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In 1841, the Welsh sent their first missionary, Thomas Jones, to evangelise the tribal peoples of the Khasi Hills of north-east India. This book follows Jones from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth and now one of the most Christianised parts of India. It is about the piety and practices, the perceptions and prejudices of people in early nineteenth century Wales. The book is also about the ways in which the religious ambitions of those same people operated upon the lives and ideas of indigenous societies of the distant Khasi Hills of north-eastern India. It foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. Its themes are universal: crises of authority, the loneliness of geographical isolation, sexual scandal, greed and exploitation, personal and institutional dogma, individual and group morality. In analysing the individual lives that flash in and out of this history, the book is a performance within the effort to break down the many dimensions of distance that the imperial scene prescribes. It pays attention to a 'networked conception of imperial interconnection'. The book discusses Jones's evangelising among the Khasis as well as his conflicts with church and state authority. It also discusses some aspects of the micro-politics of mission and state in the two decades immediately following Thomas Jones's death. While the Welsh missionary impact was significant, its 'success' or indeed its novelty, needs to be measured against the pre-existing activities of British imperialists.
The missionary Thomas Jones II, the local magistrate Harry Inglis, the civil servant's wife Emma Shadwell, and the soldier F.T. Pollok, projected their constructions of Britishness, Welshness, gender or indigeneity onto the canvas of the Khasi Hills. Hugh Roberts and John Roberts visited the grieving Gwenllian Jones at Nongsawlia, but found her hardened against the mission she blamed for her husband's demise. In the aftermath of the Jones versus Inglis affair of the 1840s, Harry Inglis preferred charges against judge Stainforth for borrowing money from a European in his jurisdiction, contrary to civil service regulations. On 27 September 1853, A.J.M. Mills, officiating judge of the Sudder Court, tabled his report to the government of Bengal on the Khasi and Jaintia Hills. The landscape of the hills was a wild canvas on which the clear lines of masterful authority and manly power were delineated.
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book considers the places and peoples on the margins of British empire, in Wales and in India. It also tackles the micro-historical question of the role of the marginal individual in determining the limits of freedom within the social and political systems in which they operate. The book explores the particular brand of Welsh Nonconformity that had been forged through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did give a distinct institutional and ideological temper to the Welsh as missionaries. It begins with initials scratched in a Welsh barn at Llifi or Mill. The last Welsh missionaries in the north-east packed their bags in the 1960s, but the legacy of a century and a quarter of evangelisation in the hills has left an indelible mark.
After the earthquake, the missionaries near Shillong noticed that a much longer stretch of road was visible on the route leading from Mawphlang to Mairang as it rounded distant spurs. The tombs of the missionaries and British officials that sat on the grassy knolls at Cherrapunji were driven into the loose sand and now leaned over at various angles. The great earthquake was also known as the Jubilee Earthquake; just over a week later, on 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria, Empress of India, celebrated her diamond jubilee. By 19 June the Viceroy Lord Elgin had received a sympathetic telegram from the Queen, and on Jubilee Day presided over the State ceremonial at Simla. For subsequent generations, the catastrophe of 1897 marked a zero point in the region's history, but it is also an irresistible final metaphor of the collision of cultures and the aftershocks of empire.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the history of one particular mission station in the under-studied north-east region of India with alternative readings of the interactions between missionary, indigenous peoples and other British imperial agents. It explores the arrival of Welsh missionaries in India in 1841. The book also explores the origins of their Calvinistic Methodist denomination in the eighteenth century, their split from the London Missionary Society (LMS) as an assertion of Welsh identity. It focuses on the voyage to India and their arrival in the Khasi hills at a time when earlier missionaries from Serampore had already wielded some influence. The book provides the work of the first generation of missionaries in relation to language translation, education, proselytism and negotiation with native polity. It examines the scandals of mission.
The desire of the Welsh to send their own missionaries to India was representative of far more than just generalised evangelical religious ideologies. On 20 June 1811, the first eight preachers from north Wales were ordained at Bala, a flannel manufacturing town in Merionethshire at the foot of the Berwyn mountains. At mid-century, the Irish-born population was around four times that of the 20,262 Welsh-born, but Liverpool would be characterised by the 1880s as 'a kind of auxiliary capital for north Wales'. The persuasiveness of the public preacher and the warmth of the communal experience meeting nurtured the spiritual experiences of the Calvinistic Methodists, but it was conversionism that underscored evangelical religiosity. The Welsh Missionary Society reported the progress of their research to the Dolgellau Quarterly Association finally decided to send Thomas Jones to the Khasi Hills on account of its favourable climate and relatively cheaper cost of living.
After losing sight of the Welsh mountains and Ireland, Thomas and Ann Jones headed for the Cape of Good Hope and on across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. As days became weeks, John Roberts plotted the Jamaica in its imaginary course to Calcutta. Lieutenant-General Hay Macdowall, who had gone down with the Lady Jane Dundas, had been returning to England in the aftermath of rebellion and disaffection in the Madras Presidency. The burial registers at St John's Church in Calcutta had numerous entries for passengers and crew who had sickened and died by the end of their voyage. In a sense, the India they had constructed was unspecific, not anchored to the detail of this particular time or that particular place. At another level, however, the Thomas Jones's voyage of discovery became an expedition that confirmed and validated the real India.
The original intent of the East India Company (EIC) to prevent missionary work throughout India was clearly eroded by the amendment to the Charter in 1813. The Serampore missionaries were the benchmark of all Indian missions. In 1804 Carey wrote to John Ryland, one of the founding members of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), detailing the modus operandi of the Baptist mission. In early 1813, Krishna Chandra Pal and Gorachund, another native Christian, set off for the eastern region of British Bengal. In December 1813, after Pal's return to Serampore, Carey secured the services of a pundit to undertake the Khasi translation of the gospels, believing him to be 'the only one in that nation who could read and write'. Direct missionary intervention in the Khasi Hills, sustained primarily by the Serampore Baptists.
The first sighting of the Khasi Hills from the plains of Sylhet in June 1841 was a long anticipated moment for the missionary. Thomas Jones travelled up to Cherrapunji on the back of a mule, and his possessions were carried up the mountainside by a hundred 'coolies'. From the 1770s to the early 1840s, a succession of imperial agents confronted the mountains of the north-east from the plain at Pandua. Over sixty years before Thomas and Ann Jones ascended to Cherrapunji, Robert Lindsay stood in the foothills at Pandua. By the mid-1820s there were new reasons for a British foothold in the frontier. The desirability of establishing a medical station for invalids in the hills had first been suggested to the government by David Scott, Political Agent to the Governor-General on the north-east frontier of Bengal.
In the geo-politics of empire from the 1770s to the 1830s, the northeast was undergoing a period of transition, in which a zone of indeterminacy became an edge, and a barrier became incorporated into a known region. Cherrapunji thus became a distinctive landmark, a node in the imperial network. At an intimate and personal level, the Khasi Hills were becoming a domesticated destination and end point as much as a staging post and site of transience. The regional subtleties of climate in India may not have been fully understood either by the London Missionary Society (LMS) or the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS). The Khasi Hills were something altogether different and unexpected. 'The tranquillity of the borders', asserted Francis Jenkins, 'can only be effectually and economically provided for, by maintaining our ascendancy in the Hills'.