Bishop Henry Whitehead as Bridge Builder
Bishop Henry Whitehead as Bridge Builder
The success of the missionary enterprise among untouchable and lowcaste groups created a massive demographic shift in the Indian church's membership during the nineteenth century. Indian Christian congrega tions had always vastly outnumbered European and Eurasian congregations: this trend accelerated by the century's end. Anglican bishops could not plausibly deny episcopal rank or supervision to Indian converts, and the generally accepted (if never fully realized) division between an ecclesiastical establishment for Europeans and Eurasians on the one hand and missionary societies for native converts on the other was no longer even theoretically tenable. The creation of the Dornakal Diocese under the leadership of Bishop Azariah bridged this gap even if it did not end all the controversy.
By the turn of the century, the new Bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead (1853-1947), recognized his need for assistance in overseeing the expanding Telugu churches and identified Azariah as the man for the job. Whitehead had been a fellow and tutor of Trinity College, Oxford, and was the brother of the famed philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.78 Hav ing received top degrees in both classics and mathematics at Trinity, Henry Whitehead began his career as a lecturer at Oxford in the former subject from 1878 to 1883. He was ordained to the priesthood in 187979 through the influence of the Tractarian movement whose mentor, John Henry Newman, made annual visits to the college as an honorary fellow and met Whitehead on several occasions. The Oxford Mission to Calcutta was founded in 1879 and sent university men to work among Indian students and educated populations by providing boys' schools and hostels, along the lines of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi. The Oxford Mission began as a religious brotherhood of four university graduates who established a boarding school for Indian Christian boys in Calcutta and, by the century's end, a successful hostel for non-Christian students.80
Whitehead served as the mission's Honorary Secretary in Oxford81 until 1883 when he offered himself to the Metropolitan, Edward R Johnson, for the Calcutta mission. Johnson persuaded him to accept, instead, the `extraordinarily important job' of Principal of Bishop's College in Calcutta. After a traumatic parting from his disapproving father, Whitehead voyaged to Calcutta, where he experienced the further trauma of discover ing only one student enrolled for instruction. Whitehead raised the enrollment to forty during the next decade,82 joined the Oxford Brotherhood in 1890, was appointed Superior of the Oxford Mission in 1891, and became Bishop of Madras in 1899, where he served until his retirement to England in 1922.
But he eventually lost patience after his mission had failed to produce more than a handful of conversions to Christianity by the turn of the century. Western education seemed to be producing agnostics by destroying `those religious feelings which would lead men to seek after any religious truth whatever,' and producing a state of `religious paralysis and religious indifference.'85 In the Oxford Mission's Annual Report for 1897, Whitehead wrote: `it cannot be said that the general body of educated Hindus are any nearer to Christianity now than they appear to have been thirty or forty years ago ... [and] there are scarcely any signs as yet that the educated classes, as a whole, are moving in the direction of Christianity. In many respects they seem to be moving away from it.'86
Whitehead argued that the lower classes were `craving for life' denied them by the tyranny and oppression of a thousand years,' and that missionaries were the first people to treat India's outcastes as human be- ings.'88 Western missionaries should abandon their elitist, top-down strategies and should adopt a new bottom-up strategy for converting India. The hostile educated classes might even be led to reconsider the claims of the Christian faith if this strategy proved successful. In a 1906 issue of his diocesan magazine, he wrote:
Rapid church growth in the Telugu districts of the Madras diocese particularly caught the bishop's attention. The successful IMS mission in Dornakal attracted Bishop Whitehead to Dornakal in 1906 to baptize 46 new IMS converts. On arrival, he discovered 300 more catechumens, mainly of outcaste Mala background, also under instruction for baptism. Henceforth, Whitehead and his wife became active supporters of the IMS mission, offering financial help for training new converts and for supporting missionaries.90
When Azariah formally joined the mission in 1909, there were approximately 30,000 Indian Christians associated with the Indo-Anglican church in Telugu regions (which included Dornakal), with an increase of between 2,000 and 3,000 converts per year.91 Whitehead's prediction of 1908, that the Telugu church could soon expect as many as 10,000 people per year seeking baptism,92 was realized and exceeded in Azariah's lifetime. In 1925 alone there were 17,000 new converts to the church.93
New congregations spread over a very large area, and the duty of traveling for confirmations rapidly became burdensome for Whitehead:
At the Episcopal Synod ofJanuary 1908, Whitehead initiated procedures to appoint an assistant bishop specifically for missionary work in Telugu districts.95 By the close of the year, the bishop made preliminary arrangements for a salary and asked Metropolitan Copleston (Metropolitan, 1902-13) to obtain government approval for appointing an assistant bishop, either European or Indian.96
Copleston, another Oxford don with decidedly high church views, proved a willing collaborator with Whitehead. Both men had been criticized by the CMS for their `ritualism': Copleston during his earlier tenure as Bishop of Colombo and Whitehead shortly after his arrival in Madras in 1899.97 Both men's experiences in South Asia moderated their strict AngloCatholic opinions, and both developed extremely cordial relations with the CMS and the evangelical wing of the church. Whitehead's transformation from loyal Tractarian to ardent ecumenist and promoter of mass evangelism illustrates the general rule that `the situation in the mission field tends to have a broadening effect upon the individual missionary.'98
Both Copleston and Whitehead became avid students of Indian culture: Copleston as the leading western authority of his generation on Buddhism who was able to preach in Tamil, Hindustani, and Bengali by the end of his tenure as Metropolitan; Whitehead as an expert in South Indian folk religion who was similarly well versed in the relevant vernacu- lars.99 Both favored distancing the church from the state by instituting synodical government, and both shared a Tractarian-inspired enthusiasm for the appointment of a missionary bishop to the Telugu regions of the Madras Presidency and Hyderabad State.
Private correspondence reveals that Whitehead decided before April 1909 to appoint Azariah to the post,'°° and that Whitehead's energetic wife Isabel was almost certainly originally responsible for identifying Azariah as a potential bishop and for persuading her husband to pursue the idea.101 The bishop kept his decision a secret, particularly from Azariah, who had not yet begun his work in the IMS Dornakal mission. If Azariah were to learn of his imminent appointment before his arrival in Dornakal, Whitehead wrote to John Mott in April 1909, this would
When Azariah left the YMCA for Dornakal, neither he nor his colleagues, with the exception of Whitehead, Copleston, and John Mott, knew of Whitehead's secret plans. Bishop Whitehead did not reveal his cards until the night before Azariah's ordination as deacon on 29 June 1909, when he informed Azariah of his intention to make him a bishop. This revelation set off a three-year storm of controversy. It would take all of his vision and skills of leadership to negotiate the many issues that threatened to block Azariah's promotion.