Journey
Mission, print and the school
Protestant missions converted far fewer people than they hoped and changed India more than they expected, because what they actually did was print. The first Tamil types, the first Bengali grammar, a script for Khasi, dictionaries, girls' schools — the durable legacy is linguistic and educational rather than religious. Serampore's press alone cut type for forty languages, most of which had never been printed.
Stops (7)
- Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) · Tranquebar — the first press, 1712
A Danish port where Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg landed in 1706, learned Tamil, and set up the first press in India able to print an Indian script. He translated the New Testament into Tamil, compiled a dictionary, and wrote the first European account of Hinduism from Indian sources — which his own mission board refused to publish.
- Serampore & the Mission Press · Serampore — Carey, and forty languages
A Danish enclave the Baptists used because the East India Company would not let missionaries into its territory. Carey and the Serampore press produced scripture, grammars and dictionaries in about forty Indian languages, cast their own types for scripts never printed before, and started the first Bengali newspaper and the first degree-awarding college in Asia.
- Shillong & Khasi hills missions · The Khasi hills — a script for a language
Welsh Presbyterians reached the Khasi hills in 1841 and gave Khasi a Latin alphabet, a grammar, a dictionary and a printed literature, in a region where the language had never been written down. Meghalaya is now majority Christian, and the hymn-singing there is unmistakably Welsh in its four-part harmony.
- Pandita Ramabai · Pandita Ramabai — the school as argument
A Sanskrit scholar's daughter examined by the pandits of Calcutta and given the title Pandita, who converted in England and returned to found Mukti at Kedgaon for widows and famine orphans. She then translated the Bible into Marathi from Hebrew and Greek herself, having taught herself both, rather than use a missionary text.
- St Paul's Cathedral, Kolkata · St Paul's, Kolkata — the establishment church
The first Anglican cathedral built outside the British Isles, consecrated in 1847 in Gothic with an iron roof against white ants. It is the other half of the Christian story here: not mission but establishment — a church for the ruling community rather than a press aimed at converting anybody.
- Thalassery · Thalassery — Gundert and the Malayalam dictionary
A Malabar port where the German missionary Hermann Gundert spent twenty years, produced the first Malayalam–English dictionary and the first Malayalam grammar, started the language's first newspaper and collected its proverbs. Malayalam's modern prose owes more to this mission station than to any literary movement.
- Sacred Heart Cathedral, Delhi · Sacred Heart, Delhi — the twentieth-century church
Henry Medd's cathedral of 1934 in the new imperial capital, Italianate with a domed apse, built for a congregation that was largely Indian by then rather than European. It marks the point where Indian Christianity stopped being either a Kerala inheritance or a mission project and became an ordinary urban denomination.