Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism: James Long of Bengal 1814-87.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane

Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism: James Long of Bengal 1814-87. By GEOFFREY A. ODDIE. London Studies on South Asia, vol. 16. Richmond, Surrey: CURZON PRESS, 1999. Pp. xiv + 261, plates, maps. $45.

In this book Geoffrey Oddie returns with a biography of an Anglican missionary whose social activism he had featured two decades earlier in Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms, 1850-1900 The climax of Long's career, and the reason why he was, and remains, lionized as a folk hero in Bengal, came with his active opposition to fellow-British indigo planters in 1850-60 and his subsequent trial and imprisonment for publishing, distributing, and helping translate Dinabandhu Mitra's "libelous"--and "seditious"--satirical play, Nil Darpan or Mirror of Indigo. These events, described in chapters 7 and 8, were already substantially covered in Oddie's earlier book. New is a painstaking account, based on missionary and other archives which include an extensive correspondence, of the process by which Long became an activist, and of his unusual engagement with Russia in his later years.

Long's life adds to a considerable, but under-studied body of evidence that suggests what benefits can be derived from a comparative study of British colonialism in Ireland and in India. As Oddie shows, Long's comments on social conditions in his native Ireland, where he enjoyed a privileged youth and education, were a late and pallid reflection of his social activism in India. His thoughts on Ireland were generally less concerned with social injustice than with the need for vernacular biblical education, his foremost concern in India, Long was disappointed with the mission system of English education he first encountered in Calcutta, and which, he felt, yielded a host of mere pen pushers, some resolute foes of Christianity, and few converts. During his second stay, after a period of home leave during which he married, he devoted himself to creating at the Thakurpukur mission, south of Calcutta, a model of vernacular schools for boys and for girls--the latter through his wife--and to lobbying government for s upport of Christian vernacular education. Like most missionaries, he was also concerned with recruiting and training indigenous preachers, but he was less controlling of them than were most of his European colleagues. While native priests were desirable to offset the paucity of European missionaries and to reduce the cost...