Church-State Conflict in Anglican India
Church-State Conflict in Anglican India
Azariah was consecrated as the first Indian Anglican bishop on Sunday, 29 December 1912, in St. Paul's Cathedral, Calcutta. On that momentous day, in the presence of eleven British Anglican bishops, the Governor of Bengal, and a large crowd of western and Indian supporters, the Anglican church announced to the world that it was opening the floodgates to Indian leadership in the church. `We ... welcome to the high office of a ruler in the Church of God one whom we believe will render loyal and efficient service.... the forerunner of a long line of Indian Bishops in the years yet to come,' the Reverend Canon E. S. Sell enthused in his sermon.13 Ten days later, Azariah was installed as bishop in the newly created diocese of Dornakal. He was thirty-eight years old.
With this consecration, the Anglican church made a complete break with precedent. Azariah became the first Indian bishop, not only of the Anglican church, but of any Christian church outside the small and ancient Syrian Christian churches of St. Thomas, most of whom had themselves been dependent on bishops from Mesopotamia until the sixteenth century.14 All other churches in India lagged behind the Anglican church in consecrating indigenous bishops. The Roman Catholic church had appointed three Goan Brahmins as bishops in the seventeenth century,15 but did not appoint native Indian bishops again until 1923.16 Both the Roman Catholic and Syrian churches could be considered particularly `foreign' because they used the liturgical languages of Latin and Syriac.
The arrival of Evangelical (or Protestant) missions and the subsequent dissemination of Bibles translated into Indian vernacular languages, combined with the rising force of Indian nationalism, provoked older churches in India to seek a more genuinely Indian identity under native leadership. But even indigenous Protestant churches in India continued to rely on foreign bishops until well into the twentieth century. The Methodist Episcopal Church in southern Asia waited until 1931 to consecrate an Indian, and the Lutheran church lingered until 1955.17 The Anglican church also acted in India before anywhere else except West Africa, where, as we shall see, it consecrated Samuel Adayi Crowther in 1864. The first indigenous Anglican bishops were consecrated in China in 1918,18 Japan in 1923,19 Uganda in 1947,20 and Iran in 1961.21 Thus, the appoint ment of Azariah was a pathbreaking step, not only for the Anglican church globally but also for all Christian denominations in India.
Azariah's appointment was additionally important because it necessitated the creation of a new diocese. The growth of an Indo-Anglican ecclesiastical structure on the subcontinent, complete with chaplains, bishops, clergymen, and Gothic-styled churches, brought the Church of England continually and increasingly into conflict with the Government of India's official policy of noninterference in Indian religious affairs.22 The proliferation of bishoprics in India, Burma, and Ceylon (designed to accommodate not only the growing number of Britons abroad but also the Anglican church's expanding Indian and Eurasian membership) provided a serious, if largely unrecognized point of tension between church and state at the turn of the century. The church in India confronted a variety of frustrating, state-imposed obstacles to its growth, and Anglican bishops and missionaries in India generally regarded their association with the government as a hindrance to their work. Strongly conflicting opinions arose regarding the extent to which the government should be involved with promoting Christianity on the subcontinent. The complex legal and political battle surrounding the creation of the Dornakal Diocese is only one of many illustrations of broadening civil-ecclesiastical discord which belies the widely accepted notion that church and state formed a close partnership in which both parties participated in a semiofficial imperial system of mutual support and promotion.23
The relationship between Christianity and British rule in India was governed by a long-standing `official' policy of tolerance, which was later articulated for the East India Company in Lord Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Education: We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are in any way engaged in the work of converting natives to Christianity.' It was restated for the Indian government in the Queen's Proclamation of 1858:
