Introduction

Bibliographical Analysis

INTRODUCTION

Although comprehensive histories of Telugu Christians are scarce, there is no dearth of written sources for historians interested in studying beliefs and practices of Telugu Christians. The last one and one half centuries have produced voluminous literature that refers to Telugu Christians. Most of the writings flowed from missionary pens and were written in English. The tone and texture of this literature varied over the years due to the changing historical conditions, interests of the readers, and agendas of the writers. This analysis identifies the major trends and patterns in writing about Telugu Christians. It focuses on the monographs and journal articles written between 1848 and 2008 that either refer to Christian presence in Telugu country, which includes stories about colonial agents and Western missionaries, or to the Telugu Christian communities. The analysis covers the texts written in Telugu and English, numbering more than seven hundred documents and extending from the earliest monograph that referred to the presence of Christianity in the region, Henry W. Fox’s Chapters on Missions in South India,1 to more recent works, such as K. E. Rajpramukh’s Dalit Christians of Andhra Pradesh.2 This period of one and one half centuries is discussed below in four parts. First is the period between 1848 and 1932, an age of missionary exploration, wherein most of the writings were from missionaries. Christian missionaries during this period observed the Telugu customs and documented them in order to create missionary interest among their compatriots and help future missionaries devise missionary strategies. They treated Telugu culture as one that deserved to be conquered. These texts are either autobiographical or biographical accounts or institutional histories. The missionaries wanted to portray the land as “dark” in order to claim that they brought light,3 making the task of discerning light in the Telugu culture difficult. Missionaries portrayed themselves as actors and the Telugus as the acted upon. These writings offer a wealth of data for a historian interested in the history of Christian presence, mostly of Western Christians, in regions of Andhra, Rayalaseema, and Telangana. The second period covers the two decades between 1933 and 1952, which were very productive in terms of the number of writings. These referred not only to the Christian presence in Andhra but also to the history of Telugu Christians. The writings in these two decades outnumbered those of the preceding eighty years by almost four times.4 The literature from this period is mostly explanatory: missionaries recounted their successes, explained their “civilizing” activities, and justified their continued activism to their critics both in India and in the North Atlantic world. It was an eventful and fluid era that witnessed “nationalist” struggles in the subcontinent and missionary “rethinking” in the North American world. In this era that followed the publication of Jarrell W. Pickett’s Christian Mass Movements in India5 and W. E. Hocking’s Rethinking Missions,6 missionaries highlighted their “civilizing” activities among the Dalit communities. There were increased efforts among Western missionaries as

well as Telugu Christians to write in the Telugu language and about Telugu Christian leaders.7 The third phase of writing about Christian presence in the region and about Telugu Christians, 1953-1981, was not as productive as the second period. It is an age when missionaries were redefining their role in Andhra while local historians were defining their identity as Telugus and Christians. The writings from this era focused on local heroes and native expressions of Christian faith. Many writings in the final phase, 1981-2008, also examine indigenous expressions of Christian faith. They employ sociological tools to understand the lives and thoughts of Telugu Christians. Unlike earlier writings that addressed mission-minded enthusiasts, the writings from this era are aimed at academicians who are skeptical about the missionary enterprise and its relationship with European imperial powers. There are also a few biographical books written by Indian Christians or Western historians. Some patterns identified in this survey may be found across the periods. The habit of wearing shady glasses and finding a dark Andhra was not unique to the exploratory period or to missionaries. A church souvenir published as late as 1992 by a Telugu congregation paid homage to a missionary matron for her heroic services to the “dark” Andhra.8 We must also be aware of the limitations that the scope of this investigation poses. This analysis is limited to the literature written as monographs or journal articles in English and Telugu. Theological treatises and Bible dictionaries, potentially rich sources for intellectual history, are not part of this investigation. Research using other genres of literature from other languages, such as French and German, would add to the discussion presented here. Limiting oneself to the texts in English and Telugu languages narrows the window through which to view the histories of Catholic communities and orders in the region, rendering the story incomplete. EXPLORING A CULTURE: 1848-1932 Christian missionaries of European origins preached their faith in the Telugu-speaking regions as early as the sixteenth century.9 However, the writings of Christian missionaries before 1848 mostly were in the genre of personal letters or diaries. And most of them were written in French or German. Since the scope of this book is limited to monographs and essays in English and Telugu, the literature before 1848, which predominantly was from Catholic missionaries, does not come under the purview of this study. However, a large body of Catholic literature written after 1848 is included. As mentioned earlier, Henry W. Fox’s Chapters on Missions in South India (1848) is the earliest attempt in English. Memoirs of Fox and of Walter Gunn, an American Lutheran missionary, soon followed. The documents in this era came from missionaries’ pens. The only exceptions were the books by Ogirala Gabriel,10 R. C. Paul,11 and Murari David.12 But the earliest of them dates as far back as 1924. Ironically, like Western missionaries, the Telugu writers viewed the church in Andhra as an extension of the Western church. They wrote about the missionary activities of Western Christians in Andhra, although their titles suggest that these were histories

