The Legacy of William Carey

Sayo Ajiboye
DMin Creating Onramps for Calling
Sept 2007
The Legacy of William Carey.
Authors: Ruth & Vishal Mangalwadi

Are all cultures equal and equally valid? What tools should we deploy when we perceive a need for a change in culture? Are we to submit to relativist who asserts that there is no objective criterion with which to judge a culture or determine a moral choices? These are the opening questions that the authors sought to answer with rthe contents of this book. Their conclusions are clear: culture wars are real, winning them is not impossible, it however requires takes a skills-set that transcends simple passionate flight of fancy. Culture wars are won by loving people and battling against principles that keeps them down.

Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi did a beautiful work of introducing Carey as a cultural reformer. They described every segment of the society which Carey touched through their fictionalized presentation of a quiz forum where the question is "Who was William Carey?" According to the fictional quiz, Carey was a missionary, a botanist, an industrialist, an economist, a medical humanitarian, a media pioneer, an agriculturist, a translator, an educator an astronomer, a library pioneer, a forest conservationist, a crusader for women's right, a public servant, a moral reformer and a cultural transformer." On reading this list what came to my mind is the the modern expression of awe - waoh! Mangawaldi presented ONE MAN as "the central character in the story of India's modernization."

Mangalwadi described the India that Carey met in the words of J.N Farquhar who wrote the Classic, Modern Religious Movements in India that "When Carey came, Hindus were in a pitifully backward condition, learning had almost ceased…, there was a collapse of government and a decline of character; there was no living movement of thought: there was no spiritual leader amongst them." The greatest victims in this situation were women. In this era that "men had surrendered their reason, for women to attempt to use theirs was considered sacrilegious " (p. 29). It was an era in which the system "cut off all motives for inquiry and exertion and made stupid contentment the habit of their lives" "Their minds were devoid of pictures, harmless, indifferent vacant…" (P. 30, 31). In Bengal of Carey's time, "woman was deified in the abstract and demeaned in real life." Even though the representation of Bengal divinity was Ardhanareeshwara who was half male and half female, the basic religious conviction was that "there is no salvation for a woman until she is reborn as a man." From birth to death, there is "a chain of attitudes linked by contempt for females" (p.32). Carey helped to change all of thesde. He personally conducted the study on the basis of which the government stopped infanticide in 1804, he led a study that detailed 438 widow burning or sati within 30 mile radius of Calcutta in 1802; after a long arduous fight that Carey led against this social evil, Lord Cavendish Bentinck declared sati illegal and criminal on December 4, 1829 (p.38).

It reads like fiction today that the last census of the nineteenth century revealed that there were 10,000 widows under the age of four and fifty thousand between the ages of five and nine (p.38). This situation was compounded by polygamy a situation in which one man may have as many as 50 women! Carey attacked these social and cultural challenges by providing an alternative. He started a process of educating – for free – the children of the poor and rural women. Serampore's first woman convert was baptized in 1801, but by 1903 an Hindu writer has this to say about the Indian Christian woman, "the Indian Christian woman has become the evangelist of education to hundreds of thousands of homes…, she has won her way to the recesses of orthodoxy, overcoming a strength and bitterness of prejudice which few outsiders can comprehend."

Evangelical influence changed the manner in which the British Raj perceived the Indian Sub Continent. The operatives of the British Raj all perceived the continent from the platform of their own narrow interests. The executives of East Indian Company see India - simply as a trading base whose thousands of years of economic strength must be plundered and destroyed. With regards to this, Lord Babington Macaulay described the East Indian Trading Company “as a gang of public robbers.” The British military saw India as a “territory to be conquered” and the British intellectuals and humanitarians saw India as “customs and wisdom to be respected and romanticized.” The fourth force of perception was the force of change. The missionary force was propelled by the pen of two men and the foremost of these two is Carey. Carey and Grant saw India’s potential for change and growth.

In thinking about Change in India, Carey conceived a revolution that was founded on three suppositions (i) the power of united prayer to cause transformation and a clear idea that no one man can cause change (ii) the rationality of creation and a clear commitment to the Christian God as its creator (iii) the power of conversion and a clear conviction that moral rebellion was at the roots of human problems (p. 51). Carey and the evangelical team in India sought to plant key evangelical leaders in high positions in government and trade to facilitate this change.

Carey rejected religious fatalism of Brahamannistic Hindu scriptures. These Scriptures suggest that Karma determines the path of life (p.90). To combat this, Carey helped to introduce the language of modernization into India. He rejected the language of the elite (English) and was convinced that progress will come only as the language of the people becomes the language of inquiry. He consciously promoted the use of the Bengali language as the language of learning.

Carey rejected Tantra-ic reasoning and asserted that “mantra kills the intellect and annihilates meaningfu use of language through the repetition of a word or a sound” (p. 106). Carey stood against the philosophical concept of Maya. He asserted that creation is not an illusion and that creation is not divinity Carey fought against folk polytheism and philosophical mysticism (p. 107). He objected especially to the mystical proposition that rationality should be systematically obliterated.

Carey’s life was governed by the assumption of all modernizers (i) a given reality exist independent of his perception of it (ii) that the “modernizer has the ability to alter that reality. (p. 111). Carey affirmed an objective Universe and believes that this is the basis for freedom to be imaginative and creative. The bankruptcy of the society is the bankruptcy of Godly imagination.

For Carey, the means of establishing human dominion is work. Indian spirituality on the other hand surrounds meditation and is located in Ashrams meanin A- No Shram – Labor! Carey and his contemporaries promoted the concept that effective calling for every man is to be fully and fruitfully engaged in one form of work or the other (p. 116). This for Carey is the fulfillment of God’s call that man should have dominion.

Carey was a theological optimist, he believed that Satan’s Kingdom has already been defeated. Carey’s reformation became meaningful because his confidence was in the “Kingdom of God” (p. 121). Carey is a model for today, Eastern values have consciously taken over the mainstream of the West and is affecting the other parts of the globe. To engage with this we - like Carey - must rethink the very structure of engagement with our systems.