HARDIMAN

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qxp:GRAHAM Q7 12/5/08 16:51 Page i
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general editor John M. MacKenzie
When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more

than twenty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the convic-
tion that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as sig-
nificant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate
societies’. With more than sixty books published, this
remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary
work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cul-
tural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender
and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment,
language and literature, migration and patriotic societies,
and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to
present comparative work on European and American
imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of
books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in
all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will
continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible
range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully
organic in its development, always seeking to be at the
cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars
and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.
Missionaries and their medicine

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AVA I L A B L E I N T H E S E R I E S
CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF BRITISHNESS ed. Dana Arnold
BRITAIN IN CHINA
Community, culture and colonialism, 1900–1949 Robert Bickers
RACE AND EMPIRE
Eugenics in colonial Kenya Chloe Campbell
RETHINKING SETTLER COLONIALISM
History and memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa
ed. Annie E. Coombes
IMPERIAL CITIES
Landscape, display and identity
eds Felix Driver and David Gilbert
IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP
Empire and the question of belonging Daniel Gorman
SCOTLAND, THE CARIBBEAN AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1750–1820
Douglas J. Hamilton
FLAGSHIPS OF IMPERIALISM
The P&O company and the politics of empire from its origins to 1867 Freda Harcourt
EMIGRANT HOMECOMINGS
The return movement of emigrants, 1600–2000 Marjory Harper
ENGENDERING WHITENESS
White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1625–1865
Cecily Jones
REPORTING THE RAJ
The British press and India, c. 1880–1922 Chandrika Kaul
SILK AND EMPIRE Brenda M. King
COLONIAL CONNECTIONS, 1815–45
Patronage, the information revolution and colonial government Zoë Laidlaw
PROPAGANDA AND EMPIRE
The manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960 John M. MacKenzie
THE SCOTS IN SOUTH AFRICA
Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914 John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel
THE OTHER EMPIRE
Metropolis, India and progress in the colonial imagination John Marriott
SEX, POLITICS AND EMPIRE
A postcolonial geography Richard Phillips
IMPERIAL PERSUADERS
Images of Africa and Asia in British advertising Anandi Ramamurthy
GENDER, CRIME AND EMPIRE Kirsty Reid
THE HAREM, SLAVERY AND BRITISH IMPERIAL CULTURE
Anglo-Muslim relations, 1870–1900 Diane Robinson-Dunn
WEST INDIAN INTELLECTUALS IN BRITAIN ed. Bill Schwarz
MIGRANT RACES
Empire, identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji Satadru Sen
AT THE END OF THE LINE
Colonial policing and the imperial endgame 1945–80 Georgina Sinclair
THE VICTORIAN SOLDIER IN AFRICA Edward M. Spiers
MARTIAL RACES AND MASCULINITY IN THE BRITISH ARMY, 1857–1914
Heather Streets
THE FRENCH EMPIRE BETWEEN THE WARS
Imperialism, politics and society Martin Thomas
ORDERING AFRICA eds Helen Tilley with Robert J. Gordon
BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE ed. Stuart Ward
M1308 HARDIMAN PRELIMS.qxp:GRAHAM Q7 12/5/08 16:51 Page iii
Missionaries
and their medicine
A CHRISTIAN MODERNITY
FOR TRIBAL INDIA
David Hardiman
MANCHESTER
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by

PA L G R AV E M A C M I L L A N
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Copyright © David Hardiman 2008
The right of David Hardiman to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Printed in Great Britain
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M1308 HARDIMAN PRELIMS.qxp:GRAHAM Q7 12/5/08 16:51 Page v
CONTENTS
List of illustrations — page vii

Acknowledgements — page ix
General editor’s introduction— page xi
Abbreviations — page xiii
Glossary — page xv
Map of CMS Bhil mission area — page xvii
1 Introduction page 1
2 The Bhils 19
3 The mission to the Bhils 51
4 The great famine 73
5 The conversion of the Bhagats 83
6 Christian healing 105
7 Fighting demons 123
8 Woman’s work for woman 139
9 A little empire 147
10 Medicine on a shoestring and a prayer 165
11 A mission for a postcolonial era 178
12 Medical modernity 189
13 Closure 225
14 Conclusion: mission medicine and Bhil modernity 235
Select bibliography — 248

Index — 255
[v]
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I L L U S T R AT I O N S
1 Bhil Christians of Chhitadara, 1904. Source: Paul

Johnson papers. page 92
2 Missionaries and their families at Lusadiya, 1911.
Source: The Church Missionary Gleaner (2 October
1911), 154. See also papers of Jane and Arthur Birkett,
CMS, Unofficial Papers, acc. 446, Z6, clippings file. 93
3 Dr Daniel Christian, Lusadiya, 1940. Source:
The Church Missionary Outlook (October 1940). 173
4 Outpatients being treated on the veranda of Lusadiya
Hospital, 1943. Source: Paul Johnson papers. 195
5 Dr Margaret Johnson seeing outpatient, Lusadiya
Hospital, 1955. Source: Paul Johnson papers. 209
[ vii ]
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research on which this book has been based was funded initially by
the Wellcome Trust through a two-year Research Fellowship. Further
research and writing were carried out with the help of a grant from the
Economic and Social Research Council. The archival research was
greatly facilitated by the excellent facilities and help that were provided
for me by the archivists and librarians in the Special Collections room
at the University of Birmingham Library and the Church Missionary
Society (CMS) library at Partnership House in London. At the latter, I
would like to thank in particular Colin Rowe, Elizabeth Williams and
Ken Osborne. In addition, I made use of the holdings of the Oriental and
India Office Library and the British Library in London, the National
Archives of India, New Delhi, the Maharashtra State Archives,
Mumbai, and the Gujarat State Archives, Vadodara. Nicholas Johnson
and Hilary Griffiths were particularly generous in not only granting me
access to the papers of their father, the Reverend Paul Johnson, but also
allowing me to borrow them for a time. In addition, they supplied me
with a copy of a dissertation on Margaret Johnson by Hilary’s daughter,
Rachel Mash, and have allowed me to reproduce three photographs
from their family collection. The Bishop of Gujarat, Vinod Malaviya,
showed similar generosity in allowing me to photocopy records that he
holds. I was able to obtain an almost full set of the Bhil Mission Report
in part from the CMS archives in Birmingham (earlier years), and in part
from copies held by Bishop Malaviya, supplemented by copies held by
Nicholas Johnson and Hilary Griffiths. For help in the research in India,
I would like to thank Kanu Bhavsar and Babulal Damor for accompa-
nying me to the Bhil villages of Mewar and Sabarkantha to conduct
interviews. Raj Kumar Hans gave me invaluable help in Vadodara. For
hospitality, I would like in particular to thank Nadir, Robyn, Perin,
Kate and Amy Bharucha in Mumbai, and Makrand and Shirin Mehta in
Ahmedabad. For their very helpful comments on the manuscript,
I am indebted to David Arnold, Rosemary Fitzgerald, Sarah Hodges,
Colin Jones, Gyan Pandey, Gauri Raje and the anonymous readers for
Manchester University Press.
[ ix ]
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GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the notion of Christ as the
‘Great Physician’ became increasingly prominent in missionary dis-
course and its iconic representations. As Western medicine, supposedly
emblematic of the onward march of the rational, aspired to ever higher
status, missionaries increasingly saw themselves as healers of bodies as
well as savers of souls. David Livingstone was one of the most notable
precursors in this: many missionaries (perhaps particularly Scottish
ones) subsequently sought to combine medical with theological quali-
fications, ambitiously pursuing a sort of parallel ordination in both
spheres. Nevertheless, attitudes towards the role of medicine in mis-
sionary endeavour were complex and dynamic, as David Hardiman
demonstrates here.
This study examines a relatively long period in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in a restricted geographical sphere in India. It also
analyses the reactions of one so-called ‘tribal’ people, the Bhils, to the
missionary and medical ambitions of the Church Missionary Society in
their land. This approach offers highly rewarding results: we are able to
follow the intertwining of missionary and medical, administrative and
military developments in this region of the subcontinent. We are also
given the opportunity to consider in detail the ways in which the Bhils
responded to, resisted, or sought relief in these religious, medical and
imperial phenomena appearing in their area. All of this is charted
through the period of the so-called high noon of empire, the emergence
of nationalist resistance, violent and non-violent, the era of imperial
weakening induced by European warfare, and the post-independence
years. We follow the mission and its hospital through a process of rise
and fall, indigenisation and dispersal. Ironically, early medical arrange-
ments were primitive and expertise was often slight; but as profession-
alisation increased (along with the significant role of women), political
and social weakness became more pronounced.
Many other issues are illuminated through this useful focus: the
incorporation of the Bhils into the imperial military establishment
through the formation of the Bhil Corps and the manner in which this
could both help and hinder missionary objectives; the foundation of
schools and the development of education as another ‘social’ arm of
missionary ambitions; the articulation of complex gendered relation-
ships between traditional and mission societies; and the role of mis-
sionaries in famine relief. Missionaries were of course confronting
[ xi ]
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GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
indigenous belief systems and concepts of illness and cure. They often
saw these as inimical to their ‘modern’ methods, yet they invariably
placed as much reliance on the ‘supernatural’ as their ‘charges’ and
patients did. Pre-operative prayers were common; praying for ‘miracle
cures’ sometimes seemed to have effect. Bhils often found missionary
doctors’ activities appealing precisely because they seemed to have a
comprehensible spiritual content. Far from the missionaries counter-
posing two Manichaean systems, as they usually imagined they were
doing, the fact was that a greater degree of syncretism was occurring
than they would have been prepared to acknowledge. The Bhils were
often responding to Western medicine and the religious message that
lay behind it in this context by indigenising it and consequently ren-
dering it more comprehensible.
In these and in many other ways, David Hardiman’s book offers
insights into issues of imperial and missionary activity that are applic-
able to many other parts of India and elsewhere in the world. We are
given opportunities to consider the relationship between missionaries
and imperialism, the interaction of recruitment and fundraising in the
imperial metropole and activities in the Indian ‘empire’, the changing
educational attainments and roles of missionaries and medics, the sig-
nificance of women, married and single, and their increasingly signifi-
cant instrumentality. We are also presented with the realities of social,
economic and political hierarchies in India and the ways in which the
British sought to modify these. And all of this is related to theoretical
positions and a wider historiography. This constitutes a rewarding
study for all those interested in the relationships among missionary
endeavour, indigenous responses and imperial rule.
John M. MacKenzie
[ xii ]
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A B B R E V I AT I O N S
BMR Bhil Mission Report, used to denote the annual Church

Missionary Society Report of the Mission to the Bhils
CMS Church Missionary Society. Used in footnotes, this refers to
the CMS records held in the Special Collections, University
of Birmingham Library
CMSE Church Missionary Society Extracts, used to denote annual
Church Missionary Society: Extracts from the Annual
Letters of the Missionaries
CRR Crown Representative Records
CWMG Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
doc. document
FD Foreign Department
FPD Foreign and Political Department
Govt. Government
GSAV Gujarat State Archives, Vadodara Branch
LMHR Lusadia Mission Hospital Report, used to denote Report of
the Lusadia Mission Hospital and Biladia Dispensary
MBC Mewar Bhil Corps
MKAAR Mahi Kantha Annual Administration Report
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
NS new series
OIOC Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library,
London
Pol. Political
[ xiii ]
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G L O S S A RY
Baniya merchant caste

Bhagat devotee, a reformed Bhil
bhajan devotional song
bhakti devotion to a deity
bhopa Rajasthani term for an indigenous healer, practising
a mixture of herbalism, divination and exorcism
buva Gujarati term for indigenous healer, as in bhopa
Chamar leather tanners; untouchable caste
dai midwife
dakran witch (Mewari); also dakhan (Gujarati)
daru country liquor, made normally from mahuda flowers
Devi mother goddess
gameti headman of a Bhil pal
jangli wild
jantra-mantra spell with miraculous powers
jogi priest of the Bhils
khatlo bed, consisting of a wooden frame with woven string
base – known as charpoy in northern India
mahuda large tree (bassia latifolia), the flowers of which are
used to make country liquor
mantra sacred verse or formula, an incantation, a spell
mela fair
murti image of a deity
pal Bhil ‘village’, consisting of houses scattered over a
stretch of countryside
panchayat council
pandal cloth canopy supported by poles
Patel farmer caste
puja religious rites performed to a deity
Purdah lit. ‘curtain’ – seclusion of women in a household
Rajput warrior caste, often rulers and overlords
roti flat, round piece of unleavened bread, made of wheat,
millet or maize flour
sadhu holy man who has renounced worldly life
sahib honorific applied to European men, and to Indians in
positions of similar authority
thakor overlord who provided a mix of military service and
tribute to a ruling prince in return for being granted
[ xv ]
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G L O S S A RY
administrative, judicial and taxation powers over the

subjects of his estate
vilayati dava ‘foreign medicine’, meaning allopathy or biomedi-
cine
zenana secluded apartment for women within a household
[ xvi ]
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CMS Bhil mission area
[ xvii ]
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M1308 HARDIMAN TEXT.qxp:GRAHAM Q7 12/5/08 16:55 Page 1
CHAPTER ONE
Einführung
In November 1880 the Reverend Charles Thompson arrived at

Kherwara, a small town in the hilly tracts of Mewar State in Rajasthan.
He had come there to establish the first Anglican mission to the Bhils –
a so-called ‘primitive tribe’ that inhabited this region of India. The town
was to be his base for the next twenty years. He knew that his task
would not be an easy one. He believed nonetheless that he had a
method that would provide him with the crucial opening – he would go
amongst them as a healer. In this he sought to follow the path of Jesus,
though the healing was not – as with Jesus – to be based on faith and
miracles, but to be carried out through modern scientific medicine.
Although he was not a qualified doctor, he had taken some medical
training in England, and he believed that his knowledge of the basic
principles of such medicine was adequate to impress the Bhils and win
them to the Gospel.
As it was, his task proved harder than expected. An army doctor, a
Britisher, who also practised from Kherwara, had recently tricked some
Bhils into being operated on. Exasperated by the fact that very few Bhils
would agree to submit themselves to the surgical knife, even in minor
and easily cured cases, this doctor had offered financial inducements to
attract them into his surgery and had then carried out operations
without gaining their consent. This had clearly been a terrifying expe-
rience for the Bhils, who saw it as a violation of both their bodies and
spiritual being. Arriving soon after, Thompson found that that the large
majority of Bhils were refusing to take any treatment from white
people.1
Thompson’s problems were compounded by a major Bhil revolt in
March 1881. The revolt came at a time when census operations were
being carried in the area, leading to rumours that the people were being
counted for nefarious ends. According to Thompson: ‘All kinds of
absurd notions troubled their dark minds. Some said that our Queen
[1]

MISSIONARIES AND THEIR MEDICINE
was taking an account of their number, and the number of their cattle,
in order to kill them all. Others thought it was to impose fresh taxes.
But others, getting still wider of the mark, said that a scheme was being
prepared for giving the fat women to the fat men, and the lean women
to the lean men.’2 Government reports spoke of a further rumour that
the Bhil women were being counted so that they could be taken away
so as to exterminate the Bhils.3 Although no doubt fanciful in detail,
these rumours revealed that there was a deep underlying suspicion
amongst many Bhils of the motives of their rulers. They well under-
stood that counting was a prelude to greater surveillance and control by
the state, along with higher taxes.
The army of Mewar state reacted by marching through the rebellious
villages, killing Bhils in cold blood and burning their houses. The
officer in charge was an Irish mercenary employed by the Mewar gov-
ernment, who was heard describing the Bhils in contemptuous terms
as bandar-jat or ‘monkey-people.’4 Thompson noted the wanton
killings in his first report to his mission society, adding with exaspera-
tion that it was likely to greatly harm the reputation of all Europeans
in the area. He asked: ‘How will this officer’s presence and action affect
us and our work?’5 Although the Bhils called off their revolt following
negotiations in April, Thompson was advised to stay in Kherwara and
not visit the Bhil villages, for the time being at least. Even his attempts
to talk with Bhils who visited Kherwara proved abortive, as the towns-
people had advised them to avoid the white missionary – a devious
person, they said, who would do them harm. Although he managed to
talk to a few, he found himself hardly daring to speak on any topic. As
he later said: ‘If I inquired about the family, then how very naturally
might they have looked upon me as another enumerator. If I spoke
about their cattle, fields, or crops, then the tax question might have dis-
turbed their minds. To talk about God, I knew that with them, as with
others, nothing could so readily or so strongly call forth their highest
fears.’ Then, when the Viceroy paid a visit to Mewar State later in 1881,
a rumour swept the Bhil tracts that the sahib lok (Europeans) were
about to join the state forces and devastate the Bhil country. Thompson
also learnt that when any headmen of Bhil villages came to Kherwara,
they were being taken to the senior native army officer – a high-caste
Hindu – who told them: ‘Don’t go near the Padre Sahib. Have nothing
to say to him. Don’t listen to him.’ The native officer was eager that the
Bhils embrace his form of Hinduism rather than Christianity.6
Nonetheless, as was the pattern in missionary narratives, the initial
gloom gave way to hope. Thompson recounted how on 7 November
1881, a Bhil came to his bungalow at Kherwara complaining of deaf-
ness, and that he began treating him. Next day, he paid his first visit to
[2]

INTRODUCTION
a Bhil village. Within a few days, the Bhil whom he was treating recov-
ered fully. Thompson continued his visits to the villages within a
seven-kilometre radius of Kherwara, leaving at about seven each
morning and returning to his bungalow in the evening. At first, the
people refused to come anywhere near him, but he managed to talk to
four or five of the village headmen. Although Thompson spoke in his
report of these events about the ‘dark minds’ of the Bhils, and com-
mented on their ‘ignorance’, some of these headmen reached a shrewd
conclusion about Thompson’s position. If, they reasoned, the ‘govern-
ment’ (in the form of the native officer) was telling them to avoid him,
then he was obviously not an agent of that government. They accord-
ingly probed him as to his views on the government. Thompson
reported that he was careful not to commit himself to any opinions,
fearing that whatever he said might be twisted. He gave, however, an
impression of distancing himself from the authorities so that he would
not be implicated in their minds with any future punitive raids on Bhil
villages.7
One of the headmen whom Thompson had met agreed to accompany
him to some other villages. It was still hard to make any contact with
the people, who were highly suspicious of any white person. In
Thompson’s words: ‘Long before we got anywhere near them the chil-
dren ran off to their homes as fast as their legs could carry them. Men
and women, peering round corners, or over the enclosures surrounding
their houses, might be seen watching us in all directions.’ The headmen
were on the whole prepared to meet him and provide hospitality,
though some gave a ‘cold reception.’ As he did not as yet follow the Bhil
dialect, he found communication difficult.8
A breakthrough came after a helper joined Thompson who could act
as an interpreter – an Indian Christian called Masih Charan. The two
decided to focus for a week on Obri, a village five kilometres from
Kherwara. Each day, they set up their makeshift clinic under a shady
tree. A khatlo, or country bed with woven string base, was procured
from an adjoining house. Their first case on the initial day – a Monday –
was a broken leg, which Thompson set. According to Thompson:
It soon became evident that our new plan was going to work admirably.
In the evening we returned home. On the Tuesday we had 15 visits for
medicine or treatment; on the Wednesday, 30; on Thursday, 45; on Friday,
59; and on Saturday 58: total, 207. Some had fevers – some colds – others,
enlarged spleens – some the itch – some ophthalmia – others, nearly deaf –
some headaches – others, sores – one poor little emaciated sufferer was
simply a walking skeleton – some of the old folks complained of rheumat-
ics – one old woman, blind and deaf through old age, came to be, I suppose,
made young again. Among the number was the gammaiti [headman] of
[3]

the pal [village]. On the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we held little
meetings to make known the Saviour. We did not think it advisable to say
too much in this way on our first prolonged visit.9
A week later, there was a large funeral ceremony at Obri, attended by
twenty Bhil headmen. There was a lot of talk about the white sahib and
his medicine, and two headmen were chosen to go and ask him to live
amongst them. In this way, Thompson made his breakthrough. The
Bhils around Kherwara no longer viewed him with suspicion, and in
time he was able to gain his first converts. The medical strategy, it
seemed, had proved its worth.
My project
I myself first came into contact with some descendants of the early Bhil
converts on a visit to this region in 1997. Indian princes had in the past
ruled the whole area, and I had gone there at that time to investigate a
protest movement by the Bhils against their rulers in 1921–22. This had
culminated in a massacre by British-led troops.10 One of those I inter-
viewed was Peter Bhanat, who made me aware of another, very differ-
ent, history – that of the small but flourishing community of Christian
Bhils of this tract. Anglican missionaries had converted his father to
Christianity during the first decade of the twentieth century – a time
when many Bhils had converted. Born in 1913, he had been a life-long
Christian. He was studying in primary school at the time of the mas-
sacre, and he told me how casualties were carried to the nearby mission
station at Biladiya to be treated by the missionary, Lea Sahib. After his
schooling days were over, Peter Bhanat had worked as a teacher in the
mission schools of the area, ending up as the headmaster of the mission
secondary school at Biladiya. His whole demeanour impressed me; he
lived simply, was self-confident in himself and his faith, and as a
teacher had devoted his life to working for the good of his community.11
After returning to England, I decided to consult the records of the
Anglican missionary organisation, the Church Missionary Society
(CMS), which are held in Birmingham University Library. There,
besides uncovering some useful information about the events of
1921–22, including a report by the Reverend James Lea, I also found
detailed records relating to an ongoing struggle for power and influence
between the missionaries and the local Bhil healers – the buvas or
bhopas. The missionaries depicted these herbalists, diviners and exor-
cists as agents of Satan. I was already familiar with some excellent
recent studies of the history of medicine in colonial India, and could see
immediately that the mission records provided a dimension to this
history that had so far been largely ignored, for this work had focused
[4]

INTRODUCTION
largely on doctors of the colonial medical service and state initiatives.12

In fact, David Arnold had noted that ‘the extent to which missionaries
were successful disseminators of Western medical ideas and practices
in India remains, for the present, a matter of speculation as it has yet to
receive serious scholarly attention’.13 Megan Vaughan had similarly
stated in her pathbreaking book on colonial medicine in Africa that
much of the literature ‘is strangely silent on the activities of mission
doctors and nurses’.14 This all encouraged me to embark on the research
that forms the subject of this book.
Although the research was thus framed initially as an exercise in
medical history, I soon found from my reading of the archives that the
‘medicine’ provided by the missionaries encompassed far more than
just treatment for physical illness. What they were providing, rather,
was an all-round therapy that was designed to ‘civilise’ the supposedly
‘primitive’ Bhils, bringing them into the light of a Christian moder-
nity.15 The ‘medicine’ of the title of this book should be understood in
terms of this wider exercise undertaken by the missionaries. For them,
healing was a part of this modernising process.
Because I wanted to understand how this practice worked itself out
over a relatively long period of time, and because I wanted to elucidate
the relationship between missionaries and a discreet subaltern com-
munity, I decided to focus on just the one mission, that of the CMS
mission to the Bhils of the area I had visited in 1997. It begins with the
opening of the mission in 1880 and ends in 1964, when key white mis-
sionaries had left and the mission’s showpiece hospital was closed
down. It is not claimed that this particular history was necessarily
typical of the medical work of missions elsewhere in India or in other
parts of the world. This will have to be determined through further case
studies. A start in this direction has been made already in a volume that
I have edited on medical missions in Africa and Asia.16
Christian modernity
Over the past two centuries, the modernising project that was launched
in Europe at the time of the Enlightenment has undergone many trans-
formations. Associated initially with science, rationality and the fight
against religious superstition, it became transformed into a political
struggle for liberty, equality and fraternity at the time of the French
Revolution. In Britain, at the same time, it became associated with a
modernising Christian evangelicalism that, while largely accepting the
Newtonian and Cartesian understandings of the world, reserved a place
for God over and above the natural forces that He had, it was said,
created and set in motion. Evangelicals were at the forefront of British
[5]

radical politics, as anti-slavery campaigners and electoral reformers.

They were also deeply involved, as missionaries, in the project of colo-
nial expansion, which was one of the foremost defining features of
British power at that time.17 In this respect, missionaries were in their
day and society the most modern of men and women.
There is a certain teleology that suggests that the modernity of the
Christian missionary was a retrogressive and relatively transient form
of this historical process, for modernity was associated above all with
the ‘transition from a religious to a secular culture’.18 From Max Weber
onwards, sociologists have declared that secularism is the inevitable
outcome of the process set in motion by the Enlightenment and its
accompanying revolutions. In fact, it was just one important strand to
modernity. Championed with increasing success by radical liberals and
socialists in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twent-
ieth century, it became a major feature of Western culture only during
the latter part of the twentieth.19 Today, by contrast, secularism appears
everywhere to be on the retreat, as modern American evangelicals
champion a supposed global battle against Islam, modern Muslims
embrace Wahhabi fundamentalism (and, if female, adopt the hijab), and
modern Hindus demand the eradication of Islam in India. Throughout
the globe, diasporic minorities create communities for themselves out
of transformed religious identities.20 Because of this, we have little
choice but to reject the teleology of Weberian sociology in favour of a
definition of modernity as a process of continuing dialectical engage-
ment between the religious and the secular. This dialectic was founda-
tional to the Enlightenment, being there from the start of the modern
era, and although both sides have shifted their ground considerably over
time, it has never been, and perhaps never can be, transcended within
the framework of modernity as we know it.
Seen in such terms, evangelical Christianity was a thoroughly
modern project. It was one in which an emerging middle class in Britain
sought to create a ‘New Jerusalem’ of Christian civilisation, something
that was taken as being universally desirable. Members of this class
believed that they had a moral duty to evangelise and reform the
peoples of not only their own nation, but also those of other countries
and clines. As Marx pointed out: ‘a definite class, proceeding from its
particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society.
This class emancipates the whole of society but only provided the
whole of society is in the same situation as this class’.21 In other words,
the conversion to bourgeois modernity involved a long drawn-out
process of educating the masses to become like the middle class, a
process that included the inculcation of values such as self-help,
sobriety, representative governance, thrift and profitable enterprise.
[6]

INTRODUCTION
For middle-class evangelicals, the labouring poor of their own nation as

well as the heathen masses of other parts of the world could become
truly ‘civilised’ only – and indeed Christian – through a process of
purging their existing cultures and internalising such values. For these
ends, evangelicals established missions, both within their own coun-
tries and overseas, that were designed to win the sympathy of the
masses and then educate them in the mores of the new ‘civilisation’
and thus integrate them within the newly created public sphere. In this
way, bourgeois modernity would be universalised.
Once this vision was in place, strategies were evolved to win mass
support. As Marx noted, the middle class had to arouse:
a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which
it fraternises and merges with society in general, become confused with
it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative; a
moment in which its demands and rights are truly the rights and demands
of society itself; a moment in which it is truly the social head and the
social heart.22
In Britain, this enthusiasm was stimulated not only through the social
and political attack on the monarchy and landed gentry, but also
through evangelical fervour, seen most notably in John Wesley’s
Methodist movement. In India, the British had banned Christian mis-
sionaries up until 1813, but allowed them entry thereafter not only
because of strong evangelical pressure from within Britain, but also
because many evangelical administrators came to believe that the exist-
ing religions of the subcontinent acted as a profound barrier to the thor-
oughgoing modernisation of its peoples. While the Utilitarians on the
whole preferred to try to carry out this task through a secular system of
English education, the evangelical administrators believed that the only
effective and lasting remedy lay in mass conversion to Christianity.23
Once the project of evangelical modernity shifted to the overseas
colonies, it took on a new, additional, dimension: that of the colonial.
As Partha Chatterjee has argued, colonialism operated in the name of
modernity, but it also imposed what he calls ‘a rule of colonial differ-
ence’, in which conditions and practices were imposed that continually
countered the attempts made by the colonised subjects who had
embraced this modernity to achieve a state of equality with their colo-
nial masters.24 Unlike the working class of the home countries, whose
members could potentially attain full membership of the middle class
through their own endeavours, the racially different and supposedly
inferior peoples of the colonies were seen to lack certain crucial quali-
ties that might fit them for such a status. They were perceived, in other
words, to be fit only to be subordinates, under the authority and control
[7]

of white superiors.25 This ‘rule of colonial difference’ was imposed in

its most blatant form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, coinciding with both the consolidation of Social Darwinist
theory and missionary activity. Indeed, it may be argued that mission-
aries had prepared the ground for the wider reception of Social
Darwinism, as from the start they had seen their task as one of ‘civil-
ising the savage’. In their widely circulated writings, they always made
a point of emphasising the ‘primitivism’ of the ‘backward’ natives
amongst whom they laboured, placing missionaries in a position in
which only they were considered to have the moral and intellectual
backbone to guide each community of converts to Christianity.
Because of this, the ‘conversion to modernity’ was textured in a
markedly different way in colonial territories.
This book, which focuses on the medical work of Protestant mis-
sionaries in India, becomes therefore a study of a particular form of
civilising enterprise undertaken by evangelical Christians that became
something else within the colonial context. At home, the cultural dis-
tance between middle-class evangelicals and the subordinate classes
was much less pronounced than it was in the colonies. In Britain, the
members of both groups had not long before shared a subordinate
status, and the two therefore had much in common. In the colonies,
Christian evangelists encountered peoples whose language, culture and
religious beliefs were both alien and hard to grasp, and they commonly
took this as a marker of a profound racial difference.26 As the colonised
were seen to embody a range of defective qualities, such as ‘low intel-
ligence’, ‘childishness’, ‘irrationality’, ‘superstition’ and ‘immorality’,
as well as a whole range of other failings, the missionary was placed in
a position of having to always act for the native convert. Education
might bring the convert to a certain level, but never so far as to make
the white missionary redundant. How the missionaries sought to
maintain their role in this respect after the emergence of a powerful
nationalist movement in India, the juncture at which they conceded
defeat, and the implications of that defeat for their subjects – the
Christian converts – will be one of the questions that I shall examine.
The mission clinic

There was from the start a medical sub-theme to the mission project.
From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a small number of
middle-class evangelical doctors had established medical missions in
urban centres to provide medical treatment for the poor at a moderate
cost. This work was pioneered in Edinburgh, where the first charitable
dispensaries had been opened for the sick poor in 1776 and was followed
[8]

INTRODUCTION
by others in later years.27 By demonstrating their concern and compas-

sion for suffering and sick inferiors, evangelical doctors and medical
students sought to create bonds of sympathy that would win the hearts
and minds of those they treated. In this, they saw themselves as tread-
ing in the path of Christ the healer.
In setting this agenda, a base was laid for future medical work by mis-
sionaries in colonial territories. The middle-class evangelical doctors of
cities like Edinburgh were however pioneers, and their approach did not
become a part of mainstream missionary work for nearly a century. In
general, dissenting Christians distrusted the medical profession for its
dubious methods and association with rich clients. John Wesley thus
believed that doctors tended to obfuscate an understanding of the true
principles of health, and he held a generally low opinion of them.28 He
preached that moral salvation lay in bodily hygiene, a clean house, a
temperate life and an ordered and industrious daily routine. As he once
stated: ‘Every one that would preserve health should be as clean and
sweet as possible in their houses, clothes and furniture.’29 He claimed
his own healing arts to be superior, and was in the habit of prescribing
for his sick followers a range of folk remedies – such as powdered toads,
cowdung plasters and live puppies on the belly – along with the power
of prayer.30 Doctors, in return, were similarly disdainful of Wesley’s
methods. In contrast to the old aristocracy – which was obsessed with
heredity and ‘blood’ – the assertive new middling orders were con-
cerned above all with maintaining their own health and fitness, both
physical and moral.31
Evangelicals often depicted paganism as a sickness of both mind and
body, requiring an all-round therapy administered by a man of God. The
‘natives’ of the European colonies were seen as a source of moral and
physical contamination and infection. This being the case, illness
hardly required the attention of a medical man; any godly person who
understood the rudimentary principles of hygiene and sanitation was in
a position to bring health to the ‘natives’ by cleansing their bodies with
soap and their minds with the Gospel.
Another cause of the antipathy amongst mission organisations
at that time towards any strongly focused medical work was that
European medicine – as then practised by physicians, surgeons and
apothecaries – was not at all efficacious in the colonies. Indeed, the
treatment resorted to by such practitioners was frequently more iatro-
genic than curative. Purgatives and emetics were prescribed frequently
and lancing was used to extract blood or drain pustules to cleanse the
body of what were seen to be accumulations of noxious substances or
to correct its ‘nervous tone’. When treating malaria, for example, David
Livingstone administered strong purgatives that were designed to
[9]

cleanse the body of the ‘noxious miasmas’ that had been supposedly
ingested.32 European doctors also dressed wounds and carried out some
basic surgery, such as amputations, excisions and teeth pulling. With
uncertain hygiene, such procedures could provide an entry for danger-
ous infections. The secretary of the CMS had good reason to wonder in
1851 ‘whether a missionary does not lose rather than gain influence
with the natives by the exercise of medical knowledge’.33
This situation was however changing. Some doctors of Edinburgh,
true to their vanguard reputation, were involved in establishing the
first medical missionary society in Europe – the Edinburgh Medical
Missionary Society of 1841. In the early years they found it extremely
hard to recruit physicians to serve as missionaries. They nonetheless
set an agenda for work that was beginning to attract more widespread
support.34 In an influential essay written for this society in 1854,
W. Burns Thomson argued that Jesus had urged his followers to ‘Heal
and Preach’. Healing, he wrote, provided an entry into the hearts and
minds of ‘simple people’ who, like children, were often taught best by
objective demonstration. In this way the rationality and science of the
time could contribute towards the spread of Christianity.35
This intervention came at a time when Western medicine was gaining
a new status and sense of moral direction. In Britain, the Medical Act of
1858 allowed for greater regulation of the profession by creating a regis-
ter of doctors, from which incompetent practitioners could be struck
off.36 Policies of public hygiene and the implementation of preventive
health measures were bringing observable benefits, and breakthroughs
were being made in surgery. As the Comaroffs have noted, medicine
began to compete with the church as the guardian of public and private
health.37 Missionary organisations responded to this development by
trying to keep a foot in both camps – the spiritual and the medical.
It was claimed that Jesus had been ‘the ideal medical missionary’. ‘He
is the Founder and Patron of medical missions; and He has given us an
example that we should follow in His steps.’ It was argued that all the
diseases and disabilities mentioned in the New Testament abounded in
the ‘heathen lands’ of the day. Everywhere the crippled and diseased
could be seen – the lepers, the maimed, the paralysed, the blind, those
scourged by plague – providing a harrowing sight that the inhabitants of
the ‘civilised’ nations were spared. In such an environment, the mission
doctors could through their skill carry out what seemed to be ‘marvels
of healing’. As the ‘battle front of the Church’ was in ‘the heathen lands’,
the best doctors and surgeons were needed for this great work, and
medical colleges were needed to train Christian doctors.38
Closer relationships were fostered between churches and the
medical profession. The Christian Medical Association had been
[ 10 ]

INTRODUCTION
founded in 1853 to encourage an active faith amongst doctors in Britain.

This and its successor organisation from 1874, the Medical Prayer
Union, worked actively with medical students, encouraging them to
study the Bible and pray regularly. In some medical colleges up to a
quarter of all students attended its meetings.39 The Student Christian
Movement had a similarly strong medical following – of its members
in 1893, 38 per cent were medical students.40 Young Christian doctors
were often moved by a desire to do good in the world, and they saw their
medical work as providing a means to this end. At the same time as the
medical profession was expanding vigorously in size and prestige, a
career in the church was fast falling from favour.41 Despite this, recruit-
ment for missionary work remained buoyant in the last three decades
of the nineteenth century, and this was due in no small part to the new
emphasis on engaging qualified doctors. Many such doctors might not
have found such fulfilling employment in Britain, especially as the
medical profession was becoming overstocked at that time.
This development was consolidated by a spate of new medical
missionary societies. The Medical Missionary Association, which was
established in London in 1878, provided grants for potential medical
missionaries to study medicine, and it opened a hostel for their residence
in the city while they studied.42 The New York Medical Missionary
Society (later the International Medical Missionary Society) was founded
in 1881, with a dispensary being opened in 1882. It also provided funding
to students undergoing training, and the first of them graduated in 1884.
Dr Martyn Scudder, who had been a medical missionary in India,
founded the American Medical Missionary Society in Chicago in 1885.
In Germany, the Medical Missionary Society of Stuttgart was founded in
1898 as an auxiliary of the Basel Missionary Society.43
Until the 1870s, no hard-and-fast distinction was made between the
evangelical and the medical missionary. Many medically unqualified
missionaries turned their hand to medical work, believing that for Jesus
and the apostles healing and ministry went together. Indeed, in Britain
before the Medical Act of 1858, just about anyone could call themselves
a doctor if they so wished. Thereafter, there was a growing regulation of
the profession. This process led to the emergence of a clear demarcation
between careers in medicine and the church, and a clear distinction
began accordingly to be made between the evangelical and the medical
missionary. Although many medically unqualified missionaries contin-
ued to provide rudimentary medical care as a part of their work, such
people were no longer considered to be ‘medical missionaries’. This title
was now reserved in missionary parlance for those who had full medical
training and qualifications. In this way, medically qualified missionar-
ies distanced themselves from untrained missionary practitioners. They
[ 11 ]

were, nonetheless, expected to have some theological training, to know

their Bible and engage in evangelism to some extent.44 This all created
a demand for medically qualified missionaries.
The numbers of medical missionaries grew rapidly. In 1858 there
had been only 7 in India and China together; the total rose to 28 in
1882, 140 in 1895, and 280 in 1905. By the 1890s there were 680 med-
ically qualified Protestant missionaries working worldwide, of whom
338 were American, 288 British, 27 Canadian, 7 Australian, and 20
from continental Europe. By 1916 the Protestant medical mission
force worldwide had grown to 1,052 doctors and 537 nurses. Of these
doctors 40 per cent were serving in China and 27 per cent in India,
while 24 per cent of missionary nurses were in China and 20 per cent
in India. By 1916, missionaries in India were running 183 hospitals
and 376 dispensaries, which treated over 1,250,000 million patients
each year.45
The standard view of such work within Protestant missionary circles
in the late nineteenth century was that it was not carried out for a
purely medical purpose, but used as a beneficent means to spread
Christianity. It was carried out where most converts could be won, not
necessarily where the need was greatest. Treatment was seen to put
people in a receptive frame of mind to the message of the Gospel.46 The
mission dispensary and hospital were designed to act like a ‘magnet’,
drawing patients from near and far to the missionaries. It also demon-
strated that Christians practised what they preached, in a way that
emphasised the superiority of their religion.47
It was also seen to be an invaluable resource in challenging ‘heathen’
systems of belief. As one advocate argued in 1886: ‘In India, China,
Africa, Madagascar and in almost every heathen land, crude systems of
medicine are intimately associated with the religions of the people, and
the treatment of disease, such as it is, is monopolised by the priests, or
by others under their control.’48 Missionaries, by providing an alterna-
tive and more effective medicine, could break the hold of such priests
and healers. In the words of another campaigner:
It follows, therefore, that no more fatal blow can be dealt at this awful
evil, cursing alike body and soul, than by proving by living demonstration
the fallacy, fatuity, and powerlessness of the superstitious methods of
treatment employed by the medicine man. Destroy the faith of the non-
Christian man in his ‘doctor’ and you have very frequently taken the
surest and simplest course towards the destruction of his faith in the
superstition of his religion.49
Heathenism, in other words, had to be attacked on the medical as

well as the religious front, with Christianity providing an alternative
[ 12 ]

INTRODUCTION
system of belief and practice that provided for all needs – physical and
spiritual.
Medical missionaries were not, however, expected to heal in a mirac-
ulous way by casting out evil spirits or practising supernatural healing,
as the Gospels had shown Jesus doing. Protestant theologians largely
followed the doctrine of dispensationalism, which held that God gave
a dispensation for miracles for only a limited time and purpose. Both
Luther and Calvin had propounded this theory. Luther, for example,
held that the day of miracles had passed, and that now the Gospel stood
revealed, all that was necessary was to preach it. As he stated: ‘now that
the apostles have preached the Word and have given their writings, and
nothing more than what they have written remains to be revealed, no
new and special revelation or miracle is necessary’.50 Calvin stated sim-
ilarly that ‘The gift of healing disappeared with the other miraculous
powers which the Lord was pleased to give for a time, that it might
render the new preaching of the gospel for ever wonderful. Therefore,
even were we to grant that anointing was a sacrament of those powers
which were then administered by the hands of the apostles, it pertains
not to us, to whom no such powers have been committed.’51
This doctrine informed the medical mission upsurge of the late nine-
teenth century. It was held that the display of divine power through mir-
acles had been appropriate for its time, but in modern times God
required a higher form of belief, that of faith by ‘they that have not seen,
and yet have believed’.52 Modern Christians would accordingly be in
error if they sought to emulate the healing practices of the Jesus of the
Gospels. Mission theologians argued that such miraculous cures were
not central to Jesus’ ministry, for he had performed them out of a sense
of compassion, not to impress or win converts.53 In contemporary times,
it was argued, miracle-workers were generally charlatans, and their sup-
posed cures fraudulent.54 They accepted, however, that it was wholly
legitimate to pray for the recovery of a patient. As it was, in missionary
reports from the field there was often considerable ambiguity over
whether or not a cure came through medical intervention or prayer.
The prevailing Protestant missionary hostility towards supernatural
healing was above all the product of a class history, for there had always
been a tension in practice between the stern theologies of Luther, Calvin
and their successors and a popular Christianity based on a belief in
supernatural intervention in everyday life. In Britain, for example, dis-
senting groups had emerged during the seventeenth-century revolution
that believed in supernatural healing. George Fox, founder of the
Quakers, is recorded as having carried out frequent cures of this kind
from the late 1640s onwards.55 The Anglican hierarchy had sought to
dampen such enthusiasm after the Restoration of 1660 as they feared
[ 13 ]

that such practices might give rise to a dangerous populism that not
only would undermine church discipline, but could cause wider social
disruption if allowed to flourish.56 Even William Booth, the founder of a
denomination – the Salvation Army – that was known for its evangel-
ical enthusiasm, and who was himself sceptical of modern medicine,
refused to countenance any supernatural healing, on the grounds that it
tended to be associated with ‘one or another form of fanaticism’. Stuart
Mews has argued that he, in common with the leaders of other churches,
feared that such charismatic practices by lower-level clerics or members
of the laity would undermine their ecclesiastical authority.57
There were certain features of the medical mission in colonial terri-
tories that distinguished it from both medical practice at home and
state-controlled medicine in the colonies. For a start, it was a latecomer
in the older colonial territories such as India, becoming important only
from the 1870s onwards. It was, as a result, informed by a strong sense
of biomedical superiority that was the product of the medical revolu-
tion of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with its breakthroughs in
surgery and its new understanding of disease causation and prevention.
Medical missionaries who were trained in medical schools in metro-
politan cities did not come burdened with any strong commitment to
environmental and miasmic theories of disease causation, as was the
case with many colonial medical officials.58 They were very sure of the
modernity of their practice, and had a correspondingly low view of
most indigenous forms of healing. Their medicine was held to be more
‘advanced’ than the healing practices of the natives, the assumption
being that – in common with ‘backward’ social systems in general –
these practices would decay and wither away as they were forced to
compete with the superior ‘scientific medicine’ of the West.
Nonetheless, although the mission doctors considered their medi-
cine to be ‘scientific’, theirs was not a purely secular practice, for unlike
many lay biomedical practitioners, they maintained that there was a
psychosomatic dimension to healing. This, however, did not lie in the
realms of exorcism, miracle healing or other forms of pagan ceremony,
but came about through prayer and faith in God. For them medical con-
cepts could still be expressed quite validly through religious metaphors.
As Rhodri Heywood has emphasised, religious traditions and move-
ments appropriated biomedicine, and their language in turn influenced
it:
Although there have been persistent attempts to revise and mathematise
the language of medicine, the modern discipline still reveals rich traces
of its religious inheritance. Neurology is still permeated by Christian
notions of order and hierarchy whilst modern pathological concepts of
viruses and germs remain rooted in the magical language of agency.59
[ 14 ]

INTRODUCTION
Christian medicine and its psychosomatic method was nonetheless to

be distinguished sharply from heathen forms of healing practised by
priests and ‘witchdoctors’, which were labelled as false and demonical,
being paths to damnation rather than salvation. The Christian Self was
thus counterpoised to the Satanic Other. This could give rise to the use
of vivid and provocative imagery in the writings of missionaries, as we
shall see in the course of this book.
‘English’ medicine
To conclude this introduction, I would like to say something about the
differences between the metropolitan and Indian experiences of modern
medicine. In Europe and America the medical establishment was able
with considerable success to project its practice – hegemonically – as the
only ‘scientific’ and thus valid form of healing. In India, by contrast, a
strong distinction continued to be maintained throughout the colonial
period – and indeed to this day – between the practice of healing that
came with the British, and other indigenous forms of healing. Historians
of medicine have tended to label the former ‘biological medicine’ – or
‘biomedicine’ for short – with the focus being on the bacterial element
to disease and its curing through remedial drugs, or the prevention of
bacterial infection through immunisation and sanitation. These were
certainly core features of the Western system of medicine from the later
part of the nineteenth century onwards. The term ‘biomedicine’ is not
however commonly used in India, the preferred one being ‘allopathy’.
This term, which originated in the early nineteenth century, focused on
the way in which drugs were commonly used in mainstream European
medicine to attack and overwhelm a malady. The term was devised by
the inventor of homeopathy, Hahnemann, who sought to distinguish his
practice from that of the majority of medical practitioners of his day. In
India, however, the term was applied generally to distinguish colonial
forms of medical treatment from indigenous methods of medical knowl-
edge and care, such as the Ayurvedic and Yunani Tibb systems of med-
icine. It might be argued that neither ‘biomedicine’ nor ‘allopathy’ is
entirely appropriate, as another of the core features of Western medicine
was that of surgery involving the application of sophisticated and ever-
evolving technologies. As Nancy Rose Hunt has pointed out in her study
of a medical mission in the Belgian Congo, surgery was for many
‘natives’ the defining feature of such practice, though in the Congo they
hardly viewed the surgeon in a flattering light. Rather, they looked on
with extreme unease as mission doctors wielded their knives over their
anaesthetised patients. Peering through the windows of the operating
theatre, they were reminded of the missionary dinner table; in both
[ 15 ]

cases they could see the missionaries gathered around a table to perform
what appeared an intense ritual. Rumours even spread that surgical
patients were being slaughtered and prepared as food for Europeans.60 In
India, the common perception of Western medicine often focused in a
congruent manner on the figure of the white-coated doctor with stetho-
scope hanging around the neck and surgical knife in hand, with the
system as a whole being known as daktari, or ‘doctory’.61 In the region
that forms of subject of this study it was however generally distin-
guished by its place of supposed origin, being known as in some cases
vilayati dava, that is, ‘foreign medicine’, or Angreji dava – ‘English
medicine’.62 What matters here is not so much the particular definition,
but the fact that it had a profoundly symbolic quality. An important
feature of the system of medicine practised by Europeans and Americans
in a colonial context was therefore that it was understood in terms of a
difference that set it apart from indigenous practice. Also, it required
people to define themselves in terms of whether they accepted or
rejected it. The provision and acceptance of the ‘English’ therapy was
always, in consequence, far more than just a medical matter.
Notes
11 C. S. Thompson, ‘Report on Bheel Mission, Kherwara’, The Church Missionary
Intelligencer and Record: A Monthly Journal of Missionary Information (hereafter
Intelligencer), 7 NS (October 1882), 592.
12 Ibid., pp. 591–2.
13 NAI, FD, Pol. A 25–39, April 1881; Pol. A 137–9, April 1881; Pol. A 311–13, August
1881.
14 A. Wingate, 26 April 1881, NAI, FD, Pol. A 311–13, August 1881.
15 Thompson, ‘Report on Bheel Mission, Kherwara’, 592.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., pp. 592–3.
18 Ibid., pp. 593.
19 Ibid.
10 This will be examined in Chapter 9. I have written up this history more fully in ‘A
Forgotten Massacre: Motilal Tejawat and his Movement amongst the Bhils’, in
David Hardiman, Histories for the Subordinated (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2006), pp. 29–56.
11 Interview with Peter Galji Bhanat, Samaiya village, Sabarkantha District, 15
December 1997.
12 Most noteworthy are David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and
Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley: California University
Press, 1993); Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian
Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
13 Arnold, Colonizing the Body, p. 244.
14 Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991), p. 55. Similarly, see Norman Etherington, ‘Education and
Medicine’, in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 280.
15 On Christian evangelism and modernity, see Peter Van der Veer, ‘Introduction’, in
P. Van der Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity
(New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 7–13.
[ 16 ]

INTRODUCTION
16 David Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and
Africa (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi 2006).
17 On this, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:
Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 14–15. See also Peter Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters:
Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), pp. 3–54.
18 Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Hall, David
Held and Tony McGrew (eds.), Modernity and its Futures (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1993), p. 2.
19 As suggested by Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding
and Secularisation 1800–2000 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001).
20 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 6–9.
21 Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, in Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 3: Works of Karl Marx, March 1843–August
1844, ed. Lev Goilman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 184. Emphasis in
original.
22 Ibid., p. 184. Emphasis in original.
23 For this debate, see Gauri Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and
British Rule in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).
24 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 10.
25 Ibid., p. 19.
26 Anna Johnston has thus pointed out how many missionaries were deeply disturbed
by the different gender roles assumed by indigenous women, as they had taken these
roles to be natural and given. They saw this as proof of their savagery. A. Johnston,
Missionary Writings and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p. 54.
27 J. V. Pickstone, ‘Establishment and Dissent in Nineteenth-Century Medicine’, in
W. J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 170–
4; and John Wilkinson, The Coogate Doctors: The History of the Edinburgh Medical
Missionary Society 1841 to 1991 (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh Medical Missionary
Society, 1991), p. 22.
28 Pickstone, ‘Establishment and Dissent’, p. 171.
29 Quoted in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2: The
Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), p. 336.
30 Henry D. Rack, ‘Doctors, Demons and Early Methodist Healing’, in Sheils (ed.), The
Church and Healing, pp. 139 and 143–4.
31 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984), pp. 124–5.
32 Comaroff, and Comaroff Of Revelation and Revolution, 2, p. 357 and pp. 497–8
n. 55.
33 C. Peter Williams, ‘Healing and Evangelism: The Place of Medicine in Later
Victorian Protestant Missionary Thinking’, in Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing,
p. 272.
34 Wilkinson, Coogate Doctors, pp. 1–3, 6–7.
35 Thomson’s article is summarised in Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and
Revolution, 2, p. 332.
36 Williams, ‘Healing and Evangelism’, p. 273.
37 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2, p. 325.
38 All the quotations in this paragraph are from Dr C. F. Strange, ‘The Raison d’Être of
Medical Missions’, Mercy and Truth (February 1921), 33–4.
39 ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Christian Medical Association the Predecessor of the
Medical Prayer Union’, Medical Missions at Home and Abroad, 1 (July 1878), 3–4.
The London School of Medicine for Women had a flourishing Bible and Prayer Union
[ 17 ]

at this time. See Antoinette Burton, ‘Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make
“Lady Doctors for India” ’, Journal of British Studies, 35:3 (1996), 379.
40 Williams, ‘Healing and Evangelism’, p. 278.
41 Ibid., p. 273.
42 Wilkinson, Coogate Doctors, pp. 22–3.
43 Ibid., p. 23.
44 Mercy and Truth (December 1911); Mercy and Truth (February 1912).
45 Rosemary Fitzgerald, ‘ “Clinical Christianity”: The Emergence of Medical Work as
a Missionary Strategy in Colonial India, 1800–1914’, in Biswamoy Pati and Mark
Harrison (eds.), Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India (New
Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001), p. 77 n. 10 and p. 67.
46 ‘Report by Drs. A. Lankester and A. H. Browne on the Suitability of the Peshawar
Valley for Medical Mission Work’, Mercy and Truth (October 1897), 219–21.
47 Dr A. Lankester, ‘Medical Mission in Theory’, Mercy and Truth (February 1900),
39–41.
48 J. Lowe, Medical Missions: Their Place and Power (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson
and Ferrier, 1886), p. 148; quoted in Fitzgerald, ‘Clinical Christianity’, p. 115.
49 R. Fletcher Moorshead, The Appeal of Medical Missions (Edinburgh: Oliphant,
Anderson and Ferrier, 1913), p. 76.
50 Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, Chapters 14–16, in Luther’s
Works (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), 24, p. 367, quoted in
Morton Kelsey, Healing and Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1995), p. 17.
51 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1953), VI 18, 2:636, quoted in Kelsey, Healing and Christianity, p. 17.
52 John 20:29, cited in this context by Robert Anderson, The Silence of God (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), pp. 153–4.
53 W. F. Buroughs, ‘Our Title’, Mercy and Truth, (January 1897), 2.
54 C. F. H., ‘Principles and Practices of Medical Mission’, Mercy and Truth (May 1912),
24–5.
55 Henry J. Cadbury, George Fox’s Book of Miracles (Cambridge: University of
Cambridge, 1949); David Hodges, George Fox and the Healing Ministry (Guildford:
Friends Fellowship of Healing, 1995).
56 Michael Macdonald, ‘Religion, Social Change and Psychological Healing in England
1600–1800’, in Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing, pp. 101–26.
57 Stuart Mews, ‘The Revival of Spiritual Healing in the Church of England 1920–26’,
in Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing, pp. 300–1.
58 On the survival of such theories within the Indian Medical Service up until the early
twentieth century, see Harrison, Public Health in British India, pp. 49–54, 108–15.
59 Rhodri Hayward, ‘Demonology, Neurology and Medicine in Edwardian Britain’,
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78:1 (2004), 58.
60 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and
Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). See in particular
Chapter 3, ‘Dining and Surgery’, pp. 117–58.
61 Neshat Quaiser, ‘Politics, Culture and Colonialism: Unani’s Debate with Doctory’,
in Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds.), Health, Medicine and Empire:
Perspectives on Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001), p. 317.
62 Helen Lambert, ‘Plural Traditions? Folk Therapeutics and “English” Medicine in
Rajasthan’, in Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (eds.), Western Medicine as
Contested Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 193.
[ 18 ]
CHAPTER TWO
The Bhils
While this book is framed around the study of a medical mission

between 1880 and 1964, it also provides a history of a subordinate
group, that of the Bhils of the hilly tracts on the borders between
modern-day Gujarat and Rajasthan. These people were never the
passive objects of missionary attention, and the missionaries had con-
stantly to adapt and modify their strategies to gain a response from
them. In many important ways, the Bhils can be seen as deploying the
missionaries as a resource to further their own desires and needs.
Furthermore, the conversion to Christianity had strong roots in an
earlier movement for self-purification, and in many respects the Bhil
Christians continued in this path despite the day-to-day pastoral care
exercised by the missionaries. Bhils may have disciplined themselves
to become good Christians, but it was Christianity on their own terms.
In this chapter, I shall examine their society, their history and their
healing practices. In the next chapter there will be a discussion of a
movement for Bhil self-reform under the guidance of an inspired leader
and healer called Surmaldas that preceded the coming of the mission-
aries and later gave rise to a major breakthrough for the missionaries
during the first decade of the twentieth century. The remainder of the
book will set out the history of the continuing, and often troubled,
interaction between the missionaries and the Bhils up until 1964.
This is not, therefore, only a history of missionaries and their medicine,
but also one of how certain Bhils forged their own relationship with
modernity.
Representations of the ‘primitive’

C. S. Thompson had come to work amongst the Bhils in 1880 in accor-
dance with a new strategy that the CMS was adopting at that time in
India. During the early nineteenth century, it had targeted higher-class
[ 19 ]

Hindus and Muslims, but with little success. In practice, the large
majority of converts were gained from groups who were considered to
be socially the most marginal – in particular the untouchables, but also
the tribals. Increasingly, missionaries focused their attention on such
groups. In the case of the tribals, it was held that they were aboriginals
of Dravidian origin who lacked the sophisticated scripture-based reli-
gion of the Aryans. Their ‘primitive’ beliefs – it was asserted – would
yield easily to Christianity once the truth of the Gospel had been
revealed to them. The strategy was rooted in a notion that religious
beliefs – in common with societies and modes of production – evolved
over time, from primitive animism, to religions with multiple deities,
such as Greco-Roman paganism and Hinduism, to Judaic and Islamic
monotheism, to Christianity, and, at the pinnacle, Protestantism. In
this section, I shall examine how the Bhils were made to fit into such
an evolutionary schema, and then in the rest of this chapter I shall say
something about them, their society, their beliefs and their healing
practices at that time.
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1886–1952) has examined
the separation made in European thought since the time of the
Enlightenment between those humans who were considered to be a
part of ‘history’ and those who belonged to the ‘inferior reality’ of
nature. The latter were:
men only zoologically, they are to be dominated. They may be tamed and
trained; when this proves impossible, they may be allowed to live on at
the fringes of civilization, without being the object of any of those cruel-
ties that must be avoided against any form of life, but being allowed as a
race to die out like those [native] American races who shrank and died . . .
when a civilization they could not withstand moved upon them.1
The British, when they conquered India, categorised in this manner a

range of disparate communities scattered over the subcontinent, in the
process creating for them a conceptual unity that they had never hith-
erto possessed. Those so singled out lived for the most part in the more
inaccessible hill and forest tracts, and survived largely from hunting
and gathering or rudimentary shifting agriculture. They were classed as
‘aboriginals’ or ‘early tribes’, being characterised, amongst other things,
by their ‘clan’-based systems of kinship and their ‘animistic’ religious
beliefs. Sometimes, they were defined in terms of their habitat, as
‘jungle tribes’.
In India, the largest concentrations of people so classed were in the
north-east. Elsewhere, many were found in the central-eastern region,
in what is now the state of Jharkhand and areas adjoining to it in Bengal,
Orissa and Bastar, and in a belt of western India running over the four
[ 20 ]

THE BHILS
modern Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and

Maharashtra.2 In this latter area, there were considered to be two main
types of such people – the so-called ‘Kaliparaj’ (‘black people’), who
were found in the southern part of this belt, and the Bhils. The former
were generally considered to be less aggressive than the latter. In many
cases, the Bhils had in the past been organised in warlike kinship groups
that had prevented outside rulers from extending their control over the
mountains. The British had subjugated such Bhils – with considerable
difficulty – during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even after-
wards, there were several revolts by them.
The British believed that they had a moral duty to ‘civilise’ these ‘prim-
itives’: to free them from the state of nature in which they were mired and
bring them within the ambit of ‘history’. They were encouraged to prac-
tise a more settled and intensive agriculture. In many cases, they were
excluded from large tracts of forest that they had previously controlled,
so that state foresters could exploit the timber wealth of the woodlands.3
Landlords, usurers and liquor dealers who were protected by the colonial
and princely states ruthlessly exploited those who became settled.4 A
large proportion of the tribal belt of western India was ruled by Indian
princes rather than directly by the British colonial state. Although nom-
inally independent, these princes relied on British troops and British-run
militias to maintain their control over their tribal subjects. This was
the case in Mewar and the adjoining princely states of Rajasthan and
Gujarat – the region that we are concerned with in this book – where the
tribal people were predominantly of the Bhil community.
James Tod, who served as Political Agent in Mewar from 1818 to
1822, stated that the ‘primitive inhabitants’ of that state were ‘content
to be called’ Bhumiputra (‘Sons of the Earth’) or Vanaputra (‘Children
of the Forest’). He saw them as a culturally distinct group.5 He also
described them as ‘lawless’ or ‘wild tribes’ who were being given too
much freedom by the princely rulers:
Had the wild tribes been under the sole influence of British power,
nothing would have been so simple as effectually, not only to control, but
to conciliate and improve them; for it is a mortifying truth, that the more
remote from civilization, the more tractable and easy to manage, more
especially the Bhil.6
Unfortunately, according to Tod, ‘these children of nature’ were in

these parts under the rule of oppressive feudal lords whose continuing
misrule caused frequent revolts.
The most influential of the earlier colonial texts relating to the Bhils
was John Malcolm’s A Memoir of Central India, published in 1823.
Malcolm, a general in the army of the East India Company, was sent in
[ 21 ]

1818 to establish British control over Malwa and southern Rajasthan.

