asia.78 The story of Scottish missionary John Gibson Paton's civilizing crusade against cannibalism, infanticide, the strangling of widows, constant war, witchcraft, polygamy, and other `nameless immoralities' in the Hebrides Islands was recounted in the most imaginative orientalist style.79 The NMS saw itself as part of a worldwide Christian movement more than an Indian national movement, and cited messages from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to stress the point.80 To be sure, its founding in the nationalist center of Calcutta in 1905 suggests that its leaders shared in the general desire of educated Indians to manage their country's own affairs, and its subsequent popularity benefited from the desire to shed the image of Indian Christianity as a `foreign' faith. However, far from attempting to isolate itself from continued western influences, the NMS sought to integrate itself into the corporate life of a universal church reinvigorated by a predominantly western missionary movement.
The later adoption by the NMS of a more radically `indigenous' character apparently contributed to its decline rather than to any greater acceptance in India. The European Advisory Board was dismissed in 1920 and the society assumed the vernacular name 'Bharat Kristya Sevak Samaj' (or, Indian Christian Service Society). But many Indian churches were alienated by its call for radical indigenization, and few new converts were gained by making it a more nationalist movement.81 Most of the original affiliated churches preferred to retain familiar western aspects of their worship rather than to accept the new and more `indigenous' version of NMS, which seemed to borrow unduly from a Hindu culture that was even more alien to many former outcaste Christians. Azariah himself became alienated from the NMS even earlier in 1906-9, when he made the most momentous decision of his life: to go himself to Dornakal as a simple IMS missionary to the outcastes.
Azariah was elevated as the first Indian Anglican bishop in an atmosphere of surprising controversy; but his reign brought equally surprising growth and harmony. As he moved from the worlds of Tinnevelly Indo-Anglicanism and Pan-Asian student evangelism into British imperial and church politics, he necessarily became embroiled in historic church-state controversies and served as a lightning rod for racial and other prejudices. His secure grounding in a specific sacramental spirituality and traditional church activities enabled him to absorb hostile pressures without bitterness and to become late imperial India's most successful mass evangelist and church builder.
zariah's unusual path to an unprecedented bishopric began with his decision actively to pursue rather than merely to promote missionary work. Increasingly frustrated with the broad but unfocused national scope of his work, he confided to his wife during one of his interminable itinerancies for the NMS in 1906 that `I feel afraid that if I did this long I would simply grow unreal.' Azariah's dissatisfaction with the NMS seems to have been grounded primarily in a suspicion that the society's emerging liberal nationalistic profile would detract from its evangelistic mission. He admitted in his most private correspondence that he persevered in the NMS work `simply because of Mr. Eddy and not because I feel that it is the Lord's will for me,' and concluded:
Finding himself in the paradoxical situation of promoting an indigenous national project largely for the sake of a liberal-minded foreign friend, Azariah began to search for ways to fulfil his own missionary call ing, rather than simply satisfy a westerner's enthusiasm for the Indianization of missions.
Azariah received what he interpreted as a divine `call' to conduct evangelism in a specific locality sometime between 1906 and 1909.2 In 1909, he resigned from both the YMCA and the NMS to become Superintending Missionary of the more locally activist IMS in Dornakal. The precipitating event occurred just after Azariah had completed an address on the importance of missionary service at Memorial Hall, Madras, when a student in the front row whispered loudly, `Why doesn't he go as a missionary!'3 Azariah had been considering doing so and took this as God's message to him. After a proposal to unify the IMS and the NMS failed in early 1909, Azariah decided to offer himself as a full-time missionary to the IMS.4
In April, the IMS accepted Azariah's offer of missionary service and appointed him Superintending Missionary for the Dornakal field at a salary of RS 60 per month.5 This appointment involved considerable sacrifice for Azariah, who was poised to take on new international responsibilities for the YMCA. As a YMCA colleague recalled a few years later:
Although Azariah subsequently maintained close links with the NMS and the YMCA, welcoming their workers in Dornakal, he now turned his back on other international opportunities and gave himself fully to the local mission work of his home society.
To strengthen Azariah's position in the field, the IMS Executive Committee asked the Bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead (1853-1947), if he would send Azariah to Dornakal as an ordained Anglican priest. (Previous IMS missionaries had all been laymen.)? Whitehead liked the idea and persuaded Azariah in March 1909 to take an accelerated course for ordination under the bishop's private tuition. Whitehead did not reveal to Azariah why he was abbreviating the normal ordination training, but it was almost certainly because he and his wife, Isabel, had already identified Azariah as their candidate to be the first Indian bishop.
