A Chance to Die Elisabeth Elliot (electronic reader .txt) 📖

Anglican church. Here was a whole country, by far the most important of the Empire, given over to what Anglicans could only call heathenism, with all its deplorable practices of child marriage, demon worship, widow burning (suttee, meaning “true wife”), and temple prostitution. Something had to be done about it. The Company was not without high officials who were Christians. These combined their influence with men like William Wilberforce, the abolitionist. Evangelical chaplains began going to India and new missionary societies demanded entrance and freedom to propagate the Gospel, not merely as a special privilege but as the right of any Englishman under the Crown.

In 1813 the Church of England refused to support in Parliament the renewal of the Company’s charter unless the ecclesiastical establishment was admitted into British India. This was a powerful lever. It worked. In 1816 a Cambridge man obtained a military chaplaincy in the Company in Tinnevelly. He was James Hough, an ardent disciple of a leader of the Evangelical Revival in the Church of England named Charles Simeon. Under Hough a new phase of mission-minded Christianity began, resulting in the establishing of fifty-three congregations. Two years after his arrival came the Church of England with all its panoply, terrible as an army with banners. Groups outside the pale of the establishment became conscious of a sort of pecking order, with the Churches of England and Scotland at the top, and the earlier movements in descending order, according to the social classes from which they had come.

Hindus brought grievances to Company officials again and again as they saw their own way of life interrupted and obstructed by these meddlesome foreigners. In Calcutta, thousands signed “The Sacred Petition” of 1828 to His Majesty in London on the question of suttee. They felt that a widow’s “voluntary and devout act” was a matter which was “altogether of too high and sacred a nature to admit of interference or question even from rulers of another Faith.” The British were between Scylla and Charybdis. Only nine months later five hundred Christians from forty-seven villages in Tinnevelly District addressed a petition to Parliament expressing first of all their gratitude for “the removal of the darkness of heathenism from these parts through the providence of our Lord, and the generous assistance of the people of Europe,” then begging to put before the British public a list of deeds “being done in support of heathenism and in injustice to the poor by the Honorable Company.” The list included the subsidizing of Hindu temples and exempting them from taxation. The Company had not only contributed “not the smallest sum” to help erect churches, but taxed them besides, giving rise to the reasonable conclusion that to the Company Hindu idols were the true gods. The petition mentioned also that since only those of highest caste could hold office or even enter the courts to make complaint or obtain assistance, Christians were nearly all excluded from entering. They had to stand afar off like any others who were “unclean” and call out, “as men invoke God, saying, ‘Swami, Swami!’ (Lord, Lord!)”

From Tinnevelly, one of the most important centers of old and wealthy Brahman power and pride, had come many of India’s most orthodox and scholarly pundits. Hostilities smoldered and flames broke out. Hindu rights were being violated by some of the European officials who had appeared to be on the Hindu side, and by missionaries whom Hindus saw as their “declared and implacable enemies. Hindus were obsessed with fear since Tinnevelly had become “the emporium of missionaryism and proselytism.” A society was formed dedicated to smearing sacred ashes, Siva’s sign, on every forehead. Christians refused to be smeared. Mobs attacked villages, pulled down prayer houses, raped women, stripped and beat men. One missionary fortified his compound and posted guards. Government forces were sent in. In 1847 the use of the term “heathen” to refer to Hindus or Muslims was officially banned from all government documents.

Ten years later in North India the Great Rebellion took place, recognized by Queen Victoria and the rest of Great Britain as far more than a fanatical outburst against the greasing of cartridges with animal fat. Arguments over the meaning of the rebellion broke out and have continued ever since. Some saw it as a total rejection of British rule as represented by the East India Company. Whatever the case, the mutiny symbolized the end of Company raj and the formal taking over of rulership by the British Crown. The queen noted in her journal in November 1857 her feeling in the matter, which she believed was shared by her countrymen, “that India should belong to me.”

The transition from Company to Crown rule, while enacted by Parliament, was formalized by the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858. She rejected the first draft of this document as being too cold and unfeeling. Despite her distance from India and India’s cultures, she had great sympathy for the Indian people.

All the romance she had felt since childhood for brown skins, all the advice she had received from Indian travelers flooded her mind—the iniquity of a “fire and sword” system of government, the “immense field for improvement among the natives,” the lies about mutilation of women and exaggeration of all kinds, the superior manners of the Indian “lower orders” compared with ours, the ill-treatment and insulting references to natives as “niggers”—out it all poured and was translated by royal alchemy into the moving words of a rewritten Proclamation:

“Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects . . . but all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law.”

As she wrote to Lord Derby, it was a female sovereign” speaking from the heart to a hundred million Eastern peoples.1

In 1858 the existence of the Company which had operated in India for two and a half centuries, and had ruled for a century, was terminated by royal decree. The destiny of India