Indigenous Mission to the Telugus
Indigenous Mission to the Telugus
Accounts of the origins of the IMS by its founders and their successors suggest that it was inspired, first and foremost, by a series of spiritual revivals within the diocese during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The evangelistic itinerancies of CMS missionary Thomas G. Ragland (1815-58) through relatively untouched areas of northern Tinnevelly District after 1853 were undertaken with the help of both western and Indian colleagues, and provided one important model for the IMS.27 Other spiritual revivals in Tinnevelly during the 1890s created new prayer and preaching groups: the Christian Brotherhood Association organized by Azariah and fellow students at Church Missionary College, the `Band of Faith' in 1891, and the `Tinnevelly Band of Hope' in 1892, which later became the Diocesan Children's Mission under the leadership of Samuel Pakianathan, the first IMS missionary. These revivals increased the Tinnevelly church's missionary fervor and attracted important financial support from the enthusiastic faithful.
Two inspirational western works, Foreign Missions and Home Calls by A. H. Arden and The Key to Missionary Service by Andrew Murray (one of Azariah's favorite Christian writers), encouraged Tinnevelly Christians to increase evangelistic outreach and to pray for India's salvation.28 On 3 December 1899, a special day of intercession for the regeneration of India was held, and some participants vowed to spend at least one hour each day thereafter praying for their country and diocese. Another evangelistic revival associated with CMS missionary Thomas Walker and the village of Tuckerammalpuram in 1899 attempted to introduce the methods of the English evangelical Keswick Convention. `Tinnevelly Keswick' evolved into the Tinnevelly Church Prayer Union, an important ministry for spiritual renewal.29
Azariah credited A. H. Arden for having given him the idea of founding an indigenous missionary society. Arden argued that even the poorest church had no right to evade its responsibility to support foreign missionary work. The contention that church resources must be reserved for home needs was specious, Arden claimed, in light of the many historically proven benefits that foreign work gives to a home church. In addition to increasing the home church's spiritual fervor, `the money and labour spent upon Foreign Missions have made an abundant return in increase of trade and in colonial exten- sion.'30 The best way for a poor church (or nation) to remain poor, Arden concluded, was to hoard its resources rather than to give them away.
Arden's argument that poverty at home was no excuse for avoiding missionary responsibilities abroad struck Azariah with great force. British missionaries had expressed grave doubts about the Tinnevelly church's ability to support its own missionaries, persuading Azariah and his colleagues to drop the idea of a Tinnevelly missionary society in 1897. But as the spiritual fervor and financial security of the Tinnevelly church increased, the proposal for a missionary society was revived in 190231 and led directly to the formation of the IMS the following year.
Azariah argued that the IMS was founded by `a nucleus of true believers in every part of the district longing and praying for the awakening of India.'32 Other accounts credit Azariah with almost sole personal responsibility for its creation.33 Azariah was certainly the preeminent leader within the society from its inception. He was inspired during a monthlong evangelistic visit to Jaffna in 1902, conducted in partnership with Eddy, by the fervor of the Student Foreign Missionary Society of Jaffna which had been established in 1899, to send the Gospel to Tamil-speaking peoples in neglected districts of other lands.'34 This small, courageous group caused Azariah to reevaluate the relative inactivity of his larger, more prosperous native church in Tinnevelly, though Eddy may also have prodded him to action.35
The constitution of the IMS specified that its `chief aim is to foster missionary spirit in the Indian Church by indigenous efforts and propagate the Gospel in India or other countries.' It limited membership to `all communicant Christians of Tinnevelly,' later altered to `Christian Indians.' Westerners could not be members but were welcomed to participate in the society's affairs as visitors and to promote its interests through private as well as public means.37 The founders sought advice from both the Bishop of Tinnevelly and Madura, Samuel Morley, and from the CMS's superintending missionary, E. S. Carr. These Europeans were given the honorary positions of Patron and Vice-Patron respectively.38 On 23 October 1903, the IMS defined its own relationship to the diocese as fully autonomous but insisted that the society remain on good terms with the mother church.39
Azariah was proud that the IMS belonged solely to Indian congregations and maintained complete independence from foreign control, even in financial matters.40 To the challenge, `Should not the Native Church become entirely free from foreign support before it commences such a work as this?' Azariah answered, `Foreign missionary work will give great stimulus to the cause of self-support. It has been found in Tinnevelly that those Churches which are keen on rising to what is technically called self support are also the Churches that evince a deep interest in the foreign mission.' Furthermore, he added, quoting Arden, It is a general rule ... that earnest support to Foreign Mission is usually accompanied by increased gifts to home work.'41
From 1903 until 1909, Azariah promoted the IMS while concurrently serving as YMCA Secretary. He stimulated the missionary zeal of Tinnevelly congregations by sending written appeals, speaking at public and private meetings, editing a new journal called Suvisesha Pirabalya Varthamani (The Missionary Intelligencer), arranging and participating in evangelistic tours by lay volunteers, and seeking previously unevangelized territories to which the society could send its missionaries.
