Race and the Church
Race and the Church
Why did so few Indian bishops emerge in a church whose bishops, Azariah's experience suggests, were so committed to developing Indian leadership? Why, when the Anglican church was willing in 1912 to place an Indian Christian in authority over a full-fledged multiracial Indo-Anglican diocese whose membership included British chaplains, missionaries, and congregations, did this not happen again for decades? Episcopal records, both before and after Azariah's consecration, suggest that the bishops wanted to appoint more Indians to the episcopate. What were the factors that stopped further progress in this direction?
The church had discussed the idea of appointing a native Indian bishop on several occasions during the nineteenth century, but each time largely jurisdictional obstacles stood in the way, along with some caste and racial prejudices.44 British Anglicans seemed unable to put their theo ties about Indian church leadership into practice at the highest level, and Indian bishops remained nothing but an empty dream. The Roman Catholic Church was even less successful in realizing its goal of indigenizing the church hierarchy in India. Although Rome stressed the importance of an indigenous priesthood from 1845, mission historian Stephen Neill has noted that `these injunctions met with singularly little response '45 An abiding belief in the white man's superiority combined with bad previous experiences with Goanese priests and a less venturesome phase of Jesuit activity in Asia help to explain the Roman church's delay.
The threat of a racially divided church reemerged in the negotiations over Azariah's appointment. In his remarks at Azariah's consecration, Metropolitan Copleston warned the church against allowing this sort of racial division to emerge through the appointment of future Indian bishops.47 That the next two Indians elevated to the episcopate were appointed only as assistants to European bishops (S. K. Tarafdar for Calcutta in 1935 and J. S. C. Banerjea for Lahore in 1937), and that this trend was also followed in China, Japan, and Africa,48 suggests that the bishops may have bowed to the very pressures they had hitherto successfully resisted.
Many church leaders were also haunted by the perceived `failure' of the Anglican church's first experience with a bishop of non-European race. Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1807-99)51 was consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral in 1864 as a missionary bishop52 to West African countries beyond British jurisdiction (eastern Nigeria, principally along the Niger river). Freed from slavery as a boy and raised as a Christian, Crowther became a tireless missionary and translator of Christian texts into the Yoruba language. He accepted his episcopal post reluctantly, mainly in deference to his mentor Henry Venn and after receiving reassurances from the government that he would have no jurisdiction over European missionaries. Like Azariah, he was promoted by a visionary westerner.
By the year of Crowther's death, disciplinary scandals and European criticisms of Crowther and of Africans on the mission staff had severely undermined his reputation and credibility. The reasons for his supposed failure have been hotly disputed. Henry Venn has been accused of instituting his ideal of a native episcopate prematurely and in a doctrinaire fashion without either considering the practical difficulties or consistently supporting Crowther's mission. European missionaries of the CMS have been accused of using Crowther as a `sacrificial victim' in a racially inspired vendetta against African church leadership. Crowther has also been faulted for lenience, weak judgment, and weak discipline.53 Whatever the fundamental causes, the failure of Crowther's bishopric had an enormous impact on the future development of an indigenous Anglican episcopate in Africa. To many Anglican churchmen, Crowther became `a symbol not only of African leadership but also of the supposed failure of African leadership,' so that, `for half a century and more, Africans were considered to be insufficiently "mature" for leadership in the Church.'54
Socioeconomic factors also inhibited the elevation of an Indian to the episcopacy and to other positions of leadership in the church. Most British missionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century had belonged to the growing lower middle class of skilled mechanics, artisans, and tradesmen. The British carpenters, printers, bookbinders, weavers, mechanics, smiths, coopers, cabinetmakers and tinplate workers who comprised the bulk of the early nineteenth-century missionary population were not joined by a sizable number of British university graduates until later in the nineteenth century (in contrast to the earliest Evangelical [Protestant] missionaries trained at Halle University). Not all early nineteenth-century missionaries were from the `mechanics class': Charles Simeon's `pious chaplains' and missionaries came from Cambridge University, for example. But there was a sizable nineteenth-century petit bourgeois missionary class which seems to have had a psychological need to identify a lower class over which it could feel superior. This may have intensified the paternalistic attitude which many mis sionaries of this period developed toward the populations of their host countries.56
Then, as the educational qualifications of missionaries serving in India rose, opportunities for native leadership seemed to diminish.57 By the turn of the century, the church in India recruited its bishops almost exclusively from highly qualified missionaries in India or Englishmen with previous Indian experience, and abandoned its earlier practice of recruiting less experienced bishops directly from England.58 As the pool of talent in India `improved,' competition for leadership positions stiffened, and most bishoprics remained in the hands of the same British educated class that controlled the appointments.