After several months of intensive work at the Whiteheads' Ootacamund residence (May, June, September, October), Azariah was ordained deacon on 29 June, commissioned to begin his IMS work in Dornakal in July, and ordained priest on 5 December.8 As he studied for ordination, Azariah also launched his work in Dornakal, the small railway depot in the Warangal District of southeastern Hyderabad State. Here, within the favorite hunting grounds of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he would develop his career as missionary to the depressed and nonBrahmin classes.
The year 1909 was therefore a crucial turning point for both Azariah's career and Indo-Anglicanism. Azariah was turning away from broad interdenominational organizations to more narrow denominational work in what was to him a foreign area of South India. At the same time, he was turning for guidance to Whitehead - an upper-class Englishman and member of the long line of liberal westerners who imagined themselves to be the true champions of Indianization. Azariah was moving away from the American Sherwood Eddy, who had previously succeeded in persuading Azariah not to pursue Anglican ordination in 19012. The cosmopolitan Eddy seems to have regarded Indians with a complicated mix of high-minded compassion and upper-class disdain, and he saw Azariah's return to a backward parish as the end, not the beginning, of a promising career. Eddy later wrote:
[Azariah] chose for his field the most degraded, drunken, carrion-eating devil-worshipers in Hyderabad. The poverty of the people, struggling to live on four or five cents a day, was abysmal. In fact, the people were so degraded that I did not expect to see any appreciable results in our lifetime. I pleaded with Azariah not to throw away his life there, and I said good-bye fearing I should never see him again.9
Contrary to Eddy's predictions, Azariah rapidly made Dornakal the center of the fastest-growing mission field in India and the headquarters of an expanding Indo-Anglican diocese. But in early 1909, it still seemed risky to abandon two influential posts and his native Tinnevelly, in order to work as an ordinary priest and missionary among depressed class groups in an unfamiliar and seemingly unpromising rural area.
Azariah moved in 1909 to the isolated Dornakal railway station, which was surrounded on all sides by tiger-infested jungles and tracts of dry land without access to roads. Here he lived first in a tent, unprotected from dangerous wildlife, and began the strenuous work of evangelizing nonChristian Telugu villagers and supervising new Christian congregations. 10 Traveling by foot, bullock cart, and bicycle, with his food and Bible tracts hanging in a bag suspended from the handlebars, Azariah visited families in their simple houses, talked to small groups of men sitting in the shade of trees, preached to crowds gathered in the evenings to hear him, and, on Sundays, performed priestly duties for nascent congregations." By January 1910, shortly after the death of an infant son, his wife and four young children joined him in Dornakal. He gave us this sweet boy in order that he might take him to Himself and through this that he may teach us many precious lessons,' Azariah tried to comfort Anbu before the move.12 Together again, the Azariah family set up a home in two rooms of the old brewery and began their lifelong work of service to Andhra villagers.
This story of his humble beginnings as a missionary in Dornakal has been overshadowed by the publicity generated by his simultaneous rise to an Anglican bishopric in 1912. Soon after Azariah launched his village missionary work, he was concurrently thrust into an international whirl wind of ecclesiastical and imperial politics. Bishop Henry Whitehead's three-year battle to appoint him as the first Indian Anglican bishop brought Azariah into a new world of Anglican politics and made him an international symbol of the purported success of the Empire's `civilizing mission.' It also changed his life forever.
Azariah's 1912 consecration as the first Indian bishop of the Anglican church was the most significant event in his personal and professional life. It made him a leading representative of the Indian Empire's loyal subject populations; it was a milestone in the history of the overseas Anglican church; and it thrust the established church's bishops in India into newly public and progressive roles.
But the road to consecration was long and tortuous. The battle over his appointment opened up new and unexpected rifts between the imperial state and its established church, and between various Christian subgroups. When Henry Whitehead first proposed the idea in 1909, he had little notion of the obstacles that would stand in the way of Azariah and would ultimately prevent consecrations of other Indian bishops in the waning years of the Raj. However, he was aware of one dramatic fact which should have served as a warning sign: Anglican church and missionary expansion in India had generally occurred in spite of the British government rather than because of it. The church had never been free to appoint new bishops for India. Now Whitehead was proposing to do just that, and more: to appoint a new bishop not only for India but also from India. This was a doubly controversial move.