He said that it was hard to know the Bhils, due to ‘their dispersion over
rugged mountains, their extreme ignorance and prejudices, and their
repugnance to confidential intercourse with all except their own tribe’.7
Despite this, he attempted ‘some conjectures regarding the origin and
progress of the tribe’. They were, he said, ‘a distinct race, insulated in
their abodes, and separated by their habits, usages, and forms of
worship, from the other tribes of India’.8 In the remote past they had
been expelled to the woods and hill after they had slaughtered the
favourite bull of the god Mahadev – a dire transgression in Hindu
society. They became Nishada, or outcastes. From that time on ‘they
have since dwelt, subsisting partly on their industry, but more on the
plunder of the rich landholders in their vicinity’.9 Although some had
settled down in the plains regions as peaceful cultivators, the ‘wild, or
mountain Bheel’ continued to prefer ‘savage freedom and indolence to
submission and industry, [and] have continued to subsist by plunder’.10
The plundering or wild Bheels, who reside among the hills, are a diminu-
tive and wretched-looking race, whose appearance shews [sic] the poverty
of their food; but they are nevertheless active and capable of great fatigue.
They are professed robbers and thieves, armed with bows and arrows: they
lie in wait for the weak and unprotected, while they flee from the strong.
Ignorant and superstitious to a degree, they are devoted to their Turwees
[chieftains], whose command is a law which they implicitly obey. The
men, and still more the women, have their intellect formed by their con-
dition; they are quick, have a kind of instinctive sense of danger, and are
full of art and evasion. To kill another when their Turwee desires, or to
suffer death themselves, appears to them a matter of indifference. The
whole race are illiterate, and they are, without exception, fond of tobacco
and liquor to excess. Their quarrels begin and end in drunken bouts . . .11
In Malcolm’s account, the ‘wild, or mountain’ Bhils were characterised

by their animal-like or feral traits, as seen in their undomesticated
habitat, their rudimentary and predatory forms of subsistence, their
instinctive rather than considered reactions, their proclivity towards
excess rather than a civilised moderation, their unreflective obedience
to the leader of the pack, their pre-religious amorality, their supersti-
tion and their complete lack of learning. In every way, they were the
mirror image of the civilised British, being a people that more than any
other had to be disciplined and civilised.
The missionaries who entered these territories later in the nine-
teenth century took such accounts as their guide. Thus, when the
journal of the CMS, the Intelligencer, published an article on the Bhils
in 1882, it reproduced large swathes of Malcolm’s text almost verbatim.
The unstated assumption was that as the Bhils existed in a state of
[ 22 ]

THE BHILS
nature, their condition would have remained largely unchanged since

1820. They were classed as ‘non-Aryans’, that is, as an aboriginal race
that was distinct from the later Aryan invaders who had driven then
into the hills.12 Even when the missionaries later provided more
detailed descriptions of the Bhils that were based on their own
enquiries and observations, they remained confined within these
mental parameters. C. S. Thompson thus argued in an article of 1897
that those amongst whom he worked were in fact of mixed race, being
descended in part from a pre-Aryan ‘primitive people’ of central India,
as well as from Mongolian tribes that entered India before 1500 BC, and
also from ‘predatory Rajput chiefs’ who had seized and married Bhil
women after about 1000 AD. In this way he sought to explain the fact
that he had observed many physical gradations amongst them, ‘from
the man who is almost a pure Rajput in complexion and physique to
the black and stunted inhabitant of the forest. Moreover, here and there
may be noticed features which are distinctly Mongolian. There can,
therefore, hardly be any doubt that the Bheels unite in themselves a
strain of these aboriginal, Mongolian, and Rajput stocks.’13 It is clear
from this passage that Thompson was unable to transcend a discourse
of racial identity that was both fanciful and insidious.
A feature of this discourse was that it conferred a homogenised iden-
tity on peoples who might be scattered over large regions, countries or
even continents. Thus, a variety of groups that lived in hills and forests
were categorised as ‘primitive tribes’ who were supposed to share
similar global characteristics. Viewed through such a lens, Bhils might
be seen to possess certain ‘negroid’ characteristics. An anonymous
British traveller in western India in the early 1820s thus described the
Bhils as ‘a short, thick-set people, with hideous countenances, flat
noses, and thick lips, but far less handsome and finely formed men than
the Africans; . . . they look stupid . . .. Their women are even more
hideous than the men.’14 Rudyard Kipling made a similar sort of
comparison over sixty years later on a visit to Mewar State, where he
had observed some Bhils whose speech, he claimed, ‘seems to possess
some variant of the Zulu click, which gives it a weird and unearthly
character’.15 In fact, the language of the Mewari Bhils was very close to
the neighbouring Gujarati, as was discovered by the missionaries when
they began to translate the Gospel for their benefit.
The Bhils – who were found throughout a belt of hills and mountains
in western India that stretched over 300 kilometres from north to south
and in places 150 kilometres from east to west – were all lumped
together as one unique ethnic and cultural category. It was assumed
that ‘the Bhil’ everywhere had practically identical traits, so that an
observation of a Bhil in one area could be taken to apply to all Bhils
[ 23 ]

everywhere. Thus, what John Malcolm had to say about the Bhils of
Malwa around 1820 was taken to apply to Bhils everywhere and at all
times. In many cases, a stereotypical model of ‘primitivism’ appears to
have been the starting point for a description, with observations being
recorded only when they accorded with it. This appears to have been
the case with one sweeping generalisation made about the Bhils by
the author of the Rajputana Gazetteer of 1879: ‘They are a dirty race.
The men wear their hair long, and hanging in uncombed masses over
their shoulders. The women are small and ugly’.16 Many counter-
observations might have been made – but they were not – as they would
have opposed the pre-conceived stereotype.
Given that this was the case, we are presented with a problem. With
our knowledge of these people in the past coming from such tainted
sources, is it possible for us to know anything about them that is more
than an objectionable caricature? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has raised
the question as to what extent, if any, the outside observer can represent
the subaltern.17 Given the chasm that exists between those who inhabit
a space of privilege and those who do not, any representation runs the
risk of being an exercise in bad faith. Too often, the outsider inflicts her
or his beliefs on the subaltern, whether these are of a racialist, religious,
conservative, nationalist, socialist, feminist, environmentalist or any
other bent. In such a situation, she feels, ‘the subaltern cannot speak’.18
Despite this, she goes on to argue that the outsider with a moral com-
mitment to the poor and oppressed may communicate across this
divide, so long as she or he steers clear of all ‘missionary claims’ – that
is avoids any assertion that the subaltern is endorsing any pre-conceived
ideological position.19 What is required above all is moral sympathy and
empathy. While endorsing this entirely, I would add that we also need
to locate the subaltern subject within a clearly defined space and his-
torical time. In this way, we may avoid the sweeping and ahistorical gen-
eralities that are commonly deployed in such descriptions.
In the rest of this chapter, I shall attempt to do this for the Bhils of
this book by locating my observations within such a finite area and
time, namely the tracts inhabited predominantly by Bhils that lay in
the princely states of Mewar and Dungapur in Rajasthan and the
immediately adjoining states of Idar and Pol in Gujarat – which were
the areas in which the CMS mission worked – in the second half of
the nineteenth century. The historically specific detail is valued
over the broad and ahistorical statement. From this base, we may then –
if we wish – go on to make comparative observations drawn from care-
fully defined subaltern groups elsewhere.
Following this, in researching this history, I have travelled through
the region and interviewed many women and men of the community,
[ 24 ]

THE BHILS
in the process gaining – so I hope – a sympathetic rapport with them. I

have also sought out documents from the past that were created in a
stated context, locality and situation and which are rich in detail.
Although they will inevitably give voice to the prejudices of the writer,
the detail should be sufficient to allow us to distinguish their particu-
lar prejudices and go on to provide a reading ‘against the grain’. My
starting point in this respect is an article written by Thomas Hendley
of the Indian Medical Service, who served as an assistant surgeon at the
small military hospital of the Mewar Bhil Corps at Kherwara during the
1870s. He was in daily contact with his Bhil patients, and he took an
active interest in them and their way of life. He also talked at length
with a local thakor, or feudal overlord, called Gambhir Sing. Major
Gunning, the commandant of the Bhil corps, read Hendley’s first draft
and added more details. The resulting forty-two-page account was pub-
lished in 1875.20
Before looking at this report, something needs to be said about the
Mewar Bhil Corps (MBC),21 as it was a critical element within the pol-
itics of this region at that time. It had been established in 1840, fol-
lowing the example of the Bhil corps established in 1825 in Khandesh,
Maharashtra, by James Outram. He and his successors had acted as a
new type of paternalistic overlord, learning the Bhils’ dialect, getting to
know their mountains intimately, hunting with them, participating in
their festivities and acting as an unofficial judiciary.22 Outram was pro-
moted in 1835 to be the Political Agent for the Mahi Kantha agency,
being in charge of overseeing the princely states in Gujarat bordering
Mewar and other parts of southern Rajasthan, some of which had large
Bhil populations. He soon found that these hills were almost com-
pletely out of the control of either the British or the Indian rulers.23
After considerable persuasion, the ruler of Udaipur, the Maharana,24
gave his consent to the establishment of a Bhil corps in his territory. Its
officers were British, with a few Indian soldiers posted from elsewhere
serving as non-commissioned officers in charge of the Bhils.25 Kherwara
was chosen as the headquarters because the Bhils of that immediate
area were considered somewhat less turbulent than those further into
the mountains. Kherwara – ‘the place of the kher tree’ – was about
eighty kilometres to the south of Udaipur on the main road to Gujarat.
It lay at an elevation of about 300 metres in a valley between hills.26
Recruitment began in late 1840, and soon about 400 Bhils had been
enrolled as sepoys (soldiers).27 About two-thirds of the costs were borne
by the British, about one-third by the Mewar State. A hospital was sanc-
tioned for the corps at Kherwara, and the first doctor arrived later in
1841.28 Another small hospital was set up at Kotada,29 in the west of the
Mewar hill tracts, when a subsidiary base for the Corps was established
[ 25 ]

there soon after. They predated the first clinics established by Mewar
State itself, the first of these being a dispensary opened in Udaipur in
1864. In 1869–70 a small hospital was opened at Kherwara for the civil
population that was maintained partly from a grant by the state and
partly from private subscriptions.30 Hendley was posted to Kherwara to
work as a doctor for the MBC in 1871.
Hendley – with his medical training – considered himself a man of
science, and during his long career in India he was to publish many
scholarly articles based on his observations of the people and the
country. In 1875 – still a junior doctor – he was in the vanguard of a new
scientific racialism that held that racial characteristics could be mea-
sured physically. The Anthropological Society of London, founded in
1863, was at that time propagating the theory that ‘savages’ were of a
different species from civilised Europeans, and some of its leading
figures sought to prove this by measuring and comparing the crania of
different peoples. Its racialist views were extremely popular in Britain
during the 1860s and 1870s.31 Hendley’s posting to Kherwara provided
him with an excellent opportunity to carry out what he called an ‘eth-
nology’ of the Bhils that was based on observations of their physical
characteristics and measurements. He did this in 1874, subjecting 129
soldiers of the corps to his measuring tape, recording their height, the
length of various limbs and parts of limbs, body proportions and head
dimensions. He concluded that they were ‘a small-handed race’, with
small chest and pelvis. The head measurements revealed that ‘the Bhil
skull is but slightly dolicho-cephalic, very different from the long thin
walled crania of the pure Hindu.’ He set out his observations of their
physical appearance – their dark skin, straight black hair, foreheads
that were ‘rather more square than amongst Hindus’, ‘nose slightly
retroussé, broad, clubbed at the tip, and rather more varied than the
dead level organ of the Hindu,’ ‘mouths large, lips thick, inexpressive,
sensual’, ‘expression amiable, but timid’, ‘the dilated large nostrils, the
moveable and prominent ear are very suggestive of distrust’. Teeth were
large and horselike, adapted to chewing their staple food of coarse
maize. He was not sure that his measurements provided a ‘certain
proof’ that the Hindu and Bhil races were distinct, though he believed
that they were, the Bhils most likely being descendants of the ancient
inhabitants of India, the Dasyas, who were described in the Vedas as
‘goat-nosed, the noseless, the black-skinned’.32 For all its seeming sci-
entific rigour, this exercise dripped with moral judgement.
Despite this, the detail in other parts of the article is sufficient to
allow us to go beyond such racialist stereotypes. The ‘ethnology’ that
is so objectionable to present-day sensibilities was set out in the article
only towards the end, with a range of far less value-loaded descriptions
[ 26 ]

THE BHILS
of the Bhils of the Kherwara area preceding it. It is these that I shall look
at, comparing them with other representations if necessary.
According to Hendley, the Mewar Bhils inhabited the southernmost
ranges of the Aravali Mountains of Rajasthan. This was ‘a wonderfully
interlaced series of hills, alternating with defiles, with barely a valley,
much less a plain anywhere. Streams pour down every ridge to feed the
numerous rivers’.33 The hilltops were often forested, with much teak
and bamboo and a dense undergrowth. Around Kherwara, however, the
hilltops were bare. In this region, the Bhils lived in discrete territories
called pals that consisted of a collection of houses scattered widely over
an area, houses being sometimes up to a kilometre apart. Hendley men-
tioned one such pal – Burla – which had a thousand houses and which
occupied a considerable stretch of territory.34 A house was normally
built on the side of a hill at an elevated spot, allowing the inhabitant to
escape quickly into the hills if an enemy approached. A platform was
constructed of stones and earth, and the walls were built of stone, with
a roof of tiles supported by timber beams. These buildings were,
Hendley said, ‘substantial, commodious, and clean, often having a
courtyard in the centre’. In general, high-caste people did not reside in
the pals, but in the village of the local lord – the thakor. These latter
places consisted of the thakor’s fort, erected on a small hill and sur-
rounded by houses, all of which was enclosed by a wall.35
Although the Bhils were often described stereotypically as poor and
slovenly farmers, practising only a rudimentary shifting agriculture
(this being something they were seen to have in common with ‘primi-
tive tribes’ everywhere), Hendley’s account reveals a very different
reality. He describes how they erected walls of stone and earth across
the valleys, creating series of interlinked fields through which rainwa-
ter flowed. These permanent fields were planted with rice, maize and
other crops. They created temporary fields on the hillsides by burning
debris from the forest on a patch that they then enclosed with a rough
hedge of thorns so as to keep animals out. When the rains came, they
ploughed this land and sowed seeds broadcast. Maize was the chief
crop. It may be noted that this was an American staple introduced to
India by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and it is likely that its
drought-resistant qualities had allowed for a considerable extension of
cultivation in these dry tracts – and a greater population density – in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Bhils kept cows and
goats, which the women would take into the hills to graze. The number
of cattle owned was considered an indicator of a family’s wealth.36 They
ate meat of most kinds, relishing goat in particular, and not eating pork
and beef. Hendley felt that they would have eaten beef if they dared,
but: ‘Some time since a Thakor cut off the legs of two eaters of the
[ 27 ]

sacred cow and plunged the stumps into boiling oil.’37 Bhil men hunted
for food, being excellent trackers and particularly adept at killing hares
or catching fish.38
Bhils could earn cash by taking grass, wood, honey and ghee for sale
to villages and towns where there were caste Hindus. They used the
money to purchase ornaments, arrows and various necessities that they
could not make themselves, as well as liquor. Both men and women
enjoyed a drink, though men tended to consume more than women.
The liquor (daru) was distilled from the flower of the mahuda tree and
was known locally as phul daru, or ‘flower liquor’. Families were con-
sidered to have a right to each mahuda tree, however remote it might
be in the forest. Hendley found the liquor to be rather weak in alcoholic
strength; he had had to re-distil it twice before it would burn a spirit
lamp.39
The overall ruler of the Mewar Bhils was the Maharana. A few were
directly subject to him, but most lived in the estates of the thakors –
his feudatories. The thakors were meant to pay a proportion of their
income to the state, and were also obliged to provide horsemen and foot
soldiers when the Maharana demanded it. According to Hendley, they
were mostly pure Rajputs, though a few were of ‘mixed race’, being
descended from the union of Bhil women and Rajput men, though they
still claimed Rajput status.40 Other evidence suggests that such claims
were relatively recent in origin and still tentative. Tod, fifty years
before, had described one such thakor as a Bhil overlord who could
assemble five thousand bowmen when he gave the command.41 In
1868, a British political agent stated that certain Bhils of this region
were under their own chiefs, some of whom were powerful enough to
maintain their own courts.42 In 1902, it was stated that these particu-
lar ‘Bhil’ chiefs now claimed to be pure Rajputs.43 Although Hendley
considered that the remainder of the thakors – who were the overlords
of a much larger area – were ‘pure’ Rajputs, it is probable that in many
cases they were the descendants of Bhil chiefs who in the course of time
had been able to gain acceptance for such a claim. Becoming such an
overlord provided, therefore, an important means by which Bhils could
improve their social status. The ethos associated with such a lifestyle –
such as the valorisation of martial deeds, a strong sense of family and
clan honour that was seen often to rest in the ‘purity’ of female
members, a rigid patriarchy, devotion towards clan goddesses and
Hindu deities and conformity to caste-based rules of purity, pollution
and hierarchy – were consequently ones that percolated through Bhil
society in greater or lesser degrees.
Up until the around the mid-nineteenth century, the Bhils generally
saw their thakor as a protector. They could for example look to support
[ 28 ]

THE BHILS
from their thakor in a feud with the Bhils of a neighbouring thakor, or

perhaps anticipate that their thakor would shelter them after they had
carried out a marauding raid on the plains, providing a cut from the pro-
ceeds in recompense.44 The situation was relatively fluid, with thakors
who were able to command a loyal following and who had the neces-
sary political skills enhancing their position within the Rajput polity
at the expense of other less able and popular thakors. During the colo-
nial period, the opportunity for such advancement was largely cur-
tailed, as rights were clearly defined and estates mapped out. The
thakors now came to be regarded as landlords who paid a tribute to their
ruler and who were in turn granted the power to collect rent from their
‘tenants’ – the mass of the Bhils. Although they were meant to be
responsible for maintaining law and order in their estates, they in fact
had little control in the pals, and the ‘justice’ they exercised was gen-
erally spasmodic and arbitrary, though at times it could be very vicious,
as we have seen from Hendley’s report on the way in which one thakor
dealt with cow-killing Bhils.
The headman of a pal was known as the gameti. The position was
normally hereditary, subject to the confirmation of the thakor. The
leading Bhil elders constituted a village council, or panchayat, that
heard all sorts of cases, whether involving crimes or social problems.
The normal punishment awarded was a fine.45 The report of 1864 added
to this that the gameti had little authority as an individual, and if he
tried to punish another member of the pal on his own initiative this
would be resented and could cause a feud. He therefore always called
the panchayat before taking action. Although there was no very pro-
nounced hierarchy in Bhil society as compared to the caste-based
society of the plains regions, the gameti and elders were in a position
of authority, being responsible for maintaining the cohesion and unity
of their pal. They were considered to have a duty to insist that individ-
ual members conform to the ethos of the group, and transgressions
would be punished with a range of fines and social sanctions.
Bhil women normally married soon after puberty, and they had to
take a husband who was of a different clan from that of their father.
Often, this meant that they married outside the pal in which they had
been born and raised. The bridegroom’s father had to pay a brideprice
to the girl’s father – normally a small amount such as Rs. 1.12.0 with a
quantity of rice. Men were allowed to take as many wives as they could
afford. Women could leave their husbands, and there was no prohibi-
tion on widow remarriage.46 Bhil women rarely had affairs with non-
Bhils: ‘An attempt of this kind on the part of a foreigner lately gave rise
to trouble, the whole pal resenting the outrage.’ Sexual relationships
outside marriage were frowned on, and a woman with a bad reputation
[ 29 ]

in this respect would find it hard to be married, and if she did, she and
her husband would be treated as outcastes. Adultery was considered a
major transgression, and adulterers were fined a large sum – the equiv-
alent of Rs. 187. Women could be divorced for adultery, the case being
settled by the panchayat.47 This was clearly a patriarchal society –
women had little power in the pal within which they were married.
Hendley stated that the Mewar Bhils mainly worshipped local
deities, many of whom were believed to reside on particular hills or
mountains. He had seen one such shrine on the side of a hill near
Kherwara, consisting of a cairn of stones with platforms on which were
placed clay dishes in which ghee or oil had been burnt, and small stone
or earthenware effigies of horses. Hendley noted that clay horses were
offered in a similar way at shrines in many parts of India outside the
tribal regions. Long bamboo poles had also been erected by the cairn,
on which were attached cloth flags, like those found at Hindu, Muslim
and even Christian shrines in India. The Bhils also built stone platforms
on which were erected upright slabs. These slabs were sometimes
plain, in some cases daubed with red paint and named after a deity –
normally Mahadev – and sometimes carved to represent Hanuman,
who Hendley felt was as much an ‘aboriginal’ as Hindu deity. He listed
a number of local deities, mostly goddesses, to whom sacrifices of goats
were made. The foremost deity for the Bhils around Kherwara was the
goddess Samuda Mata. Her sthan, or place, was near the village of
Dhelana, about thirteen kilometres north of Kherwara. There was a
shrine to another goddess called Vajar Mata in a valley at Jawara, where
there were old silver and lead mines. Bhil women worshipped the murti
(image) of this deity to ensure their fertility. Hendley noted that the
officers of the MBC often rested in the shrine during the hot part of the
day while on marches, with the permission of its priest. The mines
were now disused, and the Bhil soldiers of the corps felt that this had
caused the power of the goddess to decline. Their priests were of the
Jogi caste.48 Hendley observed that Bhils generally esteemed saintly
people who came to stay in their region, such as mendicant Brahmans,
fakirs and bairagis, and they paid their respects at their tomb-shrines
after they had died. This appreciation had nonetheless to be earned.
Hendley cited the case of a fakir who was attacked by Bhils near
Kherwara, with his tongue being torn out and his face mutilated, as he
had concealed a rupee in his mouth, which they took as a mark of his
hypocrisy.49 Hendley also observed that the death rituals of the Bhils
were similar to those of the Hindus, as they cremated their dead. The
bones that remained were either buried or taken for immersion at a
sacred spot. In this, the Mewar Bhils appeared to be more Hinduised
than the Bhils of Malwa, who were reported to bury their dead.50
[ 30 ]

THE BHILS
Hendley argued that ‘the religion of the Bhils is one of ignorance and
fear, modified more or less by contact with powerful and formed
faiths’.51 In other words, a base of ‘primitive’ beliefs and rituals was –
in his view – overlaid unevenly with the beliefs of more ‘advanced’ reli-
gious systems, most notably that of the Brahmans. A similar notion
informed a statement by another British ethnographer: ‘It is not easy to
describe the religion of the Bhils as they are all in stages of civilisation
from the wild fetish and nature worshippers having no idea of a divine
being to the peaceful peasant who observes most of the details of
popular Hinduism.’52 As Aron Gurevich has pointed out, many schol-
ars have tried to analyse the degree to which supposedly ancient ‘pagan’
beliefs survive in later religions. He is critical of such exercises, as they
are based on an idea of ‘pure’ forms of religion – such as the ‘animism’
or ‘totemism’ of the ‘primitive’, or the codified systems of belief of the
Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Rituals and beliefs are analysed in terms
of various deviations from the norm. Gurevich argues that it is prefer-
able to think in terms of a synthesis that has its own integrity that is
particular to a place and time: ‘This synthesis is alogical to Cartesian
minds, but real at the level of daily practice.’53 As an example, Gurevich
notes how in medieval England the Virgin Mary was popularly treated
as a local deity, so that her individual images in a variety of shrines were
each believed to have a particular degree of curative efficacy.54
Approaching the matter of the beliefs and rituals of the Bhils from
such a perspective, we can see that what Hendley observed represented
a discrete local system. Many of the deities that the Bhils worshipped
were particular to them, but there were also various points at which
their system overlapped with the beliefs and rituals of non-Bhils.
Their reverence (in general) for saintly mendicants provided one such
example. Carstairs mentioned that some Brahmans had established
shrines in the Bhil tracts to deities such as Krishna, Shiva and Ganesh
and that the Bhils made offerings to the deities and their Brahman
priests.55 There were also some important temples in the Bhil tract that
were visited by pilgrims from outside the area, such as Shamlaji and
Rikhabnath, and these were revered by the local Bhils. Shamlaji – a
Vaisnavite temple – lay just beyond the border with Mewar, in Idar
State of Gujarat: ‘here is a lake with a very ancient temple much
resorted to by the Bhils, especially at the time of the great winter fair’.56
According to an oral tradition of the Bhils, a Bhil farmer found the
murti of Vishnu that is worshipped in the temple at Shamlaji and was
told by some Brahmans to establish a temple for it. Initially, Bhils were
involved in running the temple, but gradually the Brahmans took
over.57 Rikhabnath was only fifteen kilometres from Kherwara, and was
a Jain temple of the Digambar sect that had been rebuilt on the site of
[ 31 ]

an earlier shrine in 1374.58 It was visited annually by thousands of

people from Rajasthan and Gujarat. The principal murti, hewn from
black marble, represented the first of the great Jain prophets
(tirthamkar), Rikhabnath. The Bhils had great reverence for this deity,
which they worshipped as Kalaji – or the ‘black one’ – and it was
reported by Erskine that ‘an oath by Kalaji is one of the most solemn a
Bhil of these parts can take’.59
The health of the Bhils

In his report, Hendley claimed that in general ‘The Bhils are a healthy
race.’ In making this claim, he appears to have been guided more by
certain notions current at that time about the ‘healthy primitive’ than
by any reality on the ground. In common with many other medical men
of that era, he appears to have believed that ‘primitive’ people were less
subject to the ravages of illness than the more ‘civilised’. As the French
physician Tissot had stated just before the Revolution: ‘Before the
advent of civilisation, people had only the simplest, most necessary dis-
eases. Peasants and workers still remain close to the basic nosological
table; the simplicity of their lives allows it to show through in its rea-
sonable order: they have none of those variable, complex, intermingled
nervous ills, but down-to-earth apoplexies, or uncomplicated attacks of
mania.’60 It was believed that as people improved their condition of life,
and as the social network tightened its grip around individuals, ‘health
seems to diminish by degrees’. Diseases became diversified and com-
bined with one another – in Tissot’s words: ‘their number is already
great in the superior order of the bourgeoisie; . . . it is as great as possi-
ble in people of quality’.61 Writing in such a vein a century later,
Hendley said of the Bhils: ‘Insanity is uncommon, perhaps unknown as
we should expect in a savage race with the mind rude and uncultivated
and little to excite it. I have never seen a case of mania, and only one or
two of dementia in old age’.62
More recently, other reasons have been advanced to explain what is
claimed to be the relatively good health of groups such as the Bhils. One
is that they were protected from many contagious diseases through their
isolation in the hills. This adopts the sort of argument put forward by
Kingsley Davis, who has suggested that India as a whole was compara-
tively free of much epidemic disease before colonial times thanks to its
relative isolation.63 Following this, it might appear that it was the
opening up of these tracts to outsiders from the late nineteenth century
onwards that led to a decline in health. It has also been claimed that in
many parts of India hill- and forest-dwelling people had a built-in
resistance to one of the most devastating diseases of the subcontinent –
[ 32 ]

THE BHILS
malaria. It is held that such people had developed sickle cell anaemia,
which, though debilitating, conferred immunity to malaria.64 Outsiders,
who lacked such immunity, could not survive in these tracts, and it was
this, rather than any great military prowess on the part of such hill-
dwellers, that allowed them to maintain control over their mountain
and forest tracts.65
It is not easy to evaluate whether or not there was indeed an increase
in contagious or other diseases amongst the Bhils during the colonial
period, as we have no clear evidence of their state of health in the pre-
colonial period. What we do know is that when doctors and missionar-
ies began to treat them on a regular basis from the late nineteenth
century onwards, they were found to be suffering from a wide range of
diseases and maladies. Dr James Shepherd, who treated a good number
of Bhils at his hospital at Udaipur from the 1880s onwards, found that
their chief complaints were malaria, dysentery, rheumatism and
‘cough’ or phthisis (e.g. tuberculosis). Many Bhils had sores that needed
dressing or broken bones to be set. Shepherd’s surgical skill also
attracted patients – surgery being a clinical facility that was nowhere
else available in Mewar State at that time. ‘When it became known that
eyes could be given to the blind, old men would occasionally be led in
to be operated on for cataract.’66 Similarly, C. S. Thompson, in his
report on his first medical work in villages near Kherwara in 1881, men-
tioned the prevalence of ‘fevers’ and enlarged spleens (a symptom of
chronic malaria), headaches, eye complaints, blindness, deafness and
rheumatism.67
When Thompson published a primer on the Bhil language in 1895,
he included a vocabulary that listed words used by Bhil for a wide range
of diseases and complaints, each with what he considered to be the
English equivalent. Although not qualified as a doctor, he had been
healing the Bhils using allopathic remedies for over a decade, and so
knew of these maladies and the terms used by the Bhils to describe
them when they came to him for treatment. They included abscesses
(gubadu), ague (taado taav), asthma (haah sadvo), catarrh accompa-
nied by a burning fever (kasro), cholera (kogaliu), cough (udaraha or
thobarajyo), diarrhoea (jhaado or hagaamanu), dropsy (jalandaro),
epilepsy (umar), sores on the feet (piduon), intermittent fever (kantro
tav), fourth day fever (chothio tav), griping pains (vad), guinea worm
(valo), headache (-nu kapal sadvu or sadi javu), indigestion (dakari),
infection (sotu), influenza (thobrajyo), leprosy (kod), lock-jaw (dant
khanhali), lumpy swelling (varholi), measles (ori mata), mumps (ratva),
ophthalmia (ank avani), paralysis in the legs or arms (-na tantya rahi
java), plague (rog), quartan fever (kantro tav), rheumatism (vai, kaltar
or vadol), ringworm (dadar), smallpox (mata), enlarged spleen (badol),
[ 33 ]

throat disease (galjibi), tonsillitis (kagalo), tumour (ganth or damru)

and ulcer (sandi).68 The list covers most of the complaints noted by
Shepherd and Thompson in their list of the main prevalent maladies,
as well as many others. There is no mention of tuberculosis, but this
probably was classed under ‘cough’ so far as the Bhils were concerned.
The reports suggest that even if there was a degree of resistance to
malaria, it was still a chronic and debilitating disease for large numbers
of Bhils. The high incidence of malaria in this region was highlighted
also by a report for the hospital at Idar town for 1875–76, which
reported that the most common complaint, making up about 23 per
cent of all cases examined, was febris intermittens.69 This was most
probably the common form of malaria known now as Plasmodium
vivax, which is characterised by a severe chill followed by a high fever.
This tended to recur periodically, with red blood cells being destroyed,
and those who went without treatment often became severely anaemic,
with enlarged and hardened spleens. In some cases, the liver also
became enlarged and the skin jaundiced.70 The many Bhils who suffered
from chronic malaria would have survived in a severely debilitated
state. This picture is one that is clearly at odds with the one of the
malaria-resistant hill-dweller.
Reports by missionaries who treated the Bhils in these years rein-
force this picture. W. B. Collins, writing in 1893, thus noted how: ‘Just
now malarial fever is the rage, and Epson salts and quinine go fast’.71
Writing eight years later, Dr Jane Birkett stated: ‘Everybody in this
valley seems to be down with fever, and almost everyone has a huge
spleen.’72 In the following year she reported:
Malarial fever with immense enlargement of the spleen is the common-

est ailment, and it is quite pitiful to see the extent of anaemia and debil-
ity from which the whole population suffers in consequence. Tiny babies,
only a few weeks old often had spleens the size of the palm of my hand,
beyond their ribs; and adults often present a hard smooth tumour which
passes from the L. ribs to well over the right of the middle line, and even
into the R. iliac fosa.
She regretted that she had no facilities to examine people’s blood for
malarial parasites.73
An epidemic disease that was almost certainly widespread in these
tracts in the pre-colonial period was that of smallpox. In his report of
1875, Hendley singles it out for attention, stating that it was greatly
feared by the Bhils; for them it was a killer. He noted that they prac-
tised their own form of inoculation against this disease, and they pre-
ferred this to Western-style vaccination.74 In a later account, Hendley
provided more detail of their inoculation technique. They dipped a
[ 34 ]

THE BHILS
grain of dust into the pustule of a smallpox patient and then inserted
this into the skin of a healthy person with the help of a needle. While
doing so they invoked the smallpox goddess.75 As was common
throughout India, the Bhils believed that in cases of smallpox the body
of the sufferer was possessed by a goddess (mata) and thus made fever-
ish. Helen Lambert has described how even in recent times villagers in
Rajasthan have held communal ceremonies of worship to placate such
goddesses and thus protect themselves from the disease.76 The invoca-
tion of the goddess by the Bhils during inoculation would seem to have
had a similar aim. All of this indicates that smallpox was long estab-
lished in this region. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the
British tried to popularise their own method of vaccination amongst
the Bhils. The Mahi Kantha agency, for example, employed a team of
vaccinators, and periodic attempts were made to persuade Bhils to
make use of the facility. In 1863–64, the team travelled to a region bor-
dering Mewar and tried to get the local Bhils to bring their children for
vaccination, without any success.77 In 1883 the political agent reported
that throughout the region the Bhils were the only significant group
that still refused vaccination.78 Practising as they did their own system
of variolation, they appear to have rejected a preventive measure
administered by people whom they had no particular reason to trust.
By contrast, they appear to have largely escaped the other major and
most dreaded epidemic disease of nineteenth-century India – cholera.
Hendley stated that it was very rare amongst the Bhils of this region.
Other sources, nonetheless, report some incidence of the disease in the
tract – for example, nine cases were reported at the annual fair at
Shamlaji, in the heart of the Bhil country, in 1889, of which five proved
fatal. This outbreak does not appear to have spread beyond the town.79
Nonetheless, Thompson’s primer showed that the Bhils had a term for
the disease – kogaliu. Some years after Hendley wrote, in 1900, there
was a devastating cholera epidemic in the region, as we shall see in
Chapter 4. We may speculate that the relative isolation of the Bhils
appears to have protected them to some degree from this epidemic
disease up until the end of the nineteenth century.
This was not the case with either tuberculosis or pneumonia, both of
which appear to have been widespread amongst the Bhils. Dr James
Shepherd, when reporting many cases of tuberculosis among the Bhils he
treated at his hospital at Udaipur, expressed his surprise, as he had
assumed – following beliefs about tuberculosis prevalent in his day – that
the bracing air found in the hills would have kept the disease at bay.80
Writing in 1901, Dr Jane Birkett also noted the high incidence of phthi-
sis, or tuberculosis, amongst Bhils.81 Other missionaries mentioned the
high incidence of pneumonia. Writing in 1896, E. P. Herbert wrote how
[ 35 ]

he was ‘saddened by the nightly wailings, for there were many deaths
from pneumonia, and no doctors.’82 Dr Birkett, in her above-mentioned
report of 1901, said that she was called on fairly frequently to treat cases
of acute pluro-pneumonia, a disease that was particularly dreaded by the
Bhils as it normally led to death. She went on to note that the Bhils knew
it as ‘the Gujarati sickness’, which suggests – perhaps – that it had come
from outside this region within living memory.
The evidence on infectious and contagious disease is thus mixed –
some were almost certainly of long standing, while others were becom-
ing major problems for the Bhils only around this time. The Bhils also
suffered from many other minor infections, various chronic complaints
and parasitic infestations. The hospital report for Idar of 1875–76 listed,
in order of importance after malaria, chronic rheumatism (15 per cent
of all case), ‘ulcers’ (9 per cent), porrigo (a disease of the scalp) (6 per
cent), constipation, influenza, eye diseases and scabies (each about 4 per
cent), and psoriasis (a skin disease), acute rheumatism, acute dysentery
and ear infections (each about 3 per cent).83 The missionaries frequently
remarked on how much the Bhils suffered from skin infections, sores
and ulcers. In 1886, G. Litchfield stated that ‘The poor untaught people
continually come to me, with old sores of long standing which they
expect to be cured on the spot . . .’.84 Dr Birkett reported in 1901 that
skin and eye infections came second only to malaria in the number of
cases she was called on to treat.85
Hendley attributed the widespread prevalence of such skin disorders,
as well as parasitical infestation, to ‘the filthiness of the people, whose
legs often remain coated for days with mud’. He himself had carried out
research on guinea worm infestation amongst the Bhils of the MBC that
had been published in The Indian Medical Gazette in 1872. This
was a problem that affected the Bhils in particular – the non-Bhils of
Kherwara town, he said, rarely suffered from it. He believed that the
worms entered into the skin of the Bhils as they were bathing in or
wading through dirty pools of water. People did not die of it, but it
caused great debilitation.86 Dr Birkett, writing nearly thirty years later,
similarly reported that guinea worm was a major problem during the
rainy season, and sufferers often had four or five abscesses on one leg.
She mentioned the case of one abscess that had developed so badly that
the patient eventually died. Ringworm was also widely prevalent.87
The missionaries also reported many minor eye infections that could,
if left untreated, develop into a serious threat to a person’s vision. There
were numerous cases of cataract, which could be operated on to good
effect if a qualified missionary had the appropriate facilities, as did
Dr Shepherd at his hospital in Udaipur. Birkett also described how she
was called on to treat a cancerous tumour, cancer of the lip (it is notable
[ 36 ]

THE BHILS
in this context that the Bhils were great consumers of tobacco), a very
large hernia and a grossly swollen leg.88 Hendley, in his report, noted,
nonetheless, that venereal disease was unknown among the Bhils,
which, he believed, provided proof of their general sexual restraint.
Goitre, also, was never seen.
Bhil practices of healing

Left to their own devices, the Bhils sought to cure such diseases and dis-
orders in a range of ways. In the first instance, if a disease persisted for
more than a day or two, they generally sought a cure in various herb,
root or tree products. Although we know from studies of other parts of
India that people such as the Bhils were highly skilled in the use of such
remedies, the historical evidence from this region is very scanty.89
Hendley reported that the Bhils used the roots of certain plants or
leaves of trees. For example, a small shrub called bhut bhangra was
dried and powdered and used to treat open wounds. If a purulent wound
was caused by the bite of a tiger, a cure was obtained from the kajera
tree. Sat or bara mula was used in cases of fever accompanied with dry
swollen tongue and bad smell, and as a mouthwash. Hendley lists only
eight such herbal remedies,90 but there must have been many more. He
also stated that the ‘priests are the chief physicians, although most old
men are supposed to know something about medicine’.91 By this, he
presumably meant medicines derived from herbs and tree products that
were obtained locally. Dr Birkett similarly reported how guinea worm
infestations were treated with a poultice of leaves that caused the
abscess to burst and evacuate the worm.92
Hendley mentioned another common method of treatment: ‘The
remedy for everything is the actual cautery; few adults, few children,
and even animals are without scars’.93 Dr Birkett reported that
‘Amongst the Bhils fire seems to be the great therapeutic agent. Most
of them are marked with an arrow-head in the pit of the stomach; this
was done to cure cholera. Scars from burns are also on their legs and
arms.’94 Such cauterisation was not peculiar to the Bhils; it was used
throughout the region at that time, notably amongst the caste Hindus
of the plains. For Bhils, the rationale for this practice was that it drove
away the malign spirit that was causing the problem, as such spirits
feared fire.95
In this case, the efficacy of what might appear to have been a physi-
cal form of treatment – cauterisation – was seen to lie in its ability
to drive out the malign. Here, we enter into the realm of exterior
malign forces. The missionary-anthropologist P. O. Bodding argued, for
example, that the Santals of eastern India considered that people had a
[ 37 ]

right to good health, and disease was therefore ‘something foreign and
inimical’ to them. ‘They will not say, as we do, that somebody catches
a cold, or gets measles, etc. It is always the other way: it is the disease
which catches, makes a commencement with, attacks, or overpowers
man.’ In many cases, a disease would run its course without any spe-
cific healing intervention, but if it continued, then it became clear that
the malign force was of such power that it had to be countered through
action. In some cases, a deity had become displeased with the sick
person for a particular reason, and this deity had to be propitiated
through various sacrifices and rituals. In other cases, a bonga, or evil
spirit, was believed to be devouring a person. In some cases, witches
deliberately used such bongas against people whom they wished to
harm. The only remedy was to combat both the bonga and the witch
in an appropriate manner.96
Similarly, for the Bhils, it appears that it was above all the obduracy
of a malady that determined its treatment. Herbal remedies might be
tried in the first instance, but if these failed a ritual specialist would be
sought out, such as a bhopa or mendicant. It was assumed that invisi-
ble forces or spirits that affected the lives of the living pervaded the
world. These forces were Janus-faced, being both benign and malign in
differing proportions. The aim in any mode of treatment was to rein-
force the benign while weakening the malign. Even a herbal prepara-
tion was seen not merely as a ‘natural’ medicine for an illness located
in the physical world, but as a remedy that possessed numinous quali-
ties that might be endowed more effectively with benign power
through ritual.
These sorts of consideration were seen in a case of 1843 in which a
Bhil called Rupa of Pol State sought a cure from a sadhu. The informa-
tion comes from the testimony of Rupa’s brother in a court of law. After
his wife fell ill, Rupa approached a sadhu for help, and the sadhu
advised him to go to the liquor shop at a nearby village to purchase
some liquor, after which he promised that he would provide a charm
that would make her better. The charm would be both created and
bestowed in a ritual ceremony conducted by the sadhu. In general, the
liquor that was demanded at such times was used in part for libations
during the ritual, but the healer himself would consume the bulk of it
afterwards. In this sense, it might be seen as a form of payment for ser-
vices rendered. However, in an argument with a state official who later
murdered him, Rupa was said by his brother to have described the
liquor as ‘medicine’.97 The term can hardy have been used in the
modern clinical sense of the term, for liquor – with its consciousness-
changing qualities – was seen to have a certain power to enchant. It
might also be noted that in Ayurvedic medicine, liquor was seen to
[ 38 ]

THE BHILS
have beneficial heating properties – a popular Ayurvedic remedy was,

for example, known as safed daru (white liquor), and it is likely that the
sadhu was influenced by this sort of understanding also.98 In all of this,
the desire was to create an effect in which the malign in all its multi-
ple manifestations would be countered by the benign.
Doctors who came from a clinical background were both perplexed
and annoyed by the way in which people such as the Bhils utilised what
they saw as ‘supernatural’ means to combat what was for them self-
evidently a ‘natural’ condition that was susceptible to reasoned analy-
sis and treatment based on scientific principles. Any healer who failed
to act according to such principles – such as the above-mentioned
sadhu – was, for them, a charlatan who was bamboozling and exploit-
ing the gullible through trickery. The mental chasm between the
doctors who came to practice amongst the Bhils from the late nine-
teenth century onwards and the Bhils themselves was not easily
bridged. In later chapters, I shall trace the history of this encounter –
a narrative of continuing misunderstanding and bad feeling. First,
however, I shall say something about the strong belief that the Bhils had
in the malign power of witches, the methods they used to counter this
and the efforts that the British took to eradicate such practices in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Illness and the supernatural

Hendley observed that the Bhils believed that some people – mainly
women – had the ability to cause sickness, misfortune or death. It was
considered that they were in touch with malevolent spirits, such as
bhuts and churails (male and female departed spirits), and they could
cause them to attack a person through their malign glance. They were
known as dakran (Hindi – dakini), which was translated normally by
the British, including Hendley, as ‘witch’. Many Bhils wore charms or
amulets on their right forearms or – with women especially – on their
heads to keep such spirits at bay. The charms consisted generally of a
piece of blue string with seven knots that were tied by an exorcist while
he chanted incantations.99
What Hendley failed to mention, but had come out in an earlier
report by a commandant of the Bhil corps, was that women who pos-
sessed such powers were also valued for the protection that they were
believed to be able to provide for their own families. ‘To protect them-
selves from the consequences of being bewitched they will not marry
into a family in which there is not a reputed witch to defend them from
others of her species, and these again, as in England in former days, do
everything to encourage, for the sake of the influence thereby acquired,
[ 39 ]

this belief in their supernatural power.’100 The dakran was thus an

important figure within a village politics that revolved around rivalries
between families. In serious cases of alleged witchcraft, such as a
sudden and unexpected death, the attribute could have tragic conse-
quences for the woman concerned.
In such cases, an exorcist – called a bhopa – was employed to name
the witch responsible.
Any one who is willing and has a grievance, sickness, or otherwise, has
only to bribe a witch-finder sufficiently to obtain a victim, generally the
wife or relative of an enemy, who is at once swung, head downwards, on
a tree, where she is tortured by applications of red pepper to her eyes, nos-
trils, &c. Not twenty years ago, during the rains, a woman was swung in
this way in the presence of British officers, who were unable to rescue her,
as an impassable river lay between them. Should the unlucky woman
escape death, she is turned out of the village, or, perhaps, the bhopa finds
out under the influence of another douceur, that he was mistaken.101
Although Hendley’s language is laced with contempt for the bhopa,
bhopas were highly regarded within Bhil society. Those who enjoyed a
wide reputation for their skill and integrity would sometimes be called
from a great distance to intervene in the most intractable cases. It was
considered wrong to take action against a witch without a bhopa
passing judgement first, as in 1864, when a Bhil of Idar State killed a
woman whom he suspected of injuring his brother. The local official
stated this act was considered reprehensible as ‘If the woman was a
witch the Bhopas ought to have been sent for to establish the fact.’102
A particularly malign case of witchcraft was considered a general
social threat, and once a witch had been named, everyone, including her
relatives, was required to support the action against her. Thus, when in
1850 a Bhil woman of Idar State was seized by her fellow villagers and
burnt alive in public for supposedly causing the death of her sister-in-
law, the Political Agent of Mahi Kantha commented that all the vil-
lagers participated, and that even her close relatives did nothing to save
her, believing that she was a witch. He noted that her killing was seen
‘merely as an act of self-defence not only reasonable but almost as nec-
essary’.103 Nonetheless, it seems that in most such cases the woman
escaped with her life, either through a confession leading to some pun-
ishment for her and her family or through her exile from the village.
Writing in 1851, J. C. Brooke, commandant of the MBC, estimated that
there were about a hundred such cases each year in the area under his
jurisdiction, of which about one in ten led to the death of the accused
woman.104
The Bhils looked to their rulers to take a lead in preventing witch-
craft, and up until the middle years of the nineteenth century they
[ 40 ]

THE BHILS
largely obliged. In 1842, the British resident reported that witches were
put to death in public in Udaipur city on the accession of Maharana
Sarup Singh.105 Local thakors acted in a similar manner, as was seen in
a case in 1850, when the Thakor of Gher supervised the public killing
of an alleged witch of a village in his estate.106 Witches were seen to
threaten social stability from within, and it was considered a duty for
those with power to take the lead in countering their sorcery. As it was,
the ones accused tended to be weaker members of the society, such as
old women, widows or, in a few cases, subordinate males. In cases of
illness in which witchcraft was not suspected, no collective response
was considered necessary: individuals and families were left to treat the
malady as they felt fit.
In dealing with the illnesses and misfortunes brought by malign
supernatural forces, Hendley discussed only witchcraft. This was no
doubt the most dramatic manifestation of the phenomenon, but it was
probably not the most common. Singling out a particular person for
blame caused inevitable controversy and bad feeling, and it was done
only in desperation or because of some political motive. As a rule,
malign forces were countered through ritual sacrifices and the deploy-
ment of charms that had no particular human target. A missionary who
worked in this area noted in 1906 that if an illness did not respond to
herbal remedies, offerings of a chicken and some ghee and salt might be
made at the tomb of an ancestor.107 In cases of epidemic disease, rituals
were conducted in which a goat was sacrificed and its head and other
ritual paraphernalia placed in a small wooden chariot and taken beyond
the boundary of the pal. It was hoped that by doing this the spirit
responsible for the epidemic would be tempted away from the place.108
The bhopas who generally prescribed and performed such rituals were
paid as a rule in liquor, or in the meat from the sacrifice. The Bhils also
believed that the sadhus and other mendicants who came to live in soli-
tude in their hills and forests had healing powers. Both the bhopas and
the sadhus deployed what were known as jantra-mantra, or spells with
miraculous powers. Hendley also failed to say anything about illnesses
that were believed to have a divine origin, which are spoken about in
other reports. For example, writing in 1890, the missionary C. S.
Thompson noted that when the rains failed or there was a great deal of
sickness in their villages, the Mewar Bhils would take a vow at the
shrine of the local Devi (mother goddess) that if she brought rain or
stopped the sickness they would sacrifice a buffalo to her. When the
sacrifice was eventually performed, the Devi was offered the blood,
while the meat was sold. Thompson saw this bargaining before the
goddess and their selling of the meat as a sign of their practicality in
such affairs.109
[ 41 ]

The attack on ‘superstition’

The British officers of the MBC anticipated during its early years that
with medical treatment now available for the Bhil sepoys, belief in the
supernatural causes of illness would be weakened and that the ‘civilis-
ing’ influence of the corps would help to bring an end to the persecu-
tion and killing of alleged witches. From the start, the officers had tried
to persuade their men to disassociate themselves from this, though
they were not at that time authorised by law to take action to stamp it
out. In this, they had to steer a fine course between an insensitive inter-
vention in local affairs that might backfire and a wider colonial opinion
that was liable to condemn them for a seeming apathy in the matter.
For example, in 1851 there was a report in the Bombay Telegraph which
accused the then commander of the MBC, John Brooke, of conniving at
the persecution of women accused of witchcraft. A case was cited in
which he allegedly allowed the continuing torture of one such woman
until the doctor of the corps eventually rescued her. Brooke argued in
his defence that given ‘the wild and barbarous state of the country’ they
could not hope to stop such practices amongst the Bhils ‘till long after
they have made considerable advances in civilization.’110 Nonetheless,
after a woman who was supposed to have bewitched a sepoy of the MBC
was put to death later in 1851, Brooke announced that it would be his
policy in future to dismiss any sepoy who was involved in any way in
the killing of witches.111
It was as a result of these and other such cases that the British
announced a ban on all witch killing throughout Rajasthan in 1853. A
similar ban was announced in the Mahi Kantha Agency in 1856.112
Anyone who was convicted of having killed a witch was now consid-
ered guilty of murder and subject to the appropriate punishment. The
rulers of princely states were expected to enforce this law; failures
would incur a strong reprimand from the paramount authority. The
government of Mewar passed its own law to this effect around 1862.
When announcing the ban in the states of Mahi Kantha, the political
agent, Major Whitelock, issued a proclamation:
It is now hereby notified and declared that sorcery and enchantment have
no real existence and are sheer prejudices and deceptions; and let it be
clearly understood by all that the Almighty has not invested any human
being with the supernatural power of causing the death of a fellow crea-
ture by the means of any such imaginary arts, and if any person shall
profess to cause another bodily pain, or any injury to his person, family
or property whatsoever, by pretended witchcraft, magic, or other such
fraudulent practices, or if any person shall threaten to have recourse to
witchcraft, or offer to remove fictitious evil-spirits for any one, and by
[ 42 ]

THE BHILS
such gross deceit shall receive, or shall obtain a promise of any gratuity,
or remuneration in any shape whatsoever, that person will be punished
for fraud, extortion and intimidation; and it is hereby further proclaimed
that if any person or persons shall cause the death of another person under
the false belief that he or she practised witchcraft or other delusive arts
of any kind, then such person or persons will be tried for the crime of
murder and dealt with accordingly.113
In Whitelock’s view, belief that illness and misfortune could be caused
by an evil force was not only irrational, but opposed also to true reli-
gion. In this, he gave voice to a belief that had emerged in Europe
during the Enlightenment. An important thinker in this respect was
Spinoza (1632–77), who had argued that many popular beliefs were
delusions and superstitions – even when seemingly endorsed by the
scriptures – and that those who were informed by the ‘natural light of
reason’ had no use for them. God had created a good world, without
inherent evil, and by abandoning the idea of evil, humans could free
themselves from irrational fears. By the mid-eighteenth century, main-
stream Anglican theologians had, following such precepts, largely
abandoned the concept of hell and its demonic forces, though some
popular sects continued to believe in them.114 What Whitelock was
reflecting was, in other words, a relatively recent form of theology par-
ticular to Europe. He was, moreover, asserting not only that it was a
delusion to believe in witchcraft and evil agency, but that it was a
notion that was characteristically deployed in a self-serving and ‘fraud-
ulent’ manner. Anyone practising such ‘fraud, extortion and intimida-
tion’ would be punished harshly under the law. Hendley had also made
such an assumption when he wrote, as we have seen above, that the
bhopa was ‘bribed’ to identify a witch, and that he might be made to
change his opinion ‘under the influence of another douceur’.115
Nowhere in this was there recognition that the bhopas were generally
considered sincere and skilled exorcists who were able to use their
powers to make contact with the spiritual world to detect the source
of a malign force.
In a discussion of how historians have approached the question of
medieval trials by ordeal for those who were seen as transgressors, Talal
Asad has noted how they have tended to focus on what people believed,
rather than:
the power structure by which certain truths about transgressions were
determined. Thus, we don’t know what were the real thoughts and feel-
ings of individuals who could at one time resort to the ordeal and who
were later obliged to submit to the inquisitorial courts. But we do
know that they were processed through very different political-legal-
moral structures, subject to very different powers. Their options, their
[ 43 ]

behaviour, their relationship to the personnel necessary for determining

guilt or innocence were all very different.116
In arguing as they did, colonial officers such as Whitelock and

Hendley likewise focused on belief rather than social structure, in the
process failing to acknowledge the degree to which the notion of witch-
craft was socially embedded and universally believed in as a matter of
common sense. For example, even the unfortunate women accused of
being witches believed in the reality of casting curses, their main plea
being that they had either not – or had at least not intentionally – cast
such spells. In approaching the matter on the level of true and false con-
sciousness, Whitelock and Hendley failed to appreciate that such an
argument would carry no weight with those to whom it was addressed.
Local holders of power took action against witches because they were
convinced that they had a duty to preserve their society from malign
supernatural forces. They strongly resented the new law, and the prac-
tice was driven underground rather than suppressed.
Nonetheless, the law gave rise to a new politics, for it was now possi-
ble to look to it for protection against witchcraft accusations. For
example, when in 1872 three women of Bagdari in Dungarpur State were
identified by a bhopa as having caused the death of a woman in child-
birth and her baby through witchcraft, the son of one of them tried to
protect her by threatening to complain either to the authorities of that
state or to the officers of the MBC. The reaction that followed revealed
how great the obstacles still were to making such an appeal. The son was
threatened by the gameti of the village that if he went ahead and made
his complaint he personally would be held responsible for a number of
deaths that had occurred as a result of the witchcraft of his mother. She
was then tortured and ordered to leave the village, which she did. Her son
continued to remain silent, as the other villagers and the local thakor told
him in a menacing manner that if he made any fuss a blood feud would
be declared and he also would have to flee.117 After the authorities came
to know of this case, the thakor confessed that he had failed to inform
them of this crime, but claimed that he was threatened by 500 Bhils and
did not dare to do so. He said that his father had had his hands and feet
cut off by the Bhils when he had fallen out with them many years before,
and that he himself continued to live in fear of them.118 The Dungarpur
State authorities eventually arrested two of the ringleaders, sentencing
one to four years in prison and the other to one and a half years.
By this time, it was becoming clear to the British that the law could
not by itself eradicate such ‘superstitious’ practices – their minds would
have to be won by other means. One of these was that of conversion to
Christianity. In his report on the Bhils, written in 1880, Thomas Hendley
[ 44 ]

THE BHILS
claimed that they were losing faith in their deities, who could no longer –
supposedly – protect them against outsiders, and as a result, he argued,
there was an opening for Christian missionaries. He noted that mission-
aries to the Santals of central India – a supposedly similar ‘aboriginal’
tribe – had found such an opening in comparable circumstances.
Conversion was, he believed, possible if the Christian message was kept
as simple as possible, and directed to the whole tribe so that the decision
to convert would be a community rather than individual one. ‘Their
main object is social advancement, and this they may well think would
be most easily secured by reverencing the strong English Gods; their
character would lead, however, to the conclusion that interest alone
would not long remain the ruling motive.’ By this latter statement,
Hendley seems to have been saying that once they were drawn towards
Christianity and learnt more of the faith, they would soon become con-
vinced believers. There was however one possible drawback, namely that
some were already being attracted towards ‘Brahmanism, which comes
within the scope of their understanding, raising them in the social scale,
and, where there are Brahman native officers, giving them, in their
opinion, a better chance of promotion. This feeling the Brahmans are not
slow to take advantage of, and it requires great vigilance to defeat them.’
The missionaries therefore needed to get in fast.119
Hendley’s opinions were echoed by other colonial officials, such as
Sir Lepal Griffen, who stated in 1883:
I believe that it would be an immense advantage if the Bhils could be con-
verted to any form of Christianity by missionaries, either Catholic or
Protestant . . . It is obvious that the inconveniences and even danger
which attend proselytising enterprises in Brahmanical and Muhammadan
States, which possess a creed as dogmatic and systematic as Christianity
itself, do not exist with reference to a people like the Bhils, who have no
dogmatic theology, and who would accept with very little difficulty the
civilising creed which would be offered to them.120
In other words, while it was inadvisable to give strong state support for
missionary endeavours in areas with strongly Hindu or Muslim popu-
lations lest it stir up enmities that could backfire against the British, it
was politically safe to patronise missionaries in ‘aboriginal’ tracts.
Whether or not the Bhils would accept the missionaries with the ease
that Griffin assumed was, of course, another matter, as we shall see in
the next chapter.
Notes
1 Benedetto Croce, Filosofica e storiografica (Bari: Laterza, 1949), p. 246; quoted and
translated by Allesandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories:
[ 45 ]

Forms and Meanings in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), p. 293 n.6.
2 A Social and Economic Atlas of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987),
p. 27.
3 On this, see in particular David Hardiman, ‘Power in the Forest: The Dangs,
1820-1940’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds.), Subaltern Studies, 8
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories:
Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
4 On usurers see David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in
Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); on liquor dealers see
David Hardiman, ‘From Custom to Crime: The Politics of Drinking in Colonial
South Gujarat’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, 4 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
5 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, ed. William Crooke, 2 (London:
Humphrey Milford, 1920), p. 651. The work was first published in two volumes of
1829 and 1832.
6 Ibid., 1, p. 586.
7 John Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa, and Adjoining
Provinces, with the History, and Copious Illustrations, of the Past and Present
Condition of that Country (New Delhi: Sagar Publications, 1970; reprint of 1823
edition), 1, pp. 516–17.
8 Ibid., pp. 517–18.
9 Ibid., p. 519.
10 Ibid., p. 521.
11 Ibid., 2, pp. 179–80.
12 ‘Some Account of the Bheels’, Intelligencer (October 1882), 585–91. The notion
that Aryan invaders had driven the aborigines of India into the hills in ancient
times was a staple of British historiography in India. See W. W. Hunter, The Annals
of Rural Bengal (Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1975; reprint of 1868 edition),
pp. 90–1. Subsequent historiography has rejected such simplistic explanations for
the creation of distinct tribal societies in India. See Romila Thapar, Early India:
From the Origins to AD 1300 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 57.
13 C. S. Thompson, ‘The Bheels’, The Church Missionary Gleaner (October 1897),
148.
14 Sketches of India, 4th edition (1826), pp. 257–8. Quoted in David Arnold, ‘Race,
Place and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth Century India’, Historical
Research, 77:196 (2004), 266.
15 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Letters of Marque, Nov–Dec 1887’, reprinted in Kipling, From
Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel, 1 (London: Macmillan, 1926),
p. 57.
16 The Rajputana Gazetteer, 1 (Calcutta: Government Press, 1879), p. 117.
17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History
of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1999), pp. 255 and 269. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern
Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
18 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 273.
19 Ibid., p. 310.
20 T. H. Hendley, ‘An Account of the Maiwar Bhils’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, 44 pt.1:4 (1875), 347–88.
21 The corps was known by the Bhils as the ‘embeecee’, so that the use of these ini-
tials in the rest of this book accords with local usage.
22 Hardiman, ‘Power in the Forest’, p. 107.
23 J. Outram to C. Ovans, 26 October 1836, NAI, FD, 3 April 1837, 23 PC.
24 In Mewar, the Rajput ruler who was acknowledged as head of the ruling Sisodiya clan
enjoyed the title of ‘Maharana’ rather than ‘Maharaja’. Udaipur was his capital city.
[ 46 ]

THE BHILS
25 A. Speirs, Pol. Agent, Mewar, to N. Alves, Agent to Governor General in Rajputana,

