Vol. 5 · pages 446–450

431 CHRISTIANIZING THE UNTOUCHABLES decencies of life. They who went thither were often desperate adventurers, whom England, in the emphatic language of the Scripture, had spud out; men who sought those golden sands of the East to repair their broken fortunes; to bury in oblivion a sullied name; or to bring, with lawless hand from the weak and unsuspecting, wealth which they had not the character or capacity to obtain by industry at home. They cheated; they gambled; they drank; they revelled in all kinds of debauchery. Associates in vice, linked together by a common bond of rapacity, they still often pursued one another with desperate malice, and, few though they were in numbers, among them there was no fellowship, except a fellowship of crime.” “All this was against the new comer; and so, whilst the depraved met with no inducement to reform the pure but rarely escaped corruption. Whether they were there initiated, or perpetrated in destructive error, equally may they be regarded as the victims of circumstance …..... How bad were the morals and behaviour of the early Christians can be gathered from the following instances quoted by Mr. Kaye. “The Deputy-Governor of Bombay was in 1669 charged as under : That he hath on the Sabbath day hindered the performance of public duty to God Almighty at the accustomary hour, continuing in drinking of health; detaining others with him against their wills; and whilst he drank, in false devotions upon his knees, a health devoted to the Union, in the time appointed for the service belonging to the Lord’s day, the unhappy sequel showed it to be but the projection of a further disunion. “That to the great scandal of the inhabitants of the island, of all the neighbours round about, both popists and others that are idolators, in dishonour of the sobriety of the Protestant religion, he hath made frequent and heavy drinking meetings, continuing some times till two or three of the clock in the morning, to the neglecting of the service of God in the morning prayers, and the service of the Company in the meantime had stood still while he slept, thus perverting and converting to an ill private use, those refreshment intended for the factory in general.” On these charges he was found guilty. In the factories of the East India Company there was enough of internecine strife and the factors of the Company committed scandalous outrages in general defiance both of the laws of God and the decencies of man. They fought grievously among themselves; blows following words; and the highest persons in the settlement settling an example of pugnacity with their inferiors under the potent influence of drink.

432 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES The report of the following incident is extracted from the records of the Company’s factory at Surat 1 : “We send your honours our consultation books from the 21st of August 1695 to 31st December 1696, in which does appear a conspiracy against the President’s life, and a design to murder the guards, because he would have opposed it. How far Messrs. Vauxe and Upphill were concerned, we leave to your honours to judge by this and depositions before mentioned. There is strong presumption that it was intended first that the President should be stabbed and it was prevented much through the vigilence of Ephraim Bendall; when hopes of that failed by the guards being doubled, it seems poison was agreed on, as by the deposition of Edmund clerk and all bound to secrecy upon an horrid imprecation of damnation to the discoverer, whom the rest were to fall upon and cut off.” In the same document is recorded the complaint of Mr. Charles Peachey against the President of the Council at Surat— “I have received from you (i.e. the President) two cuts on my head, the one very long and deep, the other a slight thing in comparison to that. Then a great blow on my left arm, which has enflamed the shoulder, and deprived me (at present), of the use of that limb; on my right side a blow on my ribs just beneath the pap, which is a stoppage to my breath, and makes me incapable of helping myself; on my left hip another, nothing inferior to the first; but above all a cut on the brow of my eye.” Such was the state of morality among the early English Settlers who came down to India. It is enough to observe that these settlers managed to work through the first eighty years of the seventeenth century without building a Church. Things did not improve in the 18th Century. Of the state of morality among Englishmen in India during the 18th Century this is what Mr. Kaye has to say— “Of the state of Anglo Indian Society during the protracted Administration of Warren Hastings, nothing indeed can be said in praise ..... those who ought to have set good example, did grievous wrong to Christianity by the lawlessness of their lives …..... Hastings took another man’s wife with his consent; Francis did the same without it …… It was scarcely to be expected that, with such examples before them, the less prominent members of society would be conspicuous for morality and decorum. In truth, it must be acknowledged that the Christianity of the English in India was, at this time, in a sadly depressed state. Men drank hard and gamed high, concubinage with the women of the country was the rule 1 Quoted by Kaye, Christianity in India, p. 106.

433 CHRISTIANIZING THE UNTOUCHABLES rather than the exception. It was no uncommon thing for English gentlemen to keep populous zenanas. There was no dearth of exciting amusement in those days. Balls, masquerades, races and theatrical entertainments, enlivened the settlements, especially in the cold weather; and the mild excitement of duelling varied the pleasures of the season. Men lived, for the most part, short lives and were resolute that they should be merry ones.” *** The drunkenness, indeed, was general and obstrusive. It was one of the besetting infirmities—the fashionable vices—of the period….... At the large Presidency towns—especially at Calcutta—public entertainments were not frequent. Ball suppers, in those days, were little less than orgies. Dancing was impossible after them, and fighting commonly took its place. If a public party went off without a duel or two, it was a circumstance as rare as it was happy. There was a famous club in those days, called Selby’s Club, at which the gentlemen of Calcutta were wont to drink as high as they gamed, and which some times saw drunken bets of 1,000 gold mohurs laid about the merest trifles. Card parties often sat all through the night, and if the night chanced to be a Saturday, all through the next day. *** Honourable marriage was the exceptional state ….... The Court of Directors of the East India Company ….... were engaged in the good work of reforming the morals of their settlements; and thinking that the means of forming respectable marriages would be an important auxiliary, they sent out not only a supply of the raw material of soldiers’ wives, but some better articles also, in the shape of what they called gentle women, for the use of such of their merchants and factors as might be matrimonially inclined. The venture, however, was not a successful one. The few who married made out indifferent wives, whilst they who did not marry,—and the demand was by no means brisk,—were, to say the least of it, in an equivocal position. For a time they were supported at the public expense, but they received only sufficient to keep them from starving, and co it happened naturally enough that the poor creatures betook themselves to vicious courses, and sold such charms as they had, if only to purchase strong drink, to which they became immoderately addicted, with the wages of their prostitution.