Two years before Azariah's consecration, an SPG missionary, J. A. Sharrock, argued that Indian Christians were comparatively unequipped to handle a bishop's responsibilities:
This argument did not deter Whitehead and Copleston, who were suspicious of arguments that so closely resembled those of British government officials anxious to safeguard their political power. Even the more liberal-minded Britons who professed long-term desires for Indian self government had increasingly during the late nineteenth century excused British inaction on the grounds of an immediate scarcity of native talent. Those few Indians who qualified for ICS positions were, like Azariah, often posted in remote and inaccessible areas where British officials preferred not to live and where Indian officials would pose less of a threat to British supremacy than in the centers of power.61
Unlike the Indian professional elites who filled scarce ICS positions, Indian Christians came mostly from outcaste or low-caste backgrounds, and this further prejudiced some Britons against them. The Indian Christian community in Tinnevelly preserves in its oral tradition a story that epitomizes the condescending manner with which some missionaries greeted the news that a Tinnevelly Christian of Nadar background was to be made a bishop. One Miss Ardill was said to have exclaimed that Azariah should be given at his consecration a kurukkanthadi (a T-shaped wooden pole used to climb palmyra trees and carried by climbers on their shoulders), instead of a bishop's staff.62 Nadar Christians viewed the kurukkanthadi as a symbol of stigma rather than status. Far from a positive suggestion for indigenization, Tinnevelly Christians understood Miss Ardill's comment only as the insult it was meant to be.
That an Indian Christian without a college degree should be permitted to occupy a seat in the Episcopal Synod alongside distinguished Oxford and Cambridge graduates was an idea which many Britons also found difficult to accept.63 Indeed, Azariah would probably not have been consecrated in 1912 had not a small group of liberal-minded church lead ers taken advantage of a nondemocratic ecclesiastical system that did not require popular approval.
Azariah's backers, Whitehead and Copleston, were both sensitive to the rising national aspirations of the English-educated elites in India. Whitehead arrived in India just before the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, and he sympathized with reformist political leaders such as G. K. Gokhale (1866-1915) who called on the British to give Indians a greater share of the responsibility for their country's government. Whitehead allied himself with the liberal tradition of British government in India which looked forward to eventual Indian self-government and specially admired the Viceroy of India from 1880 to 1884, Lord Ripon.64 Whitehead's decision to make Azariah a bishop was to some degree an attempt to provide an ecclesiastical answer to nationalist demands that he had already recognized as legitimate in the civil arena.
Azariah's appointment was also Henry Whitehead's answer to the moral problem of racism, which, he believed, was undermining the British position in India. He criticized his compatriots for encouraging divisions of caste, region, race, and nationality, and hindering both Indo-British relations and an effective united Indian nationalism. Whitehead had been shocked to see social and racial relations deteriorating between Indians and Englishmen in Calcutta, and he saw this social bitterness exacerbating India's political problems.65 He and his wife organized frequent racially mixed social events, and exhorted his Madras diocese to do likewise. After holding a garden party for Europeans and Telugus, he wrote:
I wish that garden parties of this kind, at which Europeans and Indians could meet together, were more common all over India. . . . I feel sure that the bitterness that now characterizes the political movement in India is largely due to social causes. The growing desire for political power is inevitable, but there is no need why it should be marked by such strong anti-English feeling. If Englishmen as a body in India would only be more courteous in their behaviour to their Indian subordinates and fellow-workers, and seek for opportunities of showing them a little sympathy, we should never have heard of the unrest, except as a perfectly natural and legitimate agitation on the part of educated Indians for an increased share in the government of their own country.66
Azariah's consecration drew attention to the missionaries' success in bringing non-European races into the church but also heightened anxieties about the church's changing racial composition. At exactly this moment in 1910, the British author John Buchan published his popular schoolboy's adventure story, Prester john, which features an attack on the British Empire led by a rebel `Kaffir King' disguised in the legitimizing cloak of a black African Christian minister. This story played to the primitive fear that beneath the veneer of even the most seemingly civilized black Christian minister lay some terrifying pagan essence. The protagonist, Laputa, delivers a sermon to the Free Kirk in Scotland but then disappears to a dark beach to perform a secret pagan ritual. Beneath the many onionskin layers of his personality lay only `something strange and great and moving and terrible.'
Buchan's story suggested that non-white Christians preaching equality between blacks and whites in God's sight might be secretly working to undermine the Empire. Laputa's idealistic sermon to the Scottish congregation forecastd a day when Negroes would have something to teach the British about civilization, but it was really only a euphemistic mask for his sinister plot against the white races. This popular story struck a resonant chord in the British public imagination at a time of heightened anxiety about the future of the empire. Some Britons may have subtly seen even the saintly Azariah as a mysterious Indian bishop whose real agenda could be threatening.
Whitehead hoped that Azariah's appointment would both mollify the Indian community and challenge those westerners who believed that white races should never be under the authority of non-white races. British missionaries were placed under Azariah's jurisdiction in the new Dornakal Diocese. Whitehead believed on practical grounds that an Indian would be better equipped than an Englishman to work in rural villages of the Telugu areas.
The subsequent history of Indian bishops suggests, however, that the bishops underestimated the many obstacles at different levels of Indian and British societies to realizing their interracial ideals. Whitehead chose a Tamil for the Dornakal post, thereby placing the first `indigenous' bishop in a `foreign' diocese. As Azariah's later career demonstrates, the Telugu congregations in Dornakal Diocese did not necessarily consider Azariah to be a fully sympathetic, let alone `indigenous' representative of their interests. That the first Indian bishop should be regarded as something of an alien in his own diocese suggests that Whitehead - for all his vision and leadership - took insufficient account of the complex cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and caste differences that might impede the work of the Indian church on a national scale.