25 August 1838; N. Alves to Secretary to Govt. of India, 29 August 1838; both in
NAI, FD, 26 September 1838, 75 PC.
26 C. S. Thompson, ‘Report on Bheel Mission, Kherwara’, Intelligencer, 7 NS (October
1882), 591.
27 J. Sutherland, Pol. Agent, Rajputana, and J. Robinson, Pol. Agent, Mewar, to J. H.
Maddock, Secretary to Govt. of India, 25 March 1841, NAI, FD, 3 May 1841, 44–5
FC.
28 Secretary to Govt. of India to Sutherland, 23 August 1841, NAI, FD, 23 August
1841, 16 FC.
29 It should be noted that Kotada was generally spelt ‘Kotra’ in the colonial and
mission records.
30 Rajputana Gazetteers, 2A: The Mewar Residency (Ajmer: Scottish Mission
Industries, 1908), p. 85.
31 Carol MacCormack, ‘Medicine and Anthropology’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter
(eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 2 (London: Routledge,
1993), p. 1349.
32 Hendley, ‘Account of the Maiwar Bhils’, 367–8.
33 Ibid., 364.
34 Ibid., 356.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 355–6.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 357–8.
39 Ibid., 357.
40 Hendley, ‘Account of the Maiwar Bhils’, pp. 359–60.
41 Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 1, p. 12.
42 Under-Secretary of Foreign Dept., Govt. of India, 16 July 1870, NAI, FD Pol. A, 277–
94, May 1871.
43 A. F. Pinhey, Resident, Mewar, 11 May 1902, NAI, Intl-A, 51–6, February 1904.
44 The British were often exasperated by the attitude of such thakors, holding them
responsible for harbouring ‘criminals’. For an example, see S. H. Partridge, Acting
Assistant Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to the Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, 12 August
1843, GSAV, Baroda Residency, English Department, Serial no. 418, Mahi Kantha,
Daftar 83, vol. 413, MK 14, vol. 212 for 1844.
45 Hendley, ‘Account of the Maiwar Bhils’, 359.
46 Ibid., 352–3.
47 Ibid., 353.
48 A more recent study by the anthropologist R. S. Mann lists many more local deities
worshipped by the Bhils of this region. They include goddesses that could either
cause or prevent certain diseases, such as Shitla and Vejwa, and various minor
village-specific deities that ensured rain and good harvests and provided protection
for livestock. Mann, ‘Structure and Role Dynamics among the Bhils of Rajasthan:
A Case of the Bhagats’, in K. S. Singh (ed.), Tribal Movements in India, 2 (New
Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 313–14.
49 Ibid., 347–50.
50 Ibid., 353–4.
51 Ibid., 347.
52 R. E. Enthoven, The Castes and Tribes of Bombay Presidency (Bombay:
Government Central Press, 1920) 1, p. 164.
53 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 219–20.
54 Ibid., p. 217.
55 George Carstairs, Shepherd of Udaipur and the Land he Loved (London: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1926), p. 233.
56 Hendley, ‘Account of the Maiwar Bhils’, p. 365.
57 Interview with Babulal K. Damor, Bhiloda, 17 December 2002.
[ 47 ]

58 Vand Mal to Maharana Bhopalsinghji, Ajmer, 22 June 1933, OIOC, R/2/177/334.

59 Rajputana Gazetteers, 2A: Mewar, p. 118.
60 Quoted in Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 16.
61 Quoted ibid., p. 17.
63 Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton
64 The sickle cell trait has been found to be most prevalent in India amongst tribal
populations, reaching a particularly high level of 38 per cent amongst the tribal
peoples of Bastar, and being found also amongst the tribal peoples of central and
western India. Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia: From Earliest
Times to the Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 72.
65 David Arnold, ‘Disease, Resistance, and India’s Ecological Frontier, 1700–1947’, in
James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt (eds.), Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the
Cutting Edge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 187–99.
66 Carstairs, Shepherd of Udaipur, pp. 239–40.
67 C. S. Thompson, ‘Report on Bheel Mission, Kherwara’, Intelligencer, 7 NS (October
1882), 593.
68 C. S. Thompson, Rudiments of the Bhili Language (Ahmedabad: Union Printing
Press, 1895), pp. 199–307.
69 P. S. V. Fitzgerald, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to P. H. Le Geyt, 20 July 1876,
MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1875–76, pp. 118–19.
70 Leonard G. Wilson, ‘Fevers’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), Companion
Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 1 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 384–5.
71 W. B. Collins, Kherwara, 7 October 1893, Intelligencer, 19 NS (March 1894),
211–12.
72 Mrs A. I. Birkett, ‘In the Bhil Country’, Mercy and Truth (September 1901), 208.
73 Jane L. J. Birkett, Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901, CMS, G2 I
6/0, 1902, doc. 75.
75 T. H. Hendley, General Medical History of Rajputana (Calcutta: Government
Press, 1900), p. 148.
76 Helen Lambert, ‘The Cultural Logic of Indian Medicine: Prognosis and Etiology in
Rajasthan Popular Therapeutics’, Social Science and Medicine 34:10 (1992),
p. 1071. See also Arnold, Colonizing the Body, pp. 121–5. Arnold examines indige-
nous forms of inoculation on pp. 125–33.
77 Major J. Black, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to H. L. Anderson, Govt. of Bombay, Sadra,
17 May 1864, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1864, p. 3.
78 Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Wodehouse, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to Govt. of
Bombay, Sadra, 14 July 1883, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1882–83,
pp. 20–1.
79 MKAAR, 1889–90, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 50, F 37, Colonel H. L. Nutt, Acting Pol.
Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Pol. Dept., Govt. of Bombay, Sadra, 21 and 23 July 1890,
p. 21.
80 Carstairs, Shepherd of Udaipur, p. 239.
81 Jane L. J. Birkett, ‘Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901’, CMS, G2
I 6/0, 1902, doc. 75.
82 ‘From the Rev. E. P. Herbert, Kherwara, North-West Provinces’, CMSE (1896), 140.
83 P. S. V. Fitzgerald, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to P. H. Le Geyt, 20 July 1876,
MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1875–76, pp. 118–19.
84 ‘From the Rev. G. Litchfield, Kherwara’, Intelligencer, 11 NS (May–June 1886), 414.
85 Birkett, ‘Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901’, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1902,
doc. 75.
86 T. H. Hendley, ‘Filaria Dracunculus or Medinensis at Kherwarrah’, The Indian
Medical Gazette, 7 (1872), 59–60.
87 Birkett, ‘Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901’.
[ 48 ]

THE BHILS
88 Ibid.
89 Bodding’s medical ethnography of the Santals, for example, provides detailed
descriptions of 305 herbal remedies utilised by them. P. O. Bodding, Studies in
Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 2001;
reprint of 1925–40 edition), pp. 161–393.
91 Ibid., 363.
92 Birkett, ‘Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901’.
94 Mrs A. I. Birkett, ‘Bhil Mission’, Mercy and Truth (February 1901), 45.
95 This was stated by J. C. Brooke, Commandant of the MBC, in 1851. Brooke to G. S.
P. Lawrence, Pol. Agent, Mewar, 7 April 1851, NAI, FD, 16 February 1853, 121–3 FC.
96 Bodding, Studies in Santal Medicine, pp. 1–4.
97 Deposition of Bheel Kalia Budo of Deraj of the Mondetta Putta taken before
the Attachment Mehta at Mondetta, 14 April 1843. GSAV, Baroda Residency,
English Dept., serial no. 407, Mahi Kantha, Daftar 83, vol. 412, MK 13, vol. 298 for
1843–44.
98 Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous
Medicine in Colonial Punjab (1850–1945) (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006),
p. 107 n. 3.
100 J. C. Brooke to G. S. P. Lawrence, Pol. Agent, Mewar, 7 April 1851, NAI, FD,
16 February 1853, 121–3 FC.
102 Thanedar of Poshina, 9 April 1864, OIOC, R/2/700/39.
103 R. Wallace, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Malet, 3 September 1850, OIOC,
R/2/700/39.
104 Brooke to G. S. P. Lawrence, Pol. Agent, Mewar, 7 April 1851, NAI, FD, 16 February
1853, 121–3 FC.
105 Hari Sen, ‘Popular Protest in Mewar in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth
Centuries’, PhD dissertation, University of Delhi, 1996, p. 120.
106 R. Wallace to Malet, 4 September 1850, OIOC, R/2/700/39.
107 A. H. Bull, ‘Some Bhil Customs’, The Nagpur Diocesan Quarterly Magazine
(January 1906), 41, in CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1906, doc. 9.
108 The ceremony is described in detail by the Reverend W. Hodgkinson, ‘Bhils of the
Indian Jungles; V. – Sacrifices’, The Round World (1 September 1909), 142–3, in
Jane and Arthur Birkett Papers, CMS, Unofficial Papers, Acc. 446, Z6. For a
more detailed analysis of such ceremonies, see my book The Coming of the Devi:
Adivasi Assertion in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987),
pp. 24–7.
109 ‘The Bhil Mission’, annual letter of the Reverend C. S. Thompson, Kherwara,
31 January 1890, Intelligencer, 15 NS (September 1890), 610–11.
110 G. S. P. Lawrence, Pol. Agent, Mewar, to Brooke, 31 March 1851, and Brooke to
Lawrence, 7 April 1851, and Lawrence to J. Low, Pol. Agent, Rajputana, 26 April
1851, NAI, FD, 16 February 1853, 121–3 FC.
111 Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry held at Kherwara on 21 July 1852, and Brooke to
Lawrence, 27 July 1852, ibid.
112 Ajay Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence in Colonial Western
India’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 138.
113 Zahir Nameli (proclamation) issued to the inhabitants of Mahi Kantha, 23 October
1856, OIOC, R/2/700/39.
114 D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal
Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 7, 253–4 and 262–3;
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 151–3, 333–4,
375–405.
[ 49 ]

116 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in

Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 91
n. 5.
117 Depositions of Khaloo Kana Damur Bheel of Bagdari and Khemi, mother of Mugjee
Pudmawut of Bagdari, now residing at Dehgamra in case of witch swinging in
Bagdari in Dungarpur, 1872, OIOC, R/2/161/207.
118 Deposition of Thakor Deerjee Naroojee of Bagdari in case of witch swinging in
Bagdari in Dungarpur, 1872, OIOC, R/2/161/207.
120 Sir Lepal Griffen, 17 March 1883, NAI, FD, Pol.-I, 212–58, June 1883.
[ 50 ]
CHAPTER THREE
The mission to the Bhils
During the 1870s, the CMS declared its intention to open more missions
‘among the non-Aryan hill-people’, who it was feared were coming under
Hindu influence. The Santals of Bengal and Arrains of Travancore had
‘already yielded a good harvest of souls to the Society’s sowing’. A new
mission to the Gonds of central India had been opened and efforts had
been made from time to time to reach the Bhils, particularly in Khandesh,
where the society had a base at Malegaon.1 The Bishop of Lahore felt that
more missions were needed to work amongst the ‘aboriginal’ Bhils.
Writing many years later, Dorothy McBurney – the daughter of
Montie Rundall, an officer in the MBC – provides us with the story
of how Kherwara was chosen as the site for such a mission. It is a tale
of drama and pathos, as well as British class snobbery. Rundall’s first
posting as a member of the Indian Army was to Kherwara in 1876, and
he received it only days after his marriage in England to Rosa, the
daughter of Edward Bickersteth, Vicar of Hampstead. The couple
set out immediately, arriving eventually at Kherwara in February
1877 after an arduous and slow journey from Bombay. According to
McBurney: ‘Kherwara was calculated to strike dismay into the stoutest
hearts. A low-lying barren, dusty spot, terribly unhealthy, tropically
hot, the only inhabitants an almost savage tribe called the Bhils from
whose wild ranks the regiments were enlisted’. Rosa was already preg-
nant, and she spent her lonely days at Kherwara planning for the eagerly
anticipated arrival, ordering baby clothes, trimming the cradle, plan-
ning the nursery and making arrangements for an ayah. The couple did
not however take to the regimental doctor at Kherwara, who was ‘an
ignorant little cockney just out, with no experience whatever outside
his recent hospital training’. When the time came for her confinement,
‘every mistake that it was possible to make was made by the inefficient
little doctor’. The ‘beautiful baby boy, perfect in every way’ died and
the mother nearly followed him.2
[ 51 ]

Rosa decided to build a church in his memory next to his grave. This
was completed in 1878, and consecrated by the Bishop of Calcutta. Rosa
told the bishop that she had been caring for two local orphans whom
she had been bringing up as Christians, and she expressed her willing-
ness to open a small orphanage for Bhils who might then be converted.
The bishop agreed to support the orphanage and went on to state that
in his view Kherwara would be an ideal place for a mission to the Bhils.
He promised to help its establishment in any way he could. Rosa also
wrote to her father in England, who was now the Bishop of Exeter, and
he decided to donate £1,000 of his own money for a missionary to the
Bhils in memory of his grandson. In November 1878, he wrote a letter
that was published in the Record and the Guardian, appealing for a mis-
sionary. In it, he described the Bhils as ‘one of the aboriginal tribes who
were driven up to the hills by the Aryans a thousand years before
Christ’. He went on to say that there were about three million Bhils,
but no systematic attempt had yet been made to evangelise them.
Kherwara was a healthy place, occupied by ‘our troops’ for over thirty
years, but until now the nearest church had been in Ahmedabad, 160
kilometres or so distant. A beautiful stone church had now been built
there, and he hoped that this would be ‘a point of light amid the hith-
erto almost unbroken darkness of this tract of heathendom’. He stated
that he was prepared to provide funds for a clergyman for an initial three
years, and hoped that by then ‘Christianity will have so rooted itself
there, as it has already done among the Karens, the Santhals, the Gonds,
and other primeval races of India’. The missionary would become ‘the
apostle of the Bheels’. He concluded: ‘May God send this home to some
heart, whom He will touch with Christ-like compassion for sheep far
away in the wilderness that have no shepherd!’3
It took almost two years to find a suitable ‘apostle of the Bhils’.
During that time, Rosa had another son, who survived and whom she
took with her back to England in 1879. She never returned to Kherwara,
but each year up until her death in 1926 she sent a wreath to be laid on
the grave of her first son. The man eventually chosen for the mission
to the Bhils was the Reverend Charles Stewart Thompson. Thompson,
then twenty-nine years old, was from Easington in County Durham. He
had spent three years training to be a missionary at college in Islington
in London, and had been ordained as a deacon in June 1880 and as a
priest by the Archbishop of Canterbury in October 1880. Being in the
evangelical wing of the Anglican Church, he was a believer in individ-
ual conversion through strong personal belief and faith, in moral self-
cleansing and in the importance of the Bible and Bible study.4 He left
immediately for India, arriving in Kherwara on 27 November 1880. He
was not married, and indeed never married.
[ 52 ]

THE MISSION TO THE BHILS
In addition to the new focus on the ‘aboriginals’ of India, the CMS

was at this time also developing an interest in medical work as a means
for proselytisation. At the Oxford Missionary Conference of 1877,
Bishop McDougall produced statistics to show that Anglicans had
neglected medical missions in comparison with other denominations,
and he claimed that ‘the work of the Missions of our own Church has
been much retarded in modern times because the medical element has
been left out’.5 Others, including influential clerics connected with
India, endorsed this sentiment. The secretary of the CMS in London,
William Gray, stated in response to this that medical work was expen-
sive, and it would not be easy to find suitable medical missionaries. It
was however worth trying out in cases in which local missionaries felt
that medical work was vital for their success, or in places where it was
felt that the impact of such work would be particularly great. Gray
believed that in many other cases, unqualified missionaries might carry
out simple medical work to good advantage.6 Thompson arrived in
Kherwara with a firm belief in the evangelical value of such medical
work. We have seen already in chapter 1 how Thompson’s amateur
practice managed to gain a valuable opening for him in the Bhil villages
surrounding Kherwara.7
Despite gaining an audience for his preaching, Thompson found that
the Bhils had no desire to convert to Christianity. He felt that this was
in part because they were far more Hinduised than many in the church
hierarchy had realised. He quoted a statement made in 1882 by the
Reverend H. P. Parker, secretary of the CMS in Calcutta, that ‘The
Bheels are almost free from caste prejudices against Christianity, like
other aboriginal tribes in North India, and they have so much more
strength of character than some of the others (for example, the
Pahariyas of Rajmahal), that the Bheel mission-field may be reckoned
as a hopeful opening for the missionary.’ Thompson felt that this was
misleading. He had found the Bhils around Kherwara were ‘very much
Hinduized’, and noted that Major Maccrae, the second-in-command of
the Bhil Corps, regarded them as low-caste Hindus. They appeared,
superior in physique to most Indian ‘aboriginals’ and many greatly
resembled the Hindus. Some tribes considered themselves superior to
others; for example, those who lived around the Debar Lake would have
nothing to do with other Bhils. Their language was wholly ‘Aryan’, no
traces being left of the primordial ‘Dravidian language’ that as ‘pre-
Aryan aboriginals’ they must once have spoken. The religion of the
Bhils was more Hindu than anything else, and there was a jogi, or priest,
in every pal who was sometimes a Hindu. He had seen Bhils sitting
around a fire at night singing Hindi songs and doing puja to the Devi.
However, they ate beef, and those on the Debar Lake ate alligator flesh.
[ 53 ]

As further evidence of their Hindu identity, Thompson stated that they

had a highly suspicious character.8 By this, he seems to have meant that
they no longer retained that childlike sense of trust that, according to
the colonial stereotype, was the mark of the ‘savage’.
In a report written some years later, Thompson elaborated on these
points. He argued that the Bhils, unlike the Santals, were great stick-
lers for caste. ‘They are the more particular because they can rightly
claim to have so little.’ He had recently happened to enter a room where
his Bhil servant was cooking his food. To his astonishment, the man
considered the food ritually polluted and threw it away uneaten, even
though this meant that he then had to march sixteen kilometres with
the missionary on an empty stomach. Thompson had visited the Bhils
of Khandesh, far to the south, and had treated their sick. He had found
that in contrast to the Mewar Bhils, they had no caste amongst them,
for when he had treated them they did not object to taking medicine
directly from his hands. Unlike the Mewar Bhils, they ate carrion and
monkeys. This showed that they had no regard for Hindu deities, and
particularly the monkey god, Hanuman. One of the reasons for the
Mewar Bhils being more Hinduised was, in Thompson’s view, that they
were ruled by highly conservative Hindu princes who had succeeded in
inculcating their Hindu beliefs. Another was that their ‘aboriginal’
blood had been diluted through mixture with that of the caste Hindus –
and particularly the proud and warlike Rajputs. In his words: ‘One more
contrast is that whereas the Santhals and Gonds are quiet, inextricable
aborigines, the Bhils are a wild, turbulent, mongrel race.’9 The idea that
the Bhils were, in social and religious terms, a blank slate ready to be
written on was for Thompson becoming increasingly untenable.
Despite all this, Thompson adopted an optimistic tone in his second
report. The Bhils around Kherwara, he said, no longer had any fear
whatsoever of him and his catechist. A native officer of the MBC who
had worked against them earlier on had become far more sympathetic,
and was even giving them useful help. He was in the process of col-
lecting material to build a school and dispensary at Kherwara.10 His
medical work, in particular, was going well, though he was unable to
state the number of patients he had treated or their maladies as he had
dared not write these details down ‘for fear of raising silly suspicions in
the Bheel’s dark mind’. However, a great many had received treatment.
He was being called out to villages almost daily, and sometimes twice
a day, to treat people. He described a number of his cures and the grat-
itude of the people concerned. He had refused to treat the townspeople
of Kherwara itself – despite their strong demand – as the MBC dispens-
ary and hospital was open to them and he did not want to compete with
the corps doctor in his work. In the past year there had been three
[ 54 ]

separate doctors stationed in Kherwara, and all had given helpful

advice to the mission, especially in serious cases that were beyond
Thompson’s limited expertise. They had even travelled out to the Bhil
pals with Thompson to visit the sick. One of them gave him a small
tent that he now used as a travelling hospital. ‘A poor man, with hardly
any face left, through cancer, is at this moment occupying it.’ A young
Bhil who was educated in the small mission school that Thompson had
established at Kherwara was acting as his medical assistant. Within
nine months, this previously illiterate young man had learnt enough to
be able to start reading the New Testament. The medical work had cost
Rs. 411 during that year – money that Thompson clearly felt was well
spent.11
Thompson had been sent to Kherwara for an initial three years,
funded by Bishop Bickersteth, and his continuation there depended on
either a renewal of funding by the bishop or the provision of fresh
funding from the limited coffers of the CMS.12 As such missions to
‘aboriginals’ were still considered a priority area, and as Thompson
seemed in general to be getting on well, it was decided in 1883 to make
the Bhil mission a permanent one, funded by the CMS. Donations were
obtained – including a fresh payment of £1,000 from Bickersteth – to
employ a second English missionary to work with Thompson.13 It was
decided to transfer the Reverend G. Litchfield and his wife from the
Nyanza mission in Africa to Kherwara. Writing to this missionary to
inform him of the decision, the CMS secretary in London stated:
The Committee believe that the experience you have gained in Africa
will stand you in good stead in many ways in your efforts to carry the
Gospel to the simple aboriginal races. They look to you to be able, with
the blessing of God, to win their confidence and to attract them to the
Saviour. May you and Mrs. Litchfield be the blessed means, under God,
of bringing very many of them to Christ, that their hearts may be puri-
fied by faith and that they may obtain inheritance among them that are
sanctified.14
Despite Thompson’s reservation as to the true ‘aboriginal’ nature of the

Mewar Bhils, they were still being projected in such terms for the pur-
poses of the mission.
The missionaries who were recruited on the basis of such appeals
came with romantic notions of redeeming a wild but impressionable
people, following in the footsteps of the apostles by forging large con-
gregations of Christians in heathen lands. Warnings by missionaries
such as Thompson, who understood the difficulties of working with a
community that had a strong self-identity, a highly resilient culture
and certain Hinduising tendencies, were ignored. There were soured
[ 55 ]

hopes and deep frustrations that were at times vented in somewhat

unchristian tones. The Reverend Horace Mould, who served in the Bhil
mission for four years in the 1890s, thus commented bitterly just after
leaving the mission that he had lost interest through ‘a dislike for the
work amongst the natives of this country, which has not come on me
suddenly, but has been growing on me for some time past, and which
makes work amongst them a heavy burden rather than a labour of love’.
In Kherwara, his only consolation appears to have been the company of
the MBC officers, for he went on to state that ‘My great desire now is
to obtain work amongst soldiers in India, if possible.’15
Thompson was made of sterner stuff. He realised that long and
patient labour was required that had three main dimensions – the
medical, the educational and the evangelical. He ran his dispensary at
Kherwara and went out to treat the Bhils in the surrounding pals. A
school was established at Kherwara, run initially by Masih Charan, the
catechist. Of the seven young Bhils who became the first pupils, three
soon dropped out. Two of those remaining proved particularly promis-
ing, and before long one was able to take over as schoolmaster, while
the other became Thompson’s medical assistant. Of the other two, one
became Thompson’s house servant and the other the mission errand-
runner. Other young Bhils joined the school, and it grew in size. They
were given a stipend of Rs. 2.8.0 a month for food and clothing, which
ensured a steady stream of pupils. A school for girls was also opened.
Thompson began exploring further afield, and by the end of 1884 had
established eight outstations to the north-east of Kherwara.16 Litchfield
and his wife arrived in November 1884 and took over the work in
Kherwara and the eight outstations, while Thompson travelled to the
south and west with a view to opening outstations there. Litchfield
concentrated on improving the infrastructure in Kherwara, building a
new dispensary, a schoolhouse and a residence for a native Christian
master and about twenty young Bhil men, who were to form the
nucleus of a teacher-training class. It was envisaged that they would
eventually run schools and dispense medicine in the outstations.
Litchfield stated in mid-1886: ‘The erection of these various buildings
naturally gives an appearance of organisation and system which was
entirely wanting before’. 17
Thompson, in common with most other Anglican missionaries,
adopted very stringent tests and criteria before he was prepared to
accept anyone as a convert. The would-be Christian had to show that
he or she would conform to the social and cultural values of the
missionaries. Males had to promise never to take more than one wife.
They had to agree to accept the clinical medicine provided by the mis-
sionaries and renounce their older eclecticism in treatment and cure.
[ 56 ]

In particular, they were to abandon their belief in the evil eye and black
magic as a cause of disease. Also, it helped considerably if they had
received some education and were literate. They were expected to be
able to sustain themselves by their own labour; those who were in it
only for food handouts or a job in the mission were not welcome. The
emphasis was on personal witness rather than mass conversion.
Because the demands were so tough in this respect, Thompson had to
wait many years before he was able to baptise his first Bhil.
Thompson had arrived in Kherwara believing that the Bhils were a
kind of tabula rasa on which missionaries might write with ease. Once
exposed to the truth of the Gospel, the Bhils, like other ‘primitives’,
would quickly accept its message. His particular strategy had been to
establish himself first as a healer and in this way gain sympathy and a
hearing for what he had to tell. He would first heal their bodies, and
then reclaim their souls. However, as he was now discovering, the Bhils
were less ‘primitive’ than supposed, being already engaged in a range of
dialogues with the high-caste Hindus who lived in their midst, accept-
ing or rejecting what they had to offer as they felt fit. Thompson now
found that the Bhils who seemed to be most amenable and sympathetic
to his message – such as the young Bhil who became the schoolmaster
at Kherwara – were those who were most Hinduised, being members of
a local sect known as the Bhagats. They had in the past decade reformed
their way of life in accordance with the doctrines of an inspired reli-
gious leader called Surmaldas, a Bhil who had been inspired initially by
a Brahman and who encouraged his followers to worship the Hindu
deity, Ram. Unlike many Bhils, the Bhagats were eager for education,
and Thompson held out hopes that they might prove sympathetic
towards Christianity. He saw that they were friendly towards him – the
young schoolmaster’s father often visited Thompson and expressed
very clearly his delight that his son held such a position.18 The model
of the tabula rasa was now being replaced in Thompson’s eyes by one
of religious evolution in which people developed from a lower to a
higher faith, with Christianity at the pinnacle. Belief systems, in other
words, were seen to ascend like steps on a ladder. There was clearly
some inconsistency here, for the CMS had been drawn to the Bhils
because of their supposed lack of corruption by Hindu values, with an
assumption that the ‘primitives’ could leap in one step from their sav-
agery to Christianity. Now, the most Hinduised were regarded as being
more open to the Christian message.
The change in strategy drew Thompson to the heartland of the
Bhagat movement, and in particular to Surmaldas’s home village of
Lusadiya. Lusadiya lay beyond the border of Mewar State, being in Idar,
which was in Gujarat. This was not a problem for the mission as such,
[ 57 ]

as there were no great differences between the Bhils of the two areas.
They intermarried and were thus related, and they shared a common
patois that had more in common with Gujarati than with Hindi, as
Thompson soon discovered when in 1882 he began translating the
Gospel for the Bhils.19
Idar State
Although Idar State lay in Gujarat, and most of its inhabitants spoke
the Gujarati language, it was often known as ‘Nani Marwar’ (‘Little
Marwar’) as its ruling family and several of its thakors were related to
the Rathod Rajputs of Marwar State in Rajasthan.20 In common with
the rulers of the states of Rajasthan, and unlike those of most other
states of Gujarat, Idar’s rulers had only limited control over their
thakors, whose estates covered about two-thirds of the total area of the
state. The Rathods had conquered the territory at the end of the four-
teenth century, establishing their capital at Idar, where a huge fortified
rock provided a secure stronghold. They had made alliances with exist-
ing Rajput chiefs, or had relied on other Rajputs to subjugate and rule
particular territories that were then considered to be under the nominal
control of the state. In the Bhil areas, the thakors established them-
selves as the patrons of particular Bhil pals, providing support for them
when they raided pals that were under the protection of a different
thakor. The thakors often asserted their independence in rebellions,
some of which threatened the power of the state itself.21 The Idar
Maharajas themselves had often been in a position of subordination to
the Sultans of Gujarat, and afterwards the Mughals, paying tribute to
them. This tiered system of paramountcy and subordination continued
under the British, with Idar becoming the largest and most important
state within the Mahi Kantha political agency, which was established
under the control of the government of Bombay Presidency in 1821.22
The British helped the Maharajas of Idar to extend their power over
the subordinate Rajput thakors. In some cases, the Bhils fought with
their thakors against British troops. The thakors were eventually
brought under greater control in a military campaign of the late 1830s
by the British political agent of that time, James Outram. In the
following years, many were forced to hand over the bulk of their
armouries to the British. The thakors were required to develop their
finances by increasing taxes on their subjects, rather than by relying on
the spoils of military campaigns or Bhil raids. This they did by demand-
ing either a greater share of the crop in kind or – in the case of many
Bhil pals – an enhanced lump sum from the pal as a whole.23 They
forced Bhils to perform corvée labour for them, and hired small forces
[ 58 ]

of retainers – who were often Muslims – to enforce these demands. The

thakors thus changed from being patrons and allies of the Bhils to, in
many cases, their oppressors. Increasingly, the Bhils looked to their
Maharaja or the British to support them against their thakors. This was
given under the condition that the Bhils renounce their violent ways –
which included feuds and plundering raids – and settle in their pals as
peaceful and industrious peasant farmers. They were also required to
stop persecuting alleged witches – a practice that their thakors had
always supported fully.
Throughout the colonial period, a central feature of the politics of
Idar State was the continuing conflict between the Maharajas and the
thakors, with the former trying continually to extend their power over
the latter. The British generally sought to retain the status quo that had
been reached in the middle part of the nineteenth century, so that the
thakors often found it expedient to appeal to the political agent over the
head of their Maharaja. For example, when Maharaja Keshrisinghji
assumed ruling power in Idar in 1882 after a long minority (his father
had died in 1869, when he was only seven), he tried to assert himself
against the thakors in a blustering and tactless manner, causing much
resentment.24 When he ordered that the thakors of Pal and Tintoi (two
estates in Bhil areas) be deprived of certain powers that had been recog-
nised by the British, they appealed to the Political Agent in Mahi
Kantha. Agreements were reached only after long negotiations between
Keshrisinghji, the thakors and the British official.25
In a few cases, the thakors were relatively benevolent and paternal-
istic; the majority tended to be high-handed and oppressive, causing
tensions and sometimes provoking outright revolt. One of the most
notorious of the Rajput chiefs was the Rao of Pol, whose estate lay on
the border with Mewar with a mostly Bhil population. The rulers of Pol
were Rathod Rajputs – as were the Idar Maharajas – and although they
paid tribute to Idar, they considered themselves to be largely independ-
ent. The Rao of Pol from 1864 to 1889 was Hamirsinghji. A British
political agent who visited Pol described him as ‘very backward in all
his ideas’ – a man who while taxing his subjects harshly provided
almost nothing for them in return. Instead, he hoarded from a half to
three-quarters of his revenue each year. There were no proper roads, and
the Rao had never even seen a railway. He never travelled outside his
state.26 When the Bhils of Mewar rebelled in 1881 in protest at the
census operations of that year, the Bhils of Pol decided to follow them
by rising up and besieging Hamirsinghji in his capital with a demand
that he end his exactions. He agreed to make many liberal concessions.
The rebels then linked up with other Bhils of Mewar and Idar and
raided and plundered a number of villages in Idar. The British quickly
[ 59 ]

intervened, cancelling the concession made by the Rao, but at the same
time fining him Rs. 9,000 as a punishment for the raids by his sub-
jects.27 Hamirsingji failed to mend his ways. A political agent who
visited him in 1885 reported that he continued to hoard his money and
spent nothing for the welfare of his people. There was not a single
ongoing public works project. ‘I found the Bhils of the Pol District to be
in a much poorer condition than those living in Danta and Posina, these
last looked well-fed and fairly clad, while the Pol Bhils had the appear-
ance of being half-starved and possessed no clothing but a few rags. The
difference may be accounted for partly by the Rajputana Railway,
having stations closer to Danta and Posina and partly from the more
liberal revenue administration of the Chiefs of these districts over that
of the Rao of Pol.’28
Surmaldas
The leader of the Bhil Bhagats, Surmaldas, lived in the village of
Lusadiya. This lay within the small estate of the Thakor of Karchha, a
Rajput who was a tributary of Idar State. The inhabitants of Lusadiya
were almost entirely Bhils. The first time Surmaldas was mentioned in
the colonial records was in 1875, when the commandant of the MBC
met him.29 There were further reports by the Political Agent for Mahi
Kantha in 1880 and 1881.30 Surmaldas was depicted in these reports as
a Bhil who was a devotee of the Hindu deity Rama, and who had
renounced the old turbulent way of life of his community. He was
encouraging his people to live in peace with their neighbours, to
renounce spirituous drinks, to live cleanly, to wear a yellow strip
around their turbans as a mark of identity and to earn a living by culti-
vation rather than crime. This was clearly a message that was dear to
the hearts of the British, who had for the past fifty years been pacifying
the Bhils of the region while at the same time encouraging the maha-
rajas and thakors to create the conditions that would in time induce the
Bhils to reform themselves from within. Here, it seemed, was a Bhil
who would greatly further this process, making them industrious,
peaceful and law-abiding subjects. The reports noted that those who
had converted and become Bhagats (devotees) of Surmaldas were more
prosperous than those who had not changed their way of life. For a
decade, not a single Bhagat had been accused of any crime. Thomas
Hendley commented on this that such teachers had emerged amongst
several of the ‘non-Aryan tribes’ in different parts of India. He called it
a process of ‘rapid conversion to Hinduism’ and explained that it
revealed ‘the universal desire of the wilder tribes to rise in the social
scale.’ 31
[ 60 ]

The major snag, though, was that the vast majority of Bhils were not
prepared to accept Surmaldas’s message. The reports reveal that the
Bhagats were being persecuted and boycotted socially by other Bhils,
who placed such ‘conversions’ on a par with becoming a ‘Musalman’,
something that revealed a strong antipathy towards Islam amongst the
Bhils. In this, they were probably influenced by a Rajput culture that
had for many years celebrated the struggles of the Rajputs against
Muslim overlords. But also, they themselves suffered the oppression
of the Muslims, whom many thakors employed as strongmen. The
Political Agent for Mahi Kantha claimed that he had taken measures to
prevent any outright harassment of Surmaldas and his followers,
though in practice it is unlikely that he could have done much to any
prevent any social discrimination that stopped short of violence.
Later reports add extra dimensions to the picture. In his report of
his first meeting with Surmaldas in 1882, Thompson described the
penances that Surmaldas had undergone to gain his miraculous powers,
so that he could have boiling water poured over his naked body without
suffering any harm. He also noted that he forbade his followers to drink
spirits or eat meat, and to eat food with anyone who still ate meat.32 As
in caste society this represented a claim to be ritually superior, it sug-
gests that the social boycott by other Bhils may have been a reaction to
this perceived insult.33 A. L. D. Fordya, the Assistant Political Agent in
Mahi Kantha, met Surmaldas in the following year and reported that
Surmaldas had asked him whether the British could help him to build
a small temple as it would help him gain more followers. Fordya also
stated that the Dewan, or chief minister, of the Maharaja of Idar was
encouraging Surmaldas’s activities. Even so, the assistant political
agent was none too impressed by the Bhil reformer, as he did not seem
to be a very powerful personality and he felt that it was unlikely that
he could sway the masses. The Bhils had co-existed with Hinduism for
centuries without changing their ways, and there was no reason to feel
that they would do so now. One problem that had emerged was that a
vegetarian diet was hard for the Bhils to maintain in years of scarcity,
when they often fell back on eating their livestock or hunting wild
animals. Surmaldas admitted that he had lost many of his followers for
this reason.34
Writing five years later, in 1888, Thompson gave more details about
Surmaldas’s career as a holy man. He had, Thompson said, suffered a
series of calamities, with his son, his daughter and many of his cattle
dying. Believing that he had been cursed, he made an offering to a local
deity, to no avail. He then carried out a penance for thirteen years,
not once standing upright. He sat by a fire during the hot season, and
wore only a loincloth during the cold season and rains. On different
[ 61 ]

occasions he had swallowed without harm a pound of chillies, then

boiling ghee, and then two pounds of molten lead. In this way, he gained
a reputation for miraculous power. His followers worshipped him,
removing their turbans in his presence and touching the ground at his
feet with their foreheads. He also treated the sick. ‘His one medicine, a
specific for every disease and sickness, if taken in strong faith, is a grain
of parched Indian corn, thickly coated with the ashes of his wood-fire.’35
This reveals that Surmaldas was also a healer, providing charms to cure
the sick. It is probable that this was one of his main attractions, drawing
sick people to Lusadiya from a wide surrounding area.
All of these reports provide only second-hand accounts of Surmaldas
and his reform movement. It was only some years later, in 1901, that
Surmaldas’s own account first appeared in written form. By then, he
had been dead for three years, but some of his close disciples in
Lusadiya who were literate had written down his autobiographical
account – a narrative that they obviously knew extremely well. They
gave it to the missionary Edward Walker, who published it in the North
India Church Missionary Gleaner.36 In this account, Surmaldas stated
that he was the son of a Bhil outlaw and murderer who drifted about in
Mewar during much of his life, living by robbery. He and his brother
had followed their father in this respect, and had committed many
heinous crimes. He told how in the year 1868 he had met some myste-
rious people – one of whom was a sadhu – who had said that they
wanted to rescue him from his low and degraded condition. The Bhils,
they said, were once a clever people, but their condition had deterior-
ated over the years and they needed to reform their lives. He had
returned home in a stupefied state. His family and neighbours believed
that he had been possessed by an evil spirit, and they carried out various
rituals to purify the house, such as throwing away all of their liquor and
meat and spreading cowdung. A sacred fire, or dhuni, was lit and left to
burn. Surmaldas performed a long penance, in which he fasted and sat
in a deliberately uncomfortable position by the sacred fire. He then
found that he had gained supernatural power and was able to heal the
sick by anointing their foreheads with red paste (kanku) and ash from
the sacred fire. ‘In the same manner the blind, the lame, the barren, the
feverish and all kind of sick people came to the sacred fire and were
healed.’ He became well known for these healing powers amongst the
Bhils of Idar, Mewar and Dungarpur states. He demonstrated his powers
to the British political agent by swallowing molten lead in front him,
after which the political agent had blessed him in his work and stated:
The people will not know you like that; take a piece of cloth a yard and a
half long, tie it on your head, buy at Tulsi’s shop beads and rosary and put
[ 62 ]

marks of ashes and sandalwood on your forehead, for which the native
noblemen and all people will revere you, and will not exact labour from
you without payment.
Hearing of this from the political agent, the Maharaja of Idar also came
and tested Surmaldas by asking him to swallow hot ghee, which he did.
Surmaldas began to preach to the Bhils who came to Lusadiya. He told
them to worship a god that was without any visible form, and to reform
their way of life by stopping stealing and killing cows. Although they
would suffer in the short term, they would eventually improve their
social condition. They would have schools and learn to read and write,
and would live in superior houses. As the Bhils became wealthier and
respectable, so the moral and social condition of the Baniyas and
Brahmans would decline, so that they would be the ones living by agri-
cultural labour, and eating meat and drinking liquor. Surmaldas proph-
esied that there would be a famine, that people’s wealth would be
looted, that an army would come to Shamlaji, and that the River
Ganges would disappear. In twenty years, the people would follow his
commands.
There are a number of elements to this account to be commented on.
It shows that even a very ‘wild’ Bhil like Surmaldas had a clear grasp of
popular Hindu beliefs and rituals and that there were close relation-
ships with the sadhus and other mendicants who lived amongst them.
His family and fellow Bhils believed that Hindu-style ritual purifica-
tion and personal austerity could drive away evil spirits and confer
miraculous powers, which included the power to heal. It is notable that
this healing power was the first great boon that Surmaldas’s new asceti-
cism conferred on him, and it was this that won him followers initially.
In this, he catered to a strong demand for healing within his own
society, something that the missionaries also tried to tap into in their
different way. The account of the ordeals he performed to convince his
rulers as to his power conforms to a formula found in many stories of
saintly figures in India. Whereas in the past the rulers of these ordeal
narratives were sultans, Mughal emperors and maharajas, the chief
authority figure was now the British official, with the Maharaja of Idar
in a clearly secondary position. In the story, the ordeal performed for
the latter was a weaker and less dramatic one – hot ghee has to be swal-
lowed rather than molten lead – and his endorsement was little more
than a footnote. Surmaldas understood very clearly the nature of British
hegemony, something that he appears to have been quite comfortable
with. He was happy – in this account – to accept the advice of the
Britishers as to how he should proceed to spread his religion, even
accepting their suggestions regarding the exact ritual paraphernalia and
[ 63 ]

dress that should be adopted. Although it is somewhat far-fetched to

believe that the British would have made such prescriptions, it clearly
mattered to Surmaldas that they should be made to appear to legitima-
tise these practices and marks of identification in such a way. He
was well aware that British support could provide a strong boost to
his movement, as well as help to protect him against his many Bhil
opponents.
In his account of the Mewar Bhils, Thomas Hendley had noted that
‘Most Bhils think the strong English Gods too much for the weak
deities of their country, hence their desire to embrace Brahmanism,
which comes within the scope of their understanding, raising them in
the social scale’.37 In earlier times the Bhils had asserted themselves
and maintained their independence through their prowess in battle.
This was no longer possible under British rule, for the colonial state had
managed to extend its control deep into the hills through military cam-
paigns and the formation of the MBC. The thakors had ceased to be
their allies and protectors and were now their exploiters. With the
opening of the hills to trade and commerce, Baniya usurers were also
extending their control over them, taking a greater and greater part of
their crop to service their debts, backed now by the power of the thakors
and the British.38 Many Bhils understood this in supernatural terms,
believing that their gods had lost their power and could no longer
protect them. Seen in such terms, Surmaldas, like many other Bhils of
his generation, was looking to what Hendley called ‘Brahmanism’ for
the divine protection that his own deities could no longer provide. This
required a profound change in values. The celebration of raids on rival
Bhil pals and caste peasant villages, conspicuous consumption of the
loot (including cattle) in communal feasts, drunken merriment and the
hunt – all central to the old culture – was to be replaced with an ethos
of sobriety, abstinence, vegetarianism, diligent and honest labour, and
personal development through education.
In earlier times, many Bhils who had settled in the plains regions had
been integrated into caste society as peasant cultivators, in the process
often becoming a local caste within a hierarchical society. In the
process, they tended to become more Hinduised. The independent Bhils
of the hill tract had for the most part refused to follow such a path, as
they had no desire to become merely a subordinate caste. In the
changed conditions of the day, with thakors asserting Brahmanical
values in a sometimes aggressive manner (as seen in the case referred
to by Hendley in which a thakor mutilated and tortured two Bhil cow-
killers39), and the Baniya usurers exploiting their monopoly over
writing to trap the profligate Bhils in bonds of debt, Surmaldas provided
an alternative path that allowed for both adaptation and self-assertion.
[ 64 ]

He told his followers that if they followed his teachings, they, as Bhils,
would prosper in health and wealth, while the high castes would lose
their power. No longer able to live by exploiting the Bhils, the latter
would have to put their hands to the plough. He even predicted that
they would lose their morality, and that in the end that the social, eco-
nomic and ritual positions of the high castes and the Bhils would be
reversed. His programme was not, therefore, one of trying to forge a uni-
versal religion for all so much as one of creating an exclusive religion
for the Bhils, who would thereby become God’s chosen people. Rather
than providing an agenda that acquiesced with ruling values, this was
a declaration for Bhil assertion.
Another significant feature of Surmaldas’s message was that he
depicted the old way of life as a state of wildness and lack of civilisa-
tion. He thus described his father as ‘a Bhil, who was a farmer living in
jungles in a very uncivilized and wild state’. This was because he sur-
vived on ‘loot, robbery and plunder’. In this, it might be assumed that
he had internalised the vocabulary of the British. In fact, it is more
likely that he was deploying concepts that long predated colonial rule.
Unfortunately, the source is a translation into English, so that we do
not know the original words used by Surmaldas, but they are likely to
have been jangli, meaning wild and uncouth, and hadu or hadarelu for
‘civilised’.40 Bhils were generally considered by the high castes to be a
jangli people who lacked any sense of propriety, being often boisterous
and drunk in public places, and given to violent feuds and criminal
behaviour.41 Hadu and hadarelu appear to mean the same as the
Gujarati and Hindi sudhrai. Thompson depicted the Bhil language as a
‘corrupt’ form of Gujarati,42 though we may regard it as a local dialect
which, in common with many such dialects, replaced the standard
Gujarati consonant s with h, and dh with d. This is reinforced by the
fact that the Bhil word for ‘improvement’ was hudaro.43 The standard
Gujarati word sudharo is commonly used to mean ‘improvement’ and
‘civilisation’,44 and it is closely related to the word sudhrai. In both
Gujarati and Hindi, sudhrai also means a higher and better state of
being, and thus a state of being ‘civilised’.45 The high castes commonly
saw themselves as being in a state of sudhrai, by which they meant
essentially that they conducted their lives in a respectable God-fearing
manner. As Surmaldas had first reformed himself under the inspiration
of a person of high caste, his project has to be understood primarily as
adopting such high caste, rather than British values. For him, hadu/
hadarelu/hudaro involved such qualities as living in peace with others
rather than a state of constant violent feud, the inculcation of a sense
of honour through devotion rather than violence, sober worship that
had no place for mind-changing substances, such as liquor, hashish or
[ 65 ]

opium, the careful harbouring of resources rather than displays of

ostentatious consumption, hard work, non-stealing, truthfulness and
so on. The Bhagats followed Surmaldas in this, reforming their lives in
such a way that they could now claim to be ‘civilised’ in these various
ways.
The Lusadiya mission

Thompson, for his part, felt that Surmaldas’s movement created the
conditions for a possible acceptance of the ‘civilisation’ of the Christian
missionaries, and thus Christianity. He decided to establish a mission
base in the area, and began negotiating to this effect with the Political
Agent in Mahi Kantha, the Idar authorities and local thakors. He was
attracted particularly to Lusadiya village, as he believed that many of
Surmaldas’s followers would respond to what he believed to be the
superior message of Christianity. The British and Idar authorities pro-
vided wholehearted support for his scheme – the Idar government even
promised some financial support and free supplies of teak for building –
and the Thakor of Karchha agreed to provide land at no cost in May
1886. Thompson arrived after the monsoon of that year, ready to start
work. To this day, Christians in Lusadiya can relate how he first pitched
his tent under a large banyan tree and from there went out to contact
the local Bhils.46 Some of the thakors of the area became alarmed by his
presence, believing that he was involved in a plot to seize their land,
and four of them tried to stir up the local Bhils to attack Lusadiya to
drive him away. The Bhils however ignored them, as they saw no
advantage in putting themselves out in this respect. As it was, three of
the four thakors concerned died during the course of the next two
years – which suggested to many that they had incurred supernatural
wrath as a punishment for their ill will – and their younger successors
proved friendlier towards the mission.47
Thompson sought initially to gain the confidence of the people by
focusing on medical work. In the words of the political agent:
As previously arranged the Rev. Mr. Thompson came there [Lusadiya] as

soon as the season opened at the latter end of October, and pitching his
tent near the site he had selected for the school and the mission houses
began operations by opening a dispensary and commenced making
arrangements for the timber and material required for building. It was
something so entirely new to the Bhil to find any one who took an inter-
est in him and his welfare, and especially when it went to the length of
looking after his bodily ailments, and giving him medical advice and med-
icine just for the mere asking for it, that at first he could hardly under-
stand it, and for some few days after the dispensary was opened crowds
[ 66 ]

and crowds of the Bhils flocked in as much to see what was really going
on I think as anything else; in November and the early part of December
fever was very rife and attendance at the dispensary at the time was
frequently over 500 per day, its reputation was thus thoroughly estab-
lished and it is looked on with much favour by the Bhils of whom the
average daily attendance is from 40 to 50. 48
By adopting this strategy, Thompson avoided any direct confrontation
with the religious beliefs of the Bhils, whether they were of the old or
reformed persuasions.
His second strategy was that of education. A school building was
ready by the end of December of that year and forty-five boys registered
themselves, of whom twenty-four were Bhils. All of the latter were
from Bhagat families, that is, followers of Surmaldas. They appear to
have been confident enough in their religion to take advantage of
the new facility without fear that it would lead to conversion to
Christianity. Thompson went out to neighbouring pals to encourage
other young Bhils to come to the school, and he tried particularly hard
to induce those who were not Bhagats. Possibly, he believed that it
might be easier in the long term to convert them to Christianity. One
of the thakors whom Thompson met on his tours was that of the Pal
estate, which was subordinate to Idar. The thakor – a young man of
twenty-four – was eager to carry out reforms in his territory. He said
that he would provide land and a grant of Rs. 1,200 to erect a dispen-
sary, school and mission house, and a recurring grant of Rs. 300 each
year for the running costs of this establishment. Given a free hand by
the thakor, Thompson went in April 1887 with the chief minister of
Idar to select a site, choosing one in the Bhil pal of Biladiya. Initial
building was completed just before the close of that year, and the school
opened with twenty-six pupils, of whom sixteen were Bhils. Thompson
explored other areas also, and although he found some good spots for
more mission outposts, he could not obtain adequate funding or recruit
suitable people with schooling who had the ability to operate as com-
bined schoolteachers and medical dispensers. In Thompson’s opinion,
unless such people had the personality and diligence to win the respect
of the local Bhils they would be of little use for the mission.49
The chief minister of Idar took a close and enthusiastic interest in
Thompson’s work, even going to Lusadiya in 1887 to inspect the
mission school. Both the schoolmaster and the Bhil pupils whom he
examined greatly impressed him. ‘I was really struck with the distinct
pronunciations and accents of the Bhil boys. They read and spoke just
as boys of the more refined castes do and this speaks a good deal in the
favour of the master who appears a very industrious youth and of a
quiet and settled disposition’. He suggested that the mission open a
[ 67 ]

school for girls there as well. He also inspected the medical work and
concluded that ‘Mr. Thompson’s hospital here is a great blessing to the
people of this wild district. I wish every success and God speed to
the noble work.’50 Colonel Scott, the acting political agent, visited
Lusadiya later that year. He judged the school a great success – thirty-
nine of the sixty-one pupils were Bhils, and many were able to read and
write with great fluency. Three or four came from far away, and slept at
nights in the school veranda. They brought food supplies with them,
and when these were exhausted they would ask permission to take two
days off to return home to replenish their stocks. Scott commented: ‘I
think that the Brahman and Baniya boys would not accept education at
such a price.’ He went on to remark that Thompson’s popularity
amongst the Bhils was increasing by the day, ‘and the relief received at
his dispensaries is much appreciated; some of them, however, cannot
yet understand how it is that any one, especially an European, should
take so much interest in, and so much trouble for, them, and all for
nothing, and being of a naturally suspicious nature are inclined to
imagine that there must be some ulterior motive.’51 With such official
support for the mission, the path forward appeared to be bright.
The first conversions

As it was, the missionaries had to wait until 1889 before they were able
to baptise their first Bhils. Although many of the Bhil pupils at the
mission schools were said to be Christian at heart, it was reported that
they lacked the courage to come forward for baptism, as they knew that
they would suffer social boycott if they did.52 In the end it was an older
man of Khandi Umbari village called Sukha Damor (aged about forty-
five), his wife Hirki and their four children aged between five and ten
who became the first converts, being baptised on 15 December 1889.
Sukha was one of the Bhils who had helped Thompson to make his
initial contacts in the villages around Kherwara in November 1881, and
he had continued to help him on his tours. He was a Bhagat who wore
a mala – a string of beads that marked a person as a Bhagat. He had
been told by his fellow Bhils: ‘If you become a Christian your fellow-
countrymen will disown you, and the Padre Sahib may leave India.’ He
said that his friends could do as they pleased, even kill him, and that he
had his saviour over and above the Padre Sahib. Once baptised, he gave
up wearing his mala.53
A prominent Bhagat called Isadas soon followed, becoming an impor-
tant evangelist for the mission. Thompson also converted a sadhu
called Satyadas, who was from a family of sadhus of the pilgrimage
centre of Nathadwara in the plains region of Mewar. He had come to
[ 68 ]

practise his devotions in the hilly region at the age of fifteen, and after
some initial setbacks had gradually won the respect of the Bhils. He had
nearly four thousand followers at the time of his baptism, and he
believed that they would join him.54 As it was, he was left isolated and
suffered considerable persecution. He nevertheless started preaching
the Gospel to the Bhils, continuing up until his death in 1897. The
other important convert at this time was Premji Hurji Patel, who was
a pupil at the mission school at Kherwara. He was a member of the
Dangi Patel community of Kattibadi village, near Kherwara. His family
members opposed his conversion strongly, and even tried to poison him
when he proved obdurate. He was baptised in 1890, and was subse-
quently employed as a lay preacher by the mission.55
Thompson believed that the tide was turning as far as the Bhagat
movement was concerned. He had seen more of Surmaldas since
working in Lusadiya, and had lost much of his earlier respect for the
Bhil reformer. When they had met he had twice asked Surmaldas to
explain what he meant by prayer and how he prayed, and all that he
could do was to chant repeatedly: ‘He Parmeshwar! He Bhagwan!’ (O
God! Oh God!) He did not, said Thompson, know any other prayer, and
this revealed his ignorance and his profound limitation. Moreover,
Surmaldas realised that he was losing his powers, and had decided to
resume his life of severe penance in the hope that he might somehow
regain them. In Thompson’s words:
The last time I saw the old man he was breathing with difficulty, emaci-
ated, and resolved never again to give up his life of fasting and voluntary
suffering. By remaining out in the open in the rainy and cold seasons, and
by sitting over a fire during the hot weather, he aims at being credited
with that divinity that doth hedge a successful guru. His followers,
however, are leaving the preposterous business of dethroning God. They
are going to send for a leading guru from Kathiawar, and for another from
Meywar, to ask them to point out plainly the road to heaven. If the two
men fail to do this, some of the disciples say they will seek the light and
help from the Christian teachers.56
Writing a year and a half later, in 1891, Thompson reported that

Surmaldas’s reputation continued to wane, and that Christianity stood
ready to take the place of ‘Bhagatism’.57
Nevertheless, the going continued to be slow; by 1895 there were
still only twenty-four Bhil converts. In part this was because of opposi-
tion by the local thakors and other high-caste Hindus. Some Bhils had
asked for schools, but under pressures from their thakors had later said
that they no longer required them. In one case in which a school was
started despite this, a rumour was spread that quickly emptied it of its
[ 69 ]

pupils.58 There were also stirrings of a new religious nationalism. A

member of the Arya Samaj who had an intense hatred towards
Christianity began agitating against the missionaries.59 Another reason
for the slow progress was, according to Thompson, that Bhil men
preferred to have more than one wife if they could afford to pay the nec-
essary brideprice, as it saved them from having to labour for them-
selves. They realised that if they became Christians they would not be
allowed to do this. Furthermore, the young men who been baptised had
found it very hard to obtain wives for themselves, as they were being
boycotted socially. Some converts later left the church as a result of
such pressures. Thompson also took a stern attitude towards those who
might convert to gain access to mission charity, demanding that con-
verts be self-supporting before he would accept them. He was not pre-
pared to take any easy short cuts in this respect. Thompson ordered one
young convert who tried to stay in the mission compound to leave and
earn his living outside. He subsequently stopped taking communion.
Thompson commented that ‘We do want true and manly independ-
ence, and we must inculcate into the minds of our people that slavish
dependence on missionaries is entirely antagonistic to the spirit of
Christianity.’ To do otherwise would ruin ‘the Christian name’. This,
he believed, was the method of Christ.60
The tide was however about to turn, but it did so only after a time
of intense suffering and mass mortality. This, the great famine of
1899–1900 and its aftermath form the subject of the next chapter.
Notes
11 ‘The Santal Mission’, Intelligencer, 6 NS (November 1881), 693.
12 Dorothy L. McBurney, ‘The Patron Saint of Kherwara’, typescript dated 1948, Paul
Johnson papers.
13 E. H. Bickersteth, ‘The Mission to the Bheels’, Intelligencer, 5 NS (September 1880),
537–8.
14 Vinodkumar M. Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions to the Church of North India in
Gujarat with Special Reference to Church Growth among the Bhil People of Som-
Sabarkantha’, master’s dissertation, University of Dublin, 1987, p. 98. Malaviya
notes that the Anglican missionaries to the Bhils were neither Anglo-Catholics nor
in the ‘liberal’ wing of the church. He also argues that they were not ‘greatly influ-
enced by the Bishops or the British Raj’.
15 W. Gray, ‘The C.M.S. and Medical Missions’, Intelligencer, 9 NS (May 1884), 313.
16 Ibid., 314–15.
17 See the first section of Chapter 1.
18 ‘The Bheel Mission’, Intelligencer, 8 NS (July 1883), 414.
19 ‘The Bhil Mission’, Annual Letter of the Rev. C. S. Thompson, Kherwara, 31 January
1890, Intelligencer, 15 NS (September 1890), 610–11.
11 Ibid., 416–17.
12 W. Gray (secretary of CMS) to C. S. Thompson, 22 April 1881, CMS, G2 I 1 L/10,
1881–84.
[ 70 ]

13 Intelligencer, 8 NS (June 1883), 378.

14 W. Gray to Rev. G. Litchfield, October 1883, CMS, G2 I 1 L/10, 1881–84.
15 H. Mould to Gill, Gorakhpur, 26 November 1899, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1899, doc. 479.
16 Bishop of Exeter to Ireland Jones, Exeter, 30 July 1896, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1896, doc. 320.
17 ‘From the Rev. G. Litchfield, Kherwara’, Intelligencer, 11 NS (May and June 1886),
412–13.
19 W. Gray to C. S. Thompson, 11 October 1882, CMS, G2 I 1 L/10, 1881–84.
20 History of Idar State by A. S. Meek, 1925, OIOC, R/2/149/106, pp. 17–18.
21 A. K. Forbes, Ras Mala: or Hindoo Annals of the Province of Goozerat in Western
India (London: Richardson, 1878), pp. 249–52, 267–70, 282–4, 293–304 and 308–11.
22 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 5: Cutch, Palanpur and Mahi Kantha
(Bombay: Government Central Press, 1880), p. 382 (hereafter Mahi Kantha
Gazetteer).
23 P. S. V. FitzGerald, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Pol. Dept., Bombay, Sadra, 12
August 1895, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1543 (1890–91 to 1908–9), 1894–95, pp. 4–5.
24 Major W. A. Salmon, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to Govt. of Bombay,
Ahmedabad, 26 July 1884, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1883–84, p. 4.
25 Lieutenant Colonel A. M. Philips, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Govt. of
Bombay, Sadra, 30 May 1885, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1884–85, pp. 4–6.
26 Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Wodehouse, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to Govt. of Bombay,
Sadra, 14 July 1883, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–1890), 1882–83, p. 22.
27 Major C. Wodehouse, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to Govt. of Bombay, Sadra, 31 July
1882, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1881–82, pp. 3–4.
28 Lieutenant Colonel A. M. Philips, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Govt.
of Bombay, Sadra, 30 May 1885, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–90), 1884–85,
pp. 4–6.
30 Mahi Kantha Gazetteer, p. 366; Major C. Wodehouse, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to
Govt. of Bombay, Sadra, 31 July September 1881, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1542 (1863–
90), 1881–82, p. 4.
33 Ibid., 417.
34 A. L. D. Fordya, Assistant Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, 1 December 1883, OIOC,
R/2/699/38.
35 ‘From the Rev. C. S. Thompson, Kherwara (Bheel Mission), Central Provinces’,
CMSE (1887–88), 93–4.
36 Edward Walker, ‘Letter From the Bhil Mission’, North India Church Missionary
Gleaner (September 1901), 51–2.
38 For an examination of this process, see David Hardiman, ‘The Bhils and Sahukars of
Eastern Gujarat’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, 5 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
40 This is the word that, according to Thompson, the Bhils used for the English idea of
being ‘civilised’. Thompson, Rudiments of the Bhili Language, p. 218.
41 See G. Morris Carstairs, The Twice-Born (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), pp. 126 and
135.
42 Thompson, Rudiments of the Bhili Language, p. i.
43 Ibid., p. 249.
44 P. G. Deshpande, Gujarati–Angreji Kosh (Ahmedabad: University Book Production
Board, 1974), p. 906.
45 The word sudhrai is also found in Hindi. Both the Hindi and the Gujarati are derived
from the Sanskrit word sudharin, which means maintaining orderly and good behav-
iour. See M. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit–English Dictionary (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidas, 1990), p. 1225.
[ 71 ]

