THE EAST INDIA COMPANY’s worst fears came to gruesome fruition in 1857 when many of the sepoys of its Bengal army mutinied and killed not only their officers but also their wives and children. After two and a half centuries, the Company was about to be ejected from India in ignominy. It was clear that whatever the precise motives were behind the actions of those who rebelled, the Indian Uprising of 1857/8 was for many, at least in part, a war of religion. The British similarly regarded their own brutal retaliation as revenge for the slights to Christianity as well...

A CENTURY before this quotation, Humphrey Prideaux, who was to become Dean of Norwich, castigated the East India Company for bringing down God’s curse on it for neglecting to propagate Christianity in India. He pointed out that the English East India Company had fallen from wealth and power while the Dutch company, which furthered Christianity in its territories, was thriving. Prideaux put forward nine proposals to bring the English company back into God’s favour. Amongst them, he recommended that the Company should provide chaplains, set up schools and establish a seminary to supply Protestant ministers who would ‘oppose the Popish...

BY THE 1770s there was growing concern about the way in which the Company was ruling its Indian territories. As the above effusion from Horace Walpole demonstrates, no holds were barred. Language was racist and intemperate and spared no one, least of all the British. As Company wealth and power increased, mounting concerns were expressed about the corruption of Company officials. Returning Company servants were referred to as ‘nabobs’ (a corruption of ‘nawab’ or ruler). These nabobs arrived home laden with Indian riches, which enabled them to buy country estates and purchase parliamentary seats above the ‘going rate’. This was...

CHARLES GRANT returned home from India in 1790 after 22 years’ service determined to make progress with the 1786 missionary proposal discussed in the previous chapter. Unhappy with the reception the scheme had received from Lord Cornwallis in India, Grant set about trying to obtain more support for it in Britain. He had already sent a copy of the proposal to William Wilberforce, MP and personal friend of William Pitt, the Prime Minister. They soon met and thus began a close friendship, which was to have a considerable impact on the Company once Wilberforce had taken up the cause of...

CHARLES GRANT was not about to give up his missionary plans despite the defeat of the ‘pious clause’ in 1793. In 1794 he was unanimously elected to the Direction of the Company through the influence of Henry Dundas and others.² He and his fellow Evangelical director, Edward Parry, were a formidable duo determined to use their patronage and influence to further Christianity in India. However, it was not Grant and Parry, but the Baptists who were to have the first success. While they were embroiled in the negotiations over the renewal of the Company’s charter, John Thomas, whom Grant had...

TWO HOURS after midnight on 10 July 1806, sepoys crept up and murdered the European sentries at Vellore fort, where Tipu Sultan’s family were state prisoners. The European quarters were surrounded and officers and soldiers in the barracks, including those in the hospital, were shot. The striped tiger of Mysore was hoisted. This revolt was put down very swiftly but not before the toll of dead and wounded on the British side was nearly 200.² Shortly afterwards further disturbances occurred in Madras Presidency at Wallahjabad, Nundidrug, Bellary, Hyderabad, Palamcottah, Quilon and Bangalore. The sepoy mutiny sent shock waves through India...

THE FEARS expressed by Grant and Parry that missionaries in India might be restricted further materialised within months of the arrival of Lord Minto, the new Governor-General (appointed July 1806). Minto told George Tierney, who had recently given up the presidency of the Board of Control, that he believed that a primary cause of the Vellore mutiny had been the spreading of rumours that the British were trying to convert India.² By September 1807 Minto had come to the conclusion that there was no danger. Nevertheless, he felt that ‘the only successful engine of sedition in any part of India...

BY 1812, it was clear to the Company that it was under siege once again: there were numerous interests determined to end its monopoly of trade in the East. The Company was equally determined to keep interlopers out of its domains and protected its interests with increasing forcefulness, refusing licences and insisting that those who managed to enter India illegally be sent home. We saw in the previous chapter how this had affected missionaries. With the Company’s charter due for renewal, both missionaries in India and their friends at home believed the time for legislative action had come.

Initially Wilberforce...

BY JANUARY 1813 Evangelicals were ‘all on the alert to besiege Government and perhaps Parliament for a clause in favour of missions or for liberty to send missionaries, and security when arrived’.² The Company had not been idle either and was determined to hold on to its right to determine who should enter its territories. The Baptist leaders waited on Lord Liverpool early in February. In distinct contrast to his reception of the CMS deputation in July 1812, Liverpool’s words gave little comfort. Church Evangelicals had been conciliatory and had stressed their loyalty to the Established Church. Dissenters demanded more...

THE COMPANY’s despatch providing for Church of Scotland ministers as stipulated in the new charter made much of the Company’s magnanimity, maintaining somewhat disingenuously that this demonstrated ‘our desire to encourage by every prudent means in our power, the extension of the principles of the Christian Religion in India’.² Its attitude towards granting licences to missionaries had not, however, changed. The Court continued to have concerns that missionary activity conducted by Evangelicals was not prudent. Both the Chairman of the Company, Robert Thornton, and Nicholas Vansittart, the Evangelical Chancellor of the Exchequer, advised the CMS to defer its applications until...

BY THE END of the 1820s, a new imperial vision was gaining ground in which ‘young men in a hurry’ wanted to sweep away the old ways of doing things in order to bring a new, progressive order to India. The belief of Malcolm and Munro that India needed to be ruled as far as possible in an Indian idiom was anathema to the new breed of official, who argued that Indian society was so corrupt that only the introduction of Western institutions, morals and culture could remedy the situation. Evangelicals in Britain and India continued to press the Company...

TREVELYAN’s words to Bentinck demonstrate the arrogance that was beginning to pervade senior official thinking by the 1830s. He rejected the views of men like Warren Hastings and Thomas Munro, who had believed that there was much to admire in Indian culture and civilisation and were anxious not to upset Indian sensitivities. Britain’s territories now seemed secure; Britons were confident of their superiority; and there was little hesitation in most British minds that Western civilisation and Christianity should be brought to her empire. The Company was coming under increasing pressure to relinquish its policy of religious neutrality in favour of...

BEFORE THE VELLORE mutiny occurred, William Bentinck, Governor of Madras, had concluded that the British were ‘strangers in the land’.¹ This was an opinion he still held some twenty years later when he arrived in Bengal as Governor-General. He believed the people of India had not benefited from British rule and in 1829 wrote that Britain could expect no co-operation from Indians in times of emergency.² Numerous Company servants had expressed similar views over the years. Despite a century of rule, and all the Company’s efforts to conciliate Indian religious feelings, the Great Uprising made clear that the British were...