The British Debate over Azariah's Consecration
The British Debate over Azariah's Consecration
Protests against Whitehead's plan came for different reasons from the church hierarchy led by the Metropolitan, from the Governments of Madras and India, from both Anglican and nonconformist missionaries, and from Indian Christians themselves. The bishop responded by modifying but not abandoning his plan.
The Metropolitan objected to Whitehead's 1908 proposal to appoint an Indian as an assistant without a seat in the Synod on the grounds that it was too timid and would not grant the first Indian bishop enough authority. The first Indian bishop should have independent jurisdiction over a diocese of his own, Copleston protested, rather than be appointed as subordinate to an Englishman in `a half-hearted act of trust.'103 Whitehead agreed that his plan was only `a first step towards a higher ideal,' but reassured the Metropolitan that the new assistant would be given `very large and independent functions of government and responsibility.' Whitehead claimed that he needed help in the Telugu districts immediately and feared a possible legal rejection if they attempted to establish a new diocesan bishopric in the Madras Presidency. The Metropolitan was disappointed that Whitehead was unwilling to pursue the `fuller method' and reiterated that `a tentative act of trust in our Indian brethren does not meet my views.'104 Later Copleston wrote to the CMS:
Copleston also worried that Whitehead's proposal to establish an Indian Bishopric Fund to support future Indian bishops would create undesirable racial distinctions in the church:
Foreshadowing debates over minority preferences that have dominated Indian, not to mention American, politics for much of this century, Copleston placed his church squarely on the side of those who believed that racially based preferences would worsen rather than heal racial divisions.
With this compromise in hand, the bishops then sought government authority to act. In January of 1910, the Governments of Madras and India agreed to all the provisions, but insisted upon two safeguards: (1) that the Archdeacon of Madras rather than the assistant bishop be in charge of the diocese in the bishop's absence, and (2) that the assistant bishop be commissioned under royal license by the Archbishop of Canterbury, even if consecrated in India.108 In the first instance, the Governments of India and Madras wanted to prevent the possibility of an Indian national from assuming, even temporarily, the duties of a Presidency bishop or from having authority over chaplains during the bishop's absence. Government officials had apparently not forgotten the `white mutiny' over the Ilbert Bill in 1883, and were still scared by the idea that an Indian should ever have authority over Englishmen.109 In the second instance, the Governments of India and Madras wanted to restrict the freedom of the Metropolitan and the bishops in India to consecrate future bishops without obtaining necessary permission from the state.
This was not the first time that government officials had thwarted the Metropolitan's ambition to appoint bishops independently. Copleston had previously clashed with the Government of India over episcopal freedom in 1905, when he sought to fill vacancies to the sees of Chota Nagpur and Travancore/Cochin without the usual commission from the Archbishop of Canterbury under the royal license. The government insisted that Copleston and the Indian bishops delay their proceedings until the usual permission had been obtained. The civil authorities suspected, quite rightly, that the Metropolitan was trying to bypass certain aspects of state control in order to gain greater freedom from lay control for the church in India. A Minute from the judicial and Public Department of 7 December 1905 expressed the fear that, if the Metropolitan and his bishops used such liberty to increase the number of bishoprics in India without government consent, this `might give rise to serious misapprehensions in the minds of the people of India.'" Bearing this earlier conflict in mind, the Indian government insisted that Copleston and Whitehead obtain the formal commission to consecrate Azariah issued under royal license by the Archbishop of Canterbury," and the bishops consented to the government's stipulations.
The bishops used the resulting hiatus, not to retreat, but rather to fortify and even to radicalize their position. The Episcopal Synod met at Allahabad in November 1910 and challenged the government by reversing its opinion of 1908 and resolving that a fully independent diocesan bishopric should be founded in Telugu country.113 Knowing that he would never gain the necessary Parliamentary consent to establish this new diocese, Whitehead resorted to an arrangement, used also in Chota Nagpur and Tinnevelly, which he freely admitted was `makeshift' and `legally unsound.'114 He obtained permission from the Crown to appoint an assistant bishop but, under the authority of the Synod, authorized Azariah to exercise autonomous episcopal oversight within an independent diocese. Azariah would therefore be an assistant bishop in the eyes of the government, but a diocesan bishop in the eyes of the church, with fully independent jurisdiction and voting membership in the Episcopal Synod. Only when the Church of England in India was disestablished in 1930 would Azariah gain legal status as a diocesan bishop. Until then, he was technically breaking the law by performing the full duties of his office.
Other new difficulties still stood in the way of final government permission to appoint an Indian bishop. A strong objection to Azariah was voiced in the London-based India Council by the conservative Sir James Thomson.115 He claimed that Indian Christians were generally incompetent and that no native priest was capable of handling a bishop's responsibility:
Thomson warned that Whitehead was giving Azariah too much authority and that the government should reserve the right to appeal the assistant bishop's orders. The Council's subsequent consultation with a legal advisor concluded that such a safeguard would be unnecessary, but Thomson remained dissatisfied and reaffirmed the need to help Bishop Whitehead to safeguard himself and his people.'" Thomson also warned that Azariah would have difficulty maintaining his `rank' with British missionaries in South India:
I doubt if I should find one [missionary] who would support this proposal of the Bishop's to have a native priest entrusted with a Bishop's work.