The Church of England planted its first roots in India shortly after the English East India Company received its original charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600 requiring that Anglican chaplains oversee the spiritual life on its ships and in its factories. As the British extended their commercial and military presence in India during the next three centuries, so also did the Anglican church gradually increase its influence. Company and military chaplains ministered to British residents, soldiers, and much of the growing Eurasian population. Before the first bishop was sent to India in 1814, chaplains worked under the remote supervision of the Bishop of London, and no Anglican could be confirmed or ordained in India. These early chaplains were paid from local Company revenues and apparently did not engage in serious evangelistic activity. In the seventeenth century, only one baptism of an Indian according to Anglican rites was recorded.26
The situation had changed by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the so-called `pious chaplains' undertook vigorous missionary work in India. Under the inspiration of the Cambridge evangelical leader Charles Simeon (1759-1836), they won Indian converts and translated the Bible into Indian vernaculars.27 After the Crown assumed direct control of the Indian government in 1858, the government took responsibility for appointing chaplains and paid their salaries from tax revenues.28
Since the chaplains and priests ministered primarily to Europeans, extraecclesiastical societies arose to evangelize foreign populations; the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was founded in 1699, the SPG in 1701, and the CMS in 1799. Missionaries for India first received limited permission to work in British-controlled territories in the East India Company Charter Act of 1813, and were given unlimited freedom twenty years later in the Charter Act of 1833. This development was a victory for evangelicals against the powerful anti-missionary lobby in Parliament led by Company Director Sir Stephen Lushington, who believed that evangelistic activity in India threatened British material interests.
After rejecting a proposal for government patronage of Christian missions in 1793, Parliament approved the extension of the Anglican episcopate to India in 1813, responding again to the evangelicals and rebuffing the East India Company. The East India Act of 1813 provided for the appointment of a bishop for India with an episcopal seat in Calcutta that included all `British territories in the East Indies and Parts aforesaid' (i.e., within the Company's Charter). In 1817, the island of Ceylon was added to the diocese, followed by Australia and New Zealand in 1823.29 The new Bishop of Calcutta was the first Anglican bishop `east of Suez,' with three new archdeacons assisting him in the Presidency capitals.
The bishop could not be appointed according to traditional English methods without a preexisting diocesan electoral apparatus (the Dean and Chapter of a cathedral or collegiate college). So the government revived a procedure used in the sixteenth century under Edward VI whereby the Crown nominated bishops directly.30 The royal letters patent issued after the 1813 Act appointed Thomas Fanshawe Middleton (bishop 181422) to the new episcopal see and classified him and his archdeacons as civil servants to be paid from local Company revenues - 5,000 pounds sterling per year for the bishop and 2,000 pounds per year for each archdeacon. Middleton, like bishops in England, was made subject to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to English ecclesiastical laws governing such matters as liturgy and use of the Book of Common Prayer;31 but the letters safeguarded the authority of the Governor-General and Governors in India, gave the Crown the right to cancel the appointment, and withheld from the bishop a seat in the House of Lords. These civil restrictions on the bishop's authority prompted one church historian to call the letters patent `a travesty of episcopacy.'32
Middleton's episcopate was launched in virtual secrecy for fear that his appointment might provoke protests either from British officials opposed generally to `missionary meddling' in India or from the Indian pop- ulation.33 The sermon preached at his consecration was not published, as was the usual custom, and he received no public reception or even a formal residence when he arrived in Calcutta in 1814. The secretiveness may have been unnecessary, because the initial response to the importation of the English ecclesiastical establishment was surprisingly subdued. Most non-Christian Indians seemed to accept the idea that the British regime would follow the practice of previous Hindu and Muslim rulers by giving its faith some official recognition.34
Middleton faced even greater problems in extending his authority over the growing number of missionaries who, in the words of a later bishop, `seemed to wander at their own sweet will, rather than to be settled in one particular place.'36 `I must either license them or silence them ... there is no alternative,' Middleton lamented; but `how can I silence men who come to India under the authority of a clause in the charter?'37 In the end, Middleton concluded that his letters patent from the Crown gave him jurisdiction over chaplains only, and he gave up trying to license Anglican missionaries or to ordain Indian clergy.
