A NEW PHASE IN CONTACTS

For much of his time the historian of Christianity in India is condemned to present a one-sided picture of what happened. For the most part the recipients, or victims, of Christian propaganda were mute; or, if they spoke, no record has been preserved of what they said.

With the nineteenth century all is changed. All parties become more voluble, and the printing-press makes it possible to lend a certain coherence and continuity to what previously had been inchoate and transitory. We have detailed accounts from the missionaries of their methods of communicating the Gospel. We have thoughtful accounts from converts of the steps by which they were led to faith in Christ. We have from non-believers assessments of the Christian message, sometimes astonishing in their shrewdness and controversial aptness. We have objections to and repudiation of the Christian challenge varying between shrill vilification and angry misrepresentation, calm exposition of the merits of the non-Christian religions and temperate evaluation of what the non-Christian mind had identified as valuable in the Christian message.

During the first third of the nineteenth century, all groups in Bengal without exception, from Rāmmohun Roy to the young followers of Derozio, were strongly attached to the British connection. Nationalism had not yet acquired the connotation of anti-European and anti-British reaction which was to characterise it in later times.