of Telugu Christians. Both Western and Telugu writers construed the Telugu church as an eastward extension of the European church. The missionaries’ activities in this period coincided with the British colonial heyday in the region. Missionary perceptions of the Christian mission resonate with the expansionist agenda of colonial officials. There was a considerable amount of self-confidence in the missionaries’ tone. Missionaries described their efforts to Christianize Telugus in commercial and military images, such as “enterprise,”13 “expansion,”14 and “conquest.”15 Writing in 1925, at the fortieth anniversary of the Canadian Baptist missionary activities in coastal Andhra, Malcolm Orville employed the mercantile image of “enterprise” to narrate the institutional history of his organization. His colleague William Boggs described the mission as an “expansion” of North American Baptist churches. James Thoburn, an Episcopal Methodist missionary bishop, used military terms such as “conquest,” while his compatriot Brenton Badley identified the missionary accomplishments of his Methodist colleagues as “victories.”16 These terms illustrate the way missionaries perceived their mission. The power dynamics in the colonial era shaped the texture and tone of the missionary texts; they influenced the very understanding of Christian mission as an expansion or conquest. This triumphal tone of the missionary texts should be located within the political context of the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the Telugu provinces. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company consolidated its mercantile and military strength in the Telugu provinces. The defeat of French forces in the Carnatic Wars in the latter half of the eighteenth century fostered British consolidation.17 British forces occupied the ports of Machilipatnam in 1759 and Pondicherry in 1761, marking the beginnings of British control over the territory. Meanwhile, the Nizam of Hyderabad, though grudgingly, ceded the coastal districts in 1766, virtually leaving the British occupants unchallenged.18 The British colonizing project assumed a religious flavor when a charter of the British East India Company issued in 1833 unbridled the missionary enthusiasm of colonial officials who were already engaged in Christianizing activities. After the suppression of the Great Revolt in 1857, the British Parliament took political control of the subcontinent and allowed the Christianizing projects of the Protestant missionaries. Collaboration of Dalit communities with the British rulers, interest among the caste communities in Western education that missionaries offered, co-operation of some social elite classes whom the colonial administration recruited as agents to control local revenues, and the limited share of power that local princes secured from the British administrators facilitated the continued control of the region by the British in the second half of the eighteenth century. Having identified how missionaries perceived their mission and why they did so, it is appropriate to analyze the genres of the literature itself. The writings from this period are autobiographical or biographical accounts, wherein the missionary was the hero, or institutional histories that celebrate the activities of missionary institutions. There were as many as eleven autobiographical and ten biographical accounts. Missionary agencies in the North Atlantic world compiled and published the daily journals, letters, and autobiographical accounts of their missionaries.

The autobiographical and biographical narratives relate the experiences of the missionaries among the Telugus. The practice of writing daily journals was an integral part of evangelical spirituality during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.19 The evangelical Christians from the North Atlantic world recorded their daily experiences in order to edify themselves and others that followed them. The daily journals of evangelical missionaries have an additional feature or function. In their daily journals, missionaries reminded themselves and others of their missionary calling and the supernatural powers they were endowed with in the alien environment of Andhra Pradesh, in what they perceived to be a “jungle.”20 They needed to paint an image of “dark” culture in Andhra to highlight the light God had privileged them with. Just as writing their daily experiences was integral to their spiritual growth, exploring the native cultures was part of their missionary strategy. Writers and publishers hoped that these stories and portraits would lure potential missionaries to the missionary cause and help their successors to improve missionary strategies. Institutional histories of mission societies form another major portion of the literature.21 They served three purposes. First, they reported the activities of the missionaries and mission institutions, such as schools and hospitals, assuring their donors that their investment in the missionary enterprise did not go in vain. Second, the missionaries’ representations of Telugu culture sought to stir interest among their compatriots either to fund the missionary cause or to become missionaries. Above all, these stories provided clues about the possible strategies to Christianize the Telugu communities. Many missionaries dedicated their energies merely to exploring Telugu customs and documenting them. However, not all exploratory writings were similar. While Henry Whitehead’s Village Gods of South India and Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough’s While Sewing Sandals are sympathetic to Telugu culture,22 the writings of Jacob Chamberlain and John Clough represent a more polemical attitude. Whitehead and Rauschenbusch-Clough were different from their contemporaries. Whitehead was instrumental in the consecration of V. S. Azariah as an Anglican bishop, a gesture that defied the wisdom of most Western missionaries in his time. Rauschenbusch-Clough, on the other hand, was unpopular for deserting Christianity in favor of Theosophy. Nevertheless, she converted only after publishing her cultural history of the Madiga community. What was not peculiar in their attitudes was their enthusiasm to Christianize the Telugu communities, at least when they wrote these books. Drawing from the oral stories, Whitehead and RauschenbuschClough documented the folk traditions of the Telugu communities. A student of Telugu cultural history would, no doubt, find this literature a valuable source. However, we should not ignore the motives behind missionaries’ studies of native cultures. We must investigate if their study was not a synonym for spying. The authors might not have intended to aid the colonizing projects of their European cousins, but their works invented an “orient” that invited Western intervention. Rauschenbusch-Clough undertook her research and documentation under the auspices of the Asiatic Society sponsored by the British queen. Therefore, we should not plunder data from such sources without probing the motives of such undertaking. John E Clough’s From Darkness to Light illustrates the polemic nature of some of the

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