Interfaith Encounter and Religious Pluralism: J.T. Sunderland's Mission to Brahmo Samajes of India, 1895-96

According to one of the few book-length studies of encounters between American missionaries and Hinduism in the nineteenth century, the years between 1870 and 1910 represents an important turning point. For more than a half century before this period, American promoters of the Christian faith in the British Raj had focused their energies almost exclusively upon exposing what they saw as the unmitigated social, moral and spiritual evil of Hindu "idolatry." Devoted to the teaching of Christian doctrine and to affecting conversions, early American missionaries had found little or nothing of value in the "heathen" religious culture they sought to replace. These same Americans agreed with British colonial officials that Hinduism, not colonial rule or endemic poverty, was mainly responsible for the social evils that plagued Indian society. Characteristic of such views was the 1823 American Missionary Register's argument that Hinduism was one of the "great fooleries of the world" and that the resulting "Hindoo character" was "more despicable than amiable."¹

These extremely negative constructions of India and Hinduism have persisted up to recent times in American poplar culture, but there is evidence that such views receded during the late nineteenth century in important segments of the American religious landscape. Historian S.M. Pathak cites the birth of the Social Gospel movement, the growth of liberal theology and the emergence of academic comparative religion as important factors in reorienting missionary culture toward more complex, pluralistic understandings of Hinduism. Beginning in the 1880s, moreover, the appearance of highly educated South Asian religious intellectuals in the United States undercut the crude stereotypes of benighted Hinduism that had long sustained missionary fund raising in the United States. Swami Vivekananda's famous speech defending Hinduism at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago is well known to students of American culture, but Protap Chandra Mazumdar's three, well-publicized visits to the United States provided Americans with a different, but equally positive view of religious life in India. The growing vibrancy and ferment of religious thought among Indian intellectuals, a trend embodied by men like Vivekananda and Mazumdar, helped to convince American missionary societies that young recruits heading into the field would need more sophisticated knowledge of South Asia's rich spiritual heritage in order to be effective advocates for their own.²

While the broad outlines of the changing relationship between American missionaries and Hinduism seem clear, students of American history and culture have not kept up with British scholars in filling in the details. In what ways did the rise of religious modernism in both the United States and India create the possibility for new, more pluralistic religious encounters? Did such encounters require fundamental alterations of the American missionary endeavor or were they compatible in some way with the traditional emphasis on religious conversion and doctrinal teaching? What role did South Asian religious intellectuals themselves play in revising negative American missionary perceptions of India's spiritual traditions? And finally, how was the American missionary discourse about Christianity and Hinduism affected by the growing conflict over colonialism and nationalism in India? J.T. Sunderland's 1895 mission to the Brahmo Samajes of India, while only one example of a large and complex story, provides insights into these questions.³

In the 1932 edition of his book India in Bondage, the Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland of Ann Arbor, Michigan explained to readers that the origins of his nearly forty years of activism in the cause of India's freedom from British rule stretched back to his missionary tour of the country in 1895-96. The fifty-three year old American had spent three arduous months in the Raj traveling thousands of miles by railroad, steamboat, pony cart, and, in remote areas, by trappa, "a chair carried on the back of a man." From Calcutta and the great cosmopolitan cities of the north, to the Khasi Hills of Assam on the very eastern limits of British India, he had preached Unitarianism's optimistic gospel of religious and social progress to audiences of university students, social reformers...