Nor did Thomson believe that Azariah would be successful with the rest of the Ecclesiastical Establishment of the English Church':
Thomson was clearly motivated by stereotypically negative views of native priests and Indian Christians. Yet he also accused the government of discriminating against Indians by not offering, in the case of Dornakal, to support the missionary bishopric with tax revenues. It is not easy to understand why the revenues of India should provide church privileges for the white man, but not for the black.'119 Thomson's disingenuous concern with racial equity was thus summoned to mask his belief that Indian Christians were incapable of leading their own ecclesiastical institutions.
Fortunately for Azariah, Thomson's dissent was outweighed by the support of several other key members of the India Council, and by the liberal Secretary of State, the Marquess of Crewe (Secretary, 1910-15). The strongest advocate of Whitehead's plan appears to have been Sir Steyning William Edgerley,120 who objected to the Government of India's requirement that the Archdeacon of Madras have authority over the assistant bishop during the diocesan bishop's absences. This, Edgerley protested, `looks like ... racial discrimination in the very last place where we ought to find it.'121 The government safeguard was defended by the powerful Sir Arthur Hirtzel,122 who argued that, although objectionable in itself, the provision would protect British chaplains (some of whom were supposedly `jealous' of Azariah's promotion) from being placed unwillingly under the native bishop's authority. Hirtzel advised retaining the provision, at least for the time being, in order to `let the shy horse have a good look at the unaccustomed _link_ object first.1I23 _link_ Hirtzel joined Edgerley and Crewe in supporting Azariah's appointment, which the India Council approved on 14 May in time to permit the December 1912 consecration. 124 Prejudice toward Azariah, the `unaccustomed object,' was thus wrestled to the ground through the imperfect but effective art of compromise.
Newspaper accounts of Azariah's appointment in early 1912 generated rumors which caused concern in both London and Madras. Controversy erupted in Parliament on 23 April 1912, and the Undersecretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, had to assure the House of Commons, through his spokesman, that Azariah had not yet been appointed and that ,no part of the remuneration of the post, if it be sanctioned, will be provided from Government funds.'125 The same questions were raised in the Madras Legislative Council, whose members were assured that the Assistant Bishop, if appointed, will not be a Government servant and his salary will not be paid from public revenues.' The Government of Madras also admitted that it was not aware of the exact legal position [the Assistant Bishop] will occupy in relation to the Bishop of Madras, but his sphere of work will be determined from time to time by the latter.'126
In the midst of this palaver, Whitehead went to London to lobby for Azariah with the heads of missionary societies, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the former Viceroy, Lord Curzon. On 4 July 1912, while the Bishop of Madras was still in London, the King issued his Royal License to the Archbishop of Canterbury empowering him to commission the bishops in India to consecrate Azariah as Assistant Bishop in the Madras Diocese. The Metropolitan received the commission on 19 July 1912. Despite further complaints from Thomson and others, a date was set in December for the consecration with the approval of both the India Office in London and the Governments of India and Madras.
As different government branches in India and Britain bickered over Whitehead's plan, Azariah's appointment was also being debated in the wider Anglican arena. Some British Anglicans did not like his lower-caste background, but the majority were thankful that he did not represent the imitatively westernized Indian professional elite. As the editor of the Anglican Church Times wrote in 1913:
The Anglican establishment in England welcomed Azariah's appointment precisely because he was not a high-caste, English-educated Indian. Azariah symbolized what many Britons regarded as the genuinely Indian peasant masses rather than the westernized upper classes whose rising national aspirations and European `pretensions' were regarded, on one level, as ridiculous and, on another level, as threatening to the permanence of empire.
The consecration permitted the reassertion of a familiar imperial theme, articulated by Tories such as Salisbury, Lytton, and Curzon in earlier years, that urban, western-educated Indians did not represent the `real' India of `voiceless millions who can neither read nor write ... the ryots and the peasants whose life is not one of political aspiration but of mute penury and toil.'128 As a Nadar from Tinnevelly, Azariah represented formerly low-caste and untouchable groups whose rejection of high-caste Hindu domination conveniently reinforced the British Empire's own rationale for resisting the increasingly troublesome Indian National Congress. For most interested Englishmen, Azariah's appointment did not pose a serious threat to the imperial ethos but rather provided a satisfying example of how Britain's presence in India served to protect and even to promote the weak and powerless. Although some of these same Britons might have shared Thomson's prejudice against lowcaste Indians, their pleasure over the symbolism of Azariah's appointment generally outweighed any concern for the efficacy of church leadership in India.