Parliament clarified the original letters patent at the request of Middleton's successor, Reginald Heber (bishop 1823-26). He was consecrated at Lambeth Palace on 1 June 1823 without the secrecy of the preceding decade.38 The India Bishops and Courts Act of 1823 tightened the bishop's control over missionaries, loosened the Anglican ministry's attachment to the Crown, and gave the Bishop of Calcutta the right to ordain Indians to the Anglican ministry.39 During his short tenure, Heber ordained a Tamil convert, Christian David, and a Muslim convert, Abdul Masih, to Anglican orders, brought all Anglican clergymen working in the Calcutta Diocese under his authority, and promoted the church's evangelistic mission in India, calling himself the chief Missionary of the Society in the East.'40
Heber survived the Indian climate and his rigorous travel schedule for only four years, and his two successors, John Thomas James (bishop 1827-28) and John Matthias Turner (bishop 1829-3 1), both died less than two years after their arrivals. Therefore, when the Company's charter came up for renewal in 1833, Parliament lessened the bishop's burdens by establishing additional bishoprics in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies and by elevating the Bishop of Calcutta to the status of a Metropolitan. The church, like the state, now looked to Calcutta as its center of authority, and the bishops assumed prestigious roles in official ranking.41 Once again, there was surprisingly little opposition from the non-Christian Indian population which bore the brunt of increased costs, and opposition to the Indian episcopacy from the liberal Lord William Bentinck was apparently based on his disapproval of Protestant establishment in Ireland more than any concerns about the Indian situation.42
Thus the Anglican church's destiny in India was inextricably linked with that of India's British rulers.43 Whether this connection ultimately helped or hurt the Christian enterprise in India is a complex question. Al though Christianity may have benefited in early times from its close association in the popular imagination with the prestigious empire in India, the state connection became a serious liability with the advent of the national independence movement.44 Azariah later described the educated Christian nationalist's embarrassment at the Indo-Anglican church's dependence on any British government:
As Azariah's criticism suggested, the extension of Anglicanism outside the British Isles during the colonial era produced complex legal and constitutional problems for the Church of England.46 Anglican bishops generally came to regret their church's state connection well before the advent of popular Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century. They saw the state connection as a legal and cultural hindrance to the church's growth and development. As the British had expanded territorial control in India and the number of Indo-Anglicans had increased during the nineteenth century, the Church of England in India was required to obey laws whose authority rested upon the consent of a distant Parliament (the church's chief law-making body since the Reformation), and whose stipulations were suited to ecclesiastical life in Britain rather than India.
Azariah lamented that the Anglican church in India was unable to create new dioceses, to subdivide old ones, or to consecrate new bishops without government approval. It had been especially awkward for his early British predecessors in India not to be allowed to change the Book of Common Prayer or even to change the requirement that Anglican ordinands be `learned in the Latin tongue.'47 By denying the church liberty to control its institutional expansion, to adapt its work to Indian conditions via liturgical reforms, or to relax Greek, Latin, and English language proficiency requirements, the government had forced most bishops in India to conclude that their association with the state was a nuisance rather than a benefit.48
Some legal adjustments had been made over time to accommodate the growing variety of circumstances in which the Anglican church had to operate outside Britain. After the American War of Independence, a Parliamentary Act of 1786 had waived the required oath of obedience to the Crown as a prerequisite for consecration; but the need remained for a royal license and for consecrations to take place in London.49 Bishops in India and elsewhere frequently challenged civil control over ecclesiastical affairs, but to no avail. Governor-General Bentinck limited the church's right to define the nature and degree of a chaplain's authority during the Calcutta bishopric of Daniel Wilson (bishop 1832-58), despite Wilson's protest against government interference in spiritual matters.50
The growth of Empire in non-Christian lands seriously challenged the statutory authority of Parliament over church law and structure. Churchstate relations in religiously plural territories could never be established, as they had been in England, on a theory of society which conceived of the church and state as part of a unitary whole guided by God's supreme reason.51 Government regulation of ecclesiastical affairs was generally expected in England, where the House of Commons was composed mainly of Anglicans and bishops sat in the House of Lords. But expectations were different in multi-religious foreign territories such as India, even before the development of parliamentary democracy. The British policy of noninterference in Indian religious affairs was the Raj's political answer to religious pluralism, but it did not apply to the Anglican church itself.