46 Interview with Surjibhai Timothibhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 15 December 2002.

Surjibhai’s grandfather Savabhia Somabhia Suvera was a follower of Surmaldas who
came under the influence of Thompson at that time.
CMSE (1887–88), 94.
48 Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Chief Secretary, Govt. of Bombay, 28 July 1887,
MKAAR, 1886–87, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 49, F 34.
49 Ibid.; Colonel W. Scott, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Pol. Dept., Bombay,
Sadra, 8 August 1888, MKAAR, 1887–88, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 49, F 35, p. 3.
50 Dewan, Idar State, Memorandum Containing Observations on the General
Management of the State of Idar during the Year 1886–87, Idar, 30 June 1887, GSAV,
CRR, Daftar 49, F 34.
51 Colonel W. Scott, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, to Pol. Dept., Bombay, Sadra, 8
August 1888, MKAAR, 1887–88, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 49, F 35, p. 37.
52 A. Clifford, ‘ Report on the Bhil Mission’, Intelligencer, 14 NS (October 1889), 632.
53 ‘The Bhil Mission’, Annual Letter of the Rev. C. S. Thompson, Kherwara, 31 January
1890, Intelligencer, 15 NS (September 1890), 609–10. I was told in an interview that
his full name was Bada Sukha Damor. Interview with Surjibhai Timothibhai Suvera,
Lusadiya, 15 December 2002.
54 ‘From the Rev. W. B. Collins, Bheel Mission, Kherwara, North India’, CMSE (1891–
92), 426.
55 Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, pp. 19–20.
56 Annual Letter of the Rev. C. S. Thompson, Kherwara, 31 January 1890, in
Intelligencer, 15 NS (September 1890), 610–11.
57 C. S. Thompson and W. B. Collins, Kherwara, 22 July 1891, Intelligencer, 17 NS
(August 1892), 582.
58 ‘Annual letter of the Rev. W. B. Collins for 1889, Kherwara, 2 February 1890’,
Intelligencer, 15 NS (September 1890), 612–13.
59 C. S. Thompson and W. B. Collins, Kherwara, 22 July 1891, Intelligencer, 17 NS
(August 1892), 582.
60 C. S. Thompson, Kherwara, June 1895, Intelligencer, 20 NS (October 1895), 771.
[ 72 ]
CHAPTER FOUR
The great famine
In their medical work, the missionaries had sought to gain sympathy

though their compassionate response to personal crisis. A similar
principle was invoked during famines, but now the crisis was all-
encompassing, and the need for help became exponentially greater. A
great famine that began in 1899 brought radical changes in the mission
to the Bhils. Existing staff fell ill and in some cases died, creating an
influx of fresh workers to cope with the disaster. For the first time, qual-
ified medical doctors came to work for the mission. The famine also led
to a wave of conversion, so that henceforth the missionaries would be
the leaders and guides of a significant community of Bhil Christians.
Thompson returned in November 1899 from a stay in Britain to find
the Bhil region in the grip of a severe famine. In Idar State, only 16 mm
of rain had fallen during the monsoon that year, compared with the
average annual rainfall for the previous six years of 108 mm.1 Never
within living memory had there been such a failure. When Thompson
arrived back in at Kherwara, he found that the missionary who had been
in charge for the past year, Arthur Outram, was sick with malaria.2 As
yet, he had provided relief for only a few famine victims in the imme-
diate vicinity of the mission station. Colonel Bignall, the MBC com-
mandant, had outdone him by making arrangements for about 250
needy people to be fed. The Mewar State authorities took no direct
action in this area, as they considered that the responsibility lay with
the local thakors. A few of these tried to give some help, but lacked the
experience, ability and resources to cope with such an overwhelming
disaster, while many did nothing. In effect, the authorities in Mewar
provided almost no relief throughout the famine.3 Thompson quickly
took matters in hand. He ordered sheds to be built to house famine
victims, started a food kitchen, opened an orphanage, and ordered sup-
plies of grain from northern India. By mid-December, about fifty were
taking advantage of these facilities, most of them children.4
[ 73 ]

A small number of Bhils migrated to urban centres, where rich mer-

chants were at that time paying for food to be cooked and distributed
to the starving in the streets.5 Some made for James Shepherd’s mission
in Udaipur, as he had gained a reputation for his sympathetic treatment
of the Bhils who had previously visited his hospital in the city. He
opened a relief centre where he provided food that was paid for in part
from his own pocket and in part from charitable donations by the
people of the city. Very often, the Bhils brought their children and
begged him to care for them while the famine lasted. He housed them
at a refuge he had already set up for Bhil boys; the girls he sent to be
cared for in mission stations to the north.6 It would appear, however,
that only the Bhils of the hilly tracts close to Udaipur sought relief in
this way in significant numbers, as they used to visit the city regularly.
Elsewhere, the large majority of the Bhils lived far from any city and,
lacking any familiarity with such alien places and being apprehensive
of their fate there, they failed to make use of this potential lifesaver.
Leaving Outram in charge of Kherwara, Thompson toured the
mission outstations, organising similar relief measures there.7 He
found that many of the Bhil men had fled the villages, leaving only
women and children, and he found himself surrounded everywhere
by crowds of starving children. By mid-January, seven relief centres
were up and running, feeding six hundred children, who were also
attending the mission schools. At Kotada, for example, the number of
children at the mission school had within weeks increased from three
to fifty-one. Thompson commented that ‘this famine is offering us
great opportunities’. The work was however taking its toll on his health
– which had never been good since the mid-1890s – especially as he had
been travelling from outstation to outstation over the mountains on
foot.8
The large majority of those who came to the mission centres for help
were women and children. The few Bhil men who came tended to be
the sick or incapacitated, as the able-bodied preferred to try to provide
for themselves through robbery.9 The officers of the MBC had managed
to hire some five hundred camels to transport food grain to these and
their own centres.10 These had to be escorted by armed soldiers to
prevent them from being looted.11 As supplies were very limited, lists
were compiled of the needy, with children taking priority over adults.
Outram described vividly how crowds of starving people would plead
to be included on the list and the hard choices that had to be made.
Medical attention was also provided for those who were sick; guinea
worm, fever and diarrhoea were common complaints.12 Orphaned
children were sent – depending on their sex – to the girls’ orphanage
at Kherwara or the boys’ orphanage at Biladiya. Many were very
[ 74 ]

T H E G R E AT FA M I N E
weak and soon succumbed to ailments such as ‘famine diarrhoea’ and

scurvy.13
On the Gujarat side, the Idar authorities opened relief works in
various parts of the state that employed 15,604 in May 1900. The people
were put to hard work constructing roads, some of which passed though
Bhil areas, notably that from Idar to Shamlaji via Bhiloda. Some tanks
were also excavated.14 Very little of this helped the Bhils in their vil-
lages. One solitary thakor in the Bhil tract, the Rao of Ghoradar, was
reported to have made any efforts; he provided food for about fifty
people. The missionaries ran their own relief from the mission com-
pound at Ghoradar, feeding about a thousand each day.15
As winter gave way to summer, the crisis deepened. Writing on
9 April, Thompson exclaimed: ‘Wherever one goes, the starving,
dying people, with an intense craving for food, are pleading hard for
it with tears. Oh, this is a bitter time!’16 With bodies weakened
through the eating of almost indigestible, often toxic vegetation and
drinking filthy water, increasing numbers of the malnourished began to
die from disease – particularly cholera, which escalated into a major
epidemic in May. There was a panic when cholera broke out in the relief
works run by the Idar State authorities – over half of the terrified
workers fled.17 By now, the mission was feeding 5,500 children twice
daily in fifteen centres. Each had to be supplied with grain weekly.
Cholera did not spare these centres – in one, eighty children died in a
week.18
Thompson was staying overnight at the small centre at Bavaliya,
near Lusadiya, on the night of 18–19 May when he woke at three in the
morning with severe stomach pains. Aware that he had contracted
cholera, he decided that he had to return immediately to Kherwara for
treatment. Too weak to walk, he was carried on a cot. The entourage
had gone only about five kilometres when he asked to be set down
under a forest tree near the village of Jhanjari. There, at noon, he died.
An urgent message had already been sent to Outram in Kherwara, who
hurried to the spot. Arriving at the mission outpost at Kalbai at mid-
night, Outram met a melancholy procession bearing Thompson’s body.
In his words: ‘I at once had a grave dug on a little hill opposite the
Kanbia [sic] school, thinking that he would have liked as it were to be
in sight of his own work; and, just as dawn broke the grave was ready
and we laid his body to rest – a weary, worn out body – knowing his
spirit was with the Saviour he loved and worked for.’19 Thompson’s per-
sonal servant Bhagwan – who had nursed him in his illness – had
himself fallen ill of the disease and was soon dead also.20
A tragedy for the mission, Thompson’s death in the forest was
nonetheless a potent force for inspiration; he could now be acclaimed
[ 75 ]

as the saintly founding father who had lain down his life for the
salvation of his Bhil ‘flock’. As Charles Gill wrote on 25 May:
Thompson has died as he lived, in the midst of the Bhil people and the
Bhil country, straining every nerve for their temporal and external
welfare. His grave will still be a witness among them for that Saviour and
Friend whom he proclaimed to them. The devotion of his faithful Bhil
servant, Bhagwana, who caught the Cholera from him, and died a few
hours after him, may be an earnest of the future devotion of the Bhil
people to the Saviour in whose footsteps he trod. The corn of wheat has
fallen into the ground and died; but doubtless it will now bring forth
much fruit.21
Fired by this poignant and stirring model of self-sacrifice, volunteers
came forward to take up Thompson’s work.22 The Reverend E. P.
Herbert, of the mission to the Gonds of central India, who had replaced
Thompson for much of the time he had been in England on leave, agreed
to return to stand in once more. Four CMS clergymen based elsewhere
in India offered their services on a temporary basis and were accepted
within days. Miss A. H. Bull wrote from England – where she was on
furlough – offering to join the Bhil mission, and as a female missionary
was required to help Gertrude Outram run the girls’ orphanage at
Kherwara; this was agreed to.23
Writing in late May, Outram calculated that ‘40% of the population
are now dead, and 50% of the remainder, humanly-speaking, must die
before the rains are over, from famine, small-pox and cholera. It is a sad
prospect.’ The only grain that was available for the Bhils anywhere was
supplied by either the MBC or the mission, and it was now in short
supply. When he went to the outpost at Kagdar, where they were
already feeding 500 people, he found 550 extra people ‘all destitute and
bound to die’, but had only enough grain in hand to agree to feed 50 of
them.24 The suffering shocked the volunteers who began arriving at this
time. E. P. Herbert stated that ‘I never saw photographs nor read descrip-
tions vivid or awful enough to describe the sad plight’.25 Each mission
centre he went to was surrounded by dead bodies, which he had to
cremate.26 Cholera was raging unchecked at every place where the Bhils
gathered to be fed. At the Sarsau station, for example, up to ten Bhils
were dying every day from cholera, and the mission schoolmaster had
lost both his wife and his mother to the disease. Working together from
Biladiya, Herbert and J. C. Harrison made it their priority to clean the
wells at each station and to persuade the people there to drink only
from those wells rather than from dirty ponds.27
By July, fresh funds were pouring in through donations from as far
away as the United States and new volunteers were arriving, one of
whom, Dr A. H. Browne of the Amritsar Medical Mission, became
[ 76 ]

the first qualified doctor to work for the mission.28 Although the
monsoon was as yet holding off, Outram was fearful of the conse-
quences of any rain, as the people had sold almost all their clothing and,
having no protection from the damp, would almost certainly die long
before any grain could be harvested.29 He asked for donations of cloth-
ing and blankets. Because the surviving people had no seed-grain to sow
once the rain came and no bullocks left alive to plough the ground, the
missionaries provided them with enough to cultivate any field that
could be prepared with hand tools.30 Although the Bhils might have
obtained seed from the Baniya shopkeepers, the latter were demanding
three-quarters of any future crop in repayment. By providing seed-grain
at no cost, the missionaries gained immense goodwill.31 The monsoon
came eventually at the end of July, and the rainfall was sufficient to
hold out the promise of a reasonable harvest for those still able to till
their land.
The damp and cold weather proved fatal for large numbers of Bhils,
many of whom were reported to be like ‘living skeletons’.32 Although
cholera abated in August, it was replaced by epidemics of dysentery
and malaria, both of which proved killers.33 Many had only rags to
wear and were sleeping at night on the ground under trees. Often, they
died during the night. Dr Browne, now working at Biladiya, wrote in
a letter of 6 August that he was walking around the mission com-
pound three or four times a day to see if there were any fresh corpses:
‘Two mornings ago ten were picked up lying in one place or another
under the trees, and six were taken out of my little hospital. The same
afternoon, while I was feeding the hospital patients, three died before
my eyes, and four more during the afternoon died outside.’34 He had
the bodies cremated on a fire that was kept burning continuously. He
estimated that the death rate had quadrupled there since the rains
came, with 18 to 20 deaths each day. The mission was at that time
running six such centres on the Gujarat side, feeding in all 6,400
people each day, and there were similar reports from them. At
Bavaliya, 19 of the 1,100 on relief were reported to have died in one
day.35 They could not even save many of the children in their two
orphanages. Dr Browne wrote in graphic terms of his struggle on 20
August to keep alive ‘eight little ones, but to no use; in the evening
they all died’.36 During three weeks in August the numbers of boys at
this orphanage fell from 202 to 122. At the end of the month, 40 of
them were lying ill in the hospital, and many were still dying. The
death rate was reported to be even heavier at the Kherwara girls’
orphanage.37 At the orphanage for boys run by James Shepherd in
Udaipur city – which never had more than three hundred inmates –
two hundred died of cholera during the worst month.38 The particular
[ 77 ]

irony of all this was that the people were dying in greater numbers just
as their crops were at last ripening.
The missionaries themselves suffered badly during the monsoon
period; many had to abandon their relief activities because of sickness.
Outram and his wife Gertrude began to suffer from repeated bouts of
dysentery, and after coming close to death had to take long-term leave
to recover.39 Soon after, Harrison, Herbert and Dr Browne were forced
to give up their work through illness, leaving six volunteers who had
come on a temporary basis running the mission. They included another
British medical doctor, an Indian medical assistant and ‘an earnest
Christian soldier’ who had been granted leave by his regiment to
help out in the famine area. 40 Mrs Dawson, wife of the new MBC
commandant, Major C. Hutton Dawson, agreed to look after the girls’
orphanage at Kherwara.41
Dr Browne returned to work in mid-September, and noticed a change
of attitude amongst the Bhil survivors. Many had come into close
contact with the missionaries at the relief centres, and they were much
less suspicion of their motives than they had been previously. The
manner in which the missionaries had endangered their own health and
even their lives had not gone unnoticed. According to Browne, ‘Some
of the more thoughtful Bhils have said – “I want to know more about
this religion of Christ; for there must be something in it to make the
Sahibs come and live amongst us to save our lives as they have done.” ’
They needed to act fast to take advantage of this mood before it sub-
sided, and he urged the CMS to send the best missionaries and cate-
chists that were available to strike while the iron was hot.42
By October the acute stage of famine had passed, and hardly any
adults were coming for food to the mission centres. The missionaries
were, however, still feeding many children. Only about forty girl and
twenty-five boy orphans remained under their care, as many had died
and others had run away. Charles Gill visited the area at this time
and noted that although the famine was now at an end, the whole
region appeared desolate, with deserted houses, depopulated villages
and uncultivated fields. He regretted that very little proselytisation had
been carried out during the previous year. The strain of the famine, the
paucity of workers and their ignorance of the language had prevented
any real spiritual teaching amongst the crowds assembled for food.
The time had now come for such work. ‘The former barriers of timid-
ity and suspicion are now considerably broken down. They now frankly
recognise us as their friends and helpers in time of calamity; and now
is our opportunity to reach them.’ Unfortunately, most of the volun-
teers were about to leave, and there was no permanent staff of white
missionaries left. There were only a handful of Indian converts working
[ 78 ]

on a permanent basis, such as Premji, based at Bavaliya, Isadas at

Kalbai, Teza at Biladiya and Badda, his brother, who was working as
a schoolmaster at Kherwara. All the other mission schoolteachers
were non-Christians from Gujarat. Two fresh missionaries had been
recruited from England – the Reverend W. Hodgkinson and Mr G. C.
Vyse – and they were due to arrive in November. They would have to
focus initially on learning the language rather than preaching the
Gospel.43
Writing in November 1900, Gill set out his plans to establish the Bhil
mission on a much firmer footing. In the initial years, Thompson had
carried out almost all of the evangelistic and itinerating work. ‘He was
a Hercules spiritually and physically.’ Now, however, the mission had
to go beyond the ‘one-man stage’.
It can hardly be expected that Missionaries of ordinary physique can live

in the rough and ready way endured by Mr. Thompson. Accommodation
must be improved; a more permanent residence for a married Missionary
must be erected on the Gujarat side; proper arrangements must be made
for the obtaining of supplies from Kherwara or Ahmedabad; dispensaries
should be erected for Medical work; efforts should be made to introduce
native Christian preachers and to direct their work.
Gill noted that Thompson had always wanted a permanent medical

mission, and one possibility was that Dr A. H. Browne of the Punjab
mission should have his services at the Bhil mission extended by one
year.44
The problem was solved when the Reverend and Mrs Birkett of the
Lucknow mission volunteered to serve in the Bhil region. Arthur
Birkett was manager of the Church Mission High School, Lucknow. He
had made this into the best high school in the city: it regularly stood
first in the annual public examinations.45 He had also trained for a time
in England as an architect before he took holy orders, so that he had
come to India equipped with technological skills that would be of use
in the construction of new mission facilities, as and when required. His
wife, whom he had married in 1899, was a medical doctor, with quali-
fications from Brussels and Edinburgh. As Dr Jane Haskew, she had
been appointed by the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission of the CMS
to carry out medical work in Lucknow, where she had met her
future husband.46 She had run both the Kinnaird Hospital at Lucknow
and a dispensary for women at Nigohan, a large village outstation
thirty-eight kilometres from the city. It was a condition for women
who served in the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission that they
remained unmarried, and once she became Mrs Birkett she had to
resign and relinquish her post at the hospital. She continued to carry
[ 79 ]

out her work at Nigohan on a purely voluntary basis, as the dispensary

would otherwise have closed.47 As the wife of a missionary, Jane
Birkett was no longer seen as having any valid grounds for pursuing
an independent career; her status within the CMS was henceforth to
be merely that of an adjunct to her husband in his work. Arthur
Birkett himself clearly respected his wife’s skills, and does not appear to
have been happy about her downgrading in this respect. It seems
that the two wanted to make a fresh start as a couple and volunteered to
leave Lucknow for this end. Gill believed that they were particu-
larly suited for the Bhil mission, and he appointed them for a year in
the first instance, with Arthur Birkett to serve as head of the mission
in place of A. P. Herbert, who had left the mission in November 1900
after collapsing both physically and mentally. The Birketts arrived in
the same month and based themselves initially at Bavaliya.48
They moved to Biladiya in early 1901, as the thakor at Bavaliya –
whom Arthur Birkett considered a very troublesome man to deal with –
was proving obdurate on the matter of providing land for the mission to
build on. Biladiya was, he felt, better located for the outstations on the
Gujarat side, and there was sufficient land to construct an orphanage. It
was a larger place, with Bhils, Patels and other Hindus who were friendly
towards them. He decided to upgrade the existing rest house to a resi-
dence for a permanent missionary by adding an extra storey.49 Jane
Birkett ran the dispensary at Biladiya. Then, during the summer of 1901,
a major breakthrough came for the mission at Lusadiya, where some
leading Bhagats announced that they wished to convert to Christianity.
This development will be examined in the next chapter.
Notes
11 Mahi Kantha Gazetteer, p. 50.
12 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 30 November 1899, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1899, doc. 471.
14 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 14 December 1899, CMS, G2 I 6/0 1900, doc. 13.
15 For reports on such activities see Pandit Sukhdeo Prasad, The Final Report of the
Famine Operations in Marwar during 1899 and 1900 (Jodhpur: Government Press,
1900), pp. 143–6; L. V. Tarvadi, Ahmedabad, 12 January 1901, Maharashtra State
Archives, Mumbai, Famine Department, 39/169, pt. III.
17 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 18 January 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 70.
18 C. S. Thompson to C. H. Gill, Kotra, 25 January 1900, ibid., doc. 92; Gill to Durrant,
Kotra, 15 February 1900, ibid., doc. 129.
19 F. Westcott, ‘Work for the Famine-Stricken in India: The Bhil Mission: On the
Rajputana Side’, Intelligencer, 25 NS (October 1900), 739.
10 Gill to Durrant, Kotra, 15 February 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, Doc. 129.
11 R. Carter, Battling and Building amongst the Bhils (London: CMS, 1914), p. 21.
12 Report on Famine in Bhil Mission Area by Arthur Outram, Kherwara, 5 July 1900,
CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 383.
[ 80 ]

13 Rev. Foss Westcott (S.P.G. Mission, Cawnpore), Cawnpore, 25 July 1900, ‘Work
for the Famine-Stricken in India: The Bhil Mission: On the Rajputana Side’,
Intelligencer, 25 NS (October 1900), 738–40.
14 Dewan of Idar State, Administration Report for Idar State, 1899–1900, 22 August
1900, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 52, F 47.
15 ‘Work for the Famine-Stricken in India: The Bhil Mission: On the Gujerat Side’,
Intelligencer, 25 NS (October 1900), 741.
16 C. S. Thompson, Biladia, 9 April 1900, ‘The Mission-Field: North-West Provinces’,
Intelligencer, 25 NS (June 1900), 455.
17 Dewan of Idar State, Administration Report for Idar State, 1899–1900, 22 August
1900, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 52, F 47.
18 Arthur Outram to Durrant, Kherwara, 21 May 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 304.
19 A. Outram to C. H. Gill, 20 May 1900, ibid., doc. 304.
20 In all, seven European missionaries working in Gujarat died of cholera during the
famine. Robin Boyd, Church History of Gujarat (Madras: The Christian Literature
Society, 1981), p. 84.
21 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 25 May 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 303. Gill was
the secretary of the North India Corresponding Committee of the CMS, based in
Allahabad. At the time, this body was in overall charge of the Bhil mission.
22 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 25 May 1900, ibid., doc. 303.
23 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 7 June 1900, ibid., doc. 327.
24 The Famine Distress, leaflet put out by the Famine Distress Committee of the
Punjab Mission, Amritsar, 30 May 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 352.
25 E. P. Herbert, 1 June 1900, quoted in C. H. Gill, 21 June 1900, ‘The Mission-Field:
North-West Provinces’, Intelligencer, 25 NS (August 1900), 614.
26 C. H. Gill, 21 June 1900, ‘The Mission-Field: North-West Provinces’, Intelligencer,
25 NS (August 1900), 613.
27 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 12 July 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 379.
28 Proceedings of the Allahabad Corresponding Committee, Allahabad, 3 July 1900,
ibid., doc. 666.
29 Report on Famine in Bhil Mission Area by Arthur Outram, Kherwara, 5 July 1900,
ibid., doc. 383.
30 Ibid.
31 F. Westcott, ‘Work for the Famine-Stricken in India: The Bhil Mission: On the
Rajputana Side’, Intelligencer, 25 NS (October 1900), 740–1.
ibid., 741.
33 Carstairs, Shepherd of Udaipur, p. 217.
34 ‘Work for the Famine-Stricken in India: The Bhil Mission: On the Gujerat Side’, 742.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 740.
37 C. H. Gill, Famine in Rajputana and Gujarat Allahabad, 3 September 1900, CMS, G2
I 6/0, 1900, doc. 431.
38 Carstairs, Shepherd of Udaipur, pp. 216 and 250.
39 Gill to Durrant, Agra, 23 August 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0 1900, doc. 410; J. B. Outram
to Lang, Pitlochry, 21 September 1900, ibid., doc. 415.
40 Gill to Durrant, Narkanda, 19 September 1900, ibid., doc. 439.
41 Ibid., doc. 439.
42 Dr A. H. Browne, 18 September 1900, ibid., doc. 431.
43 C. H. Gill, Famine in Rajputana and Gujarat, Allahabad, 20 October 1900, ibid., doc.
431.
44 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 14 November 1900, ibid., doc. 484.
45 Church Mission High School, Lucknow, memo by A. J. Birkett, Lucknow, 6 March
1897, CMS, G2 I 6/0 1897, doc. 174. Birkett was born in Carlisle in 1863 and edu-
cated at Trinity College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained deacon in
1886, and priest in 1887, going to India that same year.
46 Medical Missions at Home and Abroad, 6 NS (July 1896), 155.
[ 81 ]

47 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 31 January 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 84.
48 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 16 November 1900, ibid., doc. 489. Herbert later stated
that both his strength and faith had deserted him during the famine. Herbert to
Durrant, Mandla, 20 June 1901, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1901, doc. 343.
49 A. I. Birkett to C. H. Gill, 15 March 1901, ibid., doc. 225.
[ 82 ]
CHAPTER FIVE
The conversion of the Bhagats
In her history of the Bhil mission, Battling and Building amongst the
Bhils, Rose Carter recounted an inspiring narrative of conversion.1 She
stated that before his death at Lusadiya in 1898, Surmaldas, the guru of
the Bhagats, made a number of prophesies:
A terrible famine would shortly occur, and teachers would come from the
north and the west, and teach them the true way of salvation from a book,
free of cost. They would teach them also about a true God, and a sinless
Incarnation born of a virgin. Eventually, a temple would be built for the
worship of the true god on a hill, which he indicated in the middle of the
village . . . He exhorted his followers to worship the sinless god, Whom
they could not see, because he was like air without any form. They were
to pray to Him with uplifted hands, and not to bow down to stones and
idols like their ancestors.
After the famine, she writes, many of the Bhagats became convinced
that the sinless deity was the God of Christians, and they decided to
convert en masse to Christianity.
Carter then goes on to tell the story of the most important of the
Bhagats’ converts, who was called Sava Suvera. Until then, she states,
he had been a leading opponent of the missionaries. He had nonetheless
been shaken profoundly by his experiences during the famine year. His
ten-year-old son Lala, who had studied to the fifth standard at the
mission school, had died, as well as his wife. While dying, Lala had told
his relatives and friends that they should stop practising their rigid caste
rules and start eating with others. He said that he was going to a beau-
tiful country and he implored them to meet him there one day. Sava was
deeply moved, but ‘although recognising in it a direct call from God,
Sava hardened his heart against the truth, and his disciples followed his
lead’.2 Even he, however, could not prevent the truth of their guru’s
prophecy being accepted by others. He determined to leave the village,
[ 83 ]

go far away and live by begging. That night he had a dream in which a
voice told him not to leave the village: ‘This kingdom is passing away,
and another kingdom will come.’ He felt that God had spoken to him
and that he had to accept the new religion. He was baptised along with
twenty-one other converts, being renamed Satgurudas.3
In Carter’s account, Surmaldas becomes a kind of John the
Baptist heralding the way for Christ. His prophecies are so set out as to
give them a remarkable prescience. The story – along with the self-
sacrificial death of Thompson – became central elements in the foun-
dational narrative of the Bhil church. To what extent was it credible?
The mission archives provide us with much fuller details, which
show that the prophecies – in common with oracular pronouncements
in general – were ambiguous enough to be read in numerous ways. They
talked in one breath of a sinless God who was without form, but in the
other stated that they should worship this deity by erecting flags on
their temple and houses – a form of self-identification that was
common in the bhakti worship of devotional Hinduism rather than
Christianity. A famine was prophesied, and persecution and suffering
for the Bhagats, followed by the coming of a person who would give
them what they asked:
This village will become a big city. If you are poor you will be rich. People
will come from different countries to reside here. These hills will be walls
of the city. There will be big bazaars. There will be only one master of the
city, and Dharm [a religious way of life]. On the hill in the middle of the
village a house of God will be built with great rejoicings. To teach and
reform your children, one master will come from the West and another
will come from the North, who will make a complete arrangement. Your
children will learn and become very clever. Some soldiers will come
and judge and give the Raj to the Bhils. The lord of this world and
Righteousness will be one. In those days the cows will graze and return
home without a cowherd. The tiger and goat will drink together. God will
punish liars and deceivers by beheading them.
There were other prophecies, such as that the River Ganges would pass
away.4 Much was thus predicted; the coming of the missionaries ful-
filled only a part of it.
Of all the prophecies made by their guru, the one that more than any
other appeared to have been fulfilled was that of a coming time of
famine and terrible suffering. Like most other Bhils, the Bhagats went
hungry in 1899–1900, and a number abandoned their vows and sur-
vived, as did others, by robbery, looting and killing cattle and other
animals for food. The devout Bhagats refused to act like this, and tried
to save themselves by eating the bark and leaves of trees and selling
grass and wood. Scores of them died of starvation and disease.5 Those
[ 84 ]

T H E C O N V E R S I O N O F T H E B H A G AT S
who survived were left in a state of destitution, mourning members of

their families and relatives. Their faith had been challenged, and many
seem to have felt that new explanations were required to underpin their
strong moral commitments. They decided to enter into a dialogue with
the Christian padres who had given them food and other help and who
had risked their lives for them during the famine.
In 1901, Edward Walker came to stay and work in Lusadiya. He was
a lay worker for the Gond mission who had volunteered his services for
the Bhil mission while Outram was on sick leave. With the help of the
lay preacher Premji Hurji Patel, he was able develop a rapport with the
local Bhils. Walker wrote of how ‘I so love the people amongst whom
my lot is cast that any spare time I have I try to spend amongst them
acquiring their language, ways, usages and customs.’ He said that he
enjoyed nothing better than to ‘go and squat in a Bhil’s hut and tell him
about God who made the “Sun Moon and Stars” ’.6 Jane Birkett, who
saw him working there, feared for his health as, unlike most other mis-
sionaries, he drank water freely in the houses of the Bhils and took few
other precautions. She observed, however, that he had managed to win
their affection to a remarkable degree.7
A turning point came when they were visited by Laxman Hari, a cat-
echist whose services had been lent by the Sind mission and who was
then in charge of the outstation at Bavaliya. He was a Gujarati whose
Hindu parents had converted to Christianity, and he had worked as a
CMS schoolteacher in Karachi. He was considered an excellent and per-
suasive preacher. He preached two sermons to the leaders of the Bhils
which were full of ‘spiritual power’ and which made a big impression
in the village. While there is no record of what he said, it appears that
he was able to speak to the Bhils in a way that resonated – in contrast,
it seems, to the white missionaries, whose grasp of the language and
local idioms was comparatively limited. The Bhagats held a meeting
soon after, and reached a consensus that the missionaries were most
probably those that Surmaldas had prophesied would come to save
them after the famine.
In the following days, they debated the matter with Walker. They
said that they now believed that conversion to the religion of the mis-
sionaries would lead to the fulfilment of some of Surmaldas’s pro-
nouncements, but stated that they expected all of the other prophecies
to be fulfilled, such as that one day they would become future masters
of a great and prosperous city and rulers of the land.8 A meeting was
arranged in which Laxman Hari listened to the bhajans (devotional
songs) of the Bhagats, commenting on each verse and showing how they
accorded with the truth of the Gospel. We do not have actual examples
of how he managed this, but he appears to have had a good enough grasp
[ 85 ]

of the Bible to be able to make relevant connections from one passage

or another. We know the words of two of the bhajans that were sung at
that time:
The sinless God will come with an army on a white horse;
From his mouth will go forth the Spirit:
He will come in great pomp decorated with jewels.
To save the world, and all quarters will hear him.
Swords will be turned into garlands
And He will marry the heavenly (sanctified) bride.
In this sinful land load your hearts with jewels,
We wander in this world like a blind man in a bazaar.
Take bundle of wisdom.
Rupa begs you to come to the City of Immortality.9
Although there was a good deal here that does not on the surface appear
very Christian, there would have been enough to serve Laxman Hari’s
purpose in either a direct or an allegorical manner.
A further meeting was held next day which was joined by some
Bhagats from a nearby village. Laxman Hari spoke for three hours
explaining how the prophecies of Surmaldas could each be explained
in the Bible. That night they discussed the matter further amongst
themselves. Sava Suvera was still dubious about the missionaries and
their religion, but found himself in a minority. That night, sitting at
home, he came to a decision to leave the village and live elsewhere. At
midnight he suddenly heard a voice from outside: ‘Son, do not flee:
remain here; this religion of the Christians is the one true religion.
This is the way; Christ is the true Light.’ Startled, he opened his door
and asked who it was who had spoken. There was no reply. Before he
could go back inside, another Bhagat came running to tell him that
he had heard a voice saying the same thing. A third soon followed.
Together, they resolved to write a letter to Walker stating that they
wished to become Christians. Walker agreed to prepare them all for
baptism.10
Following their general attitude towards conversion, the CMS
authorities advised the missionaries on the spot not to get carried away,
but to consolidate their advantage with caution. Walker, for example,
waxed lyrically about his new Bhil friends. Charles Gill, in Allahabad,
responded: ‘I have written to Walker and Birkett, strongly depreciating
haste in baptising any of these men. In my opinion they would be wise
to wait until Outram could be present.’11 In other words, Gill wanted
to them to be sure that these were ‘genuine’ converts who understood
what it meant to be a Christian and not so-called ‘rice-Christians’ who
were in it merely to fill their stomachs.
[ 86 ]

Even amongst these Anglicans, with their distaste for over-enthusias-

tic exultation, there was nonetheless a mood of firm optimism. Finally,
the Bhil mission appeared to be making good. New members of staff
were taking up their posts. Two single missionary women, Rose Carter
and Helen Bull, had arrived to supervise the girls’ orphanage at Kherwara.
G. C. Vyse had begun work at Bavaliya, and W. H. Hodgkinson had joined
the Birketts in Biladiya, where the refurbishment of the missionary res-
idence was now complete. Outram returned to the mission from his sick
leave in October, being based once more at Kherwara. There were
however setbacks. J. W. Goodwin, who had been working at Kherwara for
over a year, was forced by illness to take time off in September, but after
seeming to recover he died in November from a combination of black-
water fever and jaundice.12 Edward Walker fell dangerously ill in mid-
October when his chronic malaria developed into blackwater fever. He
had to be taken to Ahmedabad to recover, and then went on to south
India to convalesce. There, it became clear that his health was in very
poor shape, and he went back to Ireland, never returning to the Bhil
mission.13 The Birketts moved to Lusadiya to take his place, and there,
on Sunday 24 November 1901, twenty-two men, women and children –
all of Bhagat families – were baptised.14 Seeing that until that time only
fourteen people had been baptised since the mission began in 1880, this
was a radical advance.15
The 1901–2 season was a poor one, with rainfall of only about
230 mm and a plague of rats, as well as grasshoppers, both of which ate
the crops as they stood in the fields before the harvest. The missionar-
ies had once more to open relief camps and provide food for the people.16
In Lusadiya, for example, about 2,000 people were being fed daily by
mid-December 1901.17 There were other major relief centres at Biladiya
and Kherwara. The numbers on relief increased over the next months.
By the summer of 1902, about 6,000 were being fed at Lusadiya and
2,000 at Biladiya.18 The Kherwara centre was run by Outram, with the
assistance of the commandant of the MBC, Hutton Dawson. The two
men fell out in May 1902 when Outram suddenly stopped providing
relief for the 1,500 people who were coming each day. He claimed that
there was no grain available, but had in fact been piqued by Hutton
Dawson requisitioning some workmen who had been constructing a
mission granary. Hutton Dawson reported the matter to the British
Resident in Mewar, who then stated that Outram had acted in an inju-
dicious and objectionable manner. The commandant also wrote to
Charles Gill, stating that he and his fellow officers were no longer pre-
pared to put up with Outram’s presence in Kherwara, and demanded
that he be transferred. This was a great blow to the mission, as Hutton
Dawson and his wife had hitherto been its strong supporters. Gill wrote
[ 87 ]

to Outram advising him to back down.19 The resident visited the

station to mediate; Outram agreed to apologise and the matter was
ostensibly laid to rest.20 Following this, in 1904, Outram decided that
as his health still remained poor – he complained of not having had one
firm stool since returning to Kherwara – he and his family would return
to England for good.21
This episode indicated that the time had come for the mission to
shift its focal point from Mewar to Gujarat, so that it could break away
from its formative dependence on the Bhil corps and its officers.
Although the presence of the MBC had been a great help in establish-
ing the mission in the first place, the missionaries had encoun-
tered considerable opposition to their work from its Indian officers.
G. C. Vyse, who replaced Outram in Kherwara, reported that the high-
caste officers strongly discouraged the Bhil sepoys from developing any
interest in Christianity, and he cited the case of a young Christian who
joined and quickly renounced his new faith under such pressure.
Because of the strong influence of the corps in the villages around
Kherwara, the Bhils of that region were also hostile to and suspicious
of the missionaries. In this, Vyse remarked, there was a marked differ-
ence from the attitude of the Bhils of Lusadiya and the surrounding
area.22 The shift from Kherwara began in late 1902, when the medical
officer of the MBC inspected the girls’ orphanage and pronounced it to
be unfit for human habitation.23 It was decided to relocate the whole
institution to Lusadiya.24
Following their general rule of discouraging conversion for instru-
mental reasons, the missionaries were reluctant to baptise people so
long as the period of dearth continued. Catechists preached to the
people at the relief centres on a regular basis, and classes were held at
which people were taught to recite the Creed, Lord’s Prayer and Ten
Commandments and to answer simple questions on the life of Christ.
About 160 ‘inquirers’ were attending such a class at Lusadiya in March
1902. Vyse noted that many of them had asked to be baptised, but he
told them that they had to wait until the crisis had passed. He hoped
thereby to discourage those ‘with some unworthy motive’ and to sift
‘the true and loyal from the rest’.25 Laxman Hari ran another class at
Biladiya that was attended mainly by the boys of the mission orphan-
age. Hodgkinson, the missionary in charge there, was prepared to
baptise only the first batch of these boys after the dearth had ended. He
held an examination for them in September 1902, in which he ques-
tioned each candidate individually on Christian doctrine. Amongst
other things, he asked them to give reasons why they wanted to be
Christians. Besides being expected to provide convincing and worthy
answers to this question, they had to satisfy him that they were not in
[ 88 ]

it for employment or money. Fifteen of the boys and two Bhil men of
the village passed this test and were baptised next day. They were the
first converts from Biladiya.26 The other forty-two boys at the orphan-
age were also prepared and baptised as and when they were ready. At
Lusadiya, following similar procedures, fifty-four more people were
baptised in December 1902, and thirty-five four months later.27 Before
each baptism, the catechist Prema cut off the topknots, or chotis, of the
males with a pair of scissors.28
A considerable degree of this success could be attributed to the evan-
gelical endeavours of Laxman Hari. Arthur Birkett, who had often seen
him preach, commented on his great rapport with his audience, and
how he managed to convey the fundamentals of Christianity in a way
that could be readily grasped by all.
He had unlimited patience for he would go over the same thing time after
time till they understood it. He would also visit the Bhils in their homes;
and at times of special temptation, as for instance at the Holi festival, he
went at night to their houses to see what they were doing and to encour-
age them to stand fast.
He also translated part of the Prayer Book and some Christian tracts.
He was, said Birkett, devoted to his work, showing little concern for his
own personal comforts.29 Despite this, as an Indian Christian, he was
not deemed to be suited to a position of leadership in the mission. When
he was ordained in 1904, he should by rights have been put in charge of
the Lusadiya mission station, as the acting head, Vyse, had not been
ordained. It was however deemed unacceptable for a white missionary
to be under an Indian, and rather than allow it, the CMS ordered
Hodgkinson – who had also been ordained in 1904 and was the only
other priest with such a status in the Bhil mission then available – to
be transferred to Lusadiya immediately.30 Later, when Rose Carter
wrote her history of the Bhil mission – which celebrates the exploits of
the white missionaries in copious detail – she mentions Laxman Hari
in only one paragraph.31
Arthur and Jane Birkett had come initially on a temporary basis and
had left in August 1902, returning to Lucknow, after which they went
to England on furlough during 1903. In the meantime, the overall
responsibility for the Bhil mission was transferred from the North
Indian to the Central Indian CMS Committee. In 1904, the latter com-
mittee decided to request the North Indian committee to allow Arthur
Birkett to be transferred to the Bhil mission in order to become its
head.32 He was an experienced missionary – he had been in India since
1887 – and had worked with great success in the mission during the
famine. The added advantage was that his wife, Jane Birkett, could
[ 89 ]

work as a medical missionary without the need for the CMS to pay a
large additional salary. The North Indian committee agreed to this
rather reluctantly in August 1904, and the Birketts took up their posts
at Lusadiya in December of that year. For the first time, a medically
qualified doctor was now based in the mission on a permanent basis.
By the end of 1902, the schoolroom at Lusadiya had become too
small to contain all those who were now attending church services at
Lusadiya, and it was agreed that a separate building was required. As no
funds were then available for such a purpose, the converts decided in
early 1903 to build their own church. The leading Bhil convert,
Satgurudas, suggested it should be constructed where his house stood,
which was on a prominent hill in the centre of the village. This was the
place where he had heard what he believed to be the voice of God
exhorting him to become a Christian. It was also the place where
Surmaldas had lived, and where he had prophesied that a temple would
in future stand. The house was demolished and a new building erected
in traditional style, using a wooden frame, mud-covered walls and a
tiled roof. It was made large enough to take a congregation of 400, as it
was anticipated that more would soon join their church. It was named
‘Christ Church’ at the request of Satgurudas, and formally consecrated
in February 1904 by the Bishop of Nagpur.33 It stood as a powerful
symbol of the transfer of spiritual power from Surmaldas and the way
of the Bhagats to the Christians and Christianity.
Forging a Protestant ethic

By 1905 there were over 250 converts in the Bhil mission. They were
found in 16 different villages. The largest number – 80 – were in
Lusadiya, followed by 36 in Kherwara, 35 in Biladiya, 25 in Chhitadara,
22 in Nana Kanthariya, 15 in Devni Mori and varying numbers below
10 in the other villages.34 Church councils were formed in that year in
the three parishes of Lusadiya, Biladiya and Kherwara on which male
Bhil communicants were expected to sit. These were designed to
encourage self-sufficiency and a spirit of self-government and democ-
racy amongst the Christians. The councils met twice a year.35 Over and
above these village councils there was the Gujarat District Church
Council, established in 1907. In the first meeting of this body in May
1907, twelve villages were represented by twenty-six converts.36
A mela, or fair, for Christians was held at Lusadiya in November
1906 that was designed to bring the Christians of the three parishes
together and inculcate a sense of common purpose and identity. Tents
were erected for the participants and a large pandal for the meeting.
Some Baniyas established stalls and enjoyed a good trade. There were
[ 90 ]

sports for the boys, bow-and-arrow shooting for the men and a baby
show for the mothers, at which ten babies were jointly awarded the first
prize of Rs. 10. There were also prizes for cattle, ploughing, swimming,
singing, needlework, grinding and cooking. There were poetry recitals,
and Bhil choirs competed in the singing of the canticles.
According to Arthur Birkett, the overall effect of the mela was
extremely positive: ‘The past year has witnessed a greater advance in
the Kingdom of God in the Bhil Mission than any since the Church was
established at Lusadia . . . The most important feature of this advance
was the spiritual perception of the evil of sin, which many received
during the Mela’.37 This breakthrough had taken place on the fourth
and final day of the mela, when about eighty converts got up and con-
fessed past sins:
a rug [that was stolen] years ago; a watch; grain to be sown for the orphan-
age farm turned into money and used for themselves by four young men;
money given to buy lime used for themselves by two others, and a false
account given; a camera broken by an inquisitive servant and always
denied though he was dismissed for it; other acts of deception, pride, anger,
covetousness, and, alas, gross sins of the flesh of long ago and recent. Some
confessed with sobs. None could doubt that the Holy Spirit was deeply at
work, and that the couple of hours thus spent was having more spiritual
effect than years of ordinary work or panchayat investigations.38
Hodgkinson, who had led his congregation from Biladiya to the mela,
was very impressed by the participation of his flock in this mass con-
fession: ‘there were unmistakeable signs that God’s Holy Spirit was
mightily at work, and before its close such confessions had been made
that humbled us to the dust and showed how much of the Kingdom of
darkness there was in our little church. And yet who could but thank
God for such a manifestation of the power of God over the devil!’ 39 The
first to confess sin openly was the Biladiya schoolmaster, a Gujarati
who was the second-highest-paid Indian employee in the whole
mission. He confessed to a theft he had committed several years before,
and he did so before his scholars.
Then followed four senior orphan boys who owned up to stealing and
selling grain which had been given them for sowing. After these there was
a constant succession of those who under the power of conviction con-
fessed, some with tears and sobs, others being scarcely able to utter a
word – so intense was the feeling – sins which must have hindered the
blessing coming to the individual soul, and to the whole church. Sadly,
one of the boys whom I least suspected confessed the most heinous sins.40
In all, Arthur Birkett concluded, the mela had created a strong sense of
unity and common purpose amongst the new converts.41
[ 91 ]

1 Bhil Christians of Chhitadara, 1904.
After the mela was over the Birketts and Helen Bull camped in
Chhitadara to prepare candidates for confirmation. The first converts –
seven in all – had been baptised there in December 1902, and now there
were thirty-eight Christians. Six agreed to attend the daily class. Others
said they could not as they could not in all conscience promise not to
tell lies. Each year at harvest time they were obliged, they said, to give
false statements to the Baniya merchants and also to the thakor’s rent-
collectors; otherwise they would be left with inadequate subsistence for
the rest of the year. One of the six who came forward confessed that he
had paid men ‘to exorcise evil spirits, which he said were infesting his
house and wife. We did our best to persuade him to give it up, but he said
he did not believe they would be removed in answer to prayer, and
continued the exorcism the next night, so he had to be reported to the
Bishop and was excommunicated with his wife.’ Another was found at
night drunk. The other four, and nine women, were confirmed on 12
December. The male communicants formed a church committee, so that
there was now an organised church there.42 Unfortunately, the Maharaja
of Idar refused to provide any land for a church or school in the village.
There were several problems that concerned the missionaries. One
related to the marriage practices of the Bhils, which gave rise to a great
[ 92 ]

2 Missionaries and their families at Lusadiya, 1911. Arthur Birkett is in the

centre, with Dr Jane Birkett on his right. Birkett was considered unusual
amongst missionaries of his time, as he adopted Indian dress. The other
British missionary couple are G. C. Vyse and his wife. Although the others
are not named in the source, one of the Indian staff may be the Reverend
Laxman Hari, as he was based at Lusadiya at that time.
deal of what the missionaries classed as ‘immorality’ and ‘sin’.43 Bhils

could get divorced very easily and marriage was not considered in any
sense a life-long sacrament. In British India, Christians became subject
to the Indian Christian Marriage Act, but this was not the case in
princely states.44 According to Arthur Birkett: ‘This liberty threatens to
be a great danger to the young church.’45 Another problem was that Bhil
men could, if they wished and had the resources, take more than one
wife. This was an anathema for the church; no man with two or more
wives was allowed to be a member. There were also the payments that
were made on marriage, which included a brideprice of about Rs. 60 and
marriage fees to be paid to the gameti and the thakor. During the mela
of 1906, the Christians resolved to stop paying brideprice, but they
could not avoid paying the other two fees.46 This created particular
problems for the famine orphans who had become Christians. When
they reached a marriageable age, their refusal to give or take brideprice
[ 93 ]

made it extremely hard for them to find partners. Some of the young
men who had been brought up at the boys’ orphanage at Biladiya ran
away so that they could find brides in the customary manner, and in
the process abandoned their new faith. Some, frustrated, even commit-
ted the more scandalous sin of taking young women forcibly by raping
them. The missionaries tried to find Christian girls for the young men,
but these were in short supply. In the end, in 1912, the missionaries
agreed to provide money for the boys so that they could offer a bride-
price and thus obtain a ‘heathen’ wife who, it was stipulated, had then
to convert to Christianity.47 Arthur Birkett commented on this that
Bhil girls were of independent mind, and would enter into such a mar-
riage only if they were willing to convert.48
Another problem related to the relationship between Bhil and
untouchable converts. In Gujarat as a whole, most conversions to
Christianity during these years were among people classed as untouch-
ables. Most of them were from central Gujarat, far from the Bhil region;
but a few local untouchables were also converted, which led to ten-
sions. The missionaries demanded that the Bhil converts have full
social contact with them, even eating together. There was great unease
amongst the Bhil converts over this, as was apparent when a Chamar
(untouchable) convert from Biladiya was invited by Hodgkinson to take
a meal with the others at the first meeting of the Gujarat District
Church Council in May 1907. One of the influential Christians of
Lusadiya had gestured for him to sit apart from the Bhil Christians, and
he had done so. Peter Suvera, the brother of Satgurudas and one of the
initial converts in Lusadiya, brought up the issue at the second meeting
of the church council in November 1907. He argued that their social
mixing with the Chamar had brought the church into disrepute and
that its further growth was as a result being hindered. He proposed a
resolution: ‘That if a low caste man is converted he may be received
into the Christian religion but shall eat and drink apart and not touch
any one.’ The missionaries spent a lot of time and effort, as well as
prayer, persuading him to drop the resolution. Some said that they
could not eat with the Chamars as they were polluted through eating
the flesh of animals that had died naturally, including cows. In the
debate it became clear that caste feeling rather than disgust at this
unhygienic habit was at the root of the problem, for some younger con-
verts admitted that they were prepared to eat such carrion if served to
them by a Bhil. The Chamar convert, who was at the meeting, took a
solemn vow before God to abstain from all carrion. In the end, they
agreed to eat with untouchable converts, on condition that no
Christian ate carrion. Anyone who broke this rule would be socially
boycotted. Peter Suvera agreed to accept this, but looked extremely
[ 94 ]

unhappy, and he absented himself from the common meal when they
all sat down together to eat.49 Because of this, other Bhils considered
the Christian Bhils to be ritually polluted, and many stopped social
contact with them. This created a growing social divide between
Christian and non-Christian Bhils.
Liquor drinking was considered by the missionaries to be another
great vice of many of the converts. Those who had previously been
Bhagats and followers of Surmaldas had adopted the practices of
respectable castes such as the Brahmans and Baniyas by giving up
drinking liquor and eating meat, but after conversion, many had aban-
doned these two abstinences, which had made life easier for them. The
missionaries had no objection to meat eating, but they were strong
advocates of teetotalism, and preferred the converts to take a vow of
abstinence.50 In 1907, Arthur Birkett encouraged the converts to start
teetotaller societies. The three leading Christians of Lusadiya who had
heard the voice of God – Satgurudas, Peter and Jiva – all eventually
signed the required pledge, to Birkett’s great satisfaction.51
These various issues were discussed further at the first meeting of the
Gujarat District Church Council in May 1907. A resolution was passed
that during marriage no Christian should practise idolatry or follow
superstitions, including omens. Also in marriage, no Christian was to
give or receive brideprice, drink spirits, sing lewd songs or say anything
‘evil’. Arthur Birkett saw these as ideals, being well aware that they
could not be enforced strictly. Only recently, there had been much liquor
drinking and singing of bawdy songs at a Christian wedding, and the
bride’s father was even fined by the Idar authorities for distilling more
liquor than he had a licence to do. The dancing and singing had continued
for three weeks. Birkett believed, however, that there had been no idol
worship during the celebrations, which gave him cause for hope.52
In his address to the Gujarat District Church Council in 1909,
Arthur Birkett listed what he saw as the chief impediments to the
growth of the church in the land of the Bhils. The first was ‘ignorance’.
Very few of the converts were as yet able to read and keep accounts,
which was a great hindrance to the development of self-governing
church councils. They had had to appoint non-Bhil evangelists or
schoolteachers to act as secretaries and treasurers of all the societies
except that at Lusadiya. The second great stumbling block was ‘super-
stition’, by which he meant a continuing belief amongst Christians in
demons and evil spirits. The struggles of Arthur and Jane Birkett in this
respect will be described in Chapter 7. The third great evil was ‘world-
liness’. Converts were still spending too much on wedding celebrations
accompanied by liquor drinking, dancing and the singing of lewd songs.
He denied, however, that interdining with untouchables had hindered
[ 95 ]

their work. ‘The real obstacle in the way of the growth of the Church
is sin . . . You cannot build on unsafe foundations, and God will not add
many to our Church till it is clean and pure and holy.’53
Whatever the truth of Birkett’s diagnosis, the fact was that during the
next decade there were very few fresh conversions to Christianity.
Writing in 1918, the missionary Walter Wyatt calculated that only
about ten to twelve adult Bhils had been baptised during the past eight
years. He felt that one important reason was that they had been unable
to attract Indian Christian lay pastors and evangelists of sufficient
quality to work for the church.54 Laxman Hari had left the mission in
1910 as a result of continuing ill health compounded by the loss of one
of his children to blackwater fever. He was transferred to work in
Bombay city, where life would be easier for him and his family, and
nobody of comparable evangelical talent was found to replace him.55
This however was only one reason – and not the most important – for
the lack of progress; more significant was the backlash against conver-
sion that occurred during these years.
The backlash
Many high-caste Hindus had from the start been uneasy with the pres-
ence of the missionaries amongst the Bhils. The Indian officers of the
MBC, as we have seen already, had done their best to prevent Bhil
sepoys from converting, and to a large extent they had succeeded in
this. High-caste people of Idar State tried similarly to hinder mission-
ary work in their region. When the Bhils of Jesingpur began to show an
interest in Christianity, the high castes of a neighbouring village con-
demned the Christians for eating with all sorts of polluted people,
stating that if they converted other Bhils would despise them.56 Despite
this, a substantial number of Bhils of the village did decide to be
baptised.57 When the missionaries were camping at the village of
Kanthariya, some Brahmans began a strident counter-campaign and
caused the missionaries considerable difficulty. When a young Bhil of
the village decided to convert, the Brahmans put pressure on his family,
and he changed his mind.58 Writing in 1913, Arthur Birkett argued that
the high castes were opposing them almost everywhere: ‘The great
reason for opposing us is that we educate & raise the most oppressed of
their peoples, & all the higher castes feel that if they can read & keep
accounts their chances of making them work & getting money out of
them are much diminished.’59
The opposition to the work of Christian missionaries by caste
Hindus was becoming more focused and strident during the first decade
of the twentieth century. This was due in part to the growing influence
[ 96 ]

of the Arya Samaj and Indian nationalists in the region as a whole. The
Arya Samaj had in the closing years of the nineteenth century begun a
campaign to reclaim people in India who had been supposedly ‘lost’ to
Hinduism, most notably Muslims and Christians, through a ceremony
of purification known as shuddhi.60 It was held that various people or
communities had been converted to ‘non-Indian’ religions through
aggressive proselytism, and that these converts would in time swamp
the Hindus of India. Hindu nationalist propagandists, who were gaining
considerable influence at this time, stoked these fears and promoted
such a campaign.61 These sentiments gained considerable ground
within Gujarat from 1905 onwards, soon becoming for the high castes
a dogma of the sort that passes for ‘common sense’.62
The Arya Samaj gained considerable ground in Idar State during the
first decade of the twentieth century. Dolatsingh, the adopted heir of
Maharaja Pratapsingh, was known to be sympathetic towards the sect,
and he was in a particularly influential position in the state as had been
made Dewan, or chief minister. In 1905, he noticed that three new
mission schools had been opened in the previous year without permis-
sion from the state, and he ordered them to be closed immediately. The
missionaries had to conform to this order. He gave strict instructions
that no new schools were to be opened anywhere without the express
permission of the state, and he then ensured that such permission was
always refused. This hindered the educational expansion of the mission
considerably. He also refused to allow the mission to build churches,
rest houses or any other infrastructure in Chhitadara and Jesingpur –
both of which had good numbers of Bhil converts.63 The Arya Samaj
was encouraged to open two schools for Bhils. Books, slates and cloth-
ing were provided for the pupils free of charge, and by 1906 fifty Bhil
boys were attending the schools.64 The state was not however prepared
to fund this work from its own coffers – in general, it spent almost
nothing on welfare for its Bhil population – and with a drying-up of
donations to the Arya Samaj after the decline of the initial burst of
nationalist zeal in the 1905–10 period, both schools were forced to close
in 1910–11.65
There was another important reason for the new hostility of the Idar
authorities towards the missionaries. The continuing struggle between
the state and the thakors, which was alluded to in Chapter 3, had
become particularly intense at this time, and the missionaries became
caught up in this running encounter. The old ruler, Keshrisinghji – who
had been largely sympathetic towards the missionaries – died in 1901,
and his infant heir died soon after. A new ruler, Pratapsingh, had to be
brought in from Jodhpur in 1902. He found Idar to be a very small and
insignificant town compared with Jodhpur, with a ‘palace’ that was by
[ 97 ]

his standards little more than a house. The annual revenue of the state
was by his standards very paltry, and he drew up plans to enhance the
revenue through new taxes. He also decided to build a grand and costly
palace at a new capital city to the south of Idar town that was named
Himatnagar. Because most people lived in villages controlled by
thakors who were responsible for setting and raising their own taxes,
Pratapsingh found it hard to raise revenues sufficient to realise his
grandiose plans. In 1903 he put out a proclamation declaring that he had
a full right to the dues from customs and liquor stills, grazing and reg-
istration fees and a variety of other sources. As the thakors had never
conceded such rights, they saw the proclamation as an attack on their
ancient prerogatives, and they met it with a storm of protest. This con-
tinued over the next eight years until, in 1911, Pratapsingh abdicated
in exasperation and returned to Jodhpur, leaving the thirty-five-year-old
Dolatsingh to succeed.66 The latter was to continue as ruler up until his
death in 1931, being a continuing thorn in the side of the missionaries.
He was however always conscious that the missionaries had the ear of
the British political agents, who were ever on the lookout for evidence
of misrule in princely states. He therefore had to be subtle in the way
he opposed the Christians.
Dolatsingh continued the battle against the thakors. During the First
World War he used the imperial emergency as an excuse to issue an
order to the thakors to provide military service to the state, failing
which they were to provide a large amount of cash in compensation, to
be levied on a sliding scale according to their income. After protest, he
was forced to reduce the demand by a third. The new tax was collected
in a harsh and coercive manner, causing great hardship to many
thakors. A. S. Meek, who served as the Political Agent of Mahi Kantha
in the 1920s, considered Dolatsingh a man of particularly flawed char-
acter. He listed his deficiencies in words that ran the whole gamut of
the stereotype of the ‘Oriental Despot’ – he was a ‘tyrant Indian Ruler’,
being oppressive and extortionate towards his subjects, cruel, vicious
and morally debauched. His state was ‘seething with discontent.’67
Whatever the truth of this verdict, it was one with which the mission-
aries largely agreed. As Birkett stated in a letter to London of 1914: ‘Our
Ruler has good cause to dread exposure’.68 Nonetheless, Birkett and his
colleagues were careful to moderate their language in written docu-
ments, fearing that if their remarks came to the notice of the maharaja,
he might make life yet more difficult for them.69
Some of the thakors appear to have tried to use the missionaries in
their struggle with the maharaja. For example, in the period immedi-
ately after the great famine, two of the thakors near Biladiya had been
very hostile to the mission. One of them, the Thakor of Pal, had threat-
[ 98 ]

ened to punish anyone who became a Christian, and he had forced a

mission school to close for a time. Then, soon after Pratapsingh’s move
of 1903 to take away the prerogatives of the thakors, his attitude
suddenly changed. He stated that he approved fully of the school and
he began to socialise with the missionaries in a friendly way. He offered
to provide land for the orphan boys to settle on and farm with his full
protection. The other previously hostile thakor now permitted the mis-
sionaries to quarry stones and extract sand in his territory for the con-
struction of a new church at Biladiya, free of any charge.70 In 1904, the
Thakor of Bhetali provided land to the mission to start a school in
Jesingpur, and the Thakor of Karchha a spot at Lusadiya for their
medical work.71
An additional reason for these changes in attitude was that a new
generation of thakors was emerging that had received English educa-
tion at a special college set up for this class by the British at Sadra, the
headquarters of the Mahi Kantha agency, located thirty-five kilometres
north of Ahmedabad city. The political agents had from 1850 onwards
provided some educational facilities for the sons of the local nobility,
but this was placed on a much firmer foundation in 1885, when the
Scott College was opened, paid for by subscriptions from members of
this class. The thakors were strongly advised to send their sons to this
boarding school, where they received ‘a sound primary vernacular and
English education’.72 Many who became rulers around the first decade
of the twentieth century had been educated there. Armed with a more
‘English’ sophistication – which generally included European dress
topped by a Rajput turban – they were able to socialise and interact with
the missionaries with much greater finesse than their forebears.
In all this, the missionaries had to steer a very careful course. Writing
to the London office of the CMS in 1914, Birkett commented:
Until you live in a Native State you can have no idea how jealous they
are of outside interference or indeed of any outsider knowing anything
about their internal affairs. The Rulers do not even like their sirdars
[thakors] playing polo or tennis with English officers lest they should let
out something in friendly talks.73
These concerns extended even to the minutiae of house styles. When

one of the Indian lay pastors wanted to construct a house for himself in
the village in which he was working, Birkett advised him to make a roof
that sloped on all four sides so as to protect the mud walls from rain.
The lay pastor told him that this was not a good idea as the state author-
ities would see it as the house of a ‘sahib’ and consider that the mis-
sionaries were trying to get land by stealth. He therefore built it in local
style, with a sloping roof on two sides and gable ends.74
[ 99 ]

