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Anglican evangelism in North India and the Punjabi missionary classroom: the failure to educate 'the masses', 1860-77

Even today a few former, central mission schools of the British period remain educational citadels in both India and Pakistan. In the north of the subcontinent these include St Stephens College in New Delhi and Forman College in Lahore, the Alma Mater of the President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf. They have endured largely to serve an Indian and Pakistani elite. However, much to do with the missions and their educational efforts in the nineteenth century remains untapped by postcolonial research. The most recent analysis regarding them has been to do with the co-paradigms of masculinities and gender. Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity and Gail Minault’s Secluded Scholars are two such innovative works. Looking laterally across the subcontinent these able books have found educational territory, once etched out by the missions, fruitful to deconstruct as part of their broader discourses to do with the European in India. What has been missing in recent research efforts is an explanation as to why the missions in British India failed to recruit a clientele beyond their central city schools despite their expansive programmes of evangelism and conversion into the mofussil (rural areas) in the middle of the nineteenth century. To attempt an explanation of this I have decided on a microstudy approach in just one province in the latter half of the nineteenth century. My justification for this approach is because the extent of the impact of the missions on the agricultural population was variable across the Raj. In the south, especially in Madras, this was greater than the more recently annexed territories of the north. As well, the reasons for the ‘success’ or otherwise of the missions were different in each province. Most specifically, this article focuses on the dominant Anglican mission schools in the Punjab (a province which stretched from Delhi in the East to Peshawar on the strategic North West Frontier). It once included both St Stephen’s College and Forman College before it was divided into two (one part into India, the other into Pakistan) at the time of partition in 1947. The Punjab, under the British, was roughly the size of England (in terms of both population and land size) and its society was predominantly village based. My analysis seeks to move beyond a discussion about the general cultural incompatibilities to be found throughout the Raj. As well, my contention is that the period of genuine government experimentation with grant-in-aid mission schools was much shorter than is