Future Anglican bishops would disagree with certain government policies, but most divines agreed with Azariah that Britain's expanding influence on the subcontinent was a providential historical development bringing India closer to her ultimate destiny of redemption in Christianity. Leaders of the Indian Anglican establishment played an important although still inadequately understood role in helping to define and to articulate the framework of religious assumptions which served to justify the imperialism of the Raj.52 But most bishops still wished to free their church in India from Erastian shackles in order to execute better their own imperial Christian mission.
The tensions between church and state in British India came to a head over the issue of extending the episcopate itself. Pressure to establish more bishoprics in India grew steadily during the nineteenth century for three primary reasons. Firstly, ecclesiastical divisions in the British Empire were coterminous with civil divisions (as they had been in the Roman empire). Thus, steady territorial gains meant comparable increases in the size of each diocese and in the workload of each bishop. Secondly, the success of Anglican missionary societies in attracting Indian converts was steadily increasing the Church of England populations in most dioceses. By the end of the nineteenth century, Indian congregations outnumbered European and Eurasian congregations by a ratio of three to one.53 And, thirdly, episcopal reforms initiated in England fundamentally altered the position of Anglican bishops both at home and abroad. This third, domestic English development had important implications for India that historians have generally overlooked.
Most important of all was a dramatic shift in the Church of England's understanding of the episcopate itself under the influence of the Tractarian movement. Many eighteenth-century bishops had been grossly negligent of their dioceses, spending most of each year in London at the House of Lords. Thanks largely to the influence and example of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-73), nineteenth-century bishops were increasingly preoccupied with performing spiritual duties within their dioceses. Wilberforce's diligent stewardship of his Oxford Diocese from 1845 virtually revolutionized the idea of episcopacy. By the end of the century, English bishops were less involved in London's political life and more involved in local affairs: synods of their clergy, diocesan conferences, and educational and missionary organizations. The newly responsible bishops also utilized episcopal visitations, rural deans, and their `bishop's veto' (designed by the 1874 Public Worship Regulation Act to help keep `popery' out of the Church of England) in order to strengthen their influence over diocesan affairs.
These changes led to an increased workload for every bishop, and to pressure for dividing larger dioceses into smaller units and creating suffragan bishops to assist with the bishop's work.55 Assisted by the revival in 1870 of the Suffragan Bishops Act of 1534, the church formed ten new bishoprics in England between 1847 and 1910.56
One aspect of the intensifying debate between Tractarians and evangelicals in mid-nineteenth-century England was the problematic question of the proper relation of overseas bishops to missionaries.58 The high church view, articulated most forcefully by Bishop Wilberforce, held that the episcopate was such an essential foundation for the church that, without a bishop, a'church' could not exist (ubi episcopos, ibi ecclesia). From this position it followed that every mission should be led by a bishop. The contrary view, propagated by Henry Venn during his tenure as CMS General Secretary from 1841 to 1872, contended that the bishop was the `crown' of the church, whose foundations had to be laid by a prior vanguard of missionaries and whose bishops should be chosen from among native converts.
In contrast to Wilberforce's position that bishops (inevitably, European) should lead missions to unevangelized lands, Venn believed that missionary evangelists should create self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating native churches which would, when sufficiently mature, appoint their own native bishops. Venn rejected the high church belief in `missionary bishops' for unevangelized lands, claiming in an 1857 memorandum on the extension of the Indian episcopate that if a "missionary bishop" should be sent out ... his episcopal functions must be for the most part laid aside.'59 He argued that missionary bishops would become little more than European superintendents whose very presence further hindered `euthanasia of mission,' the desirable process whereby missions voluntarily gave way to a native church under a native bishop. Both the evangelical CMS and the high church SPG favored the extension of the episcopate overseas, but their fundamental disagreement about the relation between evangelism and the ecclesiastical hierarchy underlay several key controversies in the late nineteenth century.
