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WILLIAM
CAREY: THE FATHER OF MODERN INDIA?
Ruth and Vishal Mangalwadi -
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Imagine a quiz master at the finals of
the All India Universities' competition. He asks the
best-informed Indian students, 'Who was William Carey?'
All hands go up simultaneously. He decides to give
everyone a chance to answer. The audience is asked to
judge the correct answer.
'William Carey was the botanist,' answers a Science
student, 'after whom Careya herbacea is named. It is one
of the three varieties of Eucalyptus, found only in
India. Carey brought the English daisy to India and
introduced the Linnaean system to gardening. He also
published the first books on science and natural history
in India such as Flora Indica, because he believed the
biblical view, “All Thy Works praise Thee, O Lord.”
Carey believed that nature is declared “good” by its
Creator; it is not maya (illusion), to be shunned, but a
subject worthy of human study. He frequently lectured on
science and tried to inject a basic scientific
presupposition into the Indian mind that even lowly
insects are not souls in bondage, but creatures worthy
of our attention.'
'William Carey was the first Englishman to introduce the
steam engine to India, and the first to make indigenous
paper for the publishing industry,' pipes up the student
of Mechanical Engineering. 'Carey encouraged Indian
blacksmiths to make copies of his engine using local
materials and skills.'
'William Carey was a missionary,' announces an Economics
major, 'who introduced the idea of Savings Banks to
India, to fight the all-pervasive social evil of usury.
Carey believed that God, being righteous, hated usury,
and thought that lending at the interest of 36-72 per
cent made investment, industry, commerce and the
economic development of India impossible.
'The moral dimensions of Carey 's economic efforts,' the
student continues, 'have assumed special importance in
India, since the trustworthiness of the Savings Banks
has become questionable, due to the greed and corruption
of the bankers, and the nationalization of the banks, in
the name of socialism. The all-pervasive culture of
bribery has, in many cases, pushed the interest rates up
to as much as 100 per cent, and made credit unavailable
to honest entrepreneurs.
'In order to attract European capital to India and to
modernize Indian agriculture, economy, and industry,
Carey also advocated the policy that Europeans should be
allowed to own land and property in India. Initially the
British Government was against such a policy because of
its questionable results in the United States. But by
the time of Carey's death, the same Government had
acknowledged the far-reaching economic wisdom of his
stand. Just as our Indian Government, after one-half
century of destructive xenophobia, has again opened the
doors for Western capital and industry.'
William Carey was the first man,' asserts a Medical
student, 'who led the campaign for a humane treatment
for leprosy patients. Until his time they were sometimes
buried or burned alive in India because of the belief
that a violent end purified the body and ensured
transmigration into a healthy new existence. Natural
death by disease was believed to result in four
successive births, and a fifth as a leper. Carey
believed that Jesus' love touches leprosy patients so
they should be cared for.'
The student of Printing Technology stands up next. 'Dr
William Carey is the father of print technology in
India. He brought to India the modern science of
printing and publishing and then taught and developed
it. He built what was then the largest press in India.
Most printers had to buy their fonts from his Mission
Press at Serampore.'
'William Carey,' responds a student of Mass
Communications, 'was a Christian missionary who
established the first newspaper ever printed in any
oriental language because Carey believed that, “Above
all forms of truth and faith, Christianity seeks free
discussion”. His English-language journal, Friend of
India, was the force that gave birth to the Social
Reform Movement in India in the first half of the 19th
century.'
‘William Carey was the founder of the Agri-Horticultural
Society in the 1820s, thirty years before the Royal
Agricultural Society was established in England,' says
the post-graduate student of Agriculture 'Carey did a
systematic survey of agriculture in India, wrote for
agriculture reform in the journal, Asiatic Researches,
and exposed the evils of the indigo cultivation system
two generations before it collapsed. 'Carey did all
this,' adds the agriculturist, 'not because he was hired
to do it, but because he was horrified to see that
three-fifths of one of the finest countries in the
world, full of industrious inhabitants, had been allowed
to become an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild
beasts and serpents.'because he was horrified to see
that three-fifths of one of the finest countries in the
world, full of industrious inhabitants, had been allowed
to become an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild
beasts and serpents.'