The growing hostility of the state towards the missionaries had its
impact on the Bhils. When W. Hodgkinson tried in 1905 to persuade
some Bhils of Kanthariya village to take instruction with a view to
baptism, they told him: ‘We are quite ready to do this, but we are few
in number and very poor, and if we become Christians, the other vil-
lagers around us will cut us off, and the Ruler of the State will perse-
cute us.’ Despite their interest in Christian doctrine, they showed no
desire to convert.75
Over the years, Arthur Birkett tried time after time to gain permis-
sion to open new schools, but failed repeatedly. In 1917, the Bishop of
Bombay took the matter up with the Government of Bombay, asking it
to intercede in the matter.76 The Political Agent in Mahi Kantha,
W. Beale, mentioned the matter to Dolatsingh when they met in 1918.
The maharaja told him that he opposed the schools because the mis-
sionaries ‘were inclined to meddle in State matters and go beyond their
province’.77 He later wrote to Beale stating that some of the mission
teachers of Pal had played a role in ‘creating Bhil trouble there’, and he
was therefore reluctant to allow any more mission schools in his
state.78 Dolatsingh was nevertheless unwilling to turn down Beale’s
request outright, and said that as the Bishop of Bombay was so anxious
to have extra schools, he was prepared to consider allowing a school to
be opened at Devni Mori, so long as ‘I am assured by the Mission that
the Mission teachers will in future mind their own business, and
behave themselves loyally and faithfully towards the State’.79 The
Political Department in Bombay informed the Bishop of Bombay of
this, and he replied to them that the charge against the mission was a
serious one, and he asked for more information and evidence. As it was,
he felt that it was an ‘insinuation, which of course is a hackneyed accu-
sation against mission work by persons, especially in native states, who
do not approve of it’. He insisted that CMS missions ‘have always incul-
cated obedience to the State’. If anything could be proved to the con-
trary, the persons responsible would be punished.80
Idar was not the only state to oppose such educational work. When
a thakor of Dungarpur State, just over the border in Rajasthan, gave the
mission some land for a school – which they promptly constructed –
the Maharaja reprimanded him and then discriminated against him in
a variety of petty ways. The state officials harassed him and his Bhil
subjects, demanding free services from them, to the extent that the
latter began to threaten to leave the place and settle elsewhere.
Commenting on this, Arthur Birkett noted that in the unlikely event
of a thakor being converted to Christianity he would suffer the wrath
of his ruler, his lands would be depopulated and he would almost cer-
tainly be ruined.81
[ 100 ]

Surveying this depressing situation, the secretary to the CMS

Central India Mission, the Reverend Robert Hack, stated that mis-
sionary educational work was being hindered in almost all of the
princely states of the region. These states were less suspicious of
medical work, especially as they had almost no medical facilities of
their own. Other missionary societies had, he said, long ago come to
the conclusion that medical work in such territories was vital to evan-
gelisation.82 These sentiments were reinforced by Captain Stockley of
the MBC, who stated in 1914 that the Rajputs in general were antipa-
thetical to Bhil education in a situation in which very few Bhils them-
selves had any desire for learning. Both Idar and Dungarpur states were
hindering mission education – Mewar State perhaps less so. By con-
trast, he believed that these rulers would welcome mission doctors. In
the circumstances, medical work would, he felt, open more doors for
the missionaries.83 In the next chapter we shall look at the medical
work of the mission during these years in greater detail, seeing to what
extent it did indeed manage to make openings for the missionaries in
such a way.
Notes
11 Carter, Battling and Building amongst the Bhils, pp. 26–31.
12 Ibid., pp. 27–8.
13 Ibid., pp. 29–31.
14 ‘Second Letter from the Bhagats’, North India Church Missionary Gleaner
(September 1901), 52. The oral tradition includes some extra prophecies by
Surmaldas that it is claimed were later fulfilled, such as the coming of carts without
bullocks (e.g. cars and lorries), sky-carts (e.g. aeroplanes) and a message from across
the seas that is good and true (e.g. Christianity). Interview with Surjibhai
Timothibhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 15 December 2002.
15 ‘Second Letter from the Bhagats’, 52.
16 Edward Walker to Durrant, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, 9 April 1902, CMS,
G2 I 6/0, 1902, doc. 184.
17 Mrs A. I. Birkett to Gill, 21 December 1901, ibid., doc. 130.
18 ‘Second Letter from the Bhagats’, 52.
19 Ibid.
10 Carter, Battling and Building amongst the Bhils, pp. 29–31. Sava – who changed his
name to Satgurudas after conversion – told his full story to the Reverend S. R. Morse,
who visited Lusadiya in April 1911. Arthur Birkett acted as translator. Morse said
he had been initially sceptical about the idea that Satgurudas had heard a supernat-
ural voice, but after sitting and talking with him he became convinced that it had
indeed been the voice of God. See S. R. Morse, ‘A Visit to the Bhils’, The Church
Missionary Gleaner (2 October 1911), 155. According to Surjibhai Suvera, who is
Satgurudas’s grandson, the other two Bhagats who heard a voice were Satgurudas’s
brother Ghera Soma (who later took the name Peter) and Jiva. Interview with
Surjibhai Timothibhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 15 December 2002.
11 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 27 September 1901, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1901, doc. 431.
13 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 6 November 1901, ibid., doc. 476; Dr Simpson to Gill,
Coonoor, 28 January 1902, ibid., doc. 129; Edward Walker to Durrant, Enniskerry,
[ 101 ]

Co. Wicklow, Ireland, 9 April 1902, ibid., doc. 184; Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 28
September 1903, CMS, G2 I 7/0, 1903, doc. 364.
14 ‘The Mission Field: North-West Provinces’, Intelligentsia (February 1902), 131.
15 W. H. Hodgkinson, ‘The Bhil Mission’, The North India Church Missionary Gleaner
(November 1902), 77.
16 A. Outram to Gill, Kherwara, 31 October 1901, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1901, doc. 478.
17 Gill to Durrant, 13 December 1901, ibid., doc. 576.
18 Gill to Durrant, Mussoorie, 18 September 1902, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1902, doc. 397; ‘The
Mission Field: North-West Provinces’, Intelligentsia (September 1902), 691.
19 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 29 May 1902, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1902, doc. 285.
20 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 20 June 1902, ibid., doc. 321.
21 Arthur Outram to Durrant, Kherwara, 25 April 1904, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1904, doc. 34.
He resigned formerly from the mission after his return to England. Outram to Fox,
Tunbridge Wells, 15 December 1904, ibid., doc. 102.
22 G. C. Vyse, ‘Kherwara’, Kherwara, March 1905, BMR, 1904, 8.
23 Dr A. Murphy, Kherwara, 16 September 1902, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1902, doc. 453.
25 ‘The Mission Field: The United Provinces’, Intelligentsia (April 1903), 295.
26 W. H. Hodgkinson, ‘The Bhil Mission’, The North India Church Missionary Gleaner
(November 1902), 77.
27 ‘The Mission Field: The United Provinces’, Intelligentsia (April 1903), 295; Gill to
Durrant, Allahabad, 16 April 1903, CMS, G2 I 7/0, 1903, doc. 185.
28 Carter, Battling and Building amongst the Bhils, p. 36.
29 Rev. A. I. Birkett to Gill, Lucknow, 9 May 1903, CMS, G2 I 7/0, 1903, doc. 256.
30 The Birketts had left the mission in August 1902, returning later in 1904. Herbert
Moloney (Secretary, Jabalpur Corresponding Committee) to Durrant, Balaghat
(Central Provinces), 23 March 1904, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1904, doc. 20; Moloney to
Durrant, Mandla, 4 May 1904, ibid., doc. 36.
32 Proceedings of the Jabalpur Corresponding Committee, 12 July 1904, CMS, G2 I 8/0,
1904, doc. 68.
33 ‘The Mission Field: The United Provinces’, Intelligentsia (April 1903), 295; G. S.
Vyse, ‘A Prediction Verified’, The Church Missionary Gleaner, 357 (September
1903), 141–2; Eyre, Bishop of Nagpur, ‘The Bishop’s Quarterly Letter’, Jubbulpore, 19
March 1904, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1904, doc. 43; Morse, ‘A Visit to the Bhils’, 155; Carter,
Battling and Building amongst the Bhils, pp. 37–9.
34 BMR (1904), 2. Chhitadara, now in Meghraj Takula of Sabarkantha District, was
spelt ‘Khetadra’ in the mission records.
35 A. I. Birkett, Weston-super-Mare, 14 January 1908, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1908, doc. 12.
36 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, BMR (1907), 3–4.
37 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, BMR (1906), 3. It may be noted that the missionaries spelt the
village ‘Lusadia’, whereas I have used the more accurate transliteration ‘Lusadiya’,
except in cases of direct quotation. A similar rule applies to ‘Biladia’, ‘Biladiya’.
39 W. Hodgkinson, ‘Biladia’, 17 January 1907, BMR (1906), 20.
40 This ‘heinous sin’ was not elaborated on. Ibid., 21.
41 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, BMR (1906), 3.
43 On this, see A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 24 October 1907, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1907,
doc. 88.
44 A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 2 March 1906, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1906, doc. 31.
45 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, Lusadiya, 4 April 1905, BMR (1904), 4.
47 Robert Hack, Acting Secretary, Jabalpur, to Durrant, 22 March 1912, CMS, G2 I 8/0,
1912, doc. 11.
48 A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Weston super Mare, 6 July 1912, ibid., doc. 28. In this letter,
Birkett provides a detailed report on Bhil marriage customs and the various pay-
[ 102 ]

ments that had to be made to villagers, Brahman priests, musicians etc., all of which
shows that many local people would have lost a source of income when Christians
were married.
49 A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 24 October 1907, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1907, doc. 88;
A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, BMR (1907), 5–7.
50 When Birkett was told that the CMS was searching for a new missionary for
Kherwara, he wrote to London stating that he very much hoped that the chosen man
would be a teetotaller, as drink was one of the chief ‘besetting sins of the Bhils’. A. I.
Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 24 October 1907, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1907, doc. 88.
51 A. I. Birkett, Lusadiya, 19 May 1908, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1908, doc. 48.
53 A. I. Birkett, ‘Chairman’s Address to the Gujarati District Church Council, 1909’,
The Third Annual Report of the Indian Church Council Comprising the C.M.S.
Congregations in the Diocese of Nagpur, 1909: Minutes of the Central and District
Church Councils with Statistics (Jabalpur: Christian Mission Press, 1910),
pp. 18–21, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1910, doc. 72.
54 W. Wyatt to E. F. E. Wigram, 18 June 1918, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1918, doc. 60.
55 E. A. Hensley to Durrant, Jabalpur, 11 November 1909 and 26 January 1910, CMS,
G2 I 8/0, 1909, doc. 102.
56 Helen Bull, ‘Jesingpur, near Lusadia’, BMR (1906), 15–16.
57 In 1911, there were fifty-two Christians in Jesingpur. BMR (1911), 3.
58 W. Hodgkinson, Biladiya, 15 January 1911, BMR (1911), 7–8.
59 A. I. Birkett to Waller, Weston super Mare, 25 September 1913, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1913,
doc. 55.
60 J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Saraswati: Essays on his Life and Ideas (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1998), pp. 163–8.
61 For the development of such a consciousness in Bengal, see Pradip Datta, ‘Dying
Hindus: Production of Hindu Communal Consciousness in Early Twentieth
Century Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly (19 June 1993).
62 David Hardiman, ‘Purifying the Nation: The Arya Samaj in Gujarat 1895–1930’,
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44:1 (2007), 41–65.
63 A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 23 August 1905, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1905, doc. 140;
A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, Lusadiya, 4 April 1905, BMR (1904), 4 and 6.
64 Deputy Educational Inspector, Mahi Kantha to the Educational Inspector, Northern
Division, Sadra, 24 April 1906, GSAV, CRR, Daftar 54, F 63, 1905–6.
65 Administration Report of the Idar State for the Year Ending 31 March 1911, OIOC,
V/10/1220, p. 33. It may be noted that the Arya Samaj paper, Arya Patrika, published
in Lahore, had in its issue of 31 July 1909 complained of the unwillingness of Arya
Samajists to fund social work that could provide an adequate challenge to Christian
missionaries. In particular, it argued, they had lost the initiative over medical work.
Quoted in ‘Editorial Notes’, Mercy and Truth (October 1909), 321.
66 Major A. S. Meek, ‘A Discursive Note on some Salient Features of Idar Affairs from
the Fall of the Rao Dynasty till Recent Times’, OIOC, R/2/149/106, pp. 1–5;
Administration Report of the Idar State for the Year Ending 31 March 1912, OIOC,
V/10/1220, p. 2.
67 Meek, ‘A Discursive Note’, pp. 5–15.
68 A. I. Birkett to E. H. M. Waller, 24 June 1914, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1914, doc. 31.
69 Birkett thus cautioned in a private letter to the CMS secretary that on no account
should their critical views of the maharaja be allowed to be voiced in any printed
reports, lest they happen to come into his hands. He was extremely sensitive to even
the slightest criticism, and it would cause great harm to the mission. A. I. Birkett to
Durrant, Bombay, 9 May 1907, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1907, doc. 62.
70 W. Hodgkinson, ‘Biladia’, 17 January 1907, BMR (1906), 21–2.
71 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, 4 April 1905, BMR (1904), 3.
72 Framroz Sorabji Master, The Mahi Kantha Directory, 1 (Rajkot: Laxmi Printing
Press, 1922), pp. 96–7.
73 A. I. Birkett to E. H. M. Waller, 24 June 1914, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1914, doc. 31.
[ 103 ]

74 Ibid.
75 W. Hodgkinson, ‘Biladia’, January 1906, BMR (1905), 17.
76 Edwin James, Bishop of Bombay, 10 July 1917, GSAV, CRR, no. 1382 of 1919.
77 W. Beale, 1 February 1918, GSAV, CRR, no. 1382 of 1919.
78 The nature of this ‘Bhil trouble’ is not stated in this source, but it may have referred
to disputes in which certain thakors and their Bhil subjects were allied against the Idar
authorities, with the missionaries benefiting from the new friendliness of the thakors.
79 W. Beale, quoting the Maharaja of Idar’s letter to him, Idar, 13 March 1918, GSAV,
CRR, no. 1382 of 1919.
80 Edwin James to Robertson, Bombay, 22 March 1918, GSAV, CRR, no. 1382 of 1919.
81 A. I. Birkett to Waller, Weston super Mare, 25 September 1913, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1913,
doc. 55.
82 R. Hack to G. B. Durrant, 21 June 1912, CMS G2 I 8/0 1912, doc. 24.
83 Interview with Captain Stockley, 20 May 1914, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1914, doc. 17.
[ 104 ]
CHAPTER SIX
Christian healing
Although the medical treatment provided by the early missionaries

was rudimentary – for none had medical qualifications – it neverthe-
less proved popular. Writing from Kherwara in 1886, Litchfield stated
that on average, four to five hundred sick Bhils came each month for
medical treatment, some from a long distance, ‘though the present
dispensary and consulting-room is simply an empty horse-stall in the
stables. The poor untaught people continually come to me, with old
sores of long standing which they expect to be cured on the spot, while
the women display their faith in a still more trying way by bringing
sick and weeping babies in baskets on their heads.’1 Wounds were
cleaned with plenty of hot water and carbolic acid, and then ban-
daged.2 Writing in 1888, Thompson reported that their only real com-
petitor was Surmaldas, who was healing people with his panacea of a
roasted grain of maize coated in holy ash from his sacred fire.
Thompson noted that the further away he was from Surmaldas’s
home village of Lusadiya, the more people came to him for treatment.
One Sunday he had, for example, treated about 250 people. He con-
cluded: ‘I don’t really know what I should have done amongst the
Bheels without medicines.’3
The missionaries worked either from the dispensaries at Kherwara,
Lusadiya and Biladiya or from their tents while on tour. E. P. Herbert
described how when he was staying at Biladiya and then Bavaliya in
1896, he made ‘rounds daily to sick people on my pony like a country
doctor’. He lacked any medical qualifications and was ‘saddened by
the nightly wailings, for there were many deaths from pneumonia,
and no doctors.’4 From 1895, the dispensary at Kherwara began
taking inpatients, housing them in some empty outhouses. Relatives
were required to bring food for them. A Bhil convert called Pema
assisted the missionaries in looking after the patients. According to
Herbert:
[ 105 ]

cleanliness, carbolic, and simple ointment work wonders, and horrible

sores which have festered for months have healed up under Pema’s care.
I wish you could see Pema in the verandah of the dispensary with the sick
round him and his face lit up as he preaches the Gospel, and hear his
kindly words as he tends their ulcerated limbs, and cheerfully does for
Christ’s sake what would otherwise be loathsome.5
The more serious cases that were beyond the competence of the mis-
sionaries were passed on – if the patient was willing – to the MBC
doctors, especially if surgery was required.6
Writing in 1888, Thompson reported that he had secured £36 worth
of medicine from England, which he was dispensing.7 These ‘medicines’
appear to have included carbolic acid, Epson salts and quinine, the latter
being a drug that was becoming much more widely available in India at
this time.8 A colleague of his, W. B. Collins, reported in the early 1890s:
Just now malarial fever is the rage, and Epson salts and quinine go fast;
by-and-by, in camp, I shall have foul sores, which no doctor would have
the chance of seeing unless he belonged to the Mission, as they won’t
come in to Kherwara, as I said before. I can only give carbolic acid lotions
and afterwards some healing ointments. They often come for enlarged
spleen, which I cannot treat, ophthalmia, which I can generally cure, and
lots of other things mostly quite beyond me. My list of ailments which I
can help them in is not much over twelve, yet sometimes, on some days,
I am even four or more hours treating and dispensing.9
Collins noted that a major reason for the missionaries’ popularity

amongst the Bhils was that they were providing such medical care. The
Bhils, he claimed, preferred medical treatment by the missionaries to
that of government doctors, even though the former lacked the medical
credentials of the latter, as the tribal people had a profound distrust of
anything connected with their rulers.
The village schoolmasters employed by the mission also offered basic
treatment at their schoolhouses. As it was not easy to attract suitable
educated men to run these establishments, Thompson trained young
Bhils at the Kherwara boarding school for the task, and by 1899 there were
in all seven Bhil masters and assistant masters working in the mission
schools.10 Others were run by high-caste Hindu teachers. A political
agent who visited Biladiya in 1891–92 commented that ‘These schools
are real centres of civilisation among these wild people’.11 Their ‘civilis-
ing’ work included the inculcation of new ideas about health and healing.
When Thompson was on leave in England from 1896 to 1899, he tried
hard to persuade the CMS authorities to send a qualified doctor and
nurse to the mission.12 His appeal was couched in vivid language, with
scenes from the Bible being transposed to the land of the Bhils:
[ 106 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
Medical work has broken down many barriers, softened thousands of

hearts, and drawn the people to the Mission. Apart from it, the missionary
might earnestly preach to the poor ignorant hillmen, but would make
scarcely any impression on their dense, dark minds. When, however, he
goes about among a crowd of helpless sufferers syringing loathsome ulcers,
stilling the cries of little children in pain, and speaking gently and kindly
to all, the Bheels at last are moved, and become more than ready to hear
what the preacher has to tell them about Christ. To watch the “sick gather
together at the door” of the Kherwara Dispensary, especially when there is
an ulcer plague, leads the mind back to the time when the poor suffering
ones came to the Lord Jesus in the towns and villages of the Holy Land.
Some of the afflicted are brought in on beds ‘borne of four’; others arrive in
rude carts drawn by a couple of oxen. Many limp in leaning on the arms of
friends, and little children lying in baskets are carried in on their mother’s
heads. Similar scenes to these may be witnessed at any of the six out-
stations, or wherever the mission-tent may be pitched in the districts.
Here, indeed, is work for fully-qualified medical missionaries.13
Later, just before his return to India, Thompson set out his appeal in a
more schematic way. Thousands of Bhils, he claimed, were dying for
want of medical aid, and the work was much appreciated by them. As
they lived in scattered huts, it was hard to gain an audience when the
missionaries went to evangelise, but when news came that medical ser-
vices were available, they flocked there in large numbers. If they had a
full-time medical missionary, he himself would have much more time
for his purely evangelistic work. The thakors would, furthermore,
welcome such a doctor, and would want to be treated by him, which
would win over that class. He concluded: ‘Nowhere, perhaps, in the
world would a healing hand touch a greater sore’.14 Nonetheless, hardly
a month after Thompson had departed for India, the secretary of the
north Indian section of the CMS set out his priorities areas for medical
missions – and the Bhils were not on the list.15 As the new century
opened, there seemed little chance that a full-fledged medical mission
would be established amongst the Bhils in the near future.
As Thompson must have realised, the missionaries were still merely
scratching the surface. Medical work had helped the missionaries to
overcome the distrust of the Bhils and gain access to their homes.
Although the missionaries probably did not know it, such a path to
acceptance had had a long history, for – as we have seen in Chapter 2 –
over the centuries many Hindu mendicants had similarly won the trust
of the Bhils by providing cures for their ills that were both medical and
supernatural. Such holymen were often found in remote forest regions,
so that they were relatively familiar and esteemed for their supernat-
ural and other powers. Despite this, the Bhils had continued to revere
their own deities and follow their own distinct customs; their value
[ 107 ]

system had not been changed in any profound way through such a
contact. The same was true in regard to the medical work carried out
by the missionaries during these early years. A good number of Bhils
sought out the missionaries when they were in pain and the need was
pressing, but this did not mean that they would change their beliefs
about disease and disease causation in any profound way, still less be
attracted to Christianity. The missionaries had become merely one
more resource for the Bhils in their arsenal of possible remedies.
Because this was so, their medical work was not seen to pose any threat
to the local healers, such as the bhopas and buvas. In Lusadiya, for
example, there was at that time a Bhil buva called Jivabhai who was
skilled in the use of jantra-mantra (miraculous spells) and rituals
involving the sacrifice of goats and chickens. Many Bhils were still sus-
picious of the vilayati dava, or ‘foreign medicine’, and his services con-
tinued to be much in demand. He did not regard the missionaries as his
rivals and he made no attempt to hinder their work.16
Medical work during the famine years

The crisis during the famine period was caused by starvation made
lethal through disease. Food provided the best medicine against this
deadly combination, and this the missionaries did their best to provide.
Beyond that, there was little that they could do in most cases – even if
available the best medical treatment of the day could hardly have
saved sick people so severely weakened through hunger. Medicine,
eye lotions and chlorodyne (a painkiller that combined chloroform,
morphia, cannabis and prussic acid) were administered along with food
at the relief centres for complaints such as guinea worm, malaria, diar-
rhoea, scurvy and ophthalmia.17 Cholera was particularly lethal, and it
was no coincidence that the year 1900 had the highest annual mortal-
ity from cholera ever recorded for India as a whole.18 Although the
reason for the transmission of the disease – through contaminated
water – had been known since 1855, and Robert Koch had isolated the
bacterium Vibrio cholerae in 1883–84, doctors had not as yet developed
a safe means to provide the intravenous replacement of salt and water
that would make the disease largely treatable. This came only in the
following decade, being developed by Leonard Rogers in Calcutta.19
Disinfecting wells with potassium permanganate or chlorine was con-
sidered the most effective preventive measure against cholera and
dysentery, and in 1900 the missionaries sought to do this at the famine
relief centres whenever possible. It was known also that careful
nursing, applying, for example, cold compresses and oil massages,
might save a few of the stricken.20 At Kherwara, the missionaries
[ 108 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
erected some sheds on top of a nearby hill to isolate and treat cholera
patients to the best of their limited abilities. According to Outram,
writing in May 1900, they managed to save a good number of the girls
at the orphanage who were sent to these sheds, attributing this to the
fact that they had been getting regular meals.21 A report written two
months later was less positive; many of the orphan girls had, it said,
died from ‘famine diarrhoea’, scurvy and other complaints.22
As we have seen in Chapter 4, Dr A. H. Browne arrived in July 1900
to help at the relief centres on a temporary basis. The people were, he
said, like ‘living skeletons.’ He began by separating the sick, diseased
and dying children from the healthy. They were all, he said, repulsively
dirty, and he had them cleaned up. The sick were given Benger’s food,
but they were so weak in most cases that little could be done for them.
Many died each day despite his care. His ‘hospital’ at Biladiya con-
sisted of a small hut that the mission had purchased from a local
person. It had a tile roof and walls on three sides of bamboo matting
plastered with mud. One side was entirely open to the elements.
Although it was really adequate for only about twelve to fourteen
adults, seventy patients were housed in it, of whom about thirty were
children. Empty grain sacks were provided for them to lie on and for
covering their bodies, but as there were not enough sacks to go round,
many had to lie on the bare floor without any covering. There were
many others who needed to be housed – as the first rains had broken –
but there was no room in the shed, so that they had to suffer in the
open.23
Jane Birkett was the first doctor to work for the mission for an
extended period, arriving in November 1900 and working in the Idar
State villages for almost two years in the first instance. She began at
Bavaliya, and provided an initial report after only five days that brings
out vividly the daunting medical problems she was faced with at that
time. Bavaliya had a ‘hospital’ that consisted of a small hut similar to
the one at Biladiya. In her words: ‘When I first saw the place I groaned
in spirit, it was so unsanitary; but . . . we tried to make the best of it –
we raised the mud floor, and knocked out some of the plaster from the
bamboo work so as to provide windows’.24 The patients were nursed by
Ganki, a Bhil girl aged about fourteen or fifteen who had learnt to read
and write at the mission school and who lived on the premises. She had
worked there throughout the famine, caring for those with cholera. On
arrival, Jane Birkett found three men, two women and two children
lying sick with dysentery, diarrhoea, fever and spongy gums. One of the
children died the first night, and the other – a boy – had a dangerously
high temperature. Soon after, one of the women died; she was deeply
jaundiced. Birkett commented:
[ 109 ]

Everybody in this valley seems to be down with fever, and almost every-
one has a huge spleen. There is a little dysentery about. One thing that
catches the eye at once is the scars from burns that are to be seen on the
abdomen and legs of every other man or woman you meet. They were
inflicted during the cholera epidemic, and burning the skin over the seat
of pain seems to be the only idea of treatment that the natives here have.25
The only drugs she found were half an ounce of quinine, two or three
phials of chlorodyne and ‘cholera cures’, a few tabloids of Dover’s
powder and ‘Livingstone Rousers’.26 She asked her husband to order a
fresh supply of drugs from Bombay. She noted that in the whole of that
valley – and she believed other valleys in the region – there was no
Hakim or any other ‘native medicine man’. There was thus a lot of
scope, she felt, for a full medical mission.27
Her work was carried on in what she described as ‘a very primitive
style’. She dared not carry out any operations, except of the most minor
types, as the place was so unsanitary, and she had to advise those who
needed surgery to go to hospitals in Ahmedabad or Bombay. This,
Birkett observed, hardly increased the confidence of the people in
mission medicine. With better facilities, she could have treated a
number of people in a way that would have made a big impression in
the area. She mentioned a number of such cases – including a tumour,
cancer of the lip, a large abscess that killed the patient eventually, a
very large hernia, a grossly swollen leg and numerous cataracts.28
The reports written by Dr A. H. Browne and then Dr Jane Birkett
focused strongly on the bodily afflictions suffered by the Bhils. Browne’s
description of the famine victims, for example, had a precise clinical
tone that set it out from the famine reports of the other missionaries:
Give one of these a slight touch and down the person goes; then it is
piteous to see him trying to get up again. With the hands one leg is bent
and then the other; afterwards by turning the body he gets on to the knees
and rests the weight of the trunk on both hands, the arms being straight-
ened. From this position many can get no further without help, and at last
when the erect position is totteringly gained you see a gaunt figure com-
posed of bones covered with loose skin. From their hips to the feet there
is no change in thickness – just long straight bones covered with skin; the
abdomen in many cases can be encircled by my two hands; the ribs stand
out, and trench-like depressions of the skin mark plainly the spaces
between the ribs; the condition of the arms is something like that of the
legs; the cheek-bones are very prominent through sinking in of the
cheeks, and the eyes are unduly large, or, to use the loose expression,
appear to be starting out of their sockets.29
In a similar manner, Jane Birkett focused on specific, named diseases

and conditions, providing descriptions of the physical appearance of the
[ 110 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
afflicted, as well as the exact treatment that she had applied for each
malady. There was none of that vagueness in detail that was found in
earlier accounts of medical work by non-qualified missionaries. The
doctors also placed great stress on the medical inadequacy of the build-
ings in which they had to treat their patients, which were depicted as
being dirty, cramped and ill equipped. For the first time, also, the
patients and their treatments were recorded, so that from this time
onwards medical statistics setting out the numbers of new patients,
returning patients, outpatients, inpatients, cases of minor surgery,
major surgery and babies delivered became a feature of the annual
reports.
Missionaries such as Brown and Birkett, with their medical training,
were thus describing the conditions that were to be alleviated and the
methods adopted in a language not seen before in reports from this
mission. Poverty and suffering were being depicted less in moralistic
and Biblical terms and more through measurable symptoms and struc-
tures. Malnutrition, diseases of poverty, unhygienic living spaces and
lack of medical facilities now became central indices of civilisational
backwardness. In time, the language of all missionaries was to move in
such a direction.
A hospital for Lusadiya

Soon after her arrival, Jane Birkett wrote to the CMS authorities stating
that the mission needed a proper hospital. Although there was a canton-
ment hospital at Kherwara, this was not adequate for their needs, for it
was forty-eight kilometres away from Lusadiya and about thirty-five
from Biladiya, Bavaliya and Ghoradar. As it was, the equipment at
Kherwara was not very adequate. While she was visiting, one of the girls
in the Kherwara orphanage needed an unsightly eye enucleated, but she
was having to wait while a suitable pair of scissors was obtained from
Bombay. She noted that one of the young MBC officers had died of an
obstruction in his bowel while the doctor was away on leave for ten days.
The hospital assistant had not been up to the task of operating. They
could not therefore depend on that hospital. Also, it was a government
and not a mission hospital. One was needed on the Gujarat side, ‘both for
the physical well-being of Missionaries, orphans, workers, and inhabi-
tants, and as a powerful evangelistic agency. No doctor, even in his first
year, would be idle there.’ She recommended Lusadiya as the best place
‘because the people there are more ready, and the Thakurs (who are about
equivalent to lords of the manor) are friendly and progressive’.30
In January 1905, Jane Birkett wrote to Herbert Moloney, the secre-
tary of the CMS for central India, describing the conditions in which
[ 111 ]

she had to work at Lusadiya. Her consulting room was hardly more
than three metres square and had a large window on the south-east side
that let in a lot of sun, so that she had to keep her large and cumber-
some sola topi on her head while examining patients. Although the
temperature in the room was bearable during the cold season, it was sti-
fling in the hot season. The medical staff had to see all the patients
there, both men and women, and the Indian medical assistant,
E. Reuben, also compounded medicine and carried out dressing there.
The medical assistant’s house was similarly inadequate, with only two
tiny rooms for Reuben, his wife and three children. There was space in
it for only one bed, so that most had to sleep on the floor. This, Jane
Birkett said was ‘a real trial to an educated town bred man’. They also
needed some inpatient facilities to care for people from distant villages.
In the previous week, she had been forced to house a man from Biladiya
in a temporary house built for the servants. There had to be separate
wards for men and women. She submitted plans for two small rooms
for this purposes, which she had dignified by the title of ‘hospital’. She
intended to use famine relief money to pay for the construction of a new
dispensary, the ‘hospital’ and the assistant’s quarters, which she esti-
mated would come to Rs. 1,500, or £100. Her request – which was very
modest considering that this was for a medical mission’s chief facility
– was immediately accepted in full by the CMS authorities.31
The building went ahead, supervised by Arthur Birkett, who, as
noted earlier, had architectural training. Just as his wife was able to
deploy the technology of biomedicine in the service of the mission, so
was he equipped to create an architecture that would provide a visible
identity to the mission as well order its internal space.32 The Thakor of
Karchha, who ruled Lusadiya, provided the land free of charge on the
understanding that he and his relatives would be treated there at no
cost. The one-storeyed buildings were in local style, being built of brick
with pitched tiled roofs and with one small window in each room. The
largest construction was the three-roomed house for the hospital assis-
tant, which measured 12.5 by 8.5 metres, with a veranda running along
one side. The dispensary was another three-roomed structure with
verandas on two sides, containing a room for male patients, and a room
for female patients – each about 3 metres square – and a room for drug
compounding and medical stores that measured about 2 by 3 metres.
The ‘hospital’ for inpatients consisted of two single-room buildings
that each measured about 7 by 4.5 metres. Each had space for four beds.
The building work was completed in the summer of 1905, just before
the rain came.33
Birkett’s initial medical assistant, Reuben, was replaced in August
1905 by an Indian Christian called John Brand. He was to work with her
[ 112 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
in Lusadiya for nearly two decades. Writing in January 1906, Jane

Birkett reported that Brand had been a success from the start. He had at
once gained the confidence of the people by his kind and unassuming
manner, and at one of his first visits to a private patient he astonished
everyone by not asking for a fee, unlike Reuben, who had always taken
something.34 He told them that Christians acted differently from
others. He trained his own assistant, who took the title of ‘medical
dresser’. Before 1915, there were no nurses as it proved impossible to
find suitable local Christian girls to train for this task. The wife of an
Indian lay preacher helped out in this respect in emergencies. In par-
ticularly critical cases, Brand acted as nurse, being relieved from time
to time by Jane Birkett. Otherwise, family members or friends of the
inpatients came to stay at the hospital to look after them while they
were treated.35
The new hospital thus incorporated a hierarchy of medical staff,
albeit a rudimentary one as yet. Michel Foucault has pointed out how
the clinical system of medicine that was forged in the period after the
French Revolution incorporated a clear-cut distinction between the
doctor qualified through rigorous training in the medical school and
teaching hospital and the ‘officer of health’, who might be trained on
the job or receive a shorter training in a medical school.36 In India, the
hierarchy was both racialised and more extreme. A clear distinction
was established between members of the Indian Medical Service, who
were mostly Europeans, and those of the Subordinate Medical Service,
who were Indian. There was vast disparity in their scales of pay: in 1903
the former started on a salary of Rs. 450 per month, which rose to Rs.
550 after ten years’ service, whereas the latter might begin on a salary
as low as Rs. 5 per month, which rose to a maximum of Rs. 55.37
Mission clinics followed similar principles; the doctors in charge were
trained in Europe, whereas their Indian assistants – who had qualified
in Indian institutions – had a lower status. This was despite the fact
that the latter often did the bulk of the work, and for long periods fre-
quently ran the hospitals single-handed while the white missionaries
were on holiday or on furlough in Britain.
Once the hospital was up and running, a record was maintained of
the numbers of patients treated. In her report at the end of January 1906,
Birkett registered a total of three inpatients in the new wards, and 1,715
outpatients. Many of these had attended more than once. In several
cases, the patients had failed to stick to their prescribed treatments:
‘We are of course often disappointed in a patient for whom we have
taken much thought and care when some day we discover that our med-
icines are being supplemented by superstitious practices of Bhil quack-
ery. At other times after a very brief trial of our treatment we are asked
[ 113 ]

not to trouble further as the “country” medicine is preferred.’38 Birkett

also reported that the missionaries had also performed forty-one minor
surgical procedures. Being a general practitioner, she lacked the experi-
ence and skill to carry out complicated surgery. As it was, without an
operating theatre at Lusadiya and skilled nurses to care for patients
after such an operation, it would not have been possible to perform with
safety any surgery that required body cavities to be opened up. She and
Brand confined themselves largely to very minor surgical operations
and advised any patients who needed major surgery to go elsewhere.39
The number of patients increased rapidly. In 1906, the missionaries
treated 32 inpatients and carried out 10,488 outpatient consultations at
the hospital, of which 3,198 were new registrations. They performed
seventy-six minor operations, and also visited 530 sick people in their
homes.40 It was not always easy to ensure that inpatients remained at
the hospital long enough for them to recover. In several cases, the
motives of the missionaries were suspected and relatives – fearing con-
version to Christianity – removed patients. For example, a woman who
developed puerperal fever during labour was admitted to the hospital.
The treatment was going well when after eight days her family sud-
denly took her home, where she died. In another case, a woman who
had suffered ill health for many years came to the hospital for treat-
ment. Soon after, her stepmother arrived and, finding that she had been
responsive to the Christian message, promptly ordered her to return
home. Jane Birkett gave milk and food to sustain her on the journey, but
the stepmother threw them out on the road in front of the hospital in
an ostentatious manner. The woman somehow survived her journey
home by bullock cart over a very rough road, but died four months
later.41 In medical missionary circles, inpatient treatment was com-
monly regard as providing an excellent opportunity for conversion, as
patients were confined and thus amenable to preaching and other
‘Christian’ influences. As inpatients tended to be more seriously ill, it
was believed that they would be in a frame of mind that was more
amenable to the message of the Gospel.42 At Lusadiya, it was clear that
many patients and their relatives were only too aware of this possibil-
ity, and were prepared to curtail the treatment if they suspected that
things were going that way.
One of the reasons why the thakors were prepared to tolerate
medical work in their territories as against missionary educational
work was that access to Western medicine was during this period
becoming a mark of social status amongst them. This process had
begun with the great maharajas, who had been in some cases prepared
to pay huge sums for the treatment of themselves and family members
by European doctors.43 By the early years of the twentieth century, the
[ 114 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
aspiration for ‘English’ treatment was percolating down to the local

gentry in areas such as Idar State. Their experience as boarders at the
Scott College at Sadra, where there was a hospital run by the Indian
Medical Service, also gave them a taste for such medicine. The Thakor
of Karchha had thus been eager to provide land for the new hospital at
Lusadiya on condition that he and his family receive free treatment.
Jane Birkett initially charged thakors and their family members for
medicine, but soon after the hospital was up and running she decided
to ask for only a voluntary donation to be placed in a collecting bottle
at the hospital.44 Soon, many local thakors were taking advantage of the
new facilities, even at the risk of being preached to and evangelised by
the missionaries.
For example, in 1907 the Thakor of Pal brought his son and heir to
be cured of what he feared to be tuberculosis. The youth was being edu-
cated at Sadra, and during his vacations he had shown some interest in
Christianity, often visiting Hodgkinson in Biladiya, which was close to
Pal, for discussions on religion. The thakor had been concerned that his
son was showing excessive interest and made him curtail his visits.
Despite this, he was prepared to place the youth in the care of Jane
Birkett. He however kept a close eye on what was happening, staying
with a family of Brahmans five kilometers from Lusadiya during the
two months of his son’s treatment so that he could visit frequently. Jane
Birkett diagnosed malaria, and the youth was put on a course of quinine
and tonics. When the thakor came for his visits, she lectured him on
the evils of idolatry. He said – in a haughty way – that he was well aware
that idol worship was wrong, but that he was bound by custom in the
matter. He predicted that in twenty years or so his son would be able
to abandon idolatry and there would be no practice of puja. Jane Birkett
appears to have believed that her arguments had hit the mark,45 but this
may not have been the case, for the Arya Samaj was also highly critical
of idol worship, and the thakor may have seen his statement as merely
an acknowledgement of the need for religious reform within Hindu
practice.
Encouraged by the example of the thakors, other high-caste people –
such as the Baniyas – began to send their families to Lusadiya for treat-
ment. This created a problem, as the two tiny wards were clearly inad-
equate for such ‘respectable’ persons. The wives of the thakors, for
example, had to be cared for in Brand’s own home, so that the house
that had been intended for the medical assistant and his family became
what was in essence another hospital ward.46 Because of this demand,
it was decided to build a new block for women patients. The thakors
and other richer patients were asked to give donations for this purpose,
which they did. The new ward, which was opened in January 1912,
[ 115 ]

consisted of three rooms holding four beds each and an examining room
in which treatment could be carried out with the seclusion and privacy
demanded by ‘ladies’.47 During that year, 189 people were treated as
inpatients.
Over the years, the thakors continued to send their family members
to Lusadiya for treatment. Often, they made up a significant proportion
of the inpatients. Some showed a polite interest in Christianity and
even purchased Bibles and hymnbooks for their own elucidation.48 Jane
Birkett continued to hope against hope that some would be converted:
‘we long that these gentry should realise that our Saviour is their
Saviour too, as well as the Saviour of the Bhils’.49 Her hope was not to
be realised.50 Caring for this class was nonetheless of importance, for it
won their sympathy and made them less likely to obstruct the mis-
sionaries in their work.
The numbers of patients treated at Lusadiya increased year by year.
Figures from the CMS medical mission journal Mercy and Truth show
that the numbers of outpatient treatments rose from 15,331 in 1910 to
18, 596 in 1915, and that number of inpatients increased from 99 in 1910
to 226 in 1915. The number of minor operations increased from 158 in
1910 to 309 in 1915. Besides this, Jane Birkett and John Brand toured the
surrounding villages treating people. This practice was known in
mission circles as ‘medical itineration’. The purpose was to demonstrate
the value of modern medical treatment and gain the confidence of the
people so that they might be encouraged to go to the mission hospital
when sick. Patients were preached to, and it was hoped that the way
would be then open for ordinary evangelical work at a later time.51
Writing in 1907, Jane Birkett reported that the main problems treated on
tour were fever, enlarged spleen, ophthalmia, skin diseases and ulcers.
Birkett and Brand found that most Bhils were reluctant to come to see
them and they had to go from house to house finding people who
required treatment.52 They often encountered much suspicion. When
she upbraided a Bhil woman for failing to seek treatment for her baby
who was suffering from a bad case of ophthalmia, the reply was: ‘I am
told that if I take her to you and you put medicine in her eye the eye will
burst!’ She applied caustic and the baby’s eyes were soon healed.53
In some years, the missionaries undertook longer tours that com-
bined medical with evangelical work. They took tents with them and
sometimes camped out for months at a time. These tours were carried
out in the winter when the weather was cooler. For example, in 1914
Jane and Arthur Birkett left Lusadiya at the end of November and made
for the large village of Tintoi. They camped there for three days.
This was a village from which many had visited the Lusadiya hospital,
and as they were well known, people besieged their tent requesting
[ 116 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
treatment. They then went into the south-eastern part of Dungarpur

State, turned north, visited Dungarpur town itself, then made for Mewar
State and back home. During the two months, they camped at twenty-
five different places and treated 2,090 patients. They preached at each
place, put on lantern slide shows and sold religious literature. Crowds
often came to their tents, and in some places they were asked to visit
regularly. Many of these villages had largely non-Bhil populations. Only
in a few places did they encounter any suspicion, and according to Jane
Birkett this was soon overcome. At Dungarpur they met the maharaja
and his officials, who received them in a friendly manner, and they also
visited eighty-one houses to treat women of high status in their homes.
Jane Birkett commented that although an excellent opening had been
made in this state, they lacked the resources and personnel for regular
tours of this type, and that ‘we would earnestly ask for a male medical
recruit who can take up the work that clamours to be done’.54 No such
person was forthcoming at that time, nor would be for many years.
Brand also undertook tours of his own. He had been provided with a
pony for this purpose, and he used to go out on about two days each
week to villages within a convenient distance from Lusadiya accompa-
nied by a young helper who carried his medicine chest. In 1906, he per-
sonally visited forty-eight different villages in this way – most more
than once – and treated 825 patients in all. He also undertook some
longer tours, travelling in a bullock cart with bedding and cooking
equipment, but no tents, as he was happy to stay in local houses. He
was usually accompanied by some local converts, who carried a drum
so that they could sing hymns of worship to the villagers.55
As in the past, medically unqualified missionaries continued to
provide medical care when they were on tour. Helen Bull had taken
some basic medical instruction while on furlough in London in 1904,
being funded by the CMS to attend a short course in Bermondsey.56 She
soon became very adept at treating people on itinerating tours.
Describing one such tour of 1914, she said that she was able to help in
most cases, and as news of successful cures spread from village to
village people began to come in large numbers to demand her medicine.
In one village, for example, the Bhils were at first suspicious of her and
her party, but when one of them recognised her as the person who had
cured a badly burnt boy at another village, the attitude changed dra-
matically: ‘Then was the welcome hearty indeed; and day after day, and
night after night, the people simply flocked for medicines for sick
bodies, and to hear our teaching and see the magic lantern slides depict-
ing the Life of our Lord.’57
The other centre for medical work was Biladiya, where there was a
small dispensary. It was one of the principles of medical mission work
[ 117 ]

that the main hospital should be served by what were known as ‘affili-
ated dispensaries’. They dealt with simple conditions, with more
complex cases being passed on to the hospital. It was not expected that
they would be run by European doctors, who were few and far between,
but either by European missionaries who had some basic medical train-
ing or by Indian medical assistants trained at a mission hospital. They
were envisaged as being largely for outpatients, though a few beds might
be necessary for a limited number of inpatients.58 Margaret Hodgkinson,
who had trained for a term at the CMS medical hostel in England before
she went out to India to marry the Reverend William Hodgkinson, ran
the Biladiya dispensary from 1903 to 1913. In 1905 she treated five
hundred cases, sending those who needed more serious attention either
to Lusadiya or to the MBC doctor at Kherwara. She reported that ‘The
Bhils have such faith in our medicine that even before they take it, they
make up their minds that it is going to do them good and this goes a long
way towards their recovery.’59 Her work soon expanded – in 1906 she
treated over 1,800 cases. She reported that almost every family in
Biladiya village itself had taken treatment from her at some time or
other. She was often called out to see sick people in their homes at night,
and the people were very thankful to her for this. She was hard stretched
to do all the work, as she had two infants of her own to look after.
Patients from a distance were accommodated in a spare room in the
mission compound in 1905, but in 1906 this was required for other pur-
poses and she appealed for some money to build a small ward.60
In 1907, she treated 1,907 cases. Often, she said, the children who
were brought to see her required food as much as any medicine. With
better funding, they could provide this. She also reported that some
people who had refused to take treatment in previous years were now
coming to the dispensary. The local people had been particularly
impressed by her success in healing a woman from a neighbouring
village who had been badly gored by a bull, with the horn puncturing
her lung. She had gone to her at night and found the woman in a very
bad way, with air escaping from her lung at every breath. She bandaged
the wound, and after a month of careful dressing it healed completely.
She commented: ‘All the Bhils had quite made up their minds that she
must die and consequently the praises I get on all sides are most enthu-
siastic. I am sure it has done a great deal to break down prejudice and it
has been the means I am certain of winning their confidence.’ She had
confidence, she said, that the work would provide ‘the means of bring-
ing many a sin-stricken Bhil to the Great Physician to get all his needs
satisfied for time and eternity’.61
This was the last extensive report on the Biladiya dispensary
for many years, so it is hard to judge how the work continued there.
[ 118 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
In 1913, the Hodgkinsons were transferred to a different mission, and

Rowena Watts, who had some medical training, took over the dispen-
sary.62 In 1915 a hospital assistant called M. M. Dey was employed to
run it. He was a Bengali Christian, and besides his medical duties he
preached the Gospel.63 He was in charge over the next decade.
Jane Birkett continued to be in charge of the medical work of the
mission up until her retirement in 1922. By this time, she was becom-
ing very conscious of its limitations. Elsewhere, she saw medical mis-
sions expanding their facilities in complex new ways, particularly in
the field of surgery. The Reverend Dr John Lowe had argued as long ago
as 1886 that ‘it is in the hospital that the most satisfactory and suc-
cessful medical and surgical work will be accomplished – work which
will produce the deepest impression, and direct public attention most
favourably to the higher objects of the mission’.64 In Lowe’s day, a high
proportion of patients who underwent major surgery were still dying
from post-operative infections. With the development of better anti-
sepsis in subsequent years, success rates had soared. Once such success
had became the norm in the mission hospital, the occasional failure did
not tell against it.65 Such work was not possible at Lusadiya. No
surgeon was appointed to work alongside Jane Birkett, and no modern
surgical equipment was provided. Writing in 1919, she stated: ‘There
are such great surgical possibilities, in a very wide district, only waiting
to be used for the help of the people, both body and soul; but I am phys-
ically unable to attempt them – (and one hates to be unable to properly
fill a post).’66 Soon after, she put in a plea for a surgeon and surgical
equipment for ‘up-to-date surgical and bacteriological and electrical
treatment’. In the meantime, she did the best she could, carrying out
some minor surgery, but nothing requiring any major incisions. She
commented:
Urgent cases, such as intestinal obstructions, appendicitis, and ruptured

ectopic gestations (which would undoubtedly have been operated on
immediately if a well-manned and equipped hospital had been available),
have been successfully treated by rest and prayer, and sent home rejoic-
ing; so that the non-Christians are learning that there is a God Who hears
and answers prayers, and they often ask for our prayers. 67
She still had to advise patients who needed more complex surgery to go
elsewhere, but in her experience few were willing to undertake such a
hazardous journey to places that for them were strange and unknown.68
Despite this, the Lusadiya medical facilities had in general gained a
good reputation in the region. In her final report, Birkett praised her
assistant, John Brand, highly. He had, she said ‘built up a great reputa-
tion by his integrity and devotion. He is highly respected by gentry and
[ 119 ]

officials and loved by hundreds; and it is entirely due to his untiring

care that local contributions have usually covered all expenses for drugs
and dressings.’ A dresser whom Brand had trained assisted them. There
was no qualified nurse, and they had failed to find a suitable Christian
girl for training. The wife of one of the lay pastors helped out as a
nurse in emergencies. She noted that patients often came from long dis-
tances because they were confident that they would be treated in an
honest and straightforward way at Lusadiya, regardless of their status
in life and the payment that they could afford. Most non-mission hos-
pitals and dispensaries had, she alleged, a reputation for providing treat-
ment and medication only to the extent that the patient could pay, or
even bribe, the doctor.69
Despite this, the large majority of the Bhils, including the Christian
converts, still continued to believe that many illnesses were often
caused by the malign power of evil spirits. In the next chapter we shall
see how the Birketts struggled to break the hold of such beliefs.
Notes
11 ‘From the Rev. G. Litchfield, Kherwara’, Intelligencer, 11 NS (May and June 1886), 414.
12 Edward P. Herbert to Durrant, Kherwara, 4 January 1898, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1898,
doc. 58.
CMSE (1887–88), 95.
14 ‘From the Rev. E. P. Herbert, Kherwara, North-West Provinces’, CMSE (1896), 140.
15 Ibid., p. 139.
16 Herbert to Carter, Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, Kherwara, 6 August 1898, GSAV, CRR,
Daftar 51, F 45.
CMSE (1887–88), 95.
18 Harrison, Public Health in British India, p. 160.
19 W. B. Collins, Kherwara, 7 October 1893, Intelligencer, 19 NS (March 1894), 211–12.
10 Horace Mould to Political Agent, Mahi Kantha, Kherwara, 24 July 1899, GSAV, CRR,
Daftar 51, F 46.
11 Lieutenant Colonel J. M. Hunter, Acting Pol. Agent, Mahi Kanta, to Govt. of
Bombay, Sadra, 21 May 1892, MKAAR, OIOC, V/10/1543 (1890–91 to 1908–09),
1891–92, pp. 35–6.
12 The Bishop of Exeter to Ireland Jones, Exeter, 30 July 1896, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1896,
doc. 320.
13 C. S. Thompson, ‘The Bheels’, The Church Missionary Gleaner (October 1897), 149.
14 Thompson to Dr Lankester, Sydenham, 12 October 1899, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1899, doc.
419.
15 Gill to Durrant, Allahabad, 14 December 1899, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 2.
17 Tyndale-Biscoe, Kherwara, 1 September 1900, ‘The Famine amongst the Bhils of
Western India’, The Church Missionary Gleaner (1 November 1900), 163.
18 Arnold, Colonising the Body, p. 164. In British Gujarat, an average of 1,025 people died
each year from cholera in the five years before the great famine, while in 1900 42,944
are recorded as having died. Figures aggregated from the Gazetteer of the Bombay
Presidency, B vols. (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1904), for the districts of
Surat and Broach (vol. 2-B), Kaira and Panch Mahals (vol. 3-B), Ahmedabad (vol. 4-B).
[ 120 ]

CHRISTIAN HEALING
19 Reinhard S. Speck, ‘Cholera’, in Kenneth F. Kilpe (ed.), The Cambridge Historical

Dictionary of Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 77–8.
20 Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 173.
21 Arthur Outram, 22 May 1900, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1900, doc. 304.
22 Rev. Foss Westcott, Cawnpore, 25 July 1900, ‘Work for the Famine-Stricken in India:
The Bhil Mission: On the Rajputana Side’, Intelligencer (October 1900), 739.
ibid., 740–3.
24 Jane Birkett, Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901, CMS, G2 I 6/0,
1902, doc. 75.
25 Mrs A. I. Birkett, ‘In the Bhil Country’, Mercy and Truth, (September 1901), 208.
26 Dover’s powder was a compound invented by Dr Dover that contained opium and
ipecacuanha. It was used widely at this time by doctors as a stimulant, sedative and
pain killer. See H. W. Felter and J. U. Lloyd, King’s American Dispensatory
(Cincinnati: Ohio Valley Co., 1898). ‘Livingstone Rousers’ were pills devised by
Dr David Livingstone in Africa to treat malaria that contained oil of jalap, quinine
and opium.
27 Mrs A. I. Birkett, ‘In the Bhil Country’, Mercy and Truth (September 1901), 207–9.
28 Jane L. J. Birkett, Report of Medical Work in the Bhil Mission for 1901, CMS, G2 I
6/0, 1902, doc. 75.
Intelligencer (October 1900), 741–2.
30 Jane L. J. Birkett to Gill, 23 December 1901, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1902, doc. 74.
31 Proceedings of the Jabalpur Corresponding Committee, 18 January 1905, CMS,
M/FL I 5.
32 From the start, Birkett had taken the construction of new facilities for the Bhil
mission to hand. He had surveyed sites for mission buildings at the various mission
stations, drawn up plans, and supervised building work. See A. I. Birkett to C. H.
Gill, 15 March 1901, CMS, G2 I 6/0, 1901, doc. 225; C. H. Gill to Durrant, Allahabad,
3 May 1901, ibid., doc. 283.
33 Lusadia Hospital, Dispensary and Hospital Assistant’s Quarters, plans, 14 December
1904, CMS, M/FL I 5; Jane L. J. Birkett, ‘Medical Work’, Lusadiya, 30 January 1906,
BMR (1905), 7–8.
34 Did this attribution of a mean money-mindedness to Reuben – an Indian Jew –
reflect some anti-Semitic prejudice in Birkett? I am grateful to Sarah Hodges for
raising this question.
35 Jane Birkett, ‘Lusadia and the Present Opportunity’, The Mission Hospital (June
1923), 125.
36 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, pp. 80–1.
37 Harrison, Public Health in British India, pp. 11–12 and n. 28, p. 252.
38 Jane L. J. Birkett, ‘Medical Work’, Lusadiya, 30 January 1906, BMR (1905), 9.
39 Ibid.
40 Jane L. J. Birkett, ‘Medical Work’, BMR (1906), 12.
41 Ibid., 11–12.
42 See the statement by Lowe, Medical Missions, p. 48; quoted in Rosemary Fitzgerald,
‘A “Peculiar and Exceptional Measure”: The Call for Women Medical Missionaries
for India in the Later Nineteenth Century’, in Robert A. Bickers and Rosemary Seton
(eds.), Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996),
p. 192.
43 Harrison, Public Health in British India, p. 12.
44 Jane L. J. Birkett, ‘Medical Work’, Lusadiya, 30 January 1906, BMR (1905), 7–8.
45 Jane Birkett, ‘Medical Work at Lusadia’, April 1907, Mercy and Truth (July 1907),
204.
46 ‘Central Provinces Mission: Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (July 1909), 229; ‘Central
Provinces Mission: Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (July 1910), 228–9.
47 ‘Central Provinces Mission: Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (July 1909), 236–7.
[ 121 ]

48 Jane Birkett, ‘Lusadia Medical Mission’, BMR (1913), 7.

49 Jane Birkett, Lusadiya, ‘Church Missionary Society (Western India Mission) in
Maharashtra and Bhil Land 1920’, p. 48, CMS, G2 I O, 1921, doc. 66.
50 ‘Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (July 1921), 198.
51 For a general discussion, see C.F.H., ‘Principles and Practice of Medical Missions,
Chapter VI: Itineration’, Mercy and Truth (June 1912), 184–6.
52 ‘Central Provinces and Rajputana Mission, Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (October
1907), 319.
53 Mrs Birkett, ‘Camping out in Khetadra’, Mercy and Truth (April 1907), 103.
54 Jane Birkett, ‘A Medical Itineration from Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (September
1915), 311–13.
55 Ibid., 313.
56 A. H. Bull to Durrant, London, 24 June 1904, CMS, G2 I O, 1904, doc. 57.
57 A. H. Bull, Kotra, BMR (1914), 16–17.
58 C.F.H., ‘Principles and Practices of Medical Missions, Chapter VII: Affiliated
Dispensaries’, Mercy and Truth (August 1912), 280–1.
59 Margaret M. Hodgkinson, Biladiya, January 1906, BMR (1905), 20–1.
60 Margaret M. Hodgkinson, Biladiya, January 1907, BMR (1906), 24.
61 Margaret M. Hodgkinson, Biladiya, January 1908, BMR (1907), 20–3.
62 R. Carter to Pol. Agent, Mahi Kantha, Biladiya, 20 January 1914, GSAV, CRR, Daftar
455, F 73, 1912–13.
1923), 24.
64 Lowe, Medical Missions, p. 48; quoted in Fitzgerald, ‘Peculiar and Exceptional
Measure’, p. 192.
65 Editorial, ‘The Hand of God in the Direction and Development of Modern Medical
Mission’, Medical Missions at Home and Abroad (October 1919), 270–1.
66 Jane Birkett to Dr Lankester, Weston super Mare, 6 February 1919, CMS, MY I 3,
1919.
1923), 125–6.
68 Jane Birkett to C. W. Thorne, Lusadiya, 28 May 1919, CMS, MY I 3, 1919.
1923), 125–6.
[ 122 ]
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fighting demons
Rhodri Hayward has noted how the imperial encounter during the nine-
teenth century produced a popular stereotype of the ‘possessed and
demon-haunted natives’.1 Many Christian missionaries believed that
they were engaged in an epic struggle with the forces of Satan. They fre-
quently compared indigenous spirit possession to demonical posses-
sion in the Bible. J. L. Nevius, in Demon Possession and Allied Themes,
described Chinese Christian converts ‘being swept into paroxyms of
blasphemous rage’ through demonic forces.2 In their writings, mission-
aries reported their engagements and victories in this heroic battle in
vivid tones. A missionary to the tribal peoples of central India, J. Fryer,
thus described in 1905 how he had rescued one of his converts. Hearing
that a pagan ceremony was going on at the house of the village Panda
(headman), Fryer went there and saw:
women and men with hair matted, etc., certainly under Satanic influ-
ence, some of them rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth,
others were dancing round erected idols, beating themselves with chains
having spikes, some of the men were hitting themselves with axes and
making pretence to try and cut their throats and hack pieces out of their
limbs. I then found the reason of my being called – it was to witness the
power of Kali to protect those who trusted in her . . . I found a young Baiga
Christian called Timon possessed. I quickly went among the dancers and
pulled Timon out – some of the dancers fled when I did this. I had Timon
taken home, but that night I heard that he was dancing outside his house
around some flags crying: ‘The devil is in me, I can’t help myself, and he
(the devil) says he will not leave unless Fryer Sahib gives him the order
to go.’ I dressed hastily and went to Timon’s house and found him in the
state described. I held his arm and asked him what was the matter – he
replied: ‘I can’t help it, Satan is inside and won’t go unless you make him
go Sahib, do make him go.’ I said: ‘In the name of Christ I command the
Satan to come out of him.’ Immediately he was all right, and he pointed
with his hand and cried out: ‘There he goes Sahib, I am alright now, come
[ 123 ]

on Christian brothers, break up these flags, spit on them.’ We did this.