The missionary motive behind the proliferating episcopate in India posed the most serious challenge to the state's historic posture of religious neutrality; and the government's efforts to stymie episcopal growth dramatically reinforced a growing desire within the Indian episcopate for disestablishment.60 The Indo-Anglican church was still legally bound to civil authorities, having no rights of self-government independent of those granted by the state and needing civil consent for most ecclesiastical acts. Bishop Wilberforce failed to obtain Parliament's approval for the creation of missionary bishops for native churches within existing dioceses in 1853. Parliament defeated a plan proposed in 1865 by Bishop Cotton of Calcutta (bishop 1858-66) for a new bishopric in northern India at Lahore, and rejected similar proposals again in 1871 and 1872. Nor would Parliament accept a scheme devised by Cotton's successor, Bishop Milman (bishop 1867-76), for enjoining the Crown, Parliament, and the Indian government to cooperate with bishops in England and India to create new dioceses.61 As a result, all dioceses created in India after the 1833 Charter Act were brought into being by what Bishop Stephen Neill described as a series of 'subterfuges. '62
Between 1813 and 1929, the number of bishoprics in India, Burma, and Ceylon increased from one to fourteen.63 The establishment of bish optics in Madras (1835) and Bombay (1837) by the 1833 Charter Renewal Act, and in Australia (1836) and Colombo (1845), reduced the original Calcutta Diocese to a more manageable size. But the annexation of the Punjab, the Central Provinces, Oudh, and Burma left the Bishop of Calcutta with an even larger diocese than Middleton had possessed originally in 1813. The church was in a double bind: the geographical scope of its jurisdiction grew with the expansion of empire, but imperial authorities were limiting its ability to exercise that jurisdiction.
To cope with increasing demands for episcopal oversight, the church devised new ways to appoint bishops without an Act of Parliament. It procured a legal decision permitting new, privately endowed dioceses to be established in territories lying outside East India Company rule at the time of the 1833 Act - leading to the creation in 1877 of new dioceses in Rangoon (for Burmese territories annexed after 1833) and Lahore (for Delhi, the Punjab, the North-West Frontier, Kashmir and Baluchistan, and Sindh, which was transferred from the Bombay Diocese).64 A see was also created for Travancore and Cochin in 1879 on the basis of the Jerusalem Bishopric Act of 1841,65 which provided legal precedent for the consecration of either British or foreign subjects as Anglican bishops outside the limits of British rule. Other legal maneuvers permitted the reorganization of two assistant bishoprics in Madras (formed in 1877) into the single Diocese of Tinnevelly/Madura in 1896, and the subdivision of the Calcutta Diocese into the Dioceses of Chota Nagpur (1890), Lucknow (1893), Nagpur (1902), and Assam (1915). Finally, the Dornakal and Nasik Dioceses were established in 1912 and 1929 to reduce the geographical areas under the Bishops of Madras and Bombay.
