Person · Baptist missionary & printer
William Carey
Also known as Carey, William Carey of Serampore
A Northamptonshire cobbler turned Baptist missionary who reached Bengal in 1793 and settled in Danish Serampore because the East India Company excluded missionaries from its territory. With the Serampore press he published in about forty Indian languages, and he taught Bengali and Sanskrit at Fort William College.
- Date
- 1761 – 1834
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Serampore press imprints; Baptist mission records
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He also founded the Agri-Horticultural Society, campaigned for twenty-five years against sati, started the first Bengali newspaper and the first Indian college to award degrees. A fire in 1812 destroyed the press and years of manuscripts; it was rebuilt within months on subscriptions raised in England.
Connections (3)
- Monastic foundationSerampore & the Mission Press
Carey settled at Danish Serampore in 1800 because the East India Company would not permit missionaries in its own territory, and the press there went on to publish in about forty Indian languages and dialects. It cast its own types for scripts that had never been printed, produced the first Bengali prose in quantity, and trained the compositors who staffed the presses of nineteenth-century Calcutta.
- Teaching lineageRabindranath Tagore
Bengali prose as a written medium barely existed before the Serampore press: there was verse, and there were Sanskrit and Persian for serious matters. Carey's grammars, dictionaries and printed texts gave the language a standard form in print, and the Bengal Renaissance that produced Rammohan Roy and, two generations later, Tagore worked in the register those presses had established.
- Teaching lineageKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Carey taught Bengali and Sanskrit at Fort William College while running the Serampore press twenty kilometres upriver, so the Company's training institution and the mission the Company excluded were staffed by the same man. The prose textbooks commissioned at Fort William from Indian munshis are among the first modern prose in Bengali, Urdu and Hindi, which means a colonial college helped standardise the languages it existed to teach.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “William Carey (missionary)”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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