A reference work on Christian missionaries in 19th-century India

Blog series Untold lives

Author Hedley Sutton, APAC Reference Team Leader

Missionary endeavour in South Asia is not a subject which is especially well represented in the India Office archive for fairly obvious reasons, but a slim volume on the open access shelves of the Asian and African Studies Reading Room does shed light on some of the individuals and societies which set out to win converts in the late Victorian period.

The third edition of the Indian Missionary Directory and Memorial Volume was published in Calcutta in 1886, appropriately enough by the Methodist Publishing House, with the earlier volumes having appeared in 1876 and 1881. Its denominational and theological sympathies are made explicit in its dedication ‘To the Protestant missionaries of India of whatever name or nationality, with an earnest prayer for their continued success in winning to Christ the benighted millions of the land.’ While this grates with the sensibilities of a 21st-century audience, how can one not warm to a degree to a work compiled by the Rev. B.H. Badley?

The Directory is not illustrated, but within its 300+ pages is to be found detailed biographical information about thousands of active, retired, and deceased missionaries in India, Burma, and Ceylon. An A-Z name index will take the enquirer straight to the entry for an individual missionary; the text itself is arranged in 39 chapters about particular missionary societies, and there is a single-page bibliography listing ‘Works consulted in preparing the volume’. What is striking is the sheer number of them, from the relatively well known London Missionary Society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Wesleyan Missionary Society to the more obscure Canadian Baptist Telugu Mission and the Swedish Evangelical Missionary Society, showing that evangelisation was a multinational venture and not exclusively British at all.

While there is no consistency in terms of the amount of detail recorded across all the entries, where known dates and places of birth, dates of ordination, arrival in Asia, retirement, death and titles of publications are given. (These last include translations of religious texts into various Indian languages). Among the four appendices are statistical tables of years of service and nationality, lists of female missionaries, and a page naming ‘The Martyred Missionaries of 1857’. The final appendix table has a column showing the number of ‘Native communicants’ and the total is an impressive 784,307, though dwarfed of course by the contemporary non-Christian population.

Whatever one thinks of the rights and wrongs of seeking to convert people from one religion to another, there can be no doubt of the commitment of those featured in the volume as they left the British Isles, Europe, or North America to win souls thousands of miles away in India. While nowhere stated explicitly, some of the missionaries came to love their temporarily adopted country: the American William Todd, for example, ‘… retained to the last his deep interest in the foreign mission, and died in Madura, Kansas, having given to the new town, where he laboured, the name of his much loved mission field.’