Whitehead faced significant opposition, however, from Anglican missionary societies whose field workers did not believe that an Indian could run a diocese. He discovered by August 1911 that many CMS missionaries opposed his proposal on the grounds that mission districts in the Hyderabad State were not yet self-sufficient enough to support the first Indian bishopric. These missionaries accepted the assumption almost universally held, by imperialists and nationalists alike, that Indians needed training in self-government for successful independence. Even Gandhi maintained at this time that Indians needed to prepare themselves for self-government through various disciplines of selfcontrol and self-purification. However, the freedom to manage the vast array of Christian schools, churches, hospitals, and other institutions imported to India by westerners was a limited form of freedom indeed, which amounted to little more than the obligation to run foreign institutions.
Whitehead shared the missionaries' concern that Dornakal Christians were not yet ready to take over a full-fledged Anglican diocese. Recalling an argument raised by the SPG in 1864 against an Indian bishop for Tinnevelly, Whitehead wrote to Copleston:
In their opinion the districts in the Hyderabad State are precisely those in which European control is at present most needed. There is much force in this contention and I should not be willing at once to set it aside. The future growth of the Dornakal mission under Azariah's guidance may, and I think will, prove that European control is less needed than the missionaries imagine. But it would undoubtedly be better if the first independent Indian Bishop would be appointed to a see where the Indian congregations were riper for self-support and self-government. An independent diocese in the Telugu Country must after all be for many years a pauper diocese entirely dependent on a foreign missionary society for its support. An Indian bishop under these circumstances could not have the independence which he ought to have. For the present, therefore, I am myself in favour of consecrating an Assistant bishopric.129
Even Whitehead could not envisage Azariah as more than an assistant bishop in a `pauper diocese,' and he continued to disagree with Copleston's more radical plan for Azariah's autonomous bishopric.
Azariah's appointment opened up new fissures between missionaries in the field and mission administrators in London, while also causing the low-church CMS and the high-church SPG to reverse their normal positions toward bishops: the evangelical CMS argued for giving Azariah greater episcopal responsibility, while the Anglo-Catholic SPG issued a rare challenge to episcopal authority by opposing Azariah's appointment altogether.
The Parent Committee of the CMS in London endorsed the more radical plan for a full diocesan bishopric in 1912, and agreed to include one of its Telugu mission districts (Khammamett) in the new diocese. This outraged some CMS missionaries in India, but the London Committee prevailed and, within a decade, the CMS relinquished the remainder of its Telugu missions in the Madras Presidency to Azariah's care.130 Knowing that Azariah had stronger support from CMS administrators in distant London than from some CMS missionaries in India did not make Azariah's early years as a bishop any easier.
The London-based India Sub-Committee of the SPG, by contrast, argued that Azariah was ill qualified and that Whitehead had overstepped his authority by appointing him without wider consultation. In a gesture completely uncharacteristic of an Anglo-Catholic society renowned for loyalty to bishops, the SPG Sub-Committee passed a resolution on 24 January 1912 opposing Whitehead's plan to consecrate the `recently ordained priest, of no marked distinction. '131 This objection was eventually overruled by both the Secretary of the SPG and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who argued against trying to micro-manage the affairs of bishops in In- dia,I32 despite his own private worries about Azariah's relative lack of ex- perience.133 In the end, Azariah proved to be such a competent leader and administrator that, within a decade, the Synod extended his diocese to cover an area roughly the size of England.134
Whitehead was criticized even more strongly by nonconformist missionaries for attempting, through the consecration of Azariah, to further a larger scheme for Anglicanism as the state religion of India. A series of articles by the Congregationalist missionary to South India, Bernard Lucas (d. 1920), asked how the government intended to maintain its position of strict religious neutrality when it permitted the appointment of Anglican bishops to oversee the fieldwork of Anglican missionary societies. Claiming that the government had allowed Anglican bishops as `State Officials' to be involved actively in evangelizing Indian populations, Lucas wrote:
The fact that Azariah would not be paid by the government did not solve the fundamental problem that the Anglican Church interpreted the letters patent issued to its bishops in India as a license to encourage statesanctioned evangelism of Indian populations. The appointment of an Indian bishop brought the Indo-Anglican church one step closer to a crisis which Lucas felt could be resolved only by disestablishment.
Whitehead denied that Anglican authorities were planning a statesponsored episcopal church for India and expressed his own dissatisfaction that the letters patent required him to apply for a King's mandate before consecrating Azariah. Whitehead professed to dislike the state connection as much as Lucas, who summarized the situation as follows:
Lucas predicted that, in the event of large accessions from the Hindu community in Dornakal or elsewhere, aggrieved Hindus might accuse the government of interference in religious matters.
In fact, the mass movements of outcastes in Dornakal did not much interest caste Hindus until the franchise expanded along communal lines and Gandhi's anti-untouchability campaign brought the issue into focus more than two decades later. Lucas's argument articulated, however, the desire strongly felt by some Anglicans and most nonconformists for church disestablishment in India. As we have seen, in the year of Azariah's consecration, the Episcopal Synod took another important step towards making that desire a reality.