Initial resistance to the IMS came from Protestant missionaries of older western societies in Tamil country who feared the IMS would introduce Indo-Anglicanism as a new denomination in their mission areas. The older societies were clearly possessive toward territories (`mission fields') they had long occupied. So the IMS decided to send its first charge, Samuel Pakianathan, to a virgin mission field in `malarial' Telugu-speaking regions of eastern Hyderabad, then a Muslim-controlled princely state and now a part of Andhra Pradesh.43 After being repelled by some form of public or government resistance at their first mission site, Pakianathan and his colleague P. Devasahayam purchased a building previously used for the sale of alcohol with six acres of land in the railway village of Dornakal as the site for their new mission.
This was an ironic place to begin, in view of the Nadar Christians' strong adherence to temperance principles, which they hoped would liberate them from the social stigma (and ritual pollution) associated with the manufacture of intoxicating toddy from Tinnevelly's palmyra trees. Yet, for the arriving missionaries, establishing their mission in an unused toddy shop was not unlike building a Christian chapel on the site of a former Hindu shrine. In both cases, Christians saw themselves overthrowing idols and stigmas of the past in favor of the new faith.44 This spot in Dornakal became the center of the mission where Azariah volunteered his services in 1908 and where a new diocese was formed after he was elevated to the episcopate in 1912.
At the very time that nationalism was finding political expression in the establishment of the Indian National Congress and was gaining appeal under the swadeshi (or `economic self-reliance') banner, Azariah moved in the opposite direction: away from politics and toward the evangelization of an isolated and impoverished rural area. To be sure, Azariah was aware of developments in the broader national arena through contacts with western-educated professionals in the Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta YMCAs, and he gave a patriotic flavor to his repeated calls for missionary volunteers to work for India's sake. In 1908 he wrote:
Azariah invoked the memory of nationalist heroes to motivate young recruits to similar sacrifice in the mission field; only now the goal was spiritual rather than political liberation.
But it is inaccurate to suggest that nationalism was the prime motivating factor for indigenous mission, or that `Patriotism entered the religious sphere .... and there arose the popular urge to nationalize religion just as much as nationalize politics.'46 Azariah was drawing on nationalist sentiment to bolster the missionary cause rather than drawing primary inspiration from that sentiment.
At the turn of the century, most Nadar Christians were more interested in local issues of social, economic, and ritual preferment than in the political activities of the seemingly remote, mainly urban, higher-caste na- tionalists.47 The intensifying regional and caste preoccupations of the socalled `backward' groups in the Madras Presidency led to the flowering of non-Brahminism in the twentieth century and precluded any sustained sympathy for Brahmin-led nationalist calls for swaraj or Home Rule.48 This was not an unwelcome development to some Britons whose antipathy toward upper-caste interests resulted in ICS support for the justice Parry by 1918 and 1919. Although Azariah distanced himself from narrow Nadar aspirations during his YMCA years and even more so during his career in Dornakal, he responded more to the clarion calls of localized religious and cultural movements than to the more distant calls of national political ones.