434 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES The scandal soon became open and notorious; and the President and Council at Surat wrote to the Deputy Governor and Council at Bombay, saying : “Whereas you give us notice that some of the women are grown scandalous to our native religion and Government, we require you in the Honourable Company’s name to give them all fair warning that they do apply themselves to a more sober and Christian conversation : otherwise the sentence is that they shall be deprived totally of their liberty to go abroad, and fed with bread and water, till they are embarked on board ship for England.” 1 How bad were the morals and behaviour of the early Christians can be gathered from the three following instances which are taken from contemporary records. Captain Williamson in his ‘Indian Vade Mecum’ published about the year 1809 says— “I have known various instances of two ladies being conjointly domesticated, and one of an elderly military character who solaced himself with no less than sixteen of all sorts and sizes. Being interrogated by a friend as to what he did with such a member, “Oh”, replied he, ‘I give them little rice, and let them run about’. This same gentleman when paying his addresses to an elegant young woman lately arrived from Europe, but who was informed by the lady at whose house she was residing, of the state of affairs, the description closed with ‘Pray, my dear, how should you like to share a sixteenth of Major ?” Such was the disorderliness and immorality among Englishmen in India. No wonder that the Indians marvelled whether the British acknowledged any God and believed in any system of morality. When asked what he thought of Christianity and Christians an Indian is reported to have said in his broken English—“Christian religion, devil religion; Christian much drunk; Christian much do wrong; much beat, much abuse others”—and who can say that this judgment was contrary to facts ? It is true that England herself was not at the relevant time over burdened with morality. The English people at home were but little distinguished for the purity of their lives and there was a small chance of British virtue dwarfed and dwindled at home, expending on foreign soil. As observed by Mr. Kaye 2 “The courtly licentiousness of the Restoration had polluted the whole land. The stamp of Whitehall was upon the currency of our daily lives; and it went out upon our adventurers in the Company’s ships, and was not, we may be sure, to be easily effaced in a heathen land”. Whatever be the excuse for this immorality of Englishmen in the 17th and 18th Century the fact 1 Kaye, Christianity in India, p. 106. 2 Ibid., p. 44.

435 CHRISTIANIZING THE UNTOUCHABLES remains that it was enough to bring Christianity into disrepute, and make its spread extremely difficult. The second impediment in the progress of Christianity in India was the struggle between the Catholic and Non-catholic Missions for supremacy in the field of proselytization. The entry of the Catholic Church in the field of the spread of Christianity in India began in the year 1541 with the arrival of Francis Xavier. He was the first Missionary of the new Society of Jesus formed to support the authority of the Pope. Before the Catholic Church entered this field there existed in India particularly in the South a large Christian population which belonged to the Syrian Church. These Syrian Christians, long seated on the coast of Malabar, traced their paternity to the Apostle Thomas, who it is said “went through Syria and Cilicia conforming the Churches”. They looked to Syria as their spiritual home. They aknowledged the supremacy of the Patriarch of Babylon. Of Rome and the Pope they knew nothing. During the rise of the Papacy, the Mahomedan power, which had overrun the intervening countries, had closed the gates of India against the nations of the West. This had saved the Syrian Churches in India from the Roman Catholic Church. As to the question whether the Christianity of the Catholic Church was the true form of Christianity or whether the Christianity of the Syrian Church was the true form I am not concerned here. But the facts remain that the Portuguese who represented the Catholic Church in India were scandalized at the appearance of the Syrian Churches which they declared to be heathen temples scarcely disguised. The Syrian Christians shrank with dismay from the defiling touch of the Roman Catholics of Portugal and proclaimed themselves Christians and not idolators. The other is that the Malabar Christians had never been subject to Roman supremacy and never subscribed to the Roman doctrine. The elements of a conflict between the two Churches were thus present and the inquisition only gave an occasion for the conflagration. The inquisitors of Goa discovered that they were heretics and like a wolf on the fold, down came the delegates of the Pope upon the Syrian Churches. How great was the conflict is told by Mr. Kaye in his volume already referred to. The first Syrian prelate who was brought into antagonism with Rome, expiated his want of courage and sincerity in the dungeons of the Inquisition. The second shared the same fate. A third, whose sufferings are more worth of commiseration, died after much trial and tribulation in his diocese, denying the Pope’s supremacy to the last. The churches were now without a Bishop, at a time when they more