In the 18th and 19th century much missionary work overseas depended on the enthusiasm and the determination of one highly gifted, fully committed, single minded individual, such as Livingstone, Carey, Wilberforce and Wesley. In the literature world two maverick pioneers stand out: Benjamin Schultze in North India leading to ISPCK (India SPCK), still serving North India in Delhi, and John Murdoch laying the foundations for CLS (Christian Literature Society), still serving South India in Chennai (formerly Madras).
Benjamin Schultze
BENJAMIN SCHULTZE was SPCK’s first financed missionary who, early in the 18th century and with support and protection from the East India Company and a salary of £60 pa, was persuded to move from Tranquebar to minister in the British territories, where he regularly received gifts of books, paper, knives and binding tools, not to mention medicines, children’s toys, haberdashery and mathematical instruments.
In return Schultze developed SPCK policies, starting schools, engaging in adult education and Bible translation. By 1740 the mission had spread far inland. Ten missionaries were working with 30 native catechists (one ordained and one preparing for ordination), the whole Bible was available in Tamil, translations into other languages were in preparation and the Dutch Mission had reached its highest point. By the end of the century the spirit and organisation which had got things going in Britain a century before was bearing fruit in India. With encouragement and capital from London, District Committees of clergy and laity, centred on churches, were responding to the needs of the local people particularly in workhouses, prisons, hospitals and among the poor.
Long-term programmes and objectives overseas reflected what they had started at home: training local leaders (ordained and lay) and the provision of the necessary equipment, mainly in the form of religious and educational literature, schools, colleges and vocational institutions. Their commitment to local languages was astonishing. Between 1836-97, for example, in addition to Indian languages and the more familiar ones, publications appeared in Amharic, Cree, Ojbwa, Aina, Kua and Gogo. Having acquired the use of the press in Vespery, SPCK kept it well supplied with paper and printing materials and though it had a somewhat chequered existence it continued through most of the 19th century, providing much needed and substantial help for education and mission work.
In 1930 it was sold to CLS Madras which continued the work and maintained cordial relations with the Society. Tracts and 48-page booklets were always popular. Tract Societies, such as the Madras Religious Tract and Book Society, were set up to publish in the local languages and in 1870 when John Murdoch, founder of the Vernacular Education Society and the Religious Tract Society in Madras, compiled a catalogue of all languages known to be spoken by Christians in India up to 1868, beginning with the earliest ones from Tranquebar, the volume listed thousands of titles and ran to over 300 pages.
Alongside the Tract and Book Society there was also the South India School Book Society to provide books for schools and in 1858 they pooled their resources to form the Christian Literature Society in Madras with which the Religious Tract Society in the UK (subsequently the United Society for Christian Literature) had such a close connection.
SPCK similarly had a mission in Bengal, supporting the first Englishman to volunteer to go to India as a missionary, four years before William Carey arrived in Serampore. By 1868 the SPCK Calcutta Diocesan Committee was running schools, had published 13 tracts and books on its own account and was co-operating with Serampore, which had published 79 under Carey’s leadership, and the Calcutta Tract Society which had brought out 170 tracts in various languages besides Bengali. In Bombay the Diocesan Committee came into being in 1825 and immediately set about publishing books for schools and titles in Marathi and Gujarati.
John Murdoch
JOHN MURDOCH (1819-1904), a Scottish Presbyterian and an early pioneer in Christian literature, utterly dedicated his life and talent to the spread of literacy and education. When ill health forced him to abandon his university training in Greek and Mathematics he took himself off at the age of 25 to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become the Head of a Government Training School in Kandy. When economic problems forced him into redundancy he set about forming the Sinhalese Tract Society to print and distribute tracts and Christian books in Sinhalese in a country where at that time very little interest had been shown in healthy literature, and when subsequently he discovered a similar dirth in South India he created a General Book Society for the whole of India, working alongside ISPCK. Colleagues in the Madras School Book Society were less than warm in their welcome, but in due course he set up a Christian Book Society for South India and Ceylon with a plan for Christian literature in both countries.
Following the Indian Mutiny in 1857 four major missionary societies (the Church Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society, the Baptists and the Methodists) came together to provide education, especially Christian education, with three objectives:
- to improve the standard of teaching in primary schools
- to train Christian teachers
- to provide Christian books in English and the vernacular.
This led to the Christian Vernacular Education Society (CVES) which in 1891 became CLS Madras, with John Murdoch as Travelling Secretary.
Within ten years they had produced 250 books in 14 languages and sold 3 million copies. Three Training institutions had been created and over 1,000 young teachers trained, working alongside similar Tract Societies in Calcutta and Bombay. Murdoch himself wrote hundreds of books and pamphlets, again reflecting the same understanding, depth and breadth of Christianity as Schultze, including, for example, How to Have Healthy Babies (for Indian women) and How to Get out of Debt (for Indian Businessmen).
In the 1920s CLS for India added Africa to its title and in 1935, along with RTS in China, joined up with RTS (UK), followed in 1942 by the Scottish Committee for Christian Literature Work in China to produce the United Society for Christian Literature.
Meanwhile similar changes were taking place in SPCK in India. At the 1920 Lambeth Conference (in India) bishops from India came up with a plan for an India-based Society for Literature which in 1935 led to the establishment of 'SPCK in India’ to act as the Church Publishing Society for India, the forerunner of a fully autonomous Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (ISPCK) in 1958, a registered Indian charity with an office in Delhi, a new constitution and a self-governing body (‘church related’ but not ‘church controlled’), no longer controlled by London but whose objectives were substantially the same.