'Carey was the first man to translate and publish great
Indian religious classics such as the Ramayana, and
philosophical treaties such as Samkhya into English,'
says the student of Literature. 'Carey transformed
Bengali, which was previously considered “fit only for
demons and women” into the foremost literary language of
India. He wrote Gospel ballads in Bengali to bring the
Hindu love of musical recitations to the service of his
Lord. He also wrote the first Sanskrit dictionary for
scholars.'
‘Carey was a British cobbler,' joins in the student of
Education, 'who became a professor of Bengali, Sanskrit
and Marathi at the Fort William College in Calcutta
where civil servants were trained. Carey began dozens of
schools for Indian children of all castes and launched
the first college in Asia at Serampore, near Calcutta.
He wanted to develop the Indian mind and liberate it
from the darkness of superstition. For nearly three
thousand years, India's religious culture had denied to
most Indians free access to knowledge, and the Hindu,
Mughal, and British rulers had gone along with this high
caste strategy of keeping the masses in the bondage of
ignorance. Carey displayed enormous spiritual strength
in standing against the priests, who had a vested
interest in depriving the masses of the freedom and
power that comes from knowledge of truth.' the Creator
had made them to be signs or markers. They help divide
the monotony of the universe of space into directions -
East, West, North and South - and of time into days,
years and seasons. They make it possible for us to
devise calendars; to study geography and history; to
plan our lives, our work and our societies. The culture
of astronomy sets us free to be rulers, whereas the
culture of astrology makes us subjects, our lives
determined by our stars.'
A post-graduate student of Library Science stands up
next. 'William Carey,' she reveals, 'pioneered the idea
of lending libraries in the Subcontinent. 'While the
East India Company was importing shiploads of ammunition
and soldiers to subdue India, Carey asked his friends in
the Baptist Missionary Society to load educational books
and seeds into those same ships. He believed that would
facilitate his task of regenerating Indian soil and
empowering Indian people to embrace ideas that would
generate freedom of mind. Carey's objective was to
createindigenous literature in the vernacular. But until
such indigenous literature was available, Indians needed
to receive knowledge and wisdom from around the world to
catch up quickly with other cultures. He wanted to make
worldwide information available to Indians through
lending libraries.'
'William Carey was an evangelist, ' maintains the
student from the Indian Forest Institute. 'He thought
that “if the Gospel flourishes in India, the wilderness
will, in every respect, become a fruitful field.” He
became the first man in India to write essays on
forestry, almost fifty years before the Government made
its very first attempt at forest conservation, in
Malabar. Carey both practiced and vigorously advocated
the cultivation of timber, giving practical advice on
how to plant trees for environmental, agricultural and
commercial purposes. His motivation came from his belief
that God has made man responsible for the earth. It was
in response to Carey's journal, Friend of India , that
the Government first appointed Dr Brandis of Bonn to
care for the forests of Burma and arranged for the
supervision of the forests of South India by Dr Clegham.'
'William Carey,' argues a feminist Social Science
scholar, 'was the first man to stand against both the
ruthless murders and the widespread oppression of women,
virtually synonymous with Hinduism in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The male in India was crushing the
female through polygamy, female infanticide, child
marriage, widow-burning, euthanasia and forced female
illiteracy, all sanctioned by religion. The British
Government timidly accepted these social evils as being
an irreversible and intrinsic part of India's religious
mores. Carey began to conduct systematic sociological
and scriptural research. He published his reports in
order to raise public opinion and protest both in Bengal
and in England. He influenced a whole generation of
civil servants, his students at Fort William College, to
resist these evils. Carey opened schools for girls. When
widows converted to Christianity, he arranged marriages
for them. It was Carey's persistent battle against sati
for twenty-five years which finally ld to Lord
Bentinck's famous Edict in 1829, banning one of the most
abominable of all religious practices in the world:
widow-burning.’