Timon asked for prayers, and we all knelt and prayed. Next day, Timon
said that he was bewitched by the Panda after he had struck the son of the
Panda who had stolen some sweet potatoes from his field. Since then,
Timon has been a better Christian than he was before. I have told him
that if Jesus went with him everywhere, Satan would have no power over
him. The incident has shown to the people that evil spirits have no power
over our Christians, and are subject to Jesus.3
The missionaries working amongst the Bhils likewise believed that
Satan was in their midst, constantly enticing their hard-won converts
to relinquish their new faith and revert to their ‘heathen’ ways.
Festivals such as Holi were seen as examples of devil-worship, as is
apparent from the following description of this annual celebration by
Agnes Lees, who was based at the Kotada mission station in 1919:
it was unfortunately the time of the Holi festival, when license is granted
for all sorts of wild revelry. The first night we were surrounded by a
howling mob of villagers, usually quite quiet people, but at that time like
a pack of wolves. Although it was near midnight they sent to me three
times demanding money, and one felt at grips with Satan himself while
their dreadful drum was beaten, shrill pipes blown, and evil songs sung. I
have never prayed so earnestly that the Holy Spirit would definitely fight
the evil spirits with which we were undoubtedly surrounded. I had to go
out to deliver the third refusal myself; and only then was the gameti per-
suaded to take his people away. It was a spiritual conflict, but we were on
the always-victorious side.4
Over the years, the belief in the ever-present reality of Satan and
demonic forces had waxed and waned within the Anglican Church.
During the eighteenth century, under the influence of Spinoza,
Anglican theologians generally held that as God had created nature in
its entirety, it made no sense for Him to have created demons also. The
concept of hell and eternal damnation had been devised to keep
Christians on the straight and narrow, and in an age of reason such
beliefs were no longer required.5 During the nineteenth century there
was a strong reaction against such a theology within the Anglican
Church by theologians who asserted that the struggle between God and
Satan had continued throughout human history, and it would continue
into the future. Richard Chenevix Trench – a leading theologian and
archbishop who lived from 1807 to 1886 – thus depicted Satan as a real
force, able to win humans to his ways through what appeared to be daz-
zling miracles. Whereas in the early days, Christ and the apostles had
won converts through miracles wrought by their own hands, in the
latter days God had withdrawn such powers from believers, so that
such wonders were now a sure mark of the devil.
[ 124 ]

FIGHTING DEMONS
Yet, while the works of Antichrist and his organs are not mere tricks and
juggleries, neither are they miracles in the very highest sense of the word;
they only partake of the essential elements of the miracle. This they have,
indeed, in common with it, that they are real works of a power which is
suffered to extend thus far, and not merely dextrous feats of legerdemain;
but this, also, which is the most different, that they are abrupt, isolated,
parts of no organic whole; not the highest harmonies, but the deepest dis-
cords, of the universe; not the omnipotence of God wielding his own
world to ends of grace and wisdom and love, but evil permitted to intrude
into the hidden springs of things just so far as may suffice for its own
deeper confusion in the end, and, in the mean while, for the needful trial
and perfecting of God’s saints and servants.6
Supernatural occurrences could not therefore be taken as any proof of
divine will. ‘A miracle does not prove the truth of a doctrine, or the
divine mission of him that brings it to pass.’ People had to decide
whether the message came from heaven or hell on the basis of whether
it was good or evil, and it was up to them to use their moral judgement
in this respect. What was required was an ‘inward witness’ that all
Christians had the ability to command. The ‘simple and unlearned
Christian’ could discriminate as well as the learned one.7 Applied to the
Bhils, this meant that they had to be brought through Christian teach-
ing and education to a moral state and awareness of the Word of the
Lord that would allow them to distinguish godliness from superstition
and devilry.
Why had God withdrawn miraculous power from Christians in
the latter days? In the early days, Chenevix Trench argued, miracles
were signs for non-believers who were coming for the first time to
Christianity. Christianity had to reveal its superiority by such means.
Once they were recorded in the Bible, later Christians had them as a ref-
erence and did not need constant fresh wonders. Although the people
of ‘heathen lands’ of the present time were new to Christ’s message,
they also no longer needed miracles to win them to the faith, for:
the Church of Christ, with its immense and evident superiorities of all
kinds over everything with which it is brought in contact, and some por-
tions of which superiority every man must recognise, is itself now the
great witness and proof of the truth which it delivers. The truth, there-
fore, has no longer need to vindicate itself by an appeal to something else;
but the position which it has won in the very forefront of the world is
itself its vindication now, and suffices to give it a first claim on every
man’s attention.8
He concluded that the church itself was in our day ‘the wonder’.9
Anglican missionaries working in all parts of the world were thus
convinced that Protestantism – with its emphasis on the power of the
[ 125 ]

Word as inscribed in the Bible and its mastery of modern science, as

seen most particularly in clinical medicine – could provide the neces-
sary ‘all-encompassing cosmology that addressed the needs of body,
mind and soul’.10 In this, there was no room for ‘magical’ practices,
such as exorcism, the laying-on of hands or the use of charms. Such
practices were, rather, seen to be positively dangerous, as they would
concede too much ground to the enemy, which at that time included
both ‘heathens’ and Roman Catholics who continued to perform such
rituals. In this, these Protestants were ignoring the long history of con-
version from paganism to Christianity in their own country, a process
that had frequently manifested itself in supernatural cures by saintly
healers. The seventh-century saint of Northumbria, Cuthbert, is for
example depicted by Bede as healing the sick through prayer and the
laying-on of hands, all of which cemented the faith of the people in their
new religion.11 There was during medieval times no clear dividing line
between healing and Christian ministry, with the shrines of saints
being major therapeutic centres.12 This whole experience was being
rejected by these missionaries, and there is no doubt that in many cases
they would have gained considerable advantage from applying such
methods, as has been seen by the subsequent global success of spiritual
healing sects such as the Pentecostalists.13
The Anglican missionaries viewed attempts to heal through the
invocation of supernatural powers as not only suspect, but also devil-
ish, being the method of the ‘heathen witch doctor’. They regarded their
‘Christian’ biomedicine as standing in stark opposition to the pagan
healing of the indigenous exorcist-cum-priest. It was held that the more
their ‘scientific’ practice was extended, the more the faith of the
‘natives’ in their old belief systems would be undermined. As James B.
McCord stated in an article of 1910 on ‘Zulu Witchcraft’:
Every native who goes to the dispensary for medicine takes a step, and a
long one, away from his witch doctor and his heathen belief in witchcraft.
Every native who leaves the dispensary and receives help from the med-
icine is a missionary to all his acquaintances, testifying to the fact that a
man may be cured without resort to witchcraft, and therefore the sick-
ness could not be caused by witchcraft.14
Writing fifteen years later, a well-known medical missionary in

Uganda, J. Howard Cook, stated: ‘Where the light of science enters,
superstition rapidly disappears like those unclean insects which scatter
when the stone that buries them is upturned.’ He continued:
Many diseases are by the ignorant native ascribed to witchcraft or mali-
cious poisoning, or the breach of taboo, or a hundred other superstitions
or imaginary causes. Science in many of these cases reveals the cause and
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FIGHTING DEMONS
effects the cure, thus liberating the sufferer from his fears and super-
stitions. The art of the surgeon comes to be looked on as a superior
magic, and once more Christianity has vanquished heathenism with the
weapons that science has placed in its hands.
In effecting these victories, and rescuing the sufferers, science changes
hostility into gratitude, and creates an atmosphere in which the seeds of
truth and religion flourish.
Cook concluded that science provided the most certain cure for the
‘sin-sick soul’.15
Within the CMS, the ordained missionaries and the mission doctors
were seen to be working hand in hand, the one waging holy war on the
‘witch-doctors’ or ‘wizards’ who claimed to be in touch with the spirit
world, while the other treated the physical maladies that provided the
opening for such ‘devilish’ practices. Converts were required to demon-
strate their commitment to their new faith by renouncing all form of
‘devilish’ healing and putting their trust in biomedical treatment alone.
Such a radical mental change was not, as we shall see in this chapter,
easily achieved.
The powers of darkness

While on tour in 1905, Helen Bull spent five weeks camping in
Jesingpur, where there were a handful of Bhil converts. She received a
warm welcome, being told, ‘You have come to be one of us and to be
our teacher of God.’ They said that under the influence of Christianity
they had given up many of their superstitions, such as watching for
omens on the start of a journey. Nonetheless, Bull commented, they
still felt the need to propitiate the ‘evil eye’, and the belief in witchcraft
continued as strong as ever. Bull was however optimistic, observing
that ‘we can take courage and go on, knowing that when The Holy
Spirit of God through Jesus Christ reigns in Bhil Land these will, with
all the powers of darkness disappear.’16
Arthur and Jane Birkett were far less sanguine on this score. They
saw that there would be a long and arduous struggle before the belief of
the Bhil converts in ‘heathen’ charms, witchcraft and exorcism was
broken. Writing in early 1906, Arthur Birkett reported:
Three cases of superstition came to our notice during the year. One
husband tried to cure his wife by tying some pulse round her neck like a
locket. Another tied a string of black hair round his wife’s leg. The pulse
and the string had both been rendered effective by the use of spells and
burning butter. In the third case the cowherd, a catechumen, offered a sac-
rifice of a cock to try to cure the buffalo of the matron of the Girl’s
Orphanage. She had promised him a cloth if it got well, and so he did what
[ 127 ]

he believed best to cure it. In another case a boy had grains of wheat
strung on a string and put round his neck to cure his eyes, but, as the
necklace was made at home and no spells were used, we took no action
in the matter.
Birkett punished the offenders by fining them sums ranging from a half
to one rupee.17
In November and December 1906, the Birketts and Helen Bull set up
camp in the village of Chhitadara to provide pastoral services for the
forty or so Christian converts and medical treatment for the people in
general. Jane Birkett was called to see a Christian woman who had
given birth four months previously and since then been sick and
growing ever weaker. On being questioned, the woman said that ‘Satan’
had caused her illness:
Satan came in dreams to her in the night and threatened her because she
had left off idolatry. Her first husband had practised exorcism and had
worshipped the exorcised spirits in his house, where he had a special altar
to them, and she thought he now wanted her and her Christian husband
to return to the old practices, and that because she had not complied
Satan was tormenting her with this mysterious illness.18
The Christian couple had been told by an exorcist that for five rupees
he would remove the spirits from both the woman and the house. So
far they had resisted his offer. They had gone to live with a neighbour,
and were considering abandoning the old house and building a new one
elsewhere. Jane Birkett ‘taught them and prayed earnestly with them
for peaceful sleep for the woman’. The woman’s husband also prayed
with great zeal. In this case the couple appear to have internalised the
vocabulary of the missionaries, though the haunting was understood in
terms of the Bhils’ own cosmos of belief.
A week later news was brought to the Birketts’ tent at night that the
Christian woman who was being haunted by Satan had ‘yielded to her
heathen instincts and practice and has had the exorcist in!’ The two
missionaries went straight over to reason with the woman and her
husband. The husband and wife were however adamant that ‘nothing
but their old custom of exorcising evil spirits could avail in the present
circumstances – medicines and prayer would never cure her’. Jane
Birkett claimed that the woman had in fact been recovering her
strength in the week since they had prayed together. Other villagers
then intervened, abusing the missionaries and stating that if the
woman followed their advice she would inevitably die and her blood
would be on their heads. They threatened that if they did not leave,
their tent would be burnt down next day. The missionaries retired to
their tent ‘very sore at heart’. Next morning they took comfort when
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FIGHTING DEMONS
they found that the reading for the day was from Isaiah 53: ‘Enlarge the
place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habi-
tations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes. Fear
not; for thou shalt not be ashamed; neither be thou confounded; for
thou shalt not be put to shame’. Heartened by what they took to be
God’s Word, they resolved to stay put. News was brought to them that
the exorcism had continued for the whole of that night, and that fifteen
evil spirits had been captured by the exorcist and carried away in a sack.
The couple were reported to the bishop and excommunicated.19 The
husband later repented, but the woman remained obdurate.20 The mis-
sionaries camped there for another month, preaching and treating
patients, without suffering the threatened fate. Jane Birkett com-
mented at the end of their stay that:
the Bhils are very shy indeed; even when they seem to be very friendly on
some lines they still cling to their own idea of treatment, so progress here
will be very slow. We can only pray that as they grow in grace they may
have grace to care properly for their own bodies.21
No other such cases came to the ears of the missionaries in that year,
but in 1907 Arthur Birkett caught a Christian uttering a spell over a
woman who had been stung by a scorpion. As he did this, he brushed
her with a small tree branch. This was a very common form of exor-
cism – known as jhara – that involved sweeping the malevolence away
from a sufferer’s body (often a peacock tail feather was used).22 The
guilty man admitted the offence, but claimed that he had only used the
name of the Lord in his spell. He promised to give up using spells in
future.23 In February 1908, there was a much more serious case, again
involving the people of Chhitadara, in which a Christian woman was
alleged to have killed the village headman by cursing him. On investi-
gation, Arthur Birkett found that the woman’s husband – also a
Christian – had fallen gravely ill with pneumonia and she had begun to
behave as if possessed by a demon. She had cursed the headman, and he
had died three days later – of fright, so Birkett believed. Another
Christian then sacrificed a goat to try to placate the evil spirit. Despite
this, the woman’s husband had yet to recover his health, and he was
convinced that it was because she still had an evil influence over him.
All of the villagers, including the Christians, were terrified of her.24
In the following month, March 1908, the second Christian mela was
held at Lusadiya. With the Chhitadara case fresh in mind, the issue
became a topic of debate. There was even an example of such supersti-
tion at the mela itself, when a woman dropped and smashed a pot of
ghee that she was bringing for Helen Bull. Several of the Christians
claimed that another woman had looked at her malevolently, causing
[ 129 ]

her to drop the pot. At a special meeting held to discuss this issue,
Satgurudas made a strong speech on the powerlessness of false gods and
evil spirits to hurt those who had a firm faith in God. He told them how
he had gathered all the ancestral stones of his house that he had once
worshipped, and had thrown them all into a stream. On another occa-
sion, when two friends he was walking with bowed before a heathen
idol, he had hit the idol on the cheek and no harm had come to him.
Some of the Christians endorsed these sentiments, stating that they
now found such fear laughable. Others said that the fear was justified.
One couple, for example, was convinced that the house they had moved
into recently was haunted. After this frank discussion, prayers were
held for the sick, so as to demonstrate the correct course for Christians
to take in times of suffering.25
The problem for the missionaries was that they were fighting a
whole culture of belief and practice that was not only deeply inter-
nalised amongst the Bhils, but also rigidly enforced by the patriarchs,
elders and exorcists of the community. Although these Bhil elites
tended to raise no objection to people of their village being treated by
touring missionaries for a range of minor complaints, they were far less
willing to allow them to go to the missionaries when a witch or evil
spirit was believed to have caused an illness. The belief in witchcraft
remained undimmed, even amongst many of the converts. Writing in
1914, Arthur Birkett reported that in the past three years in the area
around Kotada, three women had been done to death as witches. ‘One
was killed with an axe and one had a red hot iron thrust into her’.26
Some cases involved converts. In 1915, a girl in a family of Bhil con-
verts of Abapur village died of tetanus. The father, Makana, and his
brother, Jalji, consulted an exorcist to discover the cause of her death.
They were told that the wife of the headman had bewitched her. The
two Christians went to her house at night and attacked her with an axe,
cutting off one arm and slashing the other to the bone. They tried to
cut her throat, but her screams brought her husband running from the
fields – where he was guarding his crops – and they fled.27
Such attacks by alleged witches were seen to threaten the well-being
and health of the community as a whole, and it was considered imper-
ative that they be dealt with in the appropriate manner, though exor-
cism. Individuals were not considered to have a right to assert their own
feelings and beliefs in such matters; they were members of kin groups
who had to conform to the wishes of the wider family or clan, so as not
to offend and bring misfortune to either the living or the spirits of
ancestors. We can see, furthermore, that refusal to accept such a
method of treatment was also a challenge to the power and prestige of
the elders and exorcists, and this provided a further reason for their
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FIGHTING DEMONS
opposition. Treatment could thus become a battlefield between the

Bhil elders and the missionaries. In 1914, for example, a Bhil woman
who was married to a Christian convert fell ill. When her father-in-law
proposed to take her to the mission hospital at Lusadiya, a local exor-
cist told him that if he did this his son – her husband – would fall ill and
die. The woman’s own father was eager to take her for treatment, but
the will of the exorcist, as exercised over the father-in-law, prevailed.
The woman died as a result. Arthur Birkett was so disgusted by this that
he excommunicated the whole family.28
In 1915 the Birketts discovered that Waga Koya, a lay pastor who led
the congregation at Chhitadara, had been taking part in ‘superstitious
practices’ for many years previously. He had himself asked for help
from a ‘wizard’, such as an exorcist, on at least one occasion. Several
converts had left the church, and the Birketts felt that Waga Koya’s
behaviour was to blame. This seems unlikely, as the pressure to use the
exorcists was just as likely to have come from the converts as from the
lay pastor. Waga Koya was ordered to go to work far away in Kherwara.
He seems to have been genuinely baffled by this, stating that he had
done no wrong, and begged to be allowed to stay in Chhitadara. As a
result of this grave lapse, fifty-one of the converts of that village were
excommunicated.29
Although the missionaries were theologically opposed to the idea
that they could perform Christian exorcisms – this being a highly
suspect ‘Roman’ practice – they at times used prayer and counter-
suggestion for a treatment that was more psychosomatic than medical.
We find one such example from 1907, when Jane Birkett was treating a
Bhil youth of Chhitadara who was suffering from a swollen leg and high
temperature. She painted the leg with iodine, but admitted that there
was little she could do for him besides providing careful nursing. In her
words, they
had a very earnest prayer meeting by his bedside, seeking that God would
stretch forth His hand to heal the lad; and from that moment he began to
improve, the discharge became healthier, the pain less, so that he slept
better, and there was steady though slow progress, so that at the end of a
month he went home with the knee healed, though stiff. All were greatly
impressed by the cure – so absolutely in answer to prayer.30
In another case, from 1909, a Bhil woman from a village near Lusadiya
fell gravely ill. Her husband, Rupaji, had become convinced as to the
truth of Christianity, but had not yet been baptised. His daughter felt
likewise, but his wife and other family members were sceptical and
continued to follow the old rituals. On two occasions when there had
been illness and misfortune in the family, Rupaji had prayed to the
[ 131 ]

Christian God and his prayers, so he believed, had been answered.

On this occasion, however, his prayers were to no avail. His wife was
in terrible pain, crying aloud throughout the night for a whole month.
In the end, he agreed to approach some exorcists. Their rituals and
charms were equally ineffective. Finally, he decided to take her to the
hospital at Lusadiya. He told John Brand very frankly of all the reme-
dies that they had tried, both Christian and non-Christian. Brand told
him that he had tempted God by consulting exorcists, and he should
not break his Christian vows again. Brand could not, however, find any-
thing in particular wrong with the woman. He felt that it must be that
she was being chastised by God for her failure to embrace her husband’s
faith, and he gave a simple medicine as a placebo and told her, ‘Do not
be afraid, God will send you relief.’ On his return to his village, Rupaji
told the other villagers that his wife was not ill as such, but she was ‘in
the grip of the hand of God’. She slept well for the first time that
night and next day awoke fully recovered. Visitors to the house were,
according to Rose Carter, ‘amazed at God’s power and love. Their faces
were radiant with joy and they eagerly desired baptism. Even now
Rupaji was a little afraid of the evil spirit and hesitated to remove its
shrine from his house, but at last he carried it out, threw it away, and
was baptised.’31
Many missionaries believed that in certain cases the sick could be
healed by trust in Christ and prayer alone. Helen Bull thus reported a
case from a village in which the missionaries had had little previous
success in gaining a sympathetic hearing from the Bhils. A woman and
her children had fallen ill during the monsoon of 1913 and she had put
a charm of knotted hair string around her neck to ward off the evil eye.
She had however once heard the missionaries preach, and had second
thoughts. In Bull’s words:
After a struggle she felt she must take it off, and she asked God to forgive
her; and then said in her own simple way, ‘since then day by day I have
said, ‘O Lord, keep me, keep all my little ones, and my house and cattle,
and take away all my superstition.’ And then triumphantly exclaimed,
‘He has done it.’32
The cure for the Bhil woman and her children had in this case depended
on faith, rather than in any medical intervention.
The Christian deployment of supernatural power was not confined
only to the sphere of healing. In times of dearth, for example, the mis-
sionaries advocated prayers for rain. Arthur Birkett thus reported in
1905 that until 10 September of that year the monsoon almost entirely
failed. Then from that date there were three full days of good rain. ‘This
last rain was sent in answer to prayer. We had a midday prayer-meeting
for three weeks before it came, and had appointed a day to be a whole
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FIGHTING DEMONS
day of prayer in connection with the Gujarat United Missionary

Conference, but the rain came first and made the appointed day one of
praise and thanksgiving.’33 Herbert Moloney commented on this:
‘Really the faith of these new Christians puts one to shame. Last year
they brought down rain when things seemed hopeless.’34 Another
rather different ‘miracle’ was said to have occurred in 1907 when
Hodgkinson was building a new church at Biladiya. The builder whom
they had contracted for the work was a Muslim, and he was at the same
time constructing a mosque in his own village three kilometres away.
Hodgkinson feared that the mosque would be completed before the
church, but the mosque suddenly collapsed in ruins because of a design
fault. The church was as a result finished first. In the words of the mis-
sionary: ‘God grant that like the mosque so the faith of Mohammedans
and all other false faiths may be destroyed, and the Church of Christ
established throughout the world.’35 In the following year, Arthur
Birkett wrote about a convert of Chhitadara called Matthew who was
threatened with prosecution on a false charge. The other Christians
prayed for him, and the charge was suddenly withdrawn.36
Even when the missionaries provided – as they saw it – clear proof of
the superiority of their methods over that of the exorcists, it was uncer-
tain whether it would lead to any change of attitude or actual conversion.
This was the case with a man of Biladiya who in March 1907 collapsed
as he was returning home one evening. Paralysed on one side and unable
to speak, he lay undiscovered for a night and a day. He was eventually
found and taken home by his family, who were convinced that he was
possessed by a ‘dumb spirit’. They called in an exorcist, who sacrificed a
goat, made him drink the blood, and cauterised him on the knee and hand
of his afflicted side. After he failed to get any better, his family, includ-
ing his wife, left the house for fear of being possessed themselves.
Margaret Hodgkinson heard of his problem from the sick man’s brother,
who was a convert, and she went to his house to see what she could do.
She found him lying in a pitiable state, on a broken and dirty bed.
Although his wife had returned, she hardly dared touch him through fear.
Hodgkinson saw that the case was beyond her limited healing powers,
and decided to wait until Jane Birkett came on her next visit, which was
soon due. Birkett duly diagnosed a stroke, and ordered that the patient
should be taken to the mission compound for twice-daily treatment.
Nobody was however prepared to help carry him the three kilometres
involved, as they believed that the evil spirit would possess them. He
thus had to be brought in by the bigger and stronger boys of the Biladiya
Christian orphanage. Margaret Hodgkinson treated the man according to
Birkett’s prescriptions, and he was soon well enough to return home,
after which he recovered completely. She felt that he was ready to
[ 133 ]

become a Christian as a result, but his wife and others persuaded him not
to. His sister did, however, become a convert.37
Another such case occurred in 1919, when Jane Birkett’s carriage-
driver fell seriously ill. His relatives brought in an exorcist to treat him,
but his condition worsened. When he appeared to be at death’s door, his
brother went to see John Brand (Birkett was then on leave) and begged
him to treat the case. Brand agreed. In Birkett’s words: ‘The prayer of
faith, together with medicines and proper diet, won him back to life and
health, and he promised the doctor that he would serve the Lord
Jesus’.38 Time went by, and he failed to come forward for baptism. The
reason, according to Birkett, was that his relatives had put pressure on
him not to do so. There were, she said, many similar cases.
There were, nevertheless, victories that conformed to the mission
script that were reported in a spirit of rejoicing. In Devni Mori in 1909,
the wife of a leading Bhil who had for many years hesitated over con-
verting fell ill. He called in exorcists and tried other local remedies, all
to no avail, and eventually took her to the hospital at Lusadiya where
she obtained immediate relief. The following Sunday, in Arthur
Birkett’s words, ‘he removed the tile which served as a demon alter &
the lamps etc. from his house & was with his wife and daughter admit-
ted to the catechumenate’.39 Their conversion made a big impression
in the village, and others soon came forward asking to be prepared for
baptism.40 In similar vein, John Brand told of a great spiritual battle
over the treatment of the lay preacher Premji Hurji Patel, who had
fallen sick. Many of the local converts believed that Premji was a
victim of sorcery, and they tried to persuade him to combat the evil
power in the traditional way. Brand reassured him that he would
recover through a combination of his treatment and the power of
prayer. Premji remained steadfast to his Christian faith, and when he
eventually recovered, Brand interpreted it as demonstrating ‘the power
of God to heal’ in a way that had ‘profoundly shaken the faith of the
heathen in charms and incantations’.41 In the following year, Helen
Bull agreed to treat a Bhil who was suffering from bronchitis and whose
son had already approached an exorcist. The exorcist was extremely
angry at being so defied, and he threatened them all with dire punish-
ment. The man recovered and said that he had lost all of his faith in
exorcism and that he was ‘almost persuaded’ to become a Christian.42
Jane Birkett wrote in 1915 of a young Christian couple whose only son
had fallen gravely ill. Their elder relatives and even leading Christian
converts told them that exorcism was the only remedy, but they
insisted that they would place their faith in God and God alone. Birkett
commented: ‘God honoured their faithfulness and restored the child to
them.’43
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FIGHTING DEMONS
Even today, Bhil Christians tell stories along such lines. I have
referred above to the story of the conversion of Rupaji after his wife was
cured – according to the missionaries – by the power of prayer. In
the popular local account, however, the conversion was obtained by
medical means. Rupaji was, in this version of the story, a powerful and
well-known buva, or exorcist, who used to cure people by driving out
evil spirits with magical incantations (jantra-mantra). He lived in a
village close to Lusadiya. When his wife fell sick, he tried to cure her
using his own methods, but failed. He decided to try the hospital at
Lusadiya, and she was given vilayati dava (foreign medicine). She
recovered, and he began to trust the medicine, and also Christianity. He
converted and gave up his work as a buva entirely.44 This story clearly
gives the credit to the efficacy of ‘foreign’ medicine – as applied by the
missionaries – rather than prayer as such.
The results of such struggles with the exorcists were sometimes
ambiguous. In 1918, for example, there was a battle between the mis-
sionaries and an exorcist in Lusadiya village itself. Jiva Dala, the local
postmaster, a Christian and brother of Satgurudas, was suffering from
what was described in the report as ‘brain-softening’. He was treated by
John Brand, but persuaded by some of his non-Christian relatives to
consult an exorcist also. It seems that his wife also put pressure on him
to do this. The exorcist used both mantras and cauterisation, branding
him with a hot iron across the back of each hand, on the instep of each
foot, above his forehead and just below his chest. This was all done
quickly by force, and he was left in agony. Satgurudas had approved of
this treatment. He recovered eventually. The missionary Walter Wyatt
commented: ‘if he finally recovers, I expect the Bhagat will get the
credit for the cure, while the fact that many Christians were praying for
his recovery will be ignored. I have seen many bullocks cured of lame-
ness and other ailments by branding, but it would seem a somewhat
drastic remedy for a brain affection!’45 Rather than depicting this as a
struggle between ‘superstition’ and scientific medicine, the missionary
interpreted it as a battle between two systems of belief and practice.
While the Christians provided medical treatment and prayer, the exor-
cist applied cauterisation and mantras. Both thus sought to cure
through a combination of appeals to a higher force and physical treat-
ment. Surprisingly, Wyatt even admitted that the exorcist’s chosen
treatment in this latter respect could have been effective.
The death of Arthur Birkett

For the missionaries, the continuing hold of ‘the powers of darkness’
over the imagination of their flock posed perhaps the greatest obstacle
[ 135 ]

to their evangelical and medical work. Indeed, Arthur Birkett stated in

December 1915 that his difficulty in this respect was weighing on him
more and more, even to the extent of keeping him awake at night.
During the hot weather that year he had almost suffered a breakdown
in consequence.46
During the monsoon of 1916, the Birketts took their annual holiday
in the Nilgiri Mountains of South India. They returned in mid-August
before the rains had ended. On 17 August, Arthur Birkett rode ahead
alone while Jane Birkett followed in a cart with their luggage. The rivers
were in spate, but he pressed ahead, determined to reach the rest house
at Jesingpur before nightfall. While crossing the Vanga River just before
Jesingpur, his horse appeared to have stumbled on a hidden boulder; he
fell and became entangled in his heavy waterproof riding-coat, and was
swept downstream in the raging torrent. Jane Birkett, in the cart, had
meanwhile decided to halt for a meal at Bhiloda when a messenger
came to tell her that her husband’s horse had been found standing
beside the river with no rider. She set out with a search party, and they
soon found his body washed against a tree. He had drowned. He was
taken back to Lusadiya, and next day buried there, with the service
being performed by the catechist Premji Patel, as no ordained priest was
available. The funeral was attended by large numbers of grieving con-
verts, including many Christian women. As a rule, Bhil women did not
attend funerals, so the sight was unusual and impressive. The Reverend
Charles Shaw – now the only ordained priest left in the mission –
arrived soon after from Kherwara, consumed – so he said – by a feeling
of ‘utter desolation’. He commented: ‘His death seems utterly mysteri-
ous. It may be that we had come to rely on him too much, and that God
is teaching us to put more personal reliance on Himself.’47
It was certainly a great blow to the mission, as Birkett had proved
over the years a powerful and popular leader. Unlike most missionaries
of his day, he was prepared to adapt himself to local practices in a way
that was derided by many Europeans at that time as ‘going native’. He
often wore a turban rather than sola topi, and a photograph shows him
sitting cross-legged on the ground with his Indian helpers. After his
death, the Bhils performed a dance in his memory and composed a song,
‘Birkata Sahib bahadure’ (‘Courageous Birkett Sahib’), that is sung to
this day in the region.48
C. S. Thompson had died feeling overwhelmed by the horrors of an
Indian famine. Birkett had died burdened by doubt as to his abilities to
overcome the demons that haunted the minds of the Bhils. He was from
a generation that had been raised in a spirit of enlightened optimism
about the power of Light to overcome the Powers of Darkness.
Christianity and its scientific civilisation were believed to be a sure and
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FIGHTING DEMONS
irresistible force in this respect. Faced by the reality of life in the

mission to the Bhils, he was beginning to have misgivings on this score.
He died during the First World War, when the darkness at the heart of
European civilisation and its scientific killing was being revealed to the
world in all its horror. Future generations, under the growing influence
of Freudian psychoanalysis, would understand the shadows at the heart
of human consciousness in new ways, and with less optimism that they
could be overcome through the power of Reason – or the Gospel.
Notes
11 Hayward, ‘Demonology’, 45.
12 J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell,
1894), quoted in Hayward, ‘Demonology’, 46. The quoted words are by Hayward.
13 ‘The Bishop’s Quarterly Letter, Pachmarhi, C. P., 17 June 1905’, The Nagpur
Diocesan Quarterly Magazine (July 1905), 31–4, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1905, doc. 133.
14 A. J. Lees, BMR (1919), 15.
15 Walker, Decline of Hell, pp. 3–7.
16 Richard Chenevix Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord (London: Macmillan,
1866), pp. 24–5.
17 Ibid., pp. 25–8.
18 Ibid., pp. 47–8.
19 Ibid., p. 55.
10 Fitzgerald, ‘Clinical Christianity’, p. 115.
11 Bede, ‘The Life of Cuthbert’, in D. H. Farmer (ed.), The Age of Bede (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1988), pp. 39–102. See also Kelsey, Healing and Christianity, pp. 103–56.
12 For the healing cult of St Winifred of Holywell see Judith F. Champ, ‘Bishop Milner,
Holywell, and the Cure Tradition’, in Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing,
pp. 153–8. See also Lea T. Olsan, ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory
and Practice’, Social History of Medicine, 16:3 (December 2003).
13 For a history of Pentecostalism, see Morton Kelsey, Tongue Speaking: An
Experiment in Spiritual Experience (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973).
14 James B. McCord, ‘Medical Missions and Zulu Witchcraft’, Medical Missions at
Home and Abroad, 13 NS (February 1910), 74.
15 J. Howard Cook, ‘The Contribution of Science to Missionary Work’, Church
Missionary Review (March 1925), 43–5.
16 A. Helen Bull, ‘Itinerating’, Khetadara, January 1906, BMR (1905), 10–12.
17 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, Lusadiya, January 1906, BMR (1905), 3.
18 Mrs Birkett, ‘Camping out in Khetadra’, Mercy and Truth (April 1907), 102.
20 Helen Bull, ‘Jesingpur, Near Lusadia’, BMR (1906), 15.
21 Mrs Birkett, ‘Camping out in Khetadara’, Mercy and Truth (April 1907), 104.
22 See Lambert, ‘Plural Traditions?’, p. 193.
23 A. I. Birkett, Ahmedabad, 27 September 1907, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1907, doc. 89.
24 A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 6 May 1908, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1908, doc. 51; A. I.
Birkett, Lusadiya, 19 May 1908, ibid., doc. 48.
25 Ibid.
26 A. Birkett to E. Waller, 24 June 1914, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1914, doc. 31.
27 R. Carter, ‘The Power of Darkness in the Bhil Mission’, The Bombay Church
Missionary Gleaner (November 1915), 2–3, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1915, doc. 107.
28 A. Birkett to E. Waller, 24 June 1914, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1914, doc. 31.
29 ‘Bhil Mission’, Report of the C.M.S. Western India Mission 1916, p. 75, CMS, G2 I
3/0, 1916, doc. 35.
30 Jane Birkett, ‘Two Patients at Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (February 1907), 54–5.
[ 137 ]


32 Helen Bull, ‘Report’, BMR (1913), 18.
33 A. I. Birkett, ‘Report’, Lusadiya, January 1906, BMR (1905), 5.
34 Moloney to Durrant, Jubbulpore, 22 September 1905, CMS, G2 I 8/0 1905, doc. 149.
35 W. Hodgkinson, ‘Biladia’, BMR (1907), 25–6.
37 Margaret M. Hodgkinson, Biladiya, 1 January 1908, BMR (1907), 20.
38 ‘Mrs Birkett’s Report for 1919’, BMR (1919), 3.
39 A. I. Birkett to Durrant, Lusadiya, 9 September 1909, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1909, doc. 91.
40 R. Carter, Lusadiya, 3 January 1910, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1910, doc. 45.
41 Report by J. Brand, BMR (1913), 8–10.
42 H. Bull, Kotra, BMR (1914), 17.
43 Jane Birkett, ‘Lusadia Medical Work’, BMR (1914), 8.
44 Interview with Surjibahi Timothibhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 15 December 2002.
45 Rev. W. Wyatt, Report of the CMS Western India Mission 1918, p. 49, CMS, G2 I
3/0, 1919, doc. 109. Wyatt here describes the exorcist as a ‘Bhagat’. The Bhagats were
reformed Bhils who generally renounced such methods. Had he confused ‘Bhagat’
with buva?
46 A. I. Birkett to Wigram, Lusadiya, 6 December 1915, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1915, doc. 110.
47 Dr Jane Birkett, ‘Mrs Birkett’s Story’, Papers of Dr H. G. Anderson, CMS, Unofficial
Papers, Acc. 376, F1A/2; Report of the C.M.S. Western India Mission 1916, pp. 5, 72–
3, 79, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1916, doc. 35; G. C. Vyse, ‘In Memoriam: The Rev. A. I. Birkett’,
Intelligencer (December 1916), 615–16; C. L. Shaw, BMR (1948), 4.
48 Boyd, Church History of Gujarat, p. 102; Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, p. 42.
[ 138 ]
CHAPTER EIGHT
Woman’s work for woman
Female missionaries, supported by male Indian assistants, sustained

much of the clinical work of the Bhil mission. Jane Birkett and
Margaret Hodgkinson were the wives of ordained missionaries, but
others, such as Helen Bull and Rowena Watts, were single women. In
her history of American women missionaries Dana Robert has shown
that until the mid-nineteenth century, women were to a large extent
accepted in the mission field only if they went as the wives of mis-
sionaries. In this role, they were expected to establish Christian homes
in mission outposts, demonstrating to indigenous people the domestic
arrangements and gender relations of a Christian family. In fact, from
the start women had gone beyond the domestic boundary, helping with
basic educational and medical work amongst local women and chil-
dren. This was carried out either on the veranda of the mission house
or in the homes of the local people, and it was seen as an extension of
domestic work.1 Attempts by single women to gain support from the
missionary societies to be sent as missionaries were in almost all cases
blocked.2
This situation changed in the second half of the nineteenth century
as women began to assert the central role of women in missionary work.
It was argued that ‘heathen’ beliefs and culture could be attacked effec-
tively only within the home, and that female missionaries were required
to work with native women, winning their sympathy and through them
influencing their children. This strategy became known as ‘woman’s
work for woman’.3 According to Robert, it was based on the ‘belief that
non-Christian religions trapped and degraded women, yet all women in
the world were sisters and should support each other’.4 Inspired by a
spirit of compassion, they sought to provide the religious, educational
and medical blessings of Christian civilisation to such women. A
central focus was on converting mothers so that they would purify their
homes, influence their children and provide a shining example of
[ 139 ]

Christian values. ‘The emphasis on the conversion of mothers, and

through them their children, and through children, the society, contin-
ued as a justification for the movement into the twentieth century.’5
Medical work was a key element within this. Robert notes that in
many cultures, women were expected to heal, and this allowed women
mission doctors an opening. This was in contrast to the experience of
educationalists, who generally encountered strong opposition when
they tried to teach women. This development came at a time when
women were gaining new freedoms and responsibilities in American
society. The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist
Episcopal Church was the foremost women’s mission organisation.
Founded in 1869, it was not auxiliary to any male-dominated mission
board. It appointed and paid for its own missionaries, and it sent the
first female physicians to India, China and Korea. It opened the first
women’s hospitals in India, China and Korea also.6 Robert maintains:
‘The embracing of medical missions by American Protestant women in
the late nineteenth century was one of the most important missiologi-
cal advances of “Woman’s Work for Woman.” ’7
As medical education for women had been pioneered in America,
American women were best placed to begin such work.8 An American
called Dr Clara Swain was the first female medical missionary, being
sent to India in 1869 by the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, and
her success there silenced the objections of male missionaries.9 In
Britain, the first medical school for women – the London School of
Medicine for Women – was founded in 1874, and three more such
single-sex institutions followed in 1886, 1888 and 1890. The first
British woman doctor to practice in India was Fanny Butler, who had
been one of the first students to enrol at this school. Qualifying in 1880,
she was sent in the same year to India by the CMS Zenana Missionary
Society, an organisation that focused on work in the zenana – the
private apartment for women within a household.10 A special hospital
for such secluded women was established in Delhi in 1885, and
although in the early years it proved hard to attract suitably qualified
women doctors and nurses to work there, an adequate number become
available in the 1890s.11 The work was consolidated with the opening
of the North India School of Medicine for Christian Women at
Ludhiana in 1894. Its prime object was to train Indian Christian women
for zenana medical work. In the early twentieth century it began to
admit non-Christian students and changed its name to the Women’s
Christian Medical College. A course there lasted four years, and stu-
dents gained diplomas from Lahore University.12
Working in a mission, a woman could expect to find herself in a posi-
tion of greater responsibility and suffer less discrimination from male
[ 140 ]

WOMAN’S WORK FOR WOMAN
doctors than was likely to be the case at home – an attractive proposi-

tion for idealistic young Christian women. By the end of the nineteenth
century, a third of all students at the London School of Medicine for
Women were found to be training there with the intention of becoming
medical missionaries. In 1900 there were 258 women on the British
Medical Register – of these 72 were serving as medical missionaries,
45 of them in India. Also in that year, the total number of qualified
medical missionaries from Britain and elsewhere stationed in Indian
missions stood at 169:88 women and 81 men.13 In 1910, American,
British and European Protestant missions employed 341 women
doctors throughout the world. Of these, half were serving in India and
one-third in China.14 Robert argues that the effect of this work was far
greater than the numbers alone suggest, as it gave an opening for mis-
sionaries in otherwise hostile places, and also because missionary
doctors made the training of indigenous women a top priority, and in
the process ‘revolutionised the medical treatment of women in India
and China’.15
Another important and novel feature of mission medicine was,
therefore, that women occupied a central role as practitioners. In their
work, they sought to reach out to local women, hoping thereby to carry
the Christian message to the heart of the non-Christian family. They
saw that Indian women frequently suffered gross maltreatment and
neglect at the hands of callous male elders, and believed that they could
be rescued from their predicament through Christian healing and, ulti-
mately, Christianity. They sought to encourage in women a spirit of
self-assertion, so that they not only would insist on taking treatment
in the mission clinics – often in defiance of male members of their
family – but might also be won to Christ. As it was, Indian women were
in general more willing to accept treatment from these missionary
women than from the male doctors of the colonial service. This strong
focus on women was one of the most radical components of mission
medicine, distinguishing it sharply from the medical practice of the
colonial state.
Work for Bhil women

The women of the Bhil mission sought similarly to embrace and uplift
their Bhil ‘sisters’. Although Bhil women did not practise purdah or live
in zenanas, the missionaries could see that they had a low social status
and were frequently oppressed by their menfolk. The latter certainly
did not consider women in any way their equals. When Helen Bull
stated at a meeting at Chhitadara that the sexes were equal, a leading
man of the village, who was also a teacher, asked her incredulously ‘But
[ 141 ]

is a woman really equal to a man?’16 Clearly, this was a strongly

patriarchal society. A woman was expected to marry into a different
lineage, which meant normally that she had to go outside her paternal
village. The brideprice paid by her father made her in effect the prop-
erty of her husband. Although she was considered to have a right to
leave her husband, a repayment of the brideprice had to be negotiated
with her father or new husband. She was not considered to have any
right of property in either her father’s or her husband’s family. Women
were considered to be particularly susceptible to possession by evil
spirits and becoming witches, and were in consequence excluded from
important ritual ceremonies. Christianity offered a possible escape for
Bhil women who were seeking a new dignity and independence in their
lives, but any independent conversion was likely to be resisted strongly
by male elders. Even the missionaries were reluctant to be the cause of
family strife by accepting women for baptism when their husbands
were unwilling to convert.17 In most cases, women became Christians
only when their fathers or husbands had taken the initiative in the
matter.
The white women missionaries found it hard to inculcate the desired
spirit of self-sufficiency in Bhil women, and often expressed their dis-
appointment with their flock in this respect. Rose Carter thus reported
in 1910 that while some male converts had organised their own early-
morning prayer meetings, women had so far not done anything like
this. ‘May God shed abroad the same spirit of prayer in the hearts of the
women is our earnest desire.’18 In a society in which women were
believed to be ritually unclean and were thus excluded from many reli-
gious ceremonies, the insistence by the missionaries that all should
pray and worship together in a spirit of equality before God took time
to be accepted. As Hodgkinson stated in 1907: ‘Here in a land where
women are looked upon as mere chattels, it is a great victory to find
husbands and wives kneeling together for prayer and praise’.19
As a first step, the female missionaries held special literacy classes
for women. It was not easy to attract a group for this, because of male
opposition. In Lusadiya, women who attended such a class were jeered
at, and it was a rare and courageous woman who persevered.20 Even the
converts saw little need for female education; girls, for instance, were
expected to carry out farm work, such as tending animals and guarding
crops, rather than go to school.21 This meant that most of the Christian
women were illiterate, unable to read the Bible and lacking, according
to Arthur Birkett, any knowledge in depth of their new faith. In early
1908, Helen Bull spent much time and effort trying to remedy this
defect amongst the Christian women of Lusadiya, and her reward came
at the second Christian mela held in March of that year when at the
[ 142 ]

special meeting for women there was an outburst of simultaneous

prayer ‘which we have never experienced before amongst these
reserved Bhil women’.22
The missionaries also tried to impress on Bhil men the need to treat
the women of their families with greater consideration. It was, for
example, considered legitimate for a husband to beat his wife. The mis-
sionaries believed that they had brought some changes in this respect.
When Helen Bull visited Jesingpur in 1905, a Bhil woman informed her
with gratitude that her that her husband no longer beat her since they
had become Christian. On one occasion, she said, her nine-month-old
baby had been burnt after rolling on a fire while she was out of the
house collecting water. When her husband returned he was very angry
with her for her neglect, but despite this he refrained from thrashing
her, as he would have done previously.23
There were a few isolated cases in which women took the initiative
in the matter of conversion. When Helen Bull and her Bhil evangelist,
Mengo, preached in Hatya village in the winter of 1906–7, a woman
called Mangli came ‘primarily out of curiosity to see and hear a white
woman, of whom she had heard, but had never come into contact’. She
was strongly impressed by what she heard, and she persuaded her
husband to convert to Christianity along with the rest of the family.
She was related to Mengo, which must have had a bearing on her deci-
sion. The family suffered considerable opprobrium within the village,
being insulted and told that they would be put out of caste, but they
remained firm in their resolve. Soon afterwards, three other families in
the village became converts.24
In another case, a Rajput woman who had been widowed in child-
hood took treatment at Lusadiya hospital in 1910 and began to practise
as a Christian when she returned home, observing Sunday as a day of
rest and singing hymns and telling stories from the Gospels. She earned
her living by working as a household servant for another Rajput. When
Jane Birkett visited the village in 1914, some Rajputs told her to take
the woman away as ‘she belongs to your religion’. Soon after, she
returned to Lusadiya in an anaemic state, and after treating her Jane
Birkett employed her as a nurse on five rupees a month, which was less
than she had earned as a servant. During her first holiday in August
1915 she returned to her natal village and tried to reclaim some of her
property. Her mother refused to see her and her brother even threatened
to kill her, so she returned empty-handed. She was so distressed that
she tried to hang herself three times, but was stopped from doing so by
other villagers. After she returned to Lusadiya, Rajput patients at the
hospital tried to persuade her to return to the Hindu fold. Then, accord-
ing to Jane Birkett: ‘A few nights ago she was wakened by a voice
[ 143 ]

enquiring when she would be baptised, and it seemed so real to her that
she rose and opened the window to see who it could be. The Holy Spirit
is working in her mightily, I am sure. May He who kept her [from
suicide] in August soon lead her into the Fold of Christ in answer to our
united persistent and prevailing prayers.’25 In this way, the hospital at
last obtained a nurse, and, as was often the case in medical missions
during their early years, she was a local convert trained on the job.26
Some of the most successful work for women was carried out
through the orphanage for girls established during the great famine. In
1905, forty-four girls were staying there and receiving education. Miss
B. M. Newton, its supervisor, reported that they did all the domestic
work, such as grinding corn, cooking and carrying water.27 In time, as
they grew up and married, they provided a nucleus of well-educated
Bhil women who were known to be strong in their faith, providing an
example to others of a new form of Bhil womanhood.
The limits to ‘sisterhood’

There were a number of limits to this work. For example, there is a sur-
prising lacuna in the mission records on the issue of childbirth – an area
in which the missionaries could have done much to ameliorate the con-
dition of Bhil women. In his report of 1875, Hendley had noted that as
a rule female friends aided mothers in labour. They kept them in a
warm hut, ‘and even in cases of haemorrhage, apply warm cloths, and
administer hot-spiced drinks’. If there were difficulties, a wise woman
of another caste might be called, or the women merely invoked the
mother goddess. The baby was suckled for two or three years.28 The
missionaries do not appear to have been called out much in this respect,
even in cases of difficult childbirth, for the records – at least – are
noticeably silent on this score. No cases are mentioned of women
coming to the hospital for lying-in, only of a few women admitted who
had suffered complications after giving birth. Indeed, it was only in the
late 1930s that this side to the mission work began to develop, as we
shall see in later chapters.
Another, rather different, issue was that for all their insistence that
the sexes were equal, it was clear to all that the female missionaries
were of subordinate status within the mission. Even Jane Birkett, a
qualified doctor, suffered the indignity in 1904 of being informed that
as a woman she could not be a member of the Bhil mission committee.
Her husband was so offended by this slight to his wife that he refused
to sit on it himself. Hubert Moloney, the mission secretary, remarked
on this – smugly – that it was ‘quite contrary to precedent’ for a woman
to sit on such bodies, and that Helen Bull, who was in charge of the
[ 144 ]

Lusadiya orphanage and was senior to all of the men in terms of years
served, ‘quite graciously acknowledged that she had no right’ in this
respect.29 Women who were senior either through longevity of service
or in their level of professional expertise were not thus considered on a
par with even the most junior male missionaries.
Several feminist scholars have asked more profound questions about
the rhetoric of a ‘sisterhood of women’ in a colonial context. Catherine
Hall, writing of the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, points
out that although white women commonly lamented the suffering of
their imagined ‘sisters’ – the black slave women – they too were
colonisers. Although the term suggested commonality, it denied the
difference and violence of colonialism. While the Western woman was
seen as the agent of history, the black woman was the object to be
worked on. Used in such a context, the term ‘sister’
slipped between registers of meaning, marking both kinship and a gap,
between fellow philanthropic ladies at home and those they supported
and helped. . . . The term hinted at proximity, but established a difference
between ‘the native female’, ‘not quite/not white’, and the Western fem-
inist, ‘not quite/not male’. Far from fixing ‘native women’ in a close
sibling relationship to white feminists, ‘sister’ destabilised and unsettled,
leaving meanings ambiguous and unresolved.30
This reaching out to the native ‘sister’ – for all its good intent – can
thus be seen above all as providing a strategic intervention in a struggle
for emancipation that was located primarily within the home country,
which is where the missionaries would in any case reside after their days
of service were over. Their solidarity was above all with their own class
and nation, and their prime concern was with their place within it.
The Bhil woman became, for this purpose, what Gayatri Spivak has
described as the ‘self-consolidating other’, who was contrasted with the
‘absolute other’. The former was the good and benighted native, deserv-
ing of uplift, while the latter was the incorrigible savage or heathen,
gloating in his ‘debased’ way of life. In this way, the binary opposites of
coloniser and colonised were modified into a threefold schema of the
coloniser, good native, and bad native.31 It was in such terms that the
missionary drama was enacted, for male and female missionaries alike.
In the next chapter we shall examine in greater detail the relationship
between the missionaries and colonialism, and consider their reaction
to the Indian nationalist challenge to colonial rule.
Notes
11 Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought
and Practice (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996), pp. 1–38.
[ 145 ]

12 Ibid., pp. 127–8.

13 Ibid., p. 130.
14 Ibid., p. 133.
15 Ibid., p. 135.
16 Ibid., p. 137.
17 Ibid., p. 166.
18 There was little regulation of medical education in the USA, and so-called ‘irregu-
lar’ medicine flourished there during the nineteenth century, which made it possi-
ble for women to establish special medical schools without the sort of opposition
encountered in Britain. I am grateful for this point to Rosemary Fitzgerald.
19 Swain’s career in India is described in Robert, American Women in Mission,
pp. 164–5.
10 Rosemary Fitzgerald, ‘Rescue and Redemption – The Rise of Female Medical
Missions in Colonial India during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries’, in Anne Marie Rafferty, Jane Robinson and Ruth Elkan (eds.), Nursing
History and the Politics of Welfare (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 73.
11 Fitzgerald, ‘Peculiar and Exceptional Measure’, p. 195.
12 Moorshead, Appeal of Medical Missions, p. 153.
13 Fitzgerald, ‘Peculiar and Exceptional Measure’, pp. 190–2.
14 Fitzgerald, ‘Rescue and Redemption’, p. 69.
15 Robert, American Women in Mission, p. 162.
16 Helen Bull, ‘Jesingpur, Near Lusadia’, BMR (1906), 14.
17 Minutes of the Women’s Conference, November 1906, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1906, doc. 130.
18 R. Carter, CMS Mission to the Bhils, Occasional Letter, Lusadiya, 3 January 1910,
CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1910, doc. 45.
19 W. Hodgkinson, ‘Biladia’, BMR (1907), 27.
20 R. Carter, Kotgarh, 20 September 1907, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1907, doc. 89.
21 B. M. Newton, ‘Girl’s Orphanage’, Lusadiya, January 1906, BMR (1905), 13–14.
22 A. I. Birkett, Lusadiya, 19 May 1908, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1908, doc. 48.
23 A. Helen Bull, ‘Itinerating’, Khetadra, January 1906, BMR (1905), 12.
24 Helen Bull, ‘Khetadra’, BMR (1907), 12–14.
25 Jane Birkett, ‘Lusadia’, The Annual Report of the Church Missionary Society in
Western India 1915, pp. 63–4, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1916, doc. 71.
26 On this, see Fitzgerald, ‘Rescue and Redemption’, pp. 74–5.
27 B. M. Newton, ‘Lusadia Girl’s Orphanage and Women’s Work’, BM, (1905), 6.
29 Hubert Moloney to Durrant, Mandla, 28 July 1904, CMS, G2 I 8/0, 1904, doc. 68. It
might be noted that unmarried and widowed women missionaries gained full voting
rights in the United Presbyterian Mission in 1904, though not married women (this
only came in 1936). The Birketts stand can be seen in the context of this gradual
move within the mission movement to acknowledge the central role of women mis-
sionaries in the work in general. See Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity
and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),
p. 155.
30 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
Imagination 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 18–19.
31 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New
York: Routledge, 1985), p. 244.
[ 146 ]
CHAPTER NINE
A little empire
Protestant missionary societies carved out areas of work in India with

clearly defined boundaries. For example, in each annual report of the
Bhil mission there was a map showing the territorial borders of the
mission, drawn in a strong black line, so that there could be no ambi-
guities on the matter. These boundaries were negotiated with other
missionary societies so as to avoid any overlap, and it was considered
reprehensible for one society to try to evangelise in the area of another.
Each constituted a unit that can be described as a ‘little empire’, gov-
erned by missionaries located in a few strategic centres. The mission
station provided a visual demonstration of Christian colonial values.
There was the church, preferably built in stone in old English style, the
hospital or dispensary, which both provided ‘modern’ medicine
and demonstrated the superiority of Western technology, the school,
which provided a Christian education, and the large multi-storeyed
colonial-style ‘bungalows’ of the white missionaries, which required
considerable everyday maintenance by servants.1 All of these, and the
surrounding compound, were kept neat and cleanly swept as a demon-
stration of the inner cleanliness of Christian civilisation. They mis-
sionaries ruled over their ‘subjects’, the Christian converts, applying a
coercive church discipline that might include corporal punishment, as
we shall see in Chapter 11.
These ‘little empires’ were particularly pronounced in the more
remote regions of the world where the colonial presence was not oth-
erwise obvious on a day-to-day basis. The tribal tracts of India came
into such a category – the missionaries were the only white people asso-
ciated with the colonial state over a wide area. Their mission stations
represented outposts of Western modernity and governance in a space
as yet ‘uncivilised’. From there they ruled their roosts. Later, when
Gandhian nationalists began to challenge them by establishing
ashrams in such regions, their presence had a similar quality. They too
[ 147 ]

became like little lords – the ‘sahibs’ whom the tribals were expected
to look up to and depend on. Many such missionaries and nationalists
gained personal satisfaction in playing out a role that allowed them to
exercise their benevolence with the feeling that they were respected
and wanted. Elsewhere, in the more densely populated plains regions of
India, and particularly in the towns and cities, the power dynamics
were less stark, and the ‘little empires’ less pronounced. In big colonial
cities like Delhi, missionaries were just one cog within a much larger
governing class.
Even in the tribal tracts this was, nonetheless, a somewhat hollow
‘empire’, for it relied for its security on the armed might of the colonial
state and its local allies, the Indian princes and their gentry. In this, the
missionaries had to steer a difficult course within a complex local
politics, being careful not to alienate either the British authorities or the
local Rajput rulers. Their task was further complicated from the 1920s
onwards with, on the one hand, the emergence of a strong Indian nation-
alist movement and, on the other, a growing assertion by the Christian
converts. We shall examine these developments in this chapter.
Missionaries in a nationalist era

