RARE PHOTOGRAPHS showing the work of Irish Protestant missionaries in India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have come to light.
The images show pith-helmeted Trinity graduates spreading the gospel among the “heathens” of northern India at the height of the British Raj. The photographs, preserved as glass-plate slides, were found in the deanery at Killaloe, Co Clare, and have been digitally remastered and published online by the Church of Ireland.
The evocative images capture the forgotten world of Victorian “Christian soldiers” – the men and women who made up the religious wing of the British Empire on the Indian subcontinent.
The photographs show Irish Protestant matrons and clerical gentlemen ministering to local people, tending orphans, teaching girls how to make Irish crochet lace and travelling by “push-push” – a vehicle pushed and pulled by “coolies”.
In 1892, a group of graduates from Trinity College responded to a request from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to send missionaries to the Chota Nagpur district of northeastern India. They were stationed in the town of Hazaribagh – some 74 miles from the nearest railway station.
Their diocese – about the size of Ireland – consisted largely of forested jungle, where tigers and leopards roamed.
Eyre Chatterton, a Cork-born missionary who served as bishop of the Chota Nagpur diocese from 1903-1926, recalled in his memoir: “The bulk of its population consists of very low-caste Hindus with caste prejudice which made the work of their evangelisation far more difficult than that amongst the simple aborigines of the other districts.” He praised fellow-Irish missionariesincluding: “Dr KWS Kennedy, the saintly Dr Hearn, who passed from us all too soon; of Fanny Hassard, our first lady worker; of James Arthur Murray, the founder of St Columba’s College; and of Dr Miss O’Meara.”
The Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur, famous throughout the Anglican world, established schools, a seminary, a dispensary and a hospital. Their legacy lives on particularly in a school they founded, St Columba’s College, now part of the Vinoba Bhave University of Hazaribagh. Although no Irish missionaries work in Chota Nagpur today, the mission is still a registered charity in Ireland and supports projects in India.
One of the last Irish missionaries to work in Hazaribagh was Rev Billy Marshall (76), who served in India from 1962-1972 and now lives in Dublin. The Trinity graduate, from Co Tyrone, had served as a curate in Co Down when, at 27, he sailed to India to take up a post teaching theology in the mission’s seminary.
Rev Marshall said he had found India “delightful” although it was “a very bureaucratic country”.
More information on the mission and images at Ireland.anglican.org/library