‘William Carey was an English missionary,' pronounces a
student of Public Administration, 'who initially was not
allowed to enter British India because the East India
Company was against proselytizing of Hindus. Therefore,
Carey worked in the Danish territory of Serampore. But
because the Company could not find a suitable professor
of Bengali for Fort William College, he was later
invited to teach there. During his professorship,
lasting thirty years, Carey transformed the ethos of the
British administration from indifferent imperial
exploitation to “civil” service.'
'William Carey,' reflects a student of Indian
Philosophy, 'was a preacher who revived the ancient idea
that ethics and morality were inseparable from religion.
This had been an important assumption underlying the
Vedic religion. But the Upanishadic teachers separated
ethics from spirituality. They thought that the human
self (Atman) was the divine Self (Brahma). Therefore,
our spirit cannot sin. Our Atman only gets deluded and
begins to imagine itself as distinct from God. What we
require is not deliverance from sin but enlightenment,
i.e. a direct experience of our divinity. This denial of
human sinfulness and emphasis on the mystical experience
of our divinity made it possible for us in India to be
intensely “religious”, yet at the same time unabashedly
immoral.
'Carey began to affirm that human beings were sinners
and needed both forgiveness for sin and deliverance from
its power over them. He taught that it was not ignorance
but sin that had separated us from God; therefore, it
was impossible to please God without holiness. According
to him, true spirituality began only when we repented of
our sin. This teaching revolutionized the nineteenth
century religious scene in India. For example, after
Raja Ram Mohun Roy, one of the greatest Hindu scholars
of the nineteenth century, came in contact with Carey
and the other missionaries at Serampore, he began to
question seriously the spirituality then prevalent in
India. He summed up his conclusions thus: The
consequence of my long and uninterrupted researches into
religious truth has been that I have found the doctrine
of Christ more conducive to moral principles, and better
adapted for the use of rational beings, than any other
which has come to my knowledge.
A student of History stands up last. 'Dr William Carey
is the father of the Indian Renaissance of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hindu India had
reached its intellectual, artistic, architectural, and
literary zenith by the eleventh century AD . After the
Absolute Monism of Adi Shankaracharya began to sweep the
Indian subcontinent in the twelfth century, the creative
springs of humanity dried up, and India's great decline
began. The material environment, human rationality, and
all that enriches human culture became suspect.
Asceticism, untouchability, mysticism, the occult,
superstition, idolatry, witchcraft, and oppressive
beliefs and practices became the hallmark of Indian
culture. The invasion, exploitation, and the resulting
political dominance of foreign rulers made matters
worse.
'Into this chaos Carey came and initiated the process of
India's reform. He saw India not as a foreign country to
be exploited, but as his heavenly Father's land to be
loved and served, a society where truth, not ignorance,
needed to rule. Carey's movement culminated in the birth
of Indian nationalism and of India's subsequent
independence. Carey believed that God's image was in
man, not in idols; therefore, it was oppressed humanity
that ought to be served. He believed in understanding
and controlling nature instead of fearing, appeasing or
worshipping it; in developing one's intellect instead of
killing it, as mysticism taught. He emphasized enjoying
literature and culture instead of shunning it as maya.
His this-worldly spirituality, with as strong an emphasis
on justice and love for one's fellows, as on love for
God, marked the turning-point of Indian culture from a
downward to an upward trend. The early Indian leaders of
the Hindu Renaissance, such as Raja Ram Mohun Roy,
Keshub Chandra Sen and others, drew their inspiration
from William Carey and the missionaries associated with
him.'
So, who was William Carey? He was a pioneer of the
modern missi-onary movement of the West, reaching out to
all parts of the world; a pioneer of the Protestant
Church in India; and the translator and/or publisher of
the Bible in forty different Indian languages. Carey was
an evangelist who used every available medium to
illumine every dark facet of Indian life with the light
of truth. He is the central character in the story of
the modernization of India.
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This page
is updated on March 15, 2009 |
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