The ‘little empires’ that the missionaries presided over began to appear
more and more anomalous as the Indian nationalist movement gathered
momentum in the years after the First World War. Before that time,
nationalism had in most parts of India been confined to a relatively
small elite that had failed to win widespread popular support. Subaltern
groups saw that the British wielded the ultimate power, and generally
looked to them for support against their upper-class and high-caste
oppressors. As we have seen in the princely states of the Bhil territories,
the British political agents were often appealed to in this way.2 Christian
missionaries were seen as an arm of British rule in this respect, and they
were able to garner support on that basis. The missionaries also provided
the poor and oppressed with a powerful alternative theology and cul-
tural practice that many found to be liberating in their day-to-day life.
At that time the lower classes were in general unaware of the existence
of the nationalist movement and its agenda and, even if they were, were
rarely attracted to it.
This all changed with the emergence of Gandhi. Through his work
in Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda in 1917–18, he established
himself in popular perception as a potent champion of the poor against
not only the British but also repressive princely rulers, landlords and
local officials. During the period 1917–22 large numbers throughout
India came to perceive him as a saintly figure with immense power to
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
combat all forms of local oppression.3 Gandhi’s Hinduism was more-

over imbued with the spirit of bhakti, emphasising the unity and equal-
ity of worshippers before God in a common devotion, and through it he
and his followers were able to reach out to the poor in a manner that
often paralleled that of the missionaries. They established nationalist
ashrams in villages, set up schools for the oppressed, and encouraged
people to reform their lives in moralistic ways.
Gandhi had considerable sympathy for Christianity as a religion, but
opposed the missionary agenda of converting people to Christianity.4
As he stated in 1929: ‘I disbelieve in the conversion of one person by
another. My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith but to
make him a better follower of his own faith. This implies belief in the
truth of all religions and therefore respect for them.’5 What he rejected
in other words was the missionary practice of strident proselytisation
with a view towards conversion, an idea he found repulsive for any reli-
gion, including Hinduism.6 He believed that a person should strive to
work through their destiny within the religious tradition in which they
were raised. He wanted people to be better people as Muslims, Hindus
or Christians. Thus, when his ardent follower Madeline Slade was
attracted to the idea of becoming a Hindu, he advised her strongly to
remain a Christian, which she did.7
Gandhi did not seek to attack the British by condemning
Christianity. This was in contrast to many Hindu nationalists, who
depicted Christianity as inferior to Hinduism. For Gandhi, this stance
merely reversed the approach of the evangelising missionaries, replac-
ing one form of intolerance with another. Gandhi, by contrast, saw
Christianity as a religion containing great moral truths, and he argued
that modern Western civilisation had turned its back on these values.8
Whereas the missionaries had seen themselves as being in the vanguard
of a superior civilisation, Gandhi argued that their association with
imperialism had demeaned their religion:
Unfortunately, Christianity in India has been inextricably mixed up for

the last one hundred and fifty years with the British rule. It appears to us
as synonymous with materialistic civilization and imperialist exploita-
tion by the stronger white races of the weaker races of the world. Its con-
tribution to India has been therefore largely of a negative character.9
The answer, for Gandhi, was for all true Christians to renounce their
association with British imperialism.
Missionaries in India for the most part rejected this advice. The issue
was debated in the journal of the CMS, The Church Missionary Review,
in an article by D. Howard of March 1922. Howard expressed his admi-
ration for many aspects of Gandhi’s life – particularly his morality and
[ 149 ]

his life of simplicity. He noted that Gandhi had praised the ethical prin-
ciples of Jesus Christ and that he saw the Sermon on the Mount as jus-
tifying his doctrine of non-violent resistance. He praised what he
described as a revival in India of ‘national pride’ and a tradition of
‘mystic idealism’, which – he claimed – ‘we have fostered by our edu-
cational system in India’. He understood the antipathy of such Indians
for ‘British rule and British civilisation on its material side; for these,
after all, are India’s chief points of contact with the West’. He accepted
that the First World War had revealed some glaring deficiencies in that
civilisation, and sympathised with the Indian critique in this respect.
Nevertheless: ‘It is easy for Indians to be blind to the obvious good that
has come to India, through many generations, as the result of that rule
and that civilisation.’ He argued that:
Gandhi simply became at first the devoted and venerated leader of the
movement towards spiritual idealism, lending to it all his previous
reputation as a sufferer for his country. If he had remained this, all would
have been well; but many of his methods are grievously wrong, and his
definite alliance with a political party, controlled by selfish aims, has
disappointed his greatest admirers – who number among them a good
many thinking people – for these had looked to him for a spiritual lead-
ership. He is unable to keep his followers true to the ideal of non-violence,
to which he first summoned them.
Howard concluded that Gandhi’s non-cooperation with British rule had
been a blunder, as he and his followers could have worked to implement
their programme of social and economic transformation through the
new legislative councils established under the constitutional reforms
of 1919. Instead, they had boycotted them.10
The CMS hierarchy in India continued to oppose the Gandhian
Congress over the next two decades. In June 1930, when Gandhi’s Civil
Disobedience Movement was at its height, the secretary to the Bombay
Diocese of the CMS, L. B. Butcher noted that some Indian Christian
pastors had held an interdenominational meeting that had passed reso-
lutions of support for the nationalist campaign. No Indian clergy of
CMS had however attended. Butcher stated that Indian clergymen who
supported the Gandhian Congress were misguided. The duty of Indian
Christians, he argued, was to support the moderate nationalists who
were cooperating with the British and demanding Dominion Status
within the British Empire.11 In the same month, The Bombay Diocesan
Magazine reprinted an article by Bishop Fosse of Calcutta condemning
Indian Christians who supported civil disobedience. Fosse argued that
Jesus had refused to set himself up as a king and lead the resistance to
Roman rule in Palestine and that he had commanded his followers to
remain aloof from politics, instructing them to ‘Render unto Caesar the
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
things that are Caesar’s.’ Jesus Christ thus forbade civil disobedience.
Christians had a duty to obey the law so that daily life could carry on
without disruption. This was a ‘natural law’. He concluded: ‘You avail
yourself of the safety which a stable government affords you and all the
services which it provides for your convenience but think you are at
liberty to violate its laws with impunity.’12
Although a small minority of missionaries became vocal supporters
of the Indian nationalist cause during the 1920s, the large majority fol-
lowed the instructions of their superiors and either maintained a low
profile on the matter or voiced their active support for the colonial
state.13 The CMS missionaries to the Bhils generally adopted a loyalist
stance. This was seen in particular in 1921–22, when a strong protest
movement linked with the Congress campaign of non-cooperation
swept their region. The leader was Motilal Tejawat (1885–1963), a
Baniya from a small town in the Bhil country south of Udaipur. While
working for a local thakor, he had seen at first hand the way in which
his employer and his henchmen had maltreated the Bhils, beating them
to extract work and taxes, and raping Bhil women. Disgusted by what
he saw, he resigned his position in 1920 and started an eki – or unity –
league. He told the Bhils to boycott the thakors, to refuse rents and
taxes and to establish their own councils to settle disputes. Motilal was
a religious man who believed that his actions enjoyed divine support.
Besides championing the grievances of the predominantly Bhil peas-
antry against the thakors, he also felt he had a religious duty to persuade
them to give up drinking liquor, to stop killing animals and to refrain
from stealing. Members of the eki league were to take an oath to abstain
from all crimes and acts of violence against other humans as well as
animals, and to abjure liquor and take a daily bath. They were to main-
tain their livelihood through agriculture. In this, Motilal was following
in the tradition of the Bhagat reformers of the region.14
In August 1921, one of the thakors captured Motilal and locked
him up. Six to seven thousand Bhils from sixty-five villages gathered
together, marched to the place and secured his release. Thousands more
Bhils then came forward to take the oath of eki. They came not only
from Mewar, but also from the adjoining states of Idar, Pol, Sirohi and
Danta. In early 1922, Motilal began to tour this area, accompanied by
several thousand Bhils armed with bows and arrows, demanding
reforms from the thakors and ruling princes. There were some minor
clashes, with some policemen and officials being beaten. There is no
record of anyone being killed by the Bhils – by their standards they were
protesting in a remarkably non-violent manner.
Motilal saw his protest as being a part of the wider movement for inde-
pendence led by Gandhi, then at its height during the Non-Cooperation
[ 151 ]

Movement. In speeches he stated that once ‘Gandhi raj’ was established

they would only have to pay one anna in the rupee to the state. Some of
his followers took to wearing white Congress-style caps. He clearly
believed that in trying to wean the Bhils away from violence he was fol-
lowing the programme of the Gandhian movement closely. This was not
however how Gandhi saw it when his attention was drawn to the matter
in early 1922. Writing in his magazine Young India in early February
1922, he condemned the movement as its followers were carrying
weapons.15 Seeing that Motilal was now isolated from wider nationalist
support, the British decided to move against him. Major H. G. Sutton,
commander of the MBC, was given the go-ahead to crush the protest.
On 6 March 1922, Motilal and about two thousand Bhils reached the
territory of the Thakor of Pal. They camped on the banks of the River
Hera, close to a village called Dadhvav and less than a kilometre from
the CMS mission station at Biladiya. Messages were passed from village
to village that Motilal had come and that they should gather to see him.
He was, it was said, telling the people to protest against free labour
demands and taxes of the thakors, and that if they did this they would
be free. People set out, reaching Dadhvav by the morning of the 7th,
many carrying coconuts and coins, which they presented to Motilal
after touching his feet. Several thousands came, swelling the numbers
to three to four thousand in all. Around midday, news came that a
platoon of the MBC was approaching from Baleta village.16
According to Sutton, as soon as he reached the spot he shouted
through a megaphone from 200 metres away that he wanted to talk
with them. Motilal, however, had ordered his followers to attack, and
he had had to resort to ‘defensive firing’ to disperse the crowd. Twenty-
two Bhils were killed and twenty-nine wounded, while Motilal
escaped.17 In Sutton’s accounts, the impression was conveyed that the
protestors were all male Bhils, armed to the teeth and spoiling for a
fight. The popular account – as retained in oral memory – provides a
very different understanding of this encounter. In this version, the
crowd consisted of men and women, mainly Bhils – for they made up
the bulk of the population in the region – but with other castes repre-
sented. They had gathered with peaceful intentions, and did not initi-
ate the violence in any serious respect. The firing was virtually
unprovoked, and took the crowd by surprise. Once it started, there was
pandemonium as everyone tried to scramble to safety. People fled with
blood pouring from wounds, some dying on the way, others after they
had reached their homes. According to these accounts, 1,200 to
1,500 were killed, of whom about a third were women. Surveying the
scene, Sutton decided that the first priority was to dispose of the bodies.
People were allowed to come forward to drag away the corpses of their
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
relatives and fellow villagers. Many of the dead were however from
distant parts. Some of the wounded were taken to the mission dispen-
sary at Biladiya, where the padre, Lea Sahib, treated them. Soon after-
wards, police reinforcements came in motorised vehicles from the
Gujarat side, sent by the Political Agent of Mahi Kantha.18
The missionary concerned, James Lea, later described the scene at
the dispensary: ‘there were a hundred casualties; dead and wounded
were lying all around, some with fearful wounds. Our little hospital
was filled and we were bringing in stretcher cases until 10 p.m.’19 Lea’s
figures were more in tune with the popular account, which put the
number of casualties far above that claimed by Sutton. A nationalist
who was active in Rajasthan at that time, V. S. Pathik, wrote later that
month to the Political Agent for Rajasthan, Robert Holland, stating
that he had heard that casualties had been over a thousand.20 Sutton
appears to have wanted to minimise the episode lest it cause a public
outcry similar to that caused by the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh in
Amritsar in 1919. In this he succeeded.
Despite claims by the British that the firing had had a salutary effect,
the situation continued tense for many months. In late March, the Bhils
of three estates besieged their thakors in their mansions, the sieges
being lifted only after the appearance of Mewar State soldiers under the
command of a British officer. The troops then marched through the
region to impress on the Bhils the power of the state.21 Motilal himself
had fled back towards the Sirohi side, where he remained in hiding.22 In
Sirohi State, the movement escalated, with widespread refusal by Bhils
and Girasias – a related community – to pay their taxes. Troops were
mobilised under the command of Major Pritchard and punitive raids
were carried out on several rebellious villages, with houses being burnt,
stocks of grain destroyed, and those who resisted shot down. Village
headmen were forced by Pritchard to break their eki oath before him in
public.23
Both the British and the princely authorities prevented nationalist
investigators from entering these states to collect information about
the atrocities carried out under British command. As it was, the
Gandhians in Gujarat did not press the matter. In part, this was because
they were in disarray after Gandhi’s arrest by the British on 10 March –
only three days after the shooting – and subsequent sentence to six
years in jail on 18 March. More important, possibly, was the fact that
they had no particular interest in taking it up. Motilal’s movement was
peripheral to their concerns, which were centred on the British-ruled
areas of Gujarat. The grievances of subjects of princely states against
their rulers were not at that time on their agenda. Gandhi had taken
some interest in the movement during February and early March as it
[ 153 ]

had, as he saw it, a violent potential that could reflect badly on the
Congress. Once it had collapsed, the interest of the nationalists waned.
The killing that occurred at Dadhvav on 7 March 1922 was as a result
largely ignored by the outside world. The attempt by the Bhils of this
region to play an active role in the Indian nationalist movement had, at
that juncture, come to nothing.
This suited the missionaries, for it does not appear that they would
have known how to deal with a more prolonged upsurge against the
thakors, the princely rulers and the British. They believed that the Bhils
were misguided in their protest in 1921–22, and when they had the
chance they advised them to abandon the movement and reform their
lives in other directions. Jane Birkett asserted in an unsympathetic tone
that ‘Mr. Gandhi’s emissaries stirred up trouble amongst the non-
Christian Bhils in the western part of our field.’24 James Lea, in his
account of the massacre, depicted Motilal Tejawat as a spiritual rival to
the missionaries, stating that he was a ‘reformer’ who ‘was reputed to
be a god come to relieve the distress among the people’. He alleged that
on 7 March Motilal and his followers had attacked first, forcing Sutton
to resort to ‘rapid fire’. He concluded that the whole affair was ‘a great
evil’.25 In her account, based on her experiences in the area around
Kotada, Rose Carter stated:
At the beginning of the year, Miss Holdom and I were out in camp in the
Kotra district, which was at that time in the throes of political agitation.
We camped amongst crowds of Bhils armed with bows and arrows, guns
and knives of various description, who were amongst those who followed
the agitator [e.g. Motilal Tejawat], and often our evening meetings were
dispersed by the beat of war drums on the hills near us. The people were
exceedingly friendly and often deputations visited our camp to ask what
course of policy to pursue. As missionaries, our counsel was always to
abide on the side of law and order and of fidelity to Raj, but alas, other
counsels often prevailed which resulted in the fight near Pal where the
Police Corps were obliged to fire upon and disperse the rebels. A consid-
erable number of the Bhils were killed. We found the people considerably
troubled and perplexed; much of the older order was changing rapidly, and
the bewildered Bhil mind was definitely seeking something stable, some-
thing to guide him in these strange times. It was pathetic to notice the
eagerness with which many of them listened, and never have we met
with larger or more attentive audiences. At times men from distant places
would come and ask us to visit their village, and one group came from a
part of the country outside the mission area. Owing to scarcity of workers
little work has been done in that remote part of the country and the
people implored us to go and tell them the news of the Sinless Incarnation
of whom we taught. For several reasons we were unable to go and one
learnt with deep regret later of villages burnt to the ground and Bhils
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
killed where a few months earlier they had implored us to take them our
Message of peace.26
Carter saw that opportunities were being lost for the missionaries, but
neither she nor her colleagues were willing or able to provide the Bhils
with the leadership that they most wanted, which was guidance in their
struggles against the oppressive thakors and the whole power structure
that propped them up.
As we have seen in previous chapters, the missionaries had managed,
with some difficulty, to situate themselves within local politics as
allies of the thakors. Although sometimes casting a mildly critical eye
on their depredations, they never took a stand against these local auto-
crats. Their attitude was revealed in the belittling tone in which Walter
Wyatt, based at Lusadiya, wrote about a protest by the Bhils of nearby
Devni Mori against their thakor in 1918:
This year the whole village of Mori went out on strike against the exac-
tions of the local Thacker [sic] or land-owner, leaving their houses and
erecting rough enclosures of boughs and branches as a protection during
the night for themselves and their cattle. They stayed in the jungle for
some weeks. Their resolution, however, did not last long as that of the
Thacker Sahib, and they returned home having accomplished nothing
more than giving the Thacker and his friends some amusement.27
The Thakor of Devni Mori ruled over about thirty Bhil villages and he
is remembered to this day for his oppressive treatment of his subjects,
who were obliged to hand over a third of all their produce, including
livestock, each year. To enforce these demands, he employed Pathans
armed with guns and whips who beat up or thrashed those who failed
to meet their dues. Bhil subjects were forced to work for no wages on
the thakor’s own fields; his Pathans would come and take five people
at a time from each village for this work. Despite this, the missionar-
ies at Lusadiya maintained cordial relations with this man. In return,
he tolerated their work in his domain and allowed them even to con-
struct a church in Devni Mori itself.28
The alliance fractured at times. In 1932 the Thakor of Bhetali con-
fiscated the house, land and well of the mission schoolteacher at
Jesingpur, a village in his domain. A former mission teacher, a Bhil of
Lusadiya, had constructed the house with the permission of a previous
thakor in 1909, and subsequent teachers had occupied it since then.
The thakor made it known that he did not want any more Christian
dharamsevaks (religious workers) in his territory, and he began harass-
ing some of the converts. The missionaries appealed to the Political
Agent for Mahi Kantha for help in the matter, and he met the Dewan
of Idar State, who agreed to bring pressure to bear on the thakor.
[ 155 ]

A meeting was arranged between the missionaries and the thakor at

Shamlaji, presided over by the Dewan. The thakor agreed under pres-
sure to allow the schoolteacher to build a new house and cultivate a
plot of land at Jesingpur.29
The fact that the Idar authorities were prepared to intervene on
the side of the missionaries against a local thakor revealed that there
had been a shift in attitude by the state towards the missionaries.
Maharaja Dolatsingh – the old foe of the missionaries – had died in
1931, and the new Maharaja, Himmatsingh, proved friendlier. Born in
1899, he was educated at Mayo College, the elite school for the Indian
nobility run by the British in Ajmer.30 He was on excellent terms with
the British, and looked to them to back him in his rejection of the
demands of the nationalists of the state Praja Mandal, or People’s
Association, for a democratic devolution of power. This body had
been established by some subjects of the state at a meeting in
Bombay in 1925. They had publicised details of the ‘reign of terror’
of Maharaja Dolatsingh, and complained about his misrule to the
Bombay Government. As a result of their pressure, the ruler dis-
missed his Dewan and deposed the Thakor of Chandarni. He also had
to agree to accept a humiliating reduction in his powers. In 1927
he agreed to allow the Praja Mandal to function within his state.
Himmatsingh, once he came to the throne, ensured that he maintained
cordial relations with the British in the expectation that they would
reward his loyalty by supporting him against his nationalist opponents.
In this, his hopes were fulfilled. In 1938, for example, the British raised
no objection when he punished the Praja Mandal leader, Gangaram
Shukla, by confiscating his landholdings and sending him to jail for two
years.31
The missionaries, who were considered an arm of the colonial
state, benefited from this new direction in Idar State policy in the years
before Indian independence. The Praja Mandal leaders – who were
mainly urban Brahmans and Baniyas – were not allowed to establish
Gandhian-style ashrams within the state to carry out educational
and social work amongst the peasantry, so that they were prevented
from gaining a base in rural areas. The missionaries therefore had no
rivals within this particular sphere, as they often did in British-ruled
areas. In this way, the missionaries maintained their hard-won little
empire, isolated for the time being from the winds of change that
were sweeping British India. The downside to this was that the
nationalists of Gujarat tended to view the missionaries as supporters of
colonial rule and enemies of the incipient nation state. In the remain-
der of this chapter, we shall examine the history of the Bhil church until
around 1940.
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
Vicissitudes of the Bhil church

The Bhil church failed to expand in any very significant manner during
these years. Its membership numbers fluctuated as converts were at
times expelled from the church for various violations of its rules, then
readmitted once they had repented. In Lusadiya, for example, a storm
within the church saw its membership numbers crash from 249 in 1924
to 72 in 1926, followed by a making-up that resulted in a membership
of 283 by 1929. There were during the 1920s a total of ten Bhil churches,
with the following membership in 1929: Lusadiya 283, Biladiya 135,
Kherwara 116, Ghodi 59, Jesingpur 59, Bavaliya 57, Chhitadara 56,
Kagdar 36 and Kotada 5 – in all, a total of 806.32
The crisis in the Lusadiya church that brought a crash in member-
ship during the 1920s was caused by a case of bigamous marriage. In
1925, the leading Christian, Satgurudas, arranged the marriage of his
daughter to John Patel, who was already married. What was particularly
serious about the case was that John’s father was Premji Hurji Patel, the
well-known lay preacher. He was then working in Lusadiya, and had
encouraged the marriage. The missionaries discovered that John’s first
wife had fallen ill through malnutrition, after which he had decided
to try to find another. All of those involved were excommunicated.
Many other Christians of Lusadiya then left the church in protest.33
Satgurudas and Premji acted in a vindictive manner, ordering some
Christians who had rented land and houses from them to vacate.
Satgurudas was even reported to have threatened to shoot them if they
did not leave, and one moved out as a result. Satgurudas accused other
Christians of theft, and registered cases against them with the local
court, which was known for its corrupt practices.34
The main reason for the failure of the church to expand during these
years was that few Bhils were prepared to stand up to strong commu-
nity pressure against conversion. When James Lea asked his Bhil cook
why he would not become a Christian, the latter replied with no hesi-
tation: ‘Fear of the world’ – by which he meant fear of falling out with
his community. Lea commented that although Bhils were often very
brave in a number of ways, they were loath to stand up to persecution
within their own community.35 The elders of the community fre-
quently orchestrated this opposition. In 1926, for example, leading
Bhils from a number of villages held meetings to consider how they
could prevent the spread of Christianity. A boycott of Christian schools
was proposed.36
From around 1910 onwards, many of the Bhagats – those who, fol-
lowing Surmaldas, had reformed their way of life – began to join forces
with the unreformed Bhils in opposing the Christians. The two groups
[ 157 ]

had often been in conflict in the late nineteenth century, and during the
first decade of the twentieth century a good number of the Bhagats
either converted to Christianity or seriously considered the idea of con-
verting.37 The mood turned after this, with the majority of the remain-
ing Bhagats turning against the Christians. In this, they were able to
forge a common ground with the unreformed Bhils in a way that
allowed them to follow their beliefs free from the abrasions of the past.
Jane Birkett first encountered such an opposition in 1910, after she had
healed a Bhil woman who was suffering from severe intestinal trouble.
The woman expressed a desire to become a Christian, but after she
returned to her village the Bhagats there brought such pressure to bear
on her that she abandoned the idea.38 In Bavaliya – where a Bhil lay
pastor led the small Christian congregation – the conflict came to a
head in 1915 when one of the Bhagats intruded into a meeting of the
Christians and started threatening them with all sorts of disasters if
they persisted in their folly. The lay pastor urged him to stop cursing
them, but he refused. In the end, the pastor took a stick and beat the
Bhagat, who cringed and begged for mercy. Several of the Christians
were terrified that they would suffer all sorts of calamities as a result,
but the weeks passed and nothing happened.39 In this case, the solidar-
ity of the Christians was reinforced. Elsewhere, in villages in which the
Christians or would-be Christians were few in number, they often
failed to stand up against such opposition.
In many cases, the conflict between the Christian and non-Christian
Bhils revolved around social customs and rituals in which the converts
refused to participate. This was seen by non-Christian Bhils to be
deeply divisive, and in many cases the converts suffered social boycott
as a result. This in turn deterred Bhils who were considering conver-
sion from going any further. In a village near Kotada, for example,
Winifred Holdom managed to win one family and she had hopes of
further conversions, but these hopes were dashed when a boy in the
newly converted family died and they refused to hold the customary
death feast. The other villagers were so disturbed by this that they drew
back from the hoped-for mass conversion.40 Such rituals and practices
were not lightly ignored, particularly in the case of death ceremonies
that were designed to placate the spirit of the dead. In their absence, it
was widely believed that the unsatisfied spirit would haunt the village,
bringing death and misfortune. Few Bhils were prepared to risk this.
Many of the conflicts revolved around healing, with the exorcists
putting pressure on Christians who were sick to make use of their ser-
vices. As we have seen in Chapter 7, many converts failed to resist such
pressures. Some however did. Such was the case when the son of a Bhil
lay pastor called Yusuph Kalasva, who was working for the mission at
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
Kotada, fell ill. Two exorcists, or bhopas, approached his wife and
offered to heal him. She believed that her son, like his father, would one
day work for the church, and she had faith that God would spare him
for this task. She sent the bhopas away, declaring that it was God’s will
whether the boy lived or died. The boy survived, and many years later
he was ordained as a priest.41 In some cases, the mission hospital could
provide a place of refuge for those who sought to escape such an influ-
ence. When a Christian woman of Biladiya village fell ill in 1925, she
feared that she would come under the influence of ‘a heathen who deals
in Black Magic, and who lives close to her house’. To resist this pres-
sure, she went to Lusadiya for treatment as an inpatient.42
In a few cases, Christians who had suffered misfortunes lost their
faith in a religion that had failed to protect them from forces that the
exorcists were believed to be able to control. Thus, when a Christian
schoolmaster of Devni Mori died suddenly in 1925, his brother – who
was also a Christian – asserted that the cause was sorcery and that he
and his family no longer would remain within the church. He per-
suaded the schoolmaster’s family to follow him in this.43 A similar
setback occurred at Kotada in 1929, when a seven-year-old Christian
boy died unexpectedly. He was from a poor Bhil family, and he had been
sent to study at the mission school, where he had quickly learnt the
alphabet, gave intelligent answers to questions about the Bible and sang
hymns with zeal. One day he told his mother that he wanted to be ‘a
Jesus child’. Soon after this he suddenly dropped down dead. He had no
history of illness, and Rose Carter was baffled as to the cause. She sus-
pected that ‘an enemy hath done this’, without stating exactly what she
thought that this ‘enemy’ might have done. Was it perhaps sorcery that
she suspected? She noted that the non-Christian Bhils of the area had
been plotting for some time to force the converts to renounce their
Christianity. She could see very clearly that the boy’s sudden and
inexplicable death had gravely undermined her work.44
With Christian numbers stagnant, the diocesan authorities in
Bombay began to question the viability of the Bhil mission. It was, they
claimed, an anachronism, being a small and insignificant mission in a
territory that was otherwise covered by Presbyterians – namely the
Scottish Presbyterians on the Rajasthan side and the Irish Presbyterians
on the Gujarat side. The Presbyterians had the infrastructure and per-
sonnel to make their work viable. It was better for the CMS, they
argued, to hand over the mission to the Presbyterians of each respective
area and consolidate the activities in areas in which they had a much
stronger presence and more converts. The mission found an ally,
however, in Edwin James, the Bishop of Bombay, who visited the
mission in 1919 and came away highly impressed with its work. Indeed,
[ 159 ]

he felt that if more resources could be put into its medical work, it
would flourish even more. He recommended very strongly that the
mission be retained by the CMS.45 The matter was therefore shelved for
the time being.
The issue resurfaced in 1929, when L. B. Butcher, the secretary of the
CMS in Bombay, once more suggested that the mission might benefit
from being handed over to the neighbouring Presbyterian churches. The
financial crisis of the time had brought a need for retrenchment within
the CMS, and in Bombay the Bhil mission was the obvious candidate
for cuts. Butcher wrote a highly critical report on the mission that high-
lighted its various failings.46 As soon as the news of this discussion
reached the mission, the lay pastors, schoolmasters and leading Bhil
Christians drew up a petition of protest, which they sent to Butcher.
They argued that Christianity had raised the whole tone of the area, and
that they did not want to be merged with another church, as their rules
and practices were different. Furthermore, if the CMS missionaries
went away, their buildings and schoolhouses might be seized by the
thakors – ‘So confusion would take the place of peace.’47 Butcher’s supe-
rior, Bishop Palmer, visited the mission in December 1929 to judge for
himself. He was highly impressed by the strength of devotion amongst
the Bhil Christians; they joined strongly in prayers and sang their
hymns with fervour. He was deeply concerned that if they abandoned
the mission there would be inevitable ‘lapses to paganism’. He recom-
mended that the work be continued with a reduced European staff.48
This was accepted, and the mission entered into a period of retrench-
ment. About a third of its Indian workers were dismissed and the
mission station at Kotada was closed down. The scheme for a new hos-
pital at Lusadiya was abandoned.49 In a comment on this, written in
1931, Butcher argued that the seeming ill might be turned to good if it
meant that the ‘tiny Bhil Church’ became more self-sufficient and the
local converts made more efforts to evangelise their fellow Bhils.50
The indigenisation of the church was thus seen to be desirable
within the CMS hierarchy not because of the growing tide of Indian
nationalism and its concomitant pressure to hand over power at all
levels to Indians, but because the mission establishment could no
longer afford to provide European staff. While British missionaries
could be employed, there appeared to be no pressing reason to devolve
power in such a way. The white missionaries continued to believe that
amongst a tribal people the church could function only with European
leadership. Writing in 1929, Marjorie Meigh argued: ‘No tribes in India
are more primitive than the Bhils, being probably pre-Dravidian, so few
are less advanced in civilisation. So also our Church is very little devel-
oped. It is scarcely other than pioneer work we are engaged on.’ James
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A LITTLE EMPIRE
Lea commented in like vein that the Bhils ‘are in many ways like
children, unfortunately often like very spoilt children. Yet with a
proper mixture of severity and kindness, and the latter to be more than
the first, you win through’.51 Notions of ‘backwardness’ and ‘primi-
tivism’ were still being deployed to justify the continuing need for
white leadership.
These comments were both insensitive and inappropriate, as several
Bhils had already by that time gained the education and expertise that
qualified them to work as lay pastors, medical assistants and school-
masters. Even more, one Bhil had proved worthy enough to be ordained
as a priest. Jakhi Kanji Asari was born in the early 1880s in Valisa village
of Mewar State, and had been converted by the missionaries in
Kherwara.52 After his education, he became a lay pastor working at
Lusadiya. He was considered a diligent and popular worker, and in 1924
he passed the written examination for the ministry, and was ordained
as a deacon 1925.53 He became a full priest in January 1928. At the same
time, young Bhil Christians were replacing non-Bhils in mission
employment. Christian boys and girls with potential were sent for
further studies to higher educational institutions run by the Irish
Presbyterian Mission elsewhere in Gujarat or to the teacher training
college at Ahmedabad. Many of them did very well, achieving excellent
marks in their exams. Once they had qualified, they were appointed to
positions in the mission. By 1932, of the forty-four Indians employed
by the mission, forty-two were Bhil Christians. These figures included
the teachers in the mission schools, all of whom were by then Bhil
Christians.54
The few Europeans who remained in the mission during the 1930s
continued to see themselves as indispensable. No more Bhils were
ordained, in part because the requirements were made more stringent.
The Bishop of Bombay had ruled that all candidates had to be fluent in
English, something that Jakhi Asari had never been. Writing in July
1938, Frank Meigh claimed that the Bhil Christians disliked Indian
pastors from other parts of India and that employing such ‘foreigners’
was not a solution to the problem of their lack of ordained priests.55 In
the following year, Charles Shaw wrote to G. F. Cranswick, the mission
secretary in London, asking for English reinforcements: ‘This primitive
mission needs Europeans, I think, more than more civilised missions
do.’ Indian padres, he stated, had failed to win the confidence of the
Bhils in the way that the European priests had done.56 Heartened by
reports of the fervour of the Bhil converts, and their passionate prayers
that the mission be kept open, Cranswick agreed to sanction the
appointment of a new European missionary in early 1940.57 The
Reverend Paul Johnson was selected, along with his wife Margaret, who
[ 161 ]

was a fully qualified doctor. They sailed for India in late 1940 and,
after a period of settling in, took charge of the mission in 1942. With
their arrival, a new era opened for the Bhil mission – one that will be
examined in Chapters 11 and 12.
Notes
11 By the 1940s, the size of these bungalows was becoming an embarrassment. George
Oldham, the CMS secretary in Bombay, visited the Bhil mission in December 1942
and expressed his unease at ‘the racial distinction of the big house for the European
and the katcha [rough or country-style] one for the Indian’. He suggested that parts
of the bungalows could be used for other purposes. G. M. Oldham to G. F. Cranswick,
Calcutta, 11 January 1943, CMS, G2 I 3/1, sub-files 9 and 13, 1943.
12 This does not mean that the British would necessarily act in their interests. Rather,
it represented a popular perception that the overlord could be appealed to for justice
against local oppressors, just as in Tsarist Russia peasant rebels often believed that
the Tsar would support them in their revolt against local officials and landlords. See
Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
13 This was despite the fact that Gandhi insisted that the British, rather than the
indigenous local elites, were the enemy. Those who adulated him generally missed
this subtlety. I have analysed the way in which the tribals of south Gujarat perceived
him in such a way from 1921 onwards in David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi;
see also Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern
Studies, 3 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984).
14 For details on this, see David Hardiman, Gandhi in his Time and Ours (New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 177–84.
15 Interview to Dr John Mott, before 1 March 1929, CWMG, 45, p. 145.
16 Discussion with C. F. Andrews, on or after 9 November 1936, CWMG, 70, pp. 58–
60.
17 Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 83–4.
18 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 93.
19 Interview to Dr John Mott, before 1 March 1929, CWMG, 45, pp. 143–4.
10 D. Howard, ‘Gandhi’, The Church Missionary Review, 73:837 (March 1922), 15–17.
11 L. B. Butcher to W. V. K. Treanor, 13 June 1930, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1930, doc. 79A.
12 The Bombay Diocesan Magazine, 11:11 (June 1930), 550–1, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1930,
doc. 79B.
13 For an account of the problems that some missionaries encountered when they
stepped out of line in this respect, see Frederick Fisher, That Strange Little Brown
Man Gandhi (New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1970), pp. xvii and 107–8. I have dealt
with this issue in more detail in my book Gandhi in his Time and Ours, pp. 177–84.
14 Details of Motilal Tejawat’s movement are found in NAI, FPD, 428-P (Secret-
Printed) of 1922–23.
15 M. K. Gandhi, ‘Danger of Mass Movement’, Young India (2 February 1922).
16 Interview with Peter Galji Bhanat, Samaiya village, Vijaynagar Taluka, Sabarkantha
District, 15 December 1997. Peter, a Christian convert, was nine at the time and
attending the mission school at Biladiya. Interview with Sankaben Kamjibhai Balat,
Biladiya, Vijaynagar Taluka, Sabarkantha District, 15 December 1997. Sankaben, a
Bhil woman, was aged fifteen in 1922, and she went from her natal village of Pal to
see Motilal at Dadhvav on 7 March.
17 Major H. G. Sutton to Pol. Agent, Mahikantha Agency, 7 March 1922, NAI, FPD,
428-P (Secret-Printed) of 1922–23.
18 Interviews with Sankaben Balat in Biladiya; Peter Bhanat in Samaiya; Galjibhai
Badaji Solanki in Dadhvav; Damaji Panaji Gameti in Baleta, 15 December 1997. I
[ 162 ]

A LITTLE EMPIRE
have also utilised interviews by carried out by Uday Mahurkar in ‘The Other
Jallianwala’, India Today (1 September 1997).
19 J. I. Lea, BMR (1923), 44.
20 B. S. Pathik to Holland, 26 March 1926, NAI, FPD, 428-P (Secret-Printed) of 1922–23.
21 Fortnightly Report, Rajputana, 31 March 1922, ibid.
22 He remained free until 1929; in that year he was arrested and sent to Mewar, where
he was jailed until 1936. Subsequently he became a leading figure in the Mewar Praja
Mandal, being jailed again from 1942 to 1945. He continued with his political and
social work amongst the Bhils till his death in 1963.
23 Pol. Secretary, FPD, to Private Secretary to Viceroy, 13 April 1922; report by H. R.
N. Pritchard, 14 April 1922; press communiqué from FPD, 7 May 1922; report by
H. R. N. Pritchard, 13 May 1922, NAI, FPD, 428-P (Secret-Printed) of 1922–23.
1923), 124.
25 J. Lea, Report of the CMS Western India Mission 1922, p. 44, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1923,
doc. 72.
26 R. Carter, Report of the C.M.S. Western India Mission 1922, p. 44, CMS, G2 I 3/0,
1923, doc. 72.
27 Walter Wyatt, Lusadiya, Report of the C.M.S. Western India Mission 1918, p. 47,
CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1919, doc. 109.
28 Interview with Virjibhai Daniel Varsat, Vaghpur, Bhiloda Taluka, 19 December 2002.
Virjibhai’s grandfather, Dola, was amongst the first Bhils of Devni Mori to convert
to Christianity in 1902.
29 Report of the CMS Western India Mission 1931–1932, p. 25, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1933,
doc. 65; correspondence on mission worker’s house in Bhetali (Idar State) 1934,
OIOC, R/2/168/269.
30 Administration Report of the Idar State for the Year 1941–42, p. 3, OIOC,
V/10/1229.
31 Gujarat State Gazetteers: Sabarkantha District (Ahmedabad: Government of
Gujarat, 1974), pp. 164–5.
32 BMR (1929), 28.
33 C. L. Shaw, Lusadiya, BMR (1925), 26; interview with Surjibhai Timothibhai Suvera
(Satgurudas’s grandson), Lusadiya, 15 December 2002.
34 K. Paine, Lusadiya, BMR (1929), 12; Report by Dr F. C. Read, BMR (1929), 17. The
standoff continued for ten years, until John’s first wife died. With the second mar-
riage no longer bigamous, it was possible in 1935 to negotiate their return to the
church. Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, p. 20.
35 J. I. Lea, Kherwara, BMR (1926), 20.
36 C. L. Shaw, Lusadiya, BMR (1926), 4.
37 For a report on the debates in this respect amongst the Bhagats of Biladiya, see
W. Hodgkinson, ‘Biladia’, BMR (1906), 23.
38 ‘Central Province Mission: Lusadia’, Mercy and Truth (July 1910), 230.
39 R. S. Heywood, ‘A Visit to Bhil Land’, The Bombay Church Missionary Gleaner
(August 1915), 2, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1915, doc. 82.
40 W.B. Holdom, Kotra, BMR (1925), 7.
41 Interview with Daniel Yusaph Kalasva, Bavaliya, Bhiloda Taluka, 16 December
2002. Daniel, now an old man, was the subject of this incident, which took place
when he was eight years old, that is, around 1923.
42 Report by Mrs C. L. Shaw, BMR (1925), 22.
43 C. L. Shaw, Lusadiya, BMR (1925), 25.
44 Report by Miss R. Carter, BMR (1929), 8–9.
45 Edwin James to secretaries of the CMS, London, 25 January 1919, CMS, G2 I 3/0,
1919, doc. 32.
46 L. B. Butcher to W. V. K. Treanor (Secretary CMS, London), Bombay, 29 November
1929, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1929, doc.110.
47 Petition by Evangelists, Schoolmasters and Elders of the Bhil Mission to Butcher, trans-
lated from Gujarati by Frank Meigh, 25 November 1929, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1930, doc. 9.
[ 163 ]

48 Bishop of Bombay to Treanor, Bombay, 15 January 1930, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1930, doc.
23; Report by Bishop of Bombay on his Tour of the Bhil Mission 1929, CMS, G2 I
3/1, sub-file 3.
49 Reports by C. Shaw and F. Read, CMS Report of Work in the Western India Mission
(Diocese of Bombay and Nasik) 1930, pp. 9–11, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1931, doc. 82.
50 L. B. Butcher, ‘The Bhil Mission Jubilee’, The Church Missionary Outlook (March
1931), 54.
51 J. Lea and Mrs Meigh, Report of the C.M.S. Western India Mission 1928, 28–9, CMS,
G2 I 3/0, 1929, doc. 54.
52 Interview with Sister Chandrika, Mankroda, Bhiladia Taluka, 16 December 2002.
53 L. B. Butcher, ‘The First Ordination in Bhil Land’, 16 January 1925, CMS, G2 I 3/0,
1925, doc. 15.
54 Report of the CMS Western India Mission 1931–1932, 22–3, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1933,
doc. 65.
55 Report by F. Meigh, Lusadiya, July 1938, CMS, G2 3/1, sub-file 3.
56 C. Shaw to G. F. Cranswick, Lusadiya, 12 May 1939, ibid.
57 For a report on the zeal and prayers of the Bhil Christians, see W. Wilson Cash, ‘Bhil
Christians and the C.M.S.’, Church Missionary Outlook (May 1939), 104–5;
Cranswick to G. Clark, London, 7 February 1940, CMS, I 3/1, sub-file 1.
[ 164 ]
CHAPTER TEN
Medicine on a shoestring and a prayer
After Dr Jane Birkett retired in 1922, John Brand became the superin-
tendent of the hospital at Lusadiya briefly, until he too retired in 1923.
Lily Shaw – a qualified nurse and the wife of the Reverend Charles Shaw
– ran the dispensary single-handed until in 1924 an Indian medical
assistant was recruited. D. K. Salvi was young, vigorous and an enthu-
siastic Christian, and his initial popularity brought an increase in
patient numbers. There was however a severe setback later that year
when the son of the ex-pastor Premji Hurji Patel – recently expelled
from the church – fell critically ill from blood-poisoning. Salvi did all
he could to save the boy, who was in great pain, but he died within days.
Premji accused Salvi of killing his son, and he then spread what Lily
Shaw described as ‘horrible lies as to the work of the hospital’. For some
months, hardly anyone came for treatment. Lily Shaw commented that
‘The evil influence of this ex-pastor is felt in almost every part of the
mission.’1
In 1925 a British doctor, Frank Read, took charge at Lusadiya. His
wife was a qualified nurse. When the couple arrived, they found that
the medical work was in disarray. The shortage of funds was such that
there were no means to replace wornout equipment. For example, the
beds for inpatients – which were no more than cheap khatlos of wood
and string – were old and falling to pieces, The situation was so bad in
this respect that Salvi and Lily Shaw had to dissuade many would-be
inpatients from coming for treatment because of the lack of beds.
Instead, in most cases, Shaw treated the sick in their own homes, even
when this meant that she had to walk a considerable distance. When a
case was critical, she would go two or three times in one day. Anyone
who wanted to be admitted had to bring their own bed or sleep on the
floor. Only after Dr Read had arrived was the mission able to make good
this deficiency, as he had some funds that had been donated by sup-
porters in Carlisle, and he used these to purchase iron beds.
[ 165 ]

The Medical Missionary Association in London had also given Read

equipment for an operating theatre – which included surgical instru-
ments, an operating table and a microscope – but he found that was no
place in the hospital suitable for operations, as the floors were of mud
and the roof let through all kinds of dust and dirt.2 In 1927, he launched
a drive to raise funds to build an operating theatre to house the new
equipment. He toured the villages around Lusadiya appealing for
money, and by August of that year the necessary sum had been
obtained.3
During that year, 4,981 outpatients and seventeen inpatients were
treated, slightly more than in the previous year, but far fewer than in
the days of Birkett and Brand. Winifred Holdom, while on tour in the
area around Bavaliya, found that many Bhils were coming to her for
treatment, but when she advised those with the more serious com-
plaints to go to see Read in Lusadiya, few were prepared to make the
journey: ‘they are strange people and often will go on suffering rather
than take the trouble to make a fourteen miles’ journey to Lusadia’.4
The hospital also suffered staffing problems at this time. Salvi left in
1926 and was replaced by another Christian medical assistant, Dr A. B.
Varman, but he proved unsuited to the work and left at the end of 1927.
For two years, no replacement could be found. A Bhil dresser was also
found to be untrustworthy and unreliable, and was dismissed. Rupji
Dhana, a Bhil youth from the mission school at Kherwara, replaced him
and was trained on the job by Read and his wife. The hospital staff con-
sisted of Read as doctor, his wife as nurse, Rupji Dhana as compounder
and Jakhi Magan as dresser. Read commented on his two Bhil assis-
tants: ‘We train them as best we can, but they do not realise very easily
the necessity of asepsis and cleanliness in all their work’. A Bhil girl
called Shanti Joria Pandav had been chosen to train as a nurse at the
mission hospital at Anand; however, it would be five years before she
was qualified. When Read was away from Lusadiya, either on tour or on
holiday, the hospital had to be closed. On one occasion he managed to
obtain an Indian locum from Ajmer who worked there for two months,
but on other occasions there was no replacement.
At the close of 1927 the mission received some encouraging news.
The CMS medical committee in London had been left a legacy of £2,700
to build a pioneer mission hospital in India, along with a £900 capital
fund for an endowment, and the sum had been awarded to Lusadiya.
The hospital was to be built on a new and better site, replacing the
existing dilapidated buildings.5 Despite the staffing problems, patient
numbers rose over the next two years. In 1929, 6,877 outpatients and
32 inpatients were treated, and 109 minor and three major operations
were performed. Read claimed that he was prevented from carrying
[ 166 ]

M E D I C I N E O N A S H O E S T R I N G A N D A P R AY E R
major surgery on any scale because he lacked an anaesthetist and

trained assistant.6 The other missionaries had a different view – Read,
they stated, was scared to perform operations. He had not had much
experience of surgery before he came to India, and after his arrival he
had no chance of honing his skills under the guidance of another doctor.
According to Lily Shaw, he was far too squeamish to make a good doctor
– he shied away even from giving inoculations to his fellow missionar-
ies. He was using the excuse of the lack of an operating theatre to avoid
having to carry out surgery. Only while he had been away and was
replaced by the locum from Ajmer had the operations that appeared in
the statistics in fact been carried out.7
L. B. Butcher, the CMS secretary in Bombay, was informed of all
this in confidence by Read’s fellow missionaries.8 He decided that
Read should be transferred to another, larger medical mission where he
could gain experience from the other doctors. He was sorry about
this, as Mrs Read’s services would be lost, and she was – in his patron-
ising words – ‘a brave little thing and really worth two of her husband’.9
The revelations about Read’s incompetence came just as the CMS
was having to cut back on its work, because of the financial crisis
mentioned in the previous chapter, and Butcher proposed that the
Bhil mission would have to do with Indian doctors only. Frank
Meigh wrote to protest against this. The mission’s ‘native doctors’,
he asserted, had all been a grave disappointment. They had not
been loyal to the mission, and some had intrigued with ‘unworthy
people’ (was this a reference to Premji Hurji Patel, the dissident ex-pa-
stor at Lusadiya?). An ‘English Doctor’ was no luxury: ‘one only has to
live in this isolated part in an epidemic, or see people in serious illness,
or with a sudden accident, see them dying for lack of skilled attention,
and the nearest qualified doctor 70 miles (= 3⁄4 days between the decision
to call and his possible arrival) to know it is an absolute necessity, not
only for the Bhils, but for the sake of our own lives also’. Meigh pre-
dicted that if a competent person could be recruited ‘who both dis-
played assurance and inspired confidence, and himself performed
operations, he would soon have patients from many miles around’.10
Although the site for the new hospital at Lusadiya had been chosen
and plans drawn up for its construction, the order for retrenchment
within the mission in early 1930 saw the proposal being postponed indef-
initely. Read, who was still in situ, commented that it was a great dis-
appointment, but that he had to accept it as ‘God’s purpose’, for ‘He
evidently knows that whatever means we have at our disposal for our
medical work, poor and inadequate though they may seem to us, in His
hands can be used to bring about most wonderful results’. Read, in fact,
seemed to be relying as much on his faith as a Christian than on his
[ 167 ]

medical training in his work. His report for 1929 was full of accounts of
how ‘seemingly impossible tasks have been accomplished by God’s won-
derful prayer’. Five or six boarding-school children had fallen ill with
whooping cough and then developed broncho-pneumonia. Although this
was an extremely dangerous condition, only one girl had died – and
she already had a weak constitution – while the rest recovered in a
most remarkable way. On another occasion a boy was carried in from
Kherwara with high fever. The parents were tearful, fearing he would die.
In Read’s words: ‘We prayed together, and what seemed almost impossi-
ble happened, and the boy took a turn for the better from that time.’
Another ‘miraculous’ recovery took place soon after, when a Bhil man
who appeared to be dying was saved as a result of Read’s treatment and
some careful nursing by an untrained Bhil woman. According to Read:
‘Truly the hand of God was in this.’11
In January 1931, Read was transferred for a year to Ranaghat in Bengal
‘to get further experience in the administration of a mission hospital’.
An Indian Christian, John Hamilton, was appointed to replace him at
Lusadiya.12 Hamilton had qualified from the Agra Medical School in
1915 as a Licentiated Medical Practitioner. He was paid Rs. 120 per
month and provided with free quarters for himself and his family.13
Read’s deficiencies as a doctor were further exposed at Ranaghat, and in
1932 he was informed that the CMS no longer required his services. He
returned to England severely disappointed, still believing that his failure
had been caused by the lack of funding for the Lusadiya medical
mission.14 In a letter to London of August 1932, Butcher wrote that
although the mission would like a doctor from England to replace Read,
the need was not urgent given the financial situation at that time. As it
was, Hamilton had already proved his capabilities.15
Frank Meigh held a very different opinion of the new doctor. His
attitude towards Hamilton appears to have been based on a racist
opinion that ‘native doctors’ were invariably inferior to their English
counterparts. Writing to Butcher in November 1932, he argued that
‘Far more confidence is naturally placed in an English Doctor. The Bhils
do not readily trust one of Hindu extract even though a Christian.’
Previous ‘native doctors’, he asserted, had proved unsatisfactory in
one way or another. They had disliked the ‘loneliness and isolation of
the jungle’. They were unable to bear being so far from their relatives.
They knew that they could earn far more in the cities and had
resigned to work there. Alternatively, they had been involved in
intrigues with the local thakors and Brahmans. The Bhils did not
trust them and they lacked the character to win their confidence, so that
they soon lost interest in their work and became lazy. One became
corrupt, taking fees for treatment on the side. Another took drugs. As
[ 168 ]

for Hamilton, though a ‘Christian gentleman’, he was not on top of his

work. His health was poor and half his salary was going into paying for
his children to attend boarding school elsewhere. His medical abilities
were doubtful, so that the Bhils, including the Bhil Christians, were
losing confidence in him. They were as a result falling into ‘hopeless-
ness and helplessness and soon resort again to heathen superstition’.
Some of the ‘stronger Christians’ were taking lengthy journeys for treat-
ment by poorly qualified non-Christian doctors in the towns. The mis-
sionaries for their part had to go to Anand, 240 kilometres away. Meigh
put in a plea for an English medical missionary who could, through his
good work, once more open the heart of the Bhils to the Gospel.16
Other missionaries did not share Meigh’s opinion of Hamilton.
Agnes Lees wrote that Hamilton and his wife were ‘very nice, helpful
people’. Although the number of patients was not large, people were
coming from a good distance for treatment and there had been ‘some
almost miraculous recoveries’. Hamilton had been ill at times, but she
had been able to fill in for him with no great difficulty. Their main
problem was that the medical fund was unable to cover the work that
they were doing, so that they were running a deficit.17
Things became worse when the London office decided to transfer the
grant that had been promised for Lusadiya to a different mission hospi-
tal in Kashmir. The ongoing grant to Lusadiya was also reduced and
suggestions were voiced that the hospital might have to be closed.
The missionaries met together in Kherwara in April 1934 to decide on
their response. They drew up a list of reasons why the medical work of
the mission was essential and sent it to Dr J. Howard Cook, who had
been a well-known medical missionary in Uganda and who now
chaired the medical committee of the CMS in London. In this, they
stated that there were very few dispensaries run by the princely states,
and the experience of the Bhils who had tried to use such establish-
ments had not been good, for they were treated there as ‘jungly’ people
whose presence lowered the tone of the place. This was in contrast to
the reception of caste Hindus at such dispensaries. Without mission
facilities for the Bhils, they would be effectively barred from any access
to modern forms of treatment.
Bhils truly are primitive, and given to gross superstitions and dealings
with the powers of evil. You would be stopping a work which is gradually
weaning them from such things; and would be throwing back upon their
heathen remedies many who have learnt to come to us.
Such ‘superstition’ was alive still amongst even the converts to

Christianity, and ‘It would be leading them into serious temptation the
only remedy for which had been taken away.’ Furthermore:
[ 169 ]

Bhils are normally fairly healthy on account of their open outdoor life;
but in sickness they are specially fearful, helpless, hopeless. It is a great
thing inspiring confidence to know there is a place to go in their need.
Take it away and you throw them into sheer despair.18
Once more, the notion of the ‘primitivism’ of the Bhils was being regur-
gitated to justify the work of the mission. Though depicted in one
respect as children of nature who enjoyed good health, they were also –
by implication – naturally sinful, being mired in superstition and
subject to the ‘powers of evil’. Whatever its merits, this appeal went
down well with Cook, who made a point of visiting Lusadiya in late
1934 on a tour of India. He responded in like terms – his report of his
visit deployed the word ‘primitive’ at every turn. Leaving the nearest
railway station to Lusadiya, he had to take a ‘primitive motor omnibus’.
The road passed through ‘primitive villages’, along rough tracks with
protruding tree roots and fords across rushing streams. Arriving at
Lusadiya, he found there a ‘primitive little hospital containing six beds,
equipment of the simplest type, and yet a living work being carried on
which is of inestimable value to the Church and the Mission in this iso-
lated spot’.
Fortunately for the mission, Cook was highly impressed. He noted
that Dr John Hamilton had had to overcome a number of problems after
he arrived. The Bhils were, for example, suspicious of Hindi-speaking
people. They were also prejudiced against Indian Christian doctors, as
the previous one had alienated both the people and the Bhil church.
Hamilton had nonetheless won them round through his sympathetic
and friendly demeanour, his care of the sick and his indefatigable visits
to their homes. The number of patients had doubled in numbers since
he took over; in the past twelve months over 11,000 outpatients had
been treated at Lusadiya. Cook concluded that ‘This Medical work
could not be closed without serious loss to the whole Bhil Mission.’19
On his return to London, Cook ensured that the CMS continued to fund
Lusadiya sufficiently to allow the work to continue there.20
In 1935, Hamilton compiled a table showing attendance at Lusadiya
during his time there. In the first full year when he had been in charge
– 1932 – there were 5,452 outpatients and 23 inpatients, whereas in
1934 there were 10,571 outpatients and 43 inpatients. In 1932, there
were 95 minor operations, against 184 in 1934. In 1934, there were 238
home visits.21 In the following year, Hamilton wrote a detailed report
on his work that was of a quality not seen since the reports of Jane
Birkett many years before. In this, he stated that the outpatients came
mainly from villages in a radius of about thirty-two kilometres, though
some came from further away. The great majority were poor and of low
[ 170 ]

caste, being predominantly Bhils and mostly Christians. The most

frequent visitors were Christians who attended the church at Lusadiya
and who lived in the village itself or the eight nearby villages.
Christians from villages further away, such as Chhitadara, Devni Mori,
Jesingpur and Bavaliya, also came fairly often. The number of inpa-
tients was relatively low as Bhils had – he said – a terror of dying away
from home, and if their illness was serious they were that much more
reluctant to come for treatment. Another reason was that an inpatient
had to be looked after in part by a family member who stayed at the hos-
pital, and this meant the loss of the labour of that person at home,
something that few poor families could afford.
Hamilton reported that the most common complaints that he had to
treat during the rainy season were dysentery, diarrhoea, malaria, and
skin and eye problems. During the rains of 1935 there was an epidemic
of dysentery in the area around Lusadiya that caused a great deal of suf-
fering. Three Christians had died, because, he said, ‘They did not ask
for help till they were dangerously ill. They were lying in their own filth
and insanitary condition. Then they would not come into hospital, and
within two or three days of treatment they died.’ All the others whom
he had treated recovered. This included a fifteen-year-old boy from
Rampur and an eight-year-old girl from Chhapara Kuski for whom there
seemed no hope, ‘but we thank God that they were wonderfully cured’.
He described the compounds of drugs he used, such as magnesium sul-
phate and quinine sulphate, and diets, such as boiled rice with curds.
All those who had been treated promptly along such lines had, to his
knowledge, survived. He noted that guinea worm was a major problem
in the area, especially during the hot weather. The people did not like
to have the worms taken out through an incision on their skin, as it was
very painful to do this. Also, it was not satisfactory to remove the
worms in this way, as they did not always come out completely.
Instead, he applied carbolic or nitric acid to the inflamed part of the
skin, and also boric fomentations, four to six times daily. The area
then suppurated and opened or burst out itself, leaving the worms to
be extracted without breaking. This had worked even in the most
intractable cases, and the people preferred it. Another problem that
Hamilton came across was that pregnant women would not take any
medicine as their ‘superstitious ideas about births are prejudicial to it’.
He had however managed to persuade some to have quinine injections
on alternate days, and this had been beneficial. In general, he found that
‘All the people have very superstitious ideas, using crude remedies of
their own. There are many Christians even, who have not altogether
given up their superstitions. This causes great difficulty in Medical
work, and much patience is needed.’22
[ 171 ]

During that year, 13,142 outpatients and sixty-seven inpatients were

treated, which represented another considerable increase.23 There was
a setback in 1936 when Hamilton fell seriously ill and the hospital and
to be closed for two months. Although Agnes Lees carried on the work
at the dispensary, the number of outpatients fell during that year.24
Thereafter, the numbers revived.
While this work continued, a young Bhil called Daniel was for the
first time attending medical school. Born in 1906, he was one of four
sons of Kavada Soma Suvera, a lay preacher who had been one of the
original converts from Lusadiya village. Daniel had excelled in his
studies at the mission school and was advised by the missionaries to
go for further study. He completed his matriculation at the Irish
Presbyterian High School at Anand, and then went on to Ahmedabad
College for his degree, which he obtained in 1932. He decided that he
wanted to become a doctor, and went for his training to the well-known
medical school run by the American Presbyterian mission at Miraj in
Maharashtra. There he met Gladys, a second-generation Christian from
Karnataka (a CMS missionary had converted her father, who was a
Brahman). They were married while Daniel’s studies continued. He
obtained his medical degree in 1938, and despite several offers of high
salaries to practise elsewhere, he returned to work among his own
people, starting at the dispensary at Biladiya. He adopted the surname
Christian.25
Meanwhile, in the same year, Shanti Pandav completed her training
as a nurse at the Irish Presbyterian mission hospital at Borsad, in central
Gujarat. She stood first in all of Gujarat in her nursing examination,
after which she took and passed her midwifery examination in Bombay.
Her marks were such that several doctors tried to persuade her to stay
and work in Bombay city, offering her a monthly salary of up to Rs.150.
She refused these offers, and returned to Borsad to work there for a year,
fulfilling a promise made when the Irish Presbyterian missionaries had
undertaken to bear the cost of her training. She was offered a perman-
ent post there on good pay, but she insisted on returning to Lusadiya to
work for a low monthly starting salary of only Rs.15. She quickly
gained a high reputation as a nurse at the hospital, and as a maternity
and welfare worker amongst the women and children of the area.26
In 1939, Daniel Christian took over from John Hamilton as superin-
tendent of the hospital at Lusadiya. In a letter of 1940, Agnes Lees
praised him for his work there. Besides treating crowds of patients, he
ran a weekly Bible class for women and helped organise the church ser-
vices. He was a frequent visitor to the girls’ school and the girls there
adored him; and children were, Lees argued, good judges of character.
The only problem was that he appeared to be taking on more than he
[ 172 ]

3 Dr Daniel Christian, Lusadiya, 1940.
could handle, suffering some strain that was showing in his attitude to
others.27
During this period, the dispensary at Biladiya was run initially by an
Indian medical assistant, Dr Dey, and then by Marjorie Meigh, a trained
nurse. The facilities could generally cope with minor complaints, but
they were helpless in the face of serious illness. Thus, when they were
hit by an epidemic of ‘relapsing fever and pneumonia’ in the winter of
1923–24, twelve Christians died despite Meigh’s attentions, ‘a large
number for such a small Christian community’. Many more non-
Christians also died; Meigh saw them burying their dead in the dry river
bed and could hear ‘the dreadful heart-rending wailing of those who
mourn without . . . the hope of the glorious resurrection in Christ
Jesus’.28 As a nurse, Meigh could provide basic drugs, dressings and
nursing care, but was helpless in the face of serious illness and injury.
Thus, when in 1925 a man was brought in from Mundeti village,
twenty-five kilometres from Biladiya, with serious abdominal injuries
[ 173 ]

caused by a fall from a tree on to a pointed branch, she cleaned up the

wound, tried to restore and sew in the injured parts and dress the injury,
all without any anaesthetic. He nonetheless died after a few days.
Marjorie’s husband Frank reflected on this case that if Dr Read had been
available, they could have called on him; but he had arrived at Lusadiya
only after this.29 As we have seen already, it is doubtful whether the
squeamish Read would have in fact have been able to handle such an
injury.
The dispensary was closed after Meigh and her husband left the
station in 1929, and remained so until Winifred Holdom was appointed
to replace them in 1931. Holdom had received the news of her new
posting while on furlough in London in 1931 and, aware that she would
be in charge of the dispensary, had undertaken some training at
Livingstone College – a CMS-run establishment in London that pro-
vided basic medical training for missionaries – and had also gained
some experience at the Mildmay Hospital in Bethnal Green. She ran the
dispensary throughout the 1930s, assisted by a young Bhil who had
been trained as a dresser at Lusadiya. Although she also carried out
evangelical and educational work at Biladiya, she soon found that the
medical work was taking up most of her time. She ran the dispensary
with far more enthusiasm than Marjorie Meigh had ever done,30 and
during 1932 was seeing an average of a hundred new patients each
month. This was despite the fact that the Idar authorities had opened a
dispensary in the late 1920s at Bhiloda, which was only ten kilometres
away. Several patients had come to Biladiya from Bhiloda, and when her
assistant had asked them why they did not use the new dispensary, they
had stated that they did not obtain ‘good medicine’ there. Nonetheless,
Holdom was all too aware of her deficiencies. In one of her reports, she
regretted that she lacked the ability to diagnose many of the complaints
adequately. However, ‘God has certainly blessed some of the very
simple remedies used.’ The hardest times had been during the summer,
when there had been a nasty epidemic of dysentery, mostly amongst
children, and in the winter, when there had been many cases of
influenza and pneumonia. These illnesses, she reported, required
careful nursing, but unfortunately the Bhils hardly ever provided proper
care for the sick in their homes. She cited a case of a non-Christian
woman who was desperately ill from pneumonia, but who was left to
lie on the floor of her house with nothing to cover her beyond her own
clothes. Holdom also commented in her report that ‘I have been trying
to follow the teaching of Livingstone College, to “stick a knife in”
wherever possible with usually most satisfactory results both to the
amateur doctor and the patient. Some times however their courage fails
and they don’t let me give them relief quickly, but prefer to let an
[ 174 ]

abscess take its time enduring far more pain of course.’ She told a
humorous story of one patient with a very painful abscess who, to avoid
having to endure such a treatment, fled across the fields pursued by his
wife. The man’s brother asked Holdom to join in the chase, but she
refused saying that she never treated anyone against their will – and
would still less run after them across the countryside – and that if he
wanted treatment he would have to come back of his own volition. He
never did.31
Inspired by the faith that God was with her in her medical work, the
unqualified Holdom appears to have been a far more effective healer
than the unconfident Frank Read. For example, she wrote in 1935 of
how she had saved the life of a four-year-old orphan boy whose clothes
had caught alight and who had received terrible burns. Although she
felt that he was unlikely to survive, she had applied daily dressings with
great care and administered a diet of milk and cod-liver oil. He recove-
red and was soon running about happily. According to Holdom, the
local people were convinced that it was a miracle.32 Writing in 1941,
she claimed that she had carried out more medical work at Biladiya
than any others had ever done. When she had taken the work over she
had anticipated that she would be mainly responsible for the care of the
local Christian community, but to her surprise more and more non-
Christians had come over the years. She was often called to go out to
treat people from all over the area. She commented: ‘All I can say is that
God was very good and overruled many mistakes I must have made and
for some reason the people seemed to have faith in me and that counts
for everything with our Bhils.’33
It is notable that during this entire period, none of the reports from
the Bhil mission mention any attempts at sustained medical education,
with, for example, lantern slide shows or pamphlets or posters setting
out the principles of biomedicine.34 In this area, the Idar State authori-
ties took the lead during the 1930s, with campaigns for vaccination, the
distribution in villages of pamphlets on village sanitation, and lantern
slide shows at village schools on health and hygiene.35 The missionar-
ies do not appear to have felt that such campaigns were necessary to
their work at this time. They deployed their medicine to win trust,
sympathy and converts, rather than to stimulate curiosity about its
techniques or a grasp of its principles. They seem to have had little
desire to demystify what appeared to local people to be a form of ‘super-
ior magic’.36
In such a light, the supposedly bizarre beliefs of the Bhils on illness
and health provided more a source of amusement than one of grave
concern. Agnes Lees thus spoke of some ‘amusing incidents’ that
enlivened her itineration of 1923:
[ 175 ]