By raising private endowments to fund the new dioceses, discovering legal loopholes, and, occasionally, disregarding the law completely, the church managed to increase its episcopal presence to what it regarded as a more acceptable but still inadequate level. Because of this improvisational process, the status of bishops in India, Burma, and Ceylon became one of the most `irregular' of any church in the world. By 1924, seven bishops were appointed by royal letters patent and paid either entirely by the government or by the government from endowment funds raised in India and England; the Bishop of Travancore and Cochin was appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and paid by the CMS; the Bishop of Chota Nagpur was appointed by the Metropolitan and paid by the SPG; the Bishop of Tinnevelly and Madura was appointed by the Bishop of Madras with the approval of the Metropolitan and paid by the CMS, the SPG, and private endowments; the Bishop of Dornakal was appointed by the Bishop of Madras with the approval of the Metropolitan and paid entirely from endowments; the Bishop of Colombo was appointed by a Diocesan Synod and paid by endowments.66 Bishop Henry Whitehead concluded in 1924 that, to the legal mind the whole position of the Church of England in India (is) utterly chaotic and impossible,'67 and Azariah described the situation as `hopeless confusion.'68 Even a later church historian was driven to exclaim: For incredible muddle, complexity and anomaly has it ever had a parallel in any Church in Christendom?'69
The picture that emerges from this history is hardly the simplistic one of an established church marching triumphantly alongside a growing and confident empire. It is rather that of an established but overstretched church struggling to find a place in the expanding empire by ingenious and, often, illegal schemes designed to minimize opposition from the imperial government.
Of course, new bishoprics would not have been allowed to multiply in India, Burma, and Ceylon without some degree of tacit consent or, as Azariah expressed it, `common sense, mutual goodwill and obligations of fellowship'70 on the part of both civil and ecclesiastical sectors. As Whitehead observed later:
The Church in India has been obliged to step over the legal fences by which it is theoretically restricted. [But] ... the system has worked well because all parties have been anxious to make it work.... It has been said that this disregard of the law `debauches the consciences' of the bishops and clergy. Perhaps I am no fit judge on this point, as I worked the system as a bishop for twenty-three years without scruple. But as nobody wants the law to be strictly observed, neither the members of the Church, nor the Government of India, nor the Crown nor the Houses of Parliament.... I cannot think that anyone's conscience has been a bit the worse for treating it as a dead letter.71
The tacit consent between church and state to treat the law as a 'dead letter' did permit expansion of a kind of Indo-Anglicanism in South Asia, but not without continuing opposition from government officials that was powerful enough to persuade the church in India to break its ties with the state altogether in the first decades of the 1900s. Once respect for the existing law had become thoroughly eroded, there seemed little reason for continuing the semblance of a specious `Establishment.'
The break began with the development of a system of synodical government which laid the groundwork for church independence in 1930. An informal meeting of bishops in Bombay in 1863 had led to more formal gatherings in 1873 and 1877 and to the first Episcopal Synod in 1883. The bishops passed their first resolution indicating their desire to establish a synodical system in 1877.72 The Episcopal Synod then played an increasingly important role in the development of the Indo-Anglican church; by 1910, it initiated plans for the establishment of a Provincial Synod of bishops, priests, and laymen.
Once again, it was western clerics who accelerated the path to independence for the Indian church. New impetus came for disestablishment in 1902, when Bishop Reginald S. Copleston (c. 1845-1925) moved from Colombo to the Metropolitan see of Calcutta. During his tenure as Bishop of Colombo (1875-1902), Copleston had overseen the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Ceylon in 1886, and he was eager to direct the church in India towards the same goal.73 His last Episcopal Synod as Metropolitan (and Azariah's first as bishop), in December 1912 January 1913, has been described as `one of the most momentous meetings in its history.'74 The bishops specified that the Provincial Synod's members would henceforth be elected by diocesan councils, which already existed in larger and older dioceses but were now also to be established in newer and smaller dioceses. Synodical government was to provide the church with greater autonomy from the state, which the bishops chided for slowness in establishing new dioceses, appointing new bishops and adapting to Indian circumstances. We should go steadily forward with our plans for Synodical Government, and if Disestablishment comes, let it come,' wrote the Bishop of Madras on 2 January 1913.75
Azariah's appointment to the Dornakal Diocese provides an excellent example of how the church deliberately circumvented civil restrictions on its growth. The complex negotiations and calculated steps leading up to Azariah's consecration were led by the brilliant and fascinating figure of Bishop Henry Whitehead. He generated vociferous opposition, but was able to engineer a decisive turning point in the development of an independent and indigenous Indo-Anglican church.