There is almost no textual evidence, even of an indirect kind, to support the theory that the founders of the IMS were motivated by anything other than the biblical commission to preach the gospel to nonbelievers, so forcefully advocated in the western missionary tracts of the 1890s. The study of Scripture and prayer, in the context of spiritual revival, led the founders of the IMS to conclude that missionary service was a duty incumbent on all Christians. This responsibility involved sacrificial giving of money and lives to foreign, and in Dornakal's case, mainly outcaste people. Recognizing themselves not as dependent converts (what critics were to call `rice Christians') but rather as spiritually mature Christian witnesses, the Indian founders aimed to work as equal partners with western missionaries and with Indo-Anglican church officials.
Nationalist propaganda which castigated Indian Christians as inherently unpatriotic' did, however, begin to affect Azariah's evangelism at about this time. Already in 1903, Azariah and Eddy found that Hindu audiences were increasingly defending `all that was theirs' and resisting `all that does not praise or tolerate the national religion.'49 Rising Hindu opposition prompted them to stop attacking Hinduism and to focus instead on the revivalist theme of overcoming sin and attaining personal salva- tion.50 While this shift was partly tactical, their written testimony suggests a consistent internal dependence on the type of spiritual awakenings that had stirred the Tinnevelly church in the 1890s. Azariah and his colleagues invoked the names of westerners - Ragland, Arden, and Murray - to legitimize their revival-based IMS, more than the names of Indian leaders, let alone politicized nationalists.
Even their models for indigenization were taken from westernbased Christian agencies rather than from Indian-based or Hindu ones. In solving the issue of how the missionaries would be supported financially, the IMS founders looked to the model established by the evangelical China Inland Mission (CIM) forty years earlier. They were impressed that CIM missionaries were offered no salary but were asked to depend on God to provide for their needs via contributions from the faithfuls' Perhaps more importantly, CIM missionaries adopted Chinese habits of life and therefore provided a model for indigenization. Azariah and his colleagues drew upon this foreign missionary organization rather than a culturally similar and indigenous Indian model - such as that of the sannyasin who also lives by alms. The IMS considered itself to be part of a trans-national Christian movement and did not choose to legitimate an indigenous non-Christian model. Even the small, relatively short-lived IMS Brotherhood that was established in 1907 when two Brahmin converts joined the Dornakal mission to work as bachelors without salary or other emolument was shaped more by the brotherhoods established by Oxford and Cambridge Universities than by any Indian ascetic tradi- tions.52
Once again, the transnational character of Azariah's Christian perspective prompted him to resist `false' man-made barriers of nation (caste, denomination, etc.). Participation in international, interdenominational student movements such as the YMCA and the SVM gave Azariah an early distaste for parochialism in all its manifestations and a preference for subordinating nationalist or sectarian appeals to the universal and unifying claims of his religion. Azariah later wrote that `the religion of Christ is one of the most dynamic factors in the world. It always bursts its boundaries ... [and] ... refuses to be confined to any one race, class or caste.'53 None of Azariah's writings indicates a negative desire to send western mission aries home. On the contrary, although he criticized missionaries for being too slow to entrust responsibilities to Indian Christians, he contended to the end of his life that India still needed missionary help (both men and money) from other countries. At the same time, the IMS reflected Azariah's recognition that Indian Christians shared responsibility for the `evangelization of the world' with churches everywhere. Indeed, in Azariah we find one of the earliest non-western statements of the partners in mission' theory which has come to animate the CMS and other modern missionary agencies.
The founding of the IMS was a bold initiative on the part of Tinnevelly's Christians in a domain where the leaders (although not the foot soldiers) had hitherto been mainly westerners. Ethnic self-assertion was beginning to displace the inertia of dependency. But precedents for the IMS had been established in complete isolation from Indian nationalism. The itinerant CMS missionary to Tinnevelly, Thomas G. Ragland (1815-58), claimed to have laid the foundation for `a genuine native missionary society' before his death; but his work was inspired by missionary fervor and by his society's commitment to founding self-propagating churches, not by protonationalism. Protestant Christian missionaries, European and Indian, focused on a broader `unlocking' of caste, regional, and ethnic aspirations which, as we shall see, were expressed in a multitude of different ways, in nearly total isolation from political nationalist movements.