One old man with a bad headache was given aspirin tablets. He turned up
next day to enquire whether the tablets were to be rubbed on the head or
swallowed. Another story is that of six old men sitting before the tent door.
They asked for cough mixture, and having no bottles were given a dose at
once, whereupon the question was “have we one cough or many coughs?”37
Rowena Watts had similar tales from her tour of 1925:
We have the humorous side too, which is usually connected with the dis-
pensing of simple remedies in the villages. Once when I was about to
administer a dose to a man who was seemingly very willing to swallow
it, I suddenly found it was for his wife at home! It is not quite proper to
speak about his lady at home, so it is a little embarrassing at times,
though amusing. The same thing happened last week out this way, but
on being asked to put out his tongue, the truth came out! It is such a
delight that these people have a keen sense of humour.38
Such stories – included ostensibly to lighten up the reports – sent out a
clear message as to the ‘backwardness’ of the Bhils and their continu-
ing need for Christian ministry and the wonders of ‘English medicine’
as administered by mission workers.
Notes
11 Lilian Shaw, Lusadiya, BMR (1924), p. 22.
12 Frank Read, Anand, BMR (1925), 16–17. The Medical Missionary Association was
an interdenominational body founded in 1878 that recruited and trained medical
missionaries and supported their work to a limited extent in the field. Salaries were
paid by each separate missionary society – in Read’s case the CMS.
13 ‘Bhil Country: Lusadia’, The Mission Hospital (August 1928), 210–11.
14 W. B. Holdom, Kherwara and Bavaliya, BMR (1927), 9, 28.
15 F. C. Read, Lusadiya, BMR (1927), 15–16; ‘Bhil Country: Lusadia’, The Mission
Hospital (August 1929), 208–9.
16 F. C. Read, Lusadiya, BMR (1929), 14–17.
17 L. B. Butcher to W. V. K. Treanor, Bombay, 29 November 1929, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 929,
doc. 110.
18 Butcher to Treanor, 19 August 1932, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1932, doc. 69.
19 Butcher to Treanor, Bombay, 29 November 1929, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1929, doc. 110.
10 F. Meigh, Comment on Canon Butcher’s Letter of 14 November 1929, CMS, G2 I
3/0, 1929, doc. 122.
11 F. C. Read, Lusadiya, BMR (1929), 14–15.
12 ‘Among the Bhils: Lusadia’, The Mission Hospital (August 1931), 208.
13 Minutes of Bombay Corresponding Committee, 9 March 1931, CMS, MY I 3, 1931.
14 F. C. Read to Treanor, 6 June 1932, CMS, G2 I 3/0 1932, doc. 50; Butcher to Treanor,
4 June 1932, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1932, doc. 53; Butcher to Treanor, 30 September 1932,
CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1932, doc. 91.
15 Butcher to Treanor, 19 August 1932, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1932, doc. 69.
16 Frank Meigh to Butcher, Lusadiya, 15 November 1932, CMS, MY I 3.
17 Report of the CMS Western India Mission 1931–1932, p. 25, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1933,
doc. 65.
18 F. Meigh and W. Holdom to Dr J. Howard Cook, Lusadiya, 14 April 1934, CMS, MY
I 3.
[ 176 ]

19 J. Howard Cook, ‘Impressions on a Secretarial Visit to India’, Conquest by Healing,

12:3 (September 1935), 73–4.
20 Gordon Hewitt, The Problem of Success: A History of the Church Missionary
Society 1910–1942, 2: Asia: Overseas Partners (London: SCM Press, 1976), p. 154.
21 ‘CMS Hospital Lusadia, 1931 to 1934’, CMS, M AD I C, 1934–35.
22 J. Hamilton, ‘CMS Mission Hospital, Lusadia, Report for 1935’, CMS, M AD I C,
1934–35.
23 The Mission Hospital (August 1936), 211.
24 The Mission Hospital (September 1937), 233.
25 Interview with Rajnikant Christian (Daniel’s son), Nana Revas, Idar Taluka, 17
December 2002.
26 ‘Western India: Lusadia’, The Mission Hospital (September 1938), 231; F. Meigh,
Lusadiya, July 1938, CMS, G2 I 3/1, 1938, sub-file 3; Lilian Shaw, ‘The First Bhil
Doctor and Nurse’, CMS Outlook (September 1940).
27 Agnes J. Lees to Cranswick, 17 April 1940, CMS, I 3/1, sub-file 1.
28 M. Meigh, Biladiya, BMR (1924), 10.
29 F. Meigh, Biladiya, BMR (1925), 7.
30 For criticisms of Meigh in this respect, see Butcher to Treanor, Bombay, 29
November 1929, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1929, doc. 110.
31 W. B. Holdom, Biladia, BMR (1932), 14.
32 ‘A Miracle of Healing’, The Church Missionary Outlook (April 1935), 87.
33 Winifred Holdom to Dr Anderson, Biladiya, 8 May 1941, CMS, M Y I 3.
34 The mission had a lantern and slides from the 1890s, but they were used only to
show scenes from the Bible. ‘From the Rev. E. P. Herbert, Kherwara, North-West
Provinces’, CMSE (1896), 140.
35 Administration Report of the Idar State for the Year 1934–5 (1–10–1934 to 30–9–
1935), pp. 66, 95, OIOC, V/10/1228.
36 A term used by J. Howard Cook to describe how the people of Uganda supposedly
regarded his medical work. Cook, ‘The Contribution of Science to Missionary
Work’, The Church Missionary Review (March 1925), 43.
37 Report of the C.M.S. Western India Mission 1923, 13, CMS, G2 I 3/0, 1924, doc. 57.
38 Rowena Watts, Biladiya, BMR (1925), 5.
[ 177 ]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A mission for a postcolonial era
Paul and Margaret Johnson, who took charge of the Bhil mission in
1942, came mentally prepared for the transfer of power from the British
to an independent Indian government, and they were the ones who
steered the mission through the period of transition in the late 1940s.
In 1948, Mewar was merged into the new state of Rajasthan, and Idar
and other adjoining minor princely states became a part of Bombay
State as the district of ‘Sabarkantha’, which meant the area lying along
the banks of the Sabarmati River. In 1953, the name for the church
changed from that of a ‘mission to the Bhils’ to one defined in terms of
the territory it covered, which stretched from the banks of the Som
River in Mewar to the Sabarmati River in the erstwhile Idar State, being
called the ‘Som-Sabarkantha church’.
In contrast to the missionaries before them, the Johnsons had a pos-
itive attitude towards the Indian nationalist movement. They were
strong admirers of Gandhi, and when their stay in Mussoorie in May
1946 happened to coincide with a visit there by the Mahatma, they met
him and prayed with him. They proudly kept a photograph in their
family album showing them strolling and chatting with the great man.1
They celebrated Indian independence in good spirit in August 1947, and
Paul wrote optimistically in his annual report for that year: ‘We mis-
sionaries certainly rejoice that a new relationship renders the old sus-
picions and doubts in Indian minds obsolete. We still have important
services to render and a rich Christian heritage to share, but no longer
are we to be identified with a foreign ruling power.’2 The chief of these
‘services’ had by then become the medical one, with huge amounts of
effort and resources being poured into providing an up-to-date hospital
for the Bhil mission, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Margaret Johnson had trained to become a medical missionary
because she had doubted the value of missionary work that focused
only on conversion.3 Nonetheless, she hoped that her medical practice
[ 178 ]

A MISSION FOR A POSTCOLONIAL ERA
would win some converts. On starting work in Lusadiya in 1942, she

stated: ‘The medical work here is worthwhile in itself, and none of us
believe in regarding it as “bait” to give us a chance of proselytising, but
it is doubly worthwhile if we can help the patient to spiritual as well as
physical health.’4 She thus sought to answer the critics of the mission-
aries who accused them of healing merely to convert, while refusing to
disown the value of conversion. As it was, she was soon giving greater
emphasis to the value of proselytisation. Writing in the same year, she
said that her former rather negative idea about evangelisation
has been entirely removed by seeing the difference between Christians

and non-Christians here. It isn’t just a matter of education. There are
plenty of people who have been through our schools and have not become
Christians, and there are others who have been baptised and gone back on
it, but their lives have not got the same quality as those who have freely
and whole-heartedly decided for Christ and stuck to their guns. I can
usually, or very often, tell from patients’ faces and bearing when coming
to outpatients whether they are Christians or not.5
In this, she was claiming that education in itself was not enough to
transform the life of a Bhil in a truly ‘civilised’ manner; Christianity
was also required.
She knew that progress would be slow in this respect. In 1945 she
stated: ‘We are not getting any obvious spiritual results from our
work; no spectacular conversions or lists of baptisms, but I am sure that
like the leaven it is working slowly, as things do in this country.’6
She was careful to ensure that patients were aware of the Christian
content of the service they received. For example, in 1945 she scheduled
daily prayers at the hospital for a later time when outpatients would be
around so as to attract a larger audience. Repeating the theme of healing
leading towards faith, she wrote in 1951 that the Bhils who took treat-
ment for malaria came to believe in the efficacy of the anti-malarial
drugs even though they did not understand how it worked, and ‘that this
is the first step to belief in the teaching which leads from the mere mos-
quito to the love of God who is waiting to heal the ills of the soul.’7
Paul, by contrast, was still deploying the more strident tones of a
‘muscular Christianity’.8 Writing about the defeat of Japan in 1945, he
stated: ‘Our deadly warfare is still going on and we more than ever need
to be spiritually fit, alert and ready at our Captain’s word to go in and
set free those who are still bound in ignorance, superstition, fear and
moral disease.’9 In their respective ways, Margaret and Paul thus con-
tinued to stress the ‘civilising’ value of Christianity, though he tended
to use a language that was by then already becoming outmoded,
whereas she adopted subtler ways of expressing this principle.10
[ 179 ]

When the Johnsons took charge in 1942, they became responsible for
1,329 baptised Christians in nine separate parishes. The largest was
the parish of Lusadiya, with 449 baptised Christians (34 per cent of
the total), followed by Biladiya with 276 (21 per cent), Bavaliya with 133
(10 per cent), Kherwara with 113 (8.5 per cent), and the others with
fewer than 100 each. The numbers had increased gradually over the
years largely as a result of natural reproduction, as the families of the
original converts had expanded over the generations.11 Fresh conver-
sions had been few and far between, and when they did occur, they were
normally of youths studying in the mission schools.12 The opposition
to conversion within the wider Bhil society continued as strong as ever.
Students at the mission schools who expressed a wish to convert were
commonly threatened with social boycott.13 Patients at the hospital
who expressed an interest in conversion might be snatched away by
their relatives before they could take the step, even if they were seri-
ously ill. When, for example, a woman who was dying of cancer at
Lusadiya hospital expressed her desire to become a Christian, a relative
of hers, who was a well-known buva, came and forced her to return to
her village. She told her husband on her deathbed that Christ had come
to her in a vision to call her away, after which she was said to have died
in peace.14
In 1942 the Idar State government passed a law that required anyone
intending to change their religion to register their name in the court
at the state capital at Himatnagar, which was sixty-five kilometres
from Lusadiya. Charles Shaw commented, hopefully, that this would
perhaps ensure the sincerity and openness of future converts.15 In fact,
it meant that officials could bring strong pressure to bear on any poten-
tial convert or his or her family, either harassing them in the court or
in their villages, or operating bureaucratic procedures in such a way as
to make it very hard to complete a successful registration.16 For
example, a young Bhil called Manji from a village near Biladiya, who
had studied up to the sixth standard at the mission school at Biladiya,
decided in 1945 to convert to Christianity. During that year, he went
on foot on three occasions to register his resolve in the court at
Himatnagar. The application was turned down each time on the ground
that he was still a minor. Back home, he faced severe persecution from
his family, being beaten and starved of food. When a group of young Bhil
men threatened to kill him, he fled to Lusadiya, where he took refuge
in the mission compound. He was taken on for training as a com-
pounder in the hospital.17 In the following year, he made several more
fruitless visits to the court. Eventually, the magistrate ruled on the
basis of evidence from Manji’s father that he was yet to come of age,
and he was ordered to return to his family. As his relatives were not in
[ 180 ]

court, he returned to Lusadiya and continued his training.18 The mis-

sionaries continued to be unable to baptise him so long as the law
remained in place.19 By 1947, Shaw had changed his tune, writing that
the law had proved to be a ‘serious deterrent’ to conversion, with only
one successful case registered during that year.20 Fortunately for the
missionaries, the law was repealed when Idar was merged into Bombay
State in 1948 as it was contrary to the law of that territory.21 Manji
could now be baptised. His family were as a result boycotted in his
village. He married a Christian, was confirmed, and subsequently
became a leading figure in the Christian community in Lusadiya.22
There was also during these years considerable opposition to the
missionaries by nationalists, particularly in the pre-independence
period. The corollary to this was that the Christians often enjoyed a
new-found support from those who felt threatened by the nationalist
agenda. When Paul Johnson visited Modasa town during the Quit India
protest of 1942, he found a strike in progress in this small British-ruled
enclave. He managed to find a refuge from the hostile crowd in the
Muslim quarter of the town, where a shopkeeper informed him: ‘You
are quite safe here, this is Pakistan.’ In other words, it was popularly
perceived that the missionaries, like the Muslims of the Muslim
League who were demanding an independent state of Pakistan, were
the enemies of the Congress nationalists.23 Within the princely states
of Mewar and Idar, the Praja Mandals (People’s Associations) began to
adopt a more vociferous stance as independence loomed. These bodies
were mainly supported and led by higher-caste Hindus from the towns.
Members of the Arya Samaj – who tended to come from such a back-
ground – were particularly strident in their opposition. In Mewar, the
Arya Samaj trained schoolteachers actively to counter the work of the
missionaries, and in one village with a mission school opened a rival
establishment of their own. They were countered by the local thakor –
an ex-pupil of the mission school – who dissuaded the villagers from
using the Arya Samaj school. Instead of losing pupils, the mission
school increased its numbers. Like the Muslims of Modasa, the thakor
saw the nationalists as his enemy (for they aimed ultimately to deprive
the Rajput rulers of their power), and he thus made common cause with
the Christians.24 The Praja Mandal of Idar State similarly opened
schools that were designed to compete with the mission schools. They
paid higher salaries to the schoolteachers, putting the loyalty of the
mission teachers under considerable strain.25
This sort of opposition declined once India gained independence in
1947. Although the Hindu Mahasabha tried to whip up a protest against
the missionaries in the early 1950s,26 the local Congress leaders
and social workers adopted a generally benign stance towards the
[ 181 ]

Christians. This was a time when the Gandhian influence was still
strong amongst many such people, and, following their mentor, the
Congress leaders and social workers placed a strong emphasis on reli-
gious tolerance. With the demise of the princely states, Gandhian
workers were able to establish ashrams in areas from which they had
previously been excluded. A Sarvodaya worker called Narsinhbhai
Bhavsar founded one such institution at Shamlaji, close to Lusadiya. He
became a frequent visitor to the mission at Lusadiya, and even sent
some of the ashram schoolchildren to the church there at Christmas so
that they could experience a Christian festival.27 K. K. Shah, the influ-
ential President of the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee, took a
keen interest in the medical work of the mission, and in 1957 he agreed
to come in person to open a new block for the Lusadiya hospital.28 The
political climate in the 1950s was as a result in general more favourable
to the missionaries than it had been in the 1940s. There were however
a few ominous signs. In 1954, for example, the police were ordered to
provide fortnightly reports on the activities of foreign missionaries, and
instructions were sent out that no attempt should be made to convert
pupils in mission schools.29 It also became increasingly difficult for
missionaries to obtain visas to work in India, and applications were
delayed and in a few cases turned down.30
Soon after his arrival, Paul Johnson expressed his dissatisfaction
with the concept of a ‘Bhil mission’. Writing in 1943, he stated:
Although the title ‘Bhil Mission’ is useful in designating the area of a par-
ticular work in C.M.S. circles yet I feel that we should aim at the creat-
ing of a church composed of people drawn from all walks of life,
eventually dropping this caste-promoting title. The Bhils of course love
it, and show little desire to receive an influx of people who might deprive
them of their livelihood as servants of the mission.31
He went on to say that his ambition was to extend the church to other
communities of Gujarat. He felt that the medical work had allowed the
misssionaries to build strong links with many non-Bhils, and said that
he was planning to take a team of evangelists to Himatnagar, the Idar
State capital, to preach to the townspeople there. He tried to rationalise
the Bhil Christians’ desire to keep the church to themselves in terms of
narrow self-interest – they gained jobs within the mission. In fact, only
a small number so benefited – their Christianity was not based on such
mercenary considerations. Johnson failed to see that what the Bhils were
asserting was a consistent and, for them, valid counter-narrative in
which their attachment to Christianity provided a means to strengthen
their community. For them, this was a perfectly moral desire.
As it was, Paul Johnson failed to extend his evangelising to the towns
and other castes of Idar State. In the same letter he complained about
[ 182 ]

how his life was being taken up with ‘petty business’. ‘Often I have felt
more like the manager of an estate than a missionary.’ He had to buy
supplies, food and livestock, plan and supervise various building works
for the mission and its hospital, pay merchants’ bills, act as paymaster
for the staff, do the mission accounts, negotiate with tax officials, run
a cooperative credit scheme for Bhil Christians and sit as chairman of
the church panchayats (councils). On top of this, he had to perform the
church services each day, celebrate Holy Communion at the outlying
churches in rotation and provide pastoral care for the congregation.
There was little time left, he grumbled, for any evangelistic work.32
In the annual report for 1942, he elaborated on the work of the
Lusadiya church panchayat. Nearly all of the cases that came before it
concerned adultery, and they were so tangled with intrigue and lies that
it took a long time to unravel the truth and obtain a confession. The
punishments laid down for the guilty in such cases were twenty-five
strokes with a stick for the guilty man, and the cutting-off of hair for
the woman.33 He described this as ‘the local Christian ruling’, as if to
distance himself from such forms of corporal punishment. It is however
clear that he went along with them, as did his predecessor, Charles
Shaw. Shaw described in his diary one such case before the panchayat
from 1940. At that time, the court consisted of Shaw and five Bhil elders
of the church. On 19 December of that year they met to discuss a case
involving two young Christians, Daniel and Esther. Daniel’s father,
Hira, and Esther’s father, Hakara, were also present. Shaw commented:
‘We got Hira to give Daniel a bit of a beating, and got Hakara to make
it up with Hira. (While Daniel was being beaten, a bit of the stick flew
off and hit me in the eye).’34 Nancy Rose Hunt, whose research likewise
uncovered missionary-sanctioned corporal punishment – in this case in
the Belgian Congo – has argued that missionary idioms of compassion
towards their flock become intertwined, incongruously, in such
instances with a language of colonial discipline.35 While this observa-
tion is pertinent, it must also be stressed that the demand for such dis-
cipline came in the case of the Bhil panchayat from the patriarchal
elders of the community, while a missionary like Paul Johnson
appeared to be somewhat uneasy about it. As it was, the church hier-
archy eventually put a stop to all corporal punishment, as we shall see
below.
The process of indigenisation of the church received a blow in 1943
when the first Bhil clergyman, Jakhi Asari – then based at Biladiya – was
discovered in an adulterous relationship. He made a full confession,
thus forestalling the need for a diocesan enquiry, but still had to be dis-
missed from his post.36 Nonetheless, a second Bhil clergyman, Rupji
Bhanat, soon replaced him. A product of the mission school at
[ 183 ]

Biladiya – which was also his home village – Rupji had caught the eye of
Charles Shaw and had been sent for theological training in Ahmedabad
and then Baroda. He was ordained as a deacon in 1945 and a priest in
1946, and he worked initially under Paul Johnson at Lusadiya.37 In
1946, there were twenty-three mission staff in all, of whom six were
British, four were Indians from outside the region, and thirteen were
Bhils. Of the three main mission centres, two were under British mis-
sionaries (Paul Johnson at Lusadiya, and Charles Shaw at Biladiya),
while only one – Kherwara – was under an Indian pastor, the Reverend
Philip Parmar. Of the thirteen Bhil staff members, one – Rupji Bhanat
– was a priest, while nine were lay pastors. The remaining three Bhils
were Dr Daniel Christian, the nurse Shanti Joria and a hospital evan-
gelist.38
Philip Parmar was from a family of untouchable converts of central
Gujarat. He had received theological training in Bombay and was
appointed to the mission in 1943. After his ordination at Lusadiya in
1944, he was sent to take charge at Kherwara. There, he encountered
sharp opposition from Agnes Lees, who had been working with the
mission since 1916, and since 1942 had become the senior missionary at
Kherwara when the girls’ boarding school that was under her charge was
shifted there from Lusadiya. Distressed by her attitude towards him and
his wife, Parmar requested a transfer away from Kherwara. In the end,
the CMS decided to get rid of Lees, who was informed that it was time
for her to retire. She left eventually in mid-1946, returning to Britain.39
Now in undisputed charge at Kherwara, Parmar decided that the
church needed to change its image, which was too closely entangled
with British colonialism. It had, for example, become over-dependent
on donations from Britain, and to counter this he introduced the idea
of a ‘God’s field’, in which land was cultivated by church members vol-
untarily and the produce used for the poorer members of the church.
The scheme enjoyed considerable success. He also held dialogues with
sympathetic Hindus, such as members of the Kabir Panth, hoping
thereby to break down the barriers that had grown between local
Hindus and Christians.40 Writing on the eve of Indian independence,
Parmar noted how nationalist politicians were working against them,
‘arguing among other things, that Christianity is a western religion
established with a view to uphold a foreign rule’. Often, the Bhil
Christians were unable to find convincing arguments to counter this
charge. The time had come, he argued, to replace the idea of a Bhil
mission with that of a Christian church.
This can only be achieved by encouraging them [the Bhil Christians]

with equal opportunities in training for leadership and in shouldering
[ 184 ]

responsibilities; thereby making them, and others, realise more thor-

oughly that the Church is open to all, irrespective of race, or nation.41
In this, he was in accord with Paul Johnson in his desire to broaden the
church, and so far as he was concerned this ideal was a long way from
being achieved.
The lay pastors of this period were in many cases second-generation
Christians with a strong family commitment to the church. The
Kalasva family provides one such case. Yusuph Kalasva, who was born
around 1890, was a famine orphan of a village near Kherwara who had
studied to the fourth standard before being appointed a lay pastor,
working at Lusadiya, Kotada and Bavaliya. His son Daniel was born in
1915 and, in an interview that I conducted with him in 2002, remem-
bered moving from one mission station to another with his father,
mother and eight siblings every two or so years. He studied up to the
fourth standard at Kherwara, and was then sent by Charles Shaw for
training in theology in Ahmedabad and Bombay, being appointed a lay
pastor in 1940. He failed his further theological exams, and as a result
was never ordained. He was sent to Biladiya to work under Charles
Shaw in 1942, and used to accompany Shaw in his preaching tours.42
His eldest sister, Manglibai, was also based in Biladiya at this time. She
was the wife of another lay pastor, who was often absent on church
business, leaving her to bring up their children and manage their fields
alone. Despite this she found time to hold frequent prayer meetings and
a weekly Bible class for women, and was considered a pillar of the
local church. She died, suddenly, of malaria in 1945, and was greatly
mourned not only by the local Christians, but also by many non-
Christians who respected her for her many kindnesses.43
Since 1907, the pastoral and evangelical work of the Bhil church had
been the responsibility of a series of church councils, or panchayats.
Each of the nine congregations had a council that initially consisted of
all communicant Christians, but later – as numbers grew – became
elected bodies. These were presided over by either a priest or lay pastor,
and met about twice a month. Over and above them were the three
parish councils of Lusadiya, Biladiya and Kherwara, which consisted of
all the members of these lower councils, and which met monthly under
the parish priest. At the apex there was the council for the entire Bhil
church, known as the moti panchayat, or great council. It consisted of
all the parish priests, lay pastors, parish council secretaries and treas-
urers, and some members elected from each parish. Although all of
these councils had a large majority of Indian members, and the aim
from the start had been to promote democracy within the church, the
leading figures – to whom the others invariably deferred in the last
[ 185 ]

instance – were still the priests, and particularly the white priests. The
councils had no responsibility so far as the medical and educational
work of the mission was concerned; this was the responsibility of the
Bhil Mission Conference, which was composed of all the white mis-
sionaries working in the area. It was only in 1952 that the first Indian
clergyman, Rupji Bhanat, was allowed to sit on this latter body.44
The constitution of the church was revised also in 1952, the new
version coming into effect at the start of 1953. This declared that the
responsibility for the work of the evangelical and pastoral church lay
with its councils, rather than the C M S. According to Paul Johnson,
this was a transitional arrangement, and for the time being support
would continue to be provided by the parent body in London. The days
were however approaching when the church would have to look after
itself entirely.45 Because it was now illegal under Bombay State law for
non-official bodies to apply corporal punishment, they were no longer
allowed to hand out sentences in matters of church discipline. Instead,
all such cases were to be heard before a local council, with a report
being sent to the Bishop of Bombay, who would rule on the appropriate
punishment. It was at this juncture that the church was renamed ‘Som-
Sabarkantha’. According to Paul Johnson, this was ‘because there were
large numbers of people other than the Bhils all to be won for Christ
and the Church was anxious not to perpetuate the name Bhil and
become another caste Church’.46
In 1954, Paul Johnson was appointed Archdeacon of Ahmedabad,
which made him responsible for all Anglicans in Gujarat. This task was
over and above his work as the leader of the Som-Sabarkantha church,
and it took him on tours all over the region. He served in this position
until 1959, when Rupji Bhanat took over. In 1957, the management of all
the schools and hostels was transferred to the moti panchayat. This
meant that the medical work was the only area kept outside any such
democratic control, being still under the management of the CMS. From
1957 onwards, the medical side of the mission published its own sepa-
rate annual report – previously its affairs had been included in the general
Bhil mission report. The period of independence did not last long, for in
1960 the Gujarat church was placed under the Bombay Diocesan
Council, with all of its property being transferred to the diocese. In 1961,
the diocese took over the responsibility for the educational and medical
work – a change that was to have profound implications for both of these
areas of work, as we shall see in Chapter 13.47
During the 1950s, Bhil priests began to take charge at the higher level
of the church. By 1958, only one of the parishes, Lusadiya, was under a
foreign missionary – Paul Johnson. The parish priest at Kherwara was
the Reverend Valji Pandav, brother of Shanti Joria, who had been
[ 186 ]

ordained as a priest in 1952. Biladiya was under Valji’s brother-in-law,

Rupji Bhanat, who was also chairman of the Som-Sabarkantha moti
panchayat. He took over from Paul Johnson as Archdeacon of Gujarat
in 1959, becoming the senior figure in the Gujarat church as a whole.
Despite this, foreign missionaries still had a strong presence. Margaret
Johnson was running the hospital, and Dr Arthur Banks joined her in
1956 with his wife and children. The Reverend John Mayoh had arrived
with his own family in 1957, and was studying Gujarati in preparation
for taking over at Lusadiya once Paul Johnson retired. A Danish mis-
sionary called Else Jorgensen ran the girls’ hostel at Kherwara, and
when she left in April 1958, Gladys Smith took her place. Two new
recruits arrived from Europe in that year, Eva Auerbach and N. F. Tate.
At the end of that year, there were therefore seven white missionaries –
a larger number than there had been ten years earlier.48 By this time,
there were in total 2,492 baptised Christians of the Som-Sabarkantha
church.49
Notes
11 Rachel Mash, ‘Margaret Fitzhugh Johnson, Doctor and Missionary (1941–1963): Her
Work and Family Life in the Context of Pre-Independence and Post-Independence
India’, BA dissertation, University of Brighton, 2001, p. 51.
12 ‘The Rev. P. H. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1947), 14.
13 Mash, ‘Margaret Fitzhugh Johnson’, p. 26.
14 Ibid., p. 29.
15 Ibid., p. 26.
16 ‘Mrs. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1945), 12–13.
17 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1951), 19.
18 This tendency has been studied by Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity:
Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass
achusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001).
19 P. Johnson, circular letter, 20 August 1945, Paul Johnson papers.
10 Looking back in 1987 at his early ambition to ‘preach the Gospel in “heathen
lands” ’, Paul Johnson remarked with hindsight that it was ‘an expression I would
not use today’. N. Johnson, ‘Paul Henry Johnson: The Constant Call’, p. 1, Paul
Johnson papers. Rosemary Fitzgerald has told me, in like vein, that an ex-mission-
ary she interviewed told her that she now cringed when she thought of the ways in
which she had spoken and acted in the past.
11 BMR (1942), 23.
12 ‘Miss Holdom Writes’, BMR (1943), 18.
13 ‘Rev. P. H. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1955), 4.
14 ‘Rev. Canon C. L. Shaw Writes’, BMR (1948), 3–4.
15 ‘Rev. Canon C. L. Shaw Writes’, BMR (1942), 10.
19 For further details of Manji’s harassment see Dr M. Fitzhugh Johnson, ‘Corn in
India’, The Church Missionary Outlook (June 1948), 5.
[ 187 ]

23 P. Johnson, ‘Circular Letter No. 3’, Lusadiya, February 1943, Paul Johnson papers.
24 ‘The Rev. P. B. Parmar Writes’, BMR (1945), 14 and 16.
27 ‘The Ven. P. H. Johnson Writes from Lusadia’, BMR (1957–58), 5. See also ibid., 17
for friendships between missionaries and Gandhian workers.
28 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, LMHR (1957), 3.
29 P. Johnson, ‘Chronology of the Bhil Mission’, entry for 1954, Paul Johnson papers.
30 In the case of two Danish citizens who volunteered to work for the Bhil mission in
the early 1950s, one application took about two years to process, and the other was
rejected. The latter person went to work in Pakistan instead. See correspondence in
CMS, G2 I 3/2, passim.
31 P. Johnson, ‘Second Annual Letter for Year Ending 30 June 1943’, Lusadiya, 16
August 1943, Paul Johnson papers.
32 P. Johnson, ‘Second Annual Letter for Year Ending 30 June 1943’, Lusadiya, 16
August 1943, Paul Johnson papers.
33 The Rev. P. H. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1942), 14–15.
34 Diary of Charles Shaw, entry for 19 December 1940, CMS, Unofficial Papers, Acc.
162.
35 Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon, pp. 94–5.
36 ‘The Rev. Canon C. L. Shaw Writes’, BMR (1943), 7.
37 Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, p. 50.
38 ‘C.M.S. Bhil Mission Staff, 1946’, BMR (1943), 2.
39 L. Butcher to C. Milford, Bombay, 4 February 1946 and 9 July 1946, CMS, G2 I 3/1
sub-file 1, 1946.
40 Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, p. 52.
41 ‘The Rev. P. B. Parmar Writes’, BMR (1946), 26.
42 Interview with Daniel Yusuph Kalasva, Bavaliya, 16 December 2002.
43 ‘Mrs. C. L. Shaw Writes’, BMR (1945), 9–10.
44 Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, pp. 61 and 69–70.
45 ‘Rev. P. H. Johnson Writes from England’, BMR (1952), 8–9.
46 ‘Address by the Rev. P. H. Johnson (Bhil Mission)’, Church Mission House, Salisbury
Square, London, 1953, Paul Johnson papers.
47 Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, pp. 71 and 80.
48 ‘The Ven. P. H. Johnson Writes from Lusadia’, BMR (1957–58), 3–4.
49 ‘Church Statistics, 1958’, BMR (1957–58), 25.
[ 188 ]
C H A P T E R T W E LV E
Medical modernity
In a study of Chinese medical missions, John R. Stanley has argued that

from the early years of the twentieth century, medical missionaries
refused increasingly to act as jack-of-all-trades. Previously, they had
been regarded as subordinates, providing their professional services
under the overall leadership of the evangelising missionary-priests and
subject to their command. From around 1900 onwards they began to
demand that they be allowed to devote their full energies to their
medical work. This gave rise to considerable acrimony in some Chinese
missions in the first decade and a half of the century. A turning point
came when the Rockefeller Foundation established a China Medical
Board in 1914 that made large grants available for medical work by
mission organisations. Large and sophisticated mission hospitals could
be built that provided a focus for mission work in general. Mission
work had always been hampered by a lack of funds, which were raised
mostly from voluntary contributions. Medical work no longer had to be
carried out on a shoe-string, and this inevitably enhanced the status of
the medical as against other poorly funded wings of missionary activ-
ity. Henceforth, medical missionaries could carry on their work for its
own sake rather than have to justify it in term of its evangelical poten-
tial. Nonetheless, to gain and maintain such funding, missions had to
demonstrate a high standard in their medical work. This could have a
knock-on effect, with missions being encouraged to improve their
medical services even in cases in which no such funding was obtained.
Medical missionaries became increasingly assertive in stressing that
their prime commitment was to healing, rather than evangelism. This
Stanley defines as an assertion of the principle of the ‘social gospel’.1
Ruth Compton Brouwer has put forward a similar argument in a
study of three women missionaries who worked in India, Korea and
Africa during the first sixty years of the twentieth century. Two of them
were doctors and one a teacher. She dates the transition, however, to
[ 189 ]

the post-First World War period. Before then, she says, it was expected
that all missionaries – whatever their particular expertise – would
devote a substantial part of their time to evangelical work. In the case
of medical missionaries, the emphasis began to shift towards a more
exclusive focus on medical work after the First World War, as mission-
aries with full medical qualifications began to demand with increasing
stridency that they be allowed to devote their full energies to the work
in which they had been trained. The old corner-cutting and making do
were becoming increasingly outmoded in a world of more exacting and
sophisticated medical therapy, and no longer was the ‘native’ likely to
be dazzled by second-best treatment. In addition, local Christians were
increasingly carrying out evangelistic activity, while foreign mission-
aries focused on supervisory, organisational or professional work. This
was happening at the same time as the challenge of nationalist move-
ments in European colonial territories and a growing respect amongst
many Christians for other religions saw the development of a belief
that missionaries should try to work with indigenous people rather
than merely convert them to Christianity. Gandhi, with his strand of
Hinduism and strong spirituality, was particularly admired. There was
a growing emphasis on the shared project of many religious people. In
this way, the old certainties were being replaced with an attitude of
greater circumspection and humility. It was felt increasingly that mis-
sionaries should seek to exemplify a Christian way of life in their own
persons through their compassion and good work. Medical work for its
own sake provided an exemplary means towards this end. As a result,
missionaries in the field became more and more involved in social
work, and they often saw this as their authentic life mission. Like
Stanley, Brouwer describes this as an affirmation of the ‘social gospel’.2
Although Stanley and Brouwer make some useful observations about
developments in missionary strategy and practice, I am not convinced
that they should be analysed in terms of any triumph of the principle
of the ‘social gospel’. The ‘social gospel’ movement was, after all, met-
ropolitan rather than colonial, and it evolved independently from the
work of missionaries in European colonies. Charles Hopkins has shown
how it originated in the United States in the period after the Civil War,
being, as he claims, a ‘uniquely American movement towards the
socialising and ethicising of Protestantism.’3 Also known as ‘social
Christianity,’ it was not, according to Paul Carter, so ‘unique’, having
as it did affinities with the contemporary Christian socialist movement
in Britain and social Catholicism in Europe.4 For Hopkins, it repre-
sented a Christian response to the social problems that resulted from
industrial capitalism and it had strong links to trade unionism. It
was critical of the materialism and greed of the capitalist ethos and
[ 190 ]

MEDICAL MODERNITY
demanded that a truly Christian society be a more co-operative and

egalitarian one. It did not in general assume a similarly critical stance
on issues of imperialism and racism.5 Carter has understood the
movement more in terms of a reaction to the strong emphasis in
American Protestantism on individual salvation, with an understand-
ing that good and evil were not merely the sum total of the good
and evil of individuals, but collective and societal qualities. As God
pronounced judgement on societies as a whole as well as individuals,
Christians were obliged to work for the good of society. It followed in a
longstanding tradition stretching back to medieval times of reading the
Bible as a subversive tract, in which Jesus cleansed social corruption
through his demand for a new ethical base to society.6 Initially a
form of dissent within the established churches, it became more main-
stream and reached a zenith in the period immediately preceding the
First World War. It received a severe setback during the First World
War and its aftermath, a period when churches were discredited by
their support for the war, followed by their backing for the unpopular
policy of Prohibition. It revived again during the period of the New Deal
in the 1930s, when many were seeking a collective solution to the
contemporary crisis of capitalism.7
Clearly, the idea that medical work came to the fore in missionary
work as the result of the ascendancy of the ‘social gospel’ cannot be
brought into line with this particular theological history without some
adaptation, and this has not been thought through by either Stanley or
Brouwer. Medical mission work had its own history and trajectory –
described in Chapter 1 – that were not connected with trade union
activity or a critique of capitalist society and the like. While it is true
that terms can at times be usefully adapted to delineate a different phe-
nomenon, the concept of the ‘social gospel’ fails, I believe, to explain
why medical work became more and more prominent during the course
of the twentieth century. The question that needs to be posed is: why
did a strategy that originated with a minority of missionaries – the
medical – in the nineteenth century, and which always existed in a
state of some tension with more purely evangelical activities (as it
channelled resources and energies away from such work), become so
much more important within the missionary movement during the
course of the twentieth century?
The answer, I believe, is that it provided a restatement of the ‘civil-
ising mission’ in an era of decolonisation, but with a new vocabulary
and in other terms. Although the missionary project in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries had been driven by a desire to save
souls for Christ, it had been justified also for its ‘civilising’ effect.
Conversion, by itself, was not enough – the convert had to accept the
[ 191 ]

need for a continuing relationship of subordination in which he or she

would undergo a long process of education under the instruction of the
white missionary. A British – or American – upbringing and higher edu-
cation was thus seen to endow the ‘character’ needed to run a mission
station. Similarly, technical training in a Western university or medical
school was seen to provide the necessary expertise to run good-quality
educational or health services for the peoples of the mission field.
As nationalist demands led to an increasing devolution of power within
many colonies, the belief that only Westerners could administrate in an
efficient, even-handed and effective way became increasingly discred-
ited. By the 1940s, fewer and fewer missionaries were hanging on to the
claim that their mission would collapse without white leadership. The
same was true for their educational projects, where highly competent
local teachers were replacing them. Medicine became increasingly
their refuge of last resort, for here there was still a huge perceived ‘gap’
between the metropolitan countries and the rest of the globe, and it was
anticipated that the latter areas would continue to require Western skill
and expertise as provided by Western medical workers long after they
had ceased to be ruled directly or indirectly by the colonial powers.
Here, it seemed, was the most fruitful prospect for a continuing
missionary engagement in a postcolonial world. Missionaries were, in
future, to be the bearers of medical modernity to the ‘underdeveloped’.
The focus was switching from saving the ‘sin-sick body’ as a part
of a ‘civilising mission’ to curing the pathological body through
‘developmental aid’.
This all helps explain the fact that the new doctor for the Bhil
mission, Margaret Johnson, had been dispatched to take over the
running of a hospital – Lusadiya – that was by then being run entirely
by local converts as a community-based resource. The doctor in charge,
Daniel Christian, had been the first Bhil to qualify as a doctor, and
he was by the year of her arrival, 1941, managing the institution
competently. Second to him was the nurse, Shanti Joria, who was
popularising the maternity work of the mission in the region. Her
brother, Suleman Joria, had been trained locally as a dispenser, and he
made up the prescriptions. There was also a dresser called Walji Bada,
who looked after any patients who required bandaging.8 A process of
indigenisation had been accomplished, and it was now being reversed.
In her initial reports on the hospital at Lusadiya, Margaret Johnson
made no mention of this remarkable fact. Her gaze – that of a highly
skilled doctor and surgeon fresh from Britain – was, rather, directed at
its many obvious shortcomings. She noted that it consisted of four
buildings made of local brick and tiles, with mud floors, which were
scattered over a craggy hillock. One of these was the dispensary, where
[ 192 ]

MEDICAL MODERNITY
Dr Daniel Christian saw the outpatients and where the medicine was
stored. There were a labour bed and a cupboard of surgical instruments,
some of which had been purchased by Dr Frank Reid as army surplus
stock. While there was a good range of equipment for eye operations,
there were few instruments suited for abdominal and gynaecological
surgery. A proper operating table was needed – the labour bed had a
habit of collapsing without warning. The other three buildings housed
the so-called ‘family wards’ for inpatients. These consisted of eleven
small rooms for patients, each with a veranda and an attached kitchen.
Besides each patient there were – invariably – a number of accompany-
ing relatives and friends who accommodated themselves on the floor of
the room or veranda and cooked in the kitchen. There were, Margaret
Johnson discovered, only five mattresses, six tattered sheets and two
pillows to share between the eleven beds. The windows of these ‘wards’
were unglazed, allowing birds to nest in the rooms. There was no elec-
tricity or independent water source for the hospital, and it was without
latrines or wash-places.9
The scene was thus set for the ‘modernisation’ of the hospital under
the expert guidance and leadership of a doctor fresh from Britain. It was
not once asked whether such a development would be sustainable in
the long run, given that it was already being foreseen that the days of
the white missionaries in India were numbered. Writing at the same
time, Margaret Johnson’s husband Paul noted that some Indian
Christians were urging the missionaries to leave India as soon as pos-
sible so that they could run their churches themselves, and he acknowl-
edged that this was inevitable sooner or later.10 However, rather than
consolidate what had been achieved and hand over power quickly at
every level, including the medical, the two inaugurated a strategy that
would require their presence and the presence of future white mission-
aries for many years hence. Like his predecessors, Johnson continued to
repeat the mantra of Bhil ‘primitivism’ and the need for continuing
white guidance and leadership, stating in 1942 that ‘I presume it will
be our increasing concern to wean them [the Bhils] from this deadening
and initiative-sapping dependence on the Mission. While this weaning
process is going on, it seems to me essential that our mission staff
should be as adequate as possible to meet the needs of training the
leaders of this very simple community.’11 In arguing thus, he ignored
the fact that Jakhi Kanji Asari had been working as an ordained priest
since 1928, that there were also several Bhil lay pastors who played a
crucial role in running the church, and that local Bhils were already
running the hospital and working as schoolteachers in many of the
schools. Rather than acknowledge this success, he could see only the
need for further ‘training’ under white tutelage. The stage was thus set
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for the final phase of the work of CMS missionaries amongst the Bhils,
which saw the building-up of a flourishing modern hospital. It proved,
however, to be an achievement built on sand, as we shall see in the next
chapter.
A modern hospital for Lusadiya

Before Margaret and Paul Johnson began their work amongst the Bhils,
they spent several months in 1941 travelling around India and spend-
ing time at other medical missions so that they could gain experience
of the sort of work that Margaret would be doing as a doctor, surgeon
and hospital administrator once they arrived at Lusadiya. Between
March and November of that year, she gained experience of twelve
mission hospitals in all.12 She then looked after the dispensary at
Biladiya for a few months after that, before taking charge of the hospi-
tal at Lusadiya from Daniel Christian in June 1942.13 A new outpatient
block had just been completed, consisting of three rooms, each about
five metres square, with a smaller room at one end. These became,
respectively, a consulting room, an operating theatre, a dispensary-
cum-drug store, and a water store-cum-sterilising room. It had a spa-
cious and shady veranda at the front that provided a space for patients
to wait their turn for treatment while an evangelist preached to them.
A smaller veranda at the back was used for dressing and bandaging
those who required it. The old dispensary was turned into another
ward. Margaret Johnson made the operating theatre her domain,
examining all of the women and children outpatients there. She left the
consulting room to Daniel Christian, who saw all the male outpatients.
The two doctors began each day with a combined round of the
inpatients in their separate wardrooms. Margaret Johnson initiated a
system of keeping a case record for each patient, something not done
before.14
Writing in November 1942, Dr H. Anderson, the medical superin-
tendent of the CMS in London, told Margaret Johnson that expansion
work would largely have to be financed from earnings and donations
rather than by any large CMS grants.15 She therefore opened a savings
account into which funds could be deposited for this purpose. The first
necessity, so far as she was concerned, was a source of water, and she
ordered work to begin on excavating a well. The site being on solid rock,
the missionaries had to blast their way down with dynamite. It could
not however be completed until 1948, because of the wartime dearth of
the cement needed to line the walls. In 1945, work began on a septic
tank, attached latrines and a washhouse.16 Because of the wartime
shortages, the missionaries decided to manufacture their own bricks,
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
4 Outpatients being treated on the veranda of Lusadiya Hospital, 1943.
and clay was dug out, hand-moulded, sun-dried and baked in a make-
shift kiln by the river at Lusadiya.17
As yet, Margaret Johnson was unable to make use of her greatest
skill, that of a surgeon. She had studied medicine at Liverpool
University, graduating with distinction in gynaecology and obstetrics
in 1934, and then gained further surgical qualifications at Edinburgh in
1937. She had proved extremely adept in surgical work, and could easily
have found a good appointment in Britain, particularly during a time –
that of the Second World War – when prospects for women in skilled
vocations had opened up considerably. She had, however, already deter-
mined to become a medical missionary.18 Writing in early 1944, she
regretted that the missionaries were very restricted by their facilities at
Lusadiya and that she was prepared to carry out major surgery only
when it was imperative. The patients did not as yet have great confi-
dence in her abilities in this respect, and neither did she, given the state
of the operating theatre and equipment. The most common major
surgery performed in 1943 had been operations to remove stones in the
bladder. There was a steady demand for cataract operations, with a
waiting list for this procedure.19 The missionaries had only one small
steriliser, which restricted them to one operation per day. She had an
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operating table made by a local carpenter to replace the rickety deliv-

ery table, but it was a crude makeshift at best.20 Winifred Holdom – the
missionary responsible for women’s work at Lusadiya – acted as anaes-
thetist, though she had no formal training in this skill. Altogether,
twenty-eight major and 296 minor operations were performed in
1943.21
The problem of inadequate equipment was compounded by the lack
of trained and experienced nurses. Shanti Pandav, the one trained nurse,
had married the Bhil clergyman Rupji Bhanat in 1942, and children
soon followed. Being expected to manage the household of her busy
husband and look after her children, she had little time for nursing
during these years. Margaret Johnson arranged for Shanti to give infor-
mal training to Hannah Yusuph, an educated woman who had recently
left her husband after an unhappy marriage.22 The missionaries also
took on Yakub Lakma for similar training. Margaret Johnson was not
altogether satisfied with this arrangement, stating in 1943 that they
really needed a European nurse to supervise and train the staff. She
added: ‘We have had an average of 51 out-patients per working day and
it is quite impossible for the doctors to attend to them and to inpatients,
as well as to all the little points in the wards and in dispensary, and the
training of workers who are ignorant of the simplest hygiene.’23
The dispensers and dressers at the hospital were all locally trained
Christian Bhils. Margaret Johnson provided a vivid description of the
work of the dressers in her report for 1945. That year, they had to treat
an unusually large number of cases of ulcers after the monsoon. ‘Nearly
every day fresh cases arrived, often on a bed in a cloud of flies, feverish
and smelly, plastered with roots, dung, or clay.’ They were admitted as
inpatients. Each day, they would limp painfully into line with groans
and complaints, and be seen one by one. The first dresser cleaned and
swabbed the wound, and the second applied ointments and powder,
helped by an assistant holding the bottles and powder-shaker, while the
third bandaged up. They had to work almost continuously from
morning till four in the afternoon each day. Many of these patients were
found to be suffering from other debilitating conditions, such as
malaria, intestinal parasites and malnutrition. Those who needed were
given quinine injections for their malaria, mepracrine tablets for their
intestinal problems and doses of shark liver oil.24 The latter was a treat-
ment used since the 1920s to speed the healing of damaged tissue.
The numbers of patients grew considerably during these years, putting
further strain on the facilities at Lusadiya. In 1945, for instance, there
were 8,111 new outpatients and 15,866 follow-up visits – making a total
of 23,977 outpatient consultations. This represented an increase of 46 %
in two years. Surgical cases were comparatively stable in numbers, 28
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
major and 305 minor operations being performed in 1945. In all 373 inpa-
tients had been treated (compared with 278 in 1942 – a 34 % increase),
with an average stay each of 22.5 days. Of these, 10 were confinements.25
The demand for beds created a new feature of the hospital – grass-hut
wards. Writing in 1945, Margaret Johnson exclaimed:
When patients are told there is no room, they simply build one for them-
selves! Yesterday I counted six grass huts in the compound, and two
‘rooms’ made by winding a length of sheeting around veranda pillars. We
supply beds and blankets and they spread straw on the ground and build
fireplaces outside, and are as cosy as can be.26
In her report for 1945, Margaret Johnson complained that in the absence
of extra trained workers, the quality of the treatment that each patient
received was bound to decline. Being overstretched, the medical staff
had no time to give adequate teaching to those in training, and the lab-
oratory work was also suffering. 27
In 1946, the mission lost its only Bhil doctor when Daniel Christian
established a private practice in Lusadiya. Margaret Johnson stated in
her annual report that he had been asked to resign and commented: ‘We
have been trying to avert this for years, but eventually he left us no
alternative, and has now set up in private practice opposite the hospi-
tal.’ She saw it as a case of ‘disunity’ that ‘strikes a blow at the heart of
the Christian witness of the whole community’.28 Writing three years
later on a visit to Lusadiya, the medical superintendent for the CMS in
London, Dr H. Anderson, stated that Daniel Christian had been dis-
missed because of his ‘uncontrollable temper and secret private prac-
tice.’ He also believed that he may have felt some resentment at the
way in which the superiority of the British missionaries was asserted
at every turn, as was made very graphic by the ‘enormous size of the
two missionary residences as compared to everything else’.29 According
to a fellow villager, Daniel was upset when Margaret Johnson was
appointed over his head. He had since 1938 built up a good practice and
was attracting many patients. His discontent in this respect led, even-
tually, to his resignation.30
Writing in 1939, Agnes Lees stated that although Daniel Christian
was a person of upright moral character, he had a tendency towards
‘pride and impatience’.31 In 1942, Margaret Johnson commended Daniel
for his keenness, sympathy, eagerness to learn, and even – contra Lees –
his patience, but noted: ‘He is no organiser though and has been unable
to work harmoniously with those under him, thus causing criticism
and bad feeling.’32 Coupled with Anderson’s remark about his ‘uncon-
trollable temper’, this reveals that a major problem was that Daniel had
had a tendency to alienate his colleagues. The missionaries explained
[ 197 ]

this in terms of an over-abrupt transition from savagery to civilisation

that led to emotional instability in the young Bhil doctor. Lees thus
added to her statement about his ‘pride and impatience’ that ‘He has
reached the highest place ever attained by one of our people, and high
places are dangerous places.’33 Anderson concluded his comments by
stating: ‘He had been brought up almost brooded over by a missionary
here, and as so often, I think the psychological strain of the relationship
proved too much for him’.34 This, in other words, was a Bhil out of
place.
There is no doubt that Daniel Christian was a difficult person to live
with. In an interview, his son summed up his character with the
Gujarati word jidi, meaning ‘obstinate, stubborn and dogged’. He had a
tendency to demand complete obedience from subordinates and be
unwilling to tolerate the authority of superiors. He set high personal
standards for himself, and was known for his upright and puritanical
lifestyle. He followed a strict daily routine and lived very frugally. His
staple diet was the common maize roti of the Bhil cultivator, and when
he went out for the day he refused to drink tea or eat any outside snacks,
carrying only some dry chickpeas and a banana for nourishment. He
never smoked or drank liquor. He lacked tolerance towards those who
failed to live up to such ideals. Within his own household, he was
a strict disciplinarian, demanding that his children work hard and
diligently, much to their resentment. His wife Gladys even left him for
a time in the late 1940s, returning to her paternal home in Miraj.
They made up in the 1950s, however, and lived together for the rest of
their lives.35 The picture that we have here is that of a prickly and
unbending man whose high ideals and manners inspired respect but
little affection.
Rather than being a Bhil who had risen too fast and too far in a way
that had thrown him out of balance – as the missionaries alleged – this
was a man who had a very clear agenda for himself and his community.
In this, he came into almost inevitable conflict with the British
missionaries, who still had the ultimate power in the mission. As I have
pointed out in the first section of this chapter, the prime agenda of the
missionaries was to ‘modernise’ the mission while retaining control
over its Eurocentric trajectory, while the leading Bhil Christians sought
above all to further the interests of their community – whether in terms
of moral reform, educational achievement, financial stability or good
health. Daniel Christian had undertaken medical training and returned
to his paternal village in 1938 to provide medical care and Christian
service to his fellows. He could have obtained lucrative employment in
a town or city, but was committed to working within his own com-
munity. Besides his medical practice, he became a leading figure on the
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
church panchayat, ran a Bible class for women and a Sunday school,
and organised various Christian celebrations. He did not particularly
want to create or run a hospital that would be a beacon of Christian
modernity, attracting all sorts of people from various other communi-
ties to Lusadiya. When Margaret Johnson was appointed over his head,
he knew that he was being overruled in this respect. His immediate
reaction was to declare his intention to resign before she arrived, and
indeed in 1941, just before she took up her post, she believed that he
was about to leave.36 He decided, however, to battle it out, trying to
make the best of what for him seemed a bad job. Initially, she was full of
praise for him – for he was a diligent and hard-working practitioner –
but the strains soon developed.
The most serious allegation against Daniel Christian was that he
was carrying on his own ‘private’ practice on the side. The implication
was that he was using mission facilities to earn an income in a corrupt
manner. Again, the problem was one of different expectations. Daniel
saw himself as a healer who was located within his community, and for
him there was no irregularity in blurring the distinction between the
public and the private. A man of strong moral integrity, he clearly saw
nothing at all wrong in this. It led, however, to him being asked to
resign.
In his new practice, Daniel Christian was once again his own master,
a situation that obviously suited him better. Working as he did very close
to the mission hospital, he appeared to be in direct competition with the
missionaries. In fact, outpatient attendances at the mission establish-
ment were higher in the year after his departure (24,629) than they had
been in the year preceding it (23,977). There was more than enough work
for both to handle. Daniel Christian took on all sorts of cases, treating
men, women and children and carrying out deliveries. He built a
good reputation, with many Bhils coming to him for treatment from a
considerable distance. He continued in his church work, and his wife
Gladys became secretary of the Mothers’ Union at Lusadiya.37 Relations
between him and the Johnsons continued to be strained over the next
decade, and he used his considerable influence in the villages to stir up
opposition to her ongoing plans to expand the hospital.38
By 1946, sufficient money had accumulated in the building fund to
start extensive construction work. The bulk of the donations had come
from thakors and other high-caste people who had received treatment
at the hospital. Building began after the rains of 1946, using the bricks
and tiles that had been manufactured in Lusadiya. The first structures
to be completed, early in 1947, were the new quarters for the hospital
staff. They had cement floors – in contrast to the mud floors of the
existing quarters – and had washrooms and a veranda for cooking. The
[ 199 ]

septic tank was also completed, with attached latrines. Margaret

Johnson announced that patients and their relatives who were in future
caught defecating in the hospital grounds would be fined, and she hoped
that it would soon be possible to enjoy a stroll around the area without
being subjected to noisome smells.
Work continued in 1947 on two substantial new private wards with
cement floors. These were designed so that maternity cases could be
accommodated in a way that did not cause offence to local susceptibil-
ities. For three weeks after giving birth, a mother was considered to be
ritually ‘polluting’, and no male relative was allowed even to see her.
The new design provided an entirely enclosed sleeping, washing and
cooking space for the mother, with an adjoining separate room and
kitchen for the relatives. Margaret Johnson justified this compliance
with local proscription by arguing that it would help them to attract far
more maternity cases. From 1948, statistics began to be printed in the
annual report of the mission showing the number of confinements at
the Lusadiya hospital, showing that obstetrics was now considered to
be a significant feature of their work. Nevertheless, the number of cases
remained relatively low. In 1948, there were twenty-seven confine-
ments at Lusadiya, and no deliveries were carried out in people’s homes
by the medical staff. Even ten years later, in 1958, the numbers had not
risen very much; in that year there were fifty-one confinements in the
hospital, and two deliveries carried out at home.
The hospital continued to lack any facilities for refrigeration, which
meant that certain medicines, such as penicillin, could not be kept
there during the hotter months of the year. The medical staff also
needed a still to make distilled water for intravenous injections, which
were becoming increasingly popular. The best they could do was to
collect rainwater from the roof in the monsoon, which was hardly a
satisfactory solution.39
The hospital also gained an ambulance in 1946. Previously, the only
motorised vehicle that was available to the mission was Charles Shaw’s
car, and this had been practically useless during the Second World War,
when petrol was very hard to obtain. The new vehicle – a Red Cross
ambulance donated by the Bombay medical department – was used to
transport patients, mission workers and even building materials. It was
often packed with people; on one trip from Biladiya to Lusadiya seven-
teen ‘patients, mothers, mothers-to-be and babies’ were recorded as
travelling in it, bringing with them ‘mountains of luggage’.40
In the same year, Margaret Johnson established a health insurance
scheme for Christians. It cost Rs. 5 a year for a family, Rs. 2 for an
individual. Membership entitled a family or person to free ‘ordinary’
medicine, surgical procedures and hospital treatment for up to a month.
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
If patent medicine or an injection was required, half the cost was paid.
People were somewhat suspicious of the scheme at first, but gradually,
as the benefits were observed, more and more families took it up. By
the end of the first year, 170 people were so covered, at an average cost
of one rupee per head.41
It proved hard to find a permanent replacement for Daniel Christian,
and for a time Margaret Johnson was the only doctor at the hospital.
Although fresh recruits joined her in time, none stayed for long in this
isolated spot. Indeed, one was so distressed by what he saw on his
arrival that he left without even meeting the Johnsons. They were
however joined in 1948 by a fully qualified nurse from Britain, Margaret
Kirk. Writing soon after, Margaret Johnson reported of her work:
Sister Kirk’s influence is at work everywhere, in fact the Bhil staff are
beginning to appreciate the fact that previously they had no idea of
nursing at all. It is a drawback that none of them have seen a hospital, as
we know it, with general wards and white tiles etc., but as no training
school in India will take pupils who have not done 3rd standard English,
these Bhils who have only learnt the vernacular cannot be sent for
Nurses’ training.42
In 1950, the mission managed to obtain the services of a Telegu-

speaking Anglican couple trained in Madras, Dr Azariah and Dr Vijayam
Ashirvadam. Azariah Ashirvadam was an expert in the treatment of
tuberculosis, and his experience in this respect brought, according to
Margaret Johnson, a complete change in outlook at Lusadiya. Although
missionaries working in the area had reported tuberculosis from the late
nineteenth century onwards, they had not hitherto regarded it as a major
health issue.43 Margaret Johnson was already conscious of the fact that
large numbers of Bhils suffered from the disease, reporting in 1948 that
tuberculosis ‘is rampant in these villages’ and that the missionaries
saw cases daily that were in urgent need of hospital treatment. She
believed that it had developed in many cases from pneumonia that had
not been treated. Sufferers were too poor to go for treatment in special-
ist sanatoria, and their only hope was a long stay at Lusadiya or
Biladiya.44 Azariah Ashirvadam made the missionaries very conscious
of the fact that, in his words, ‘in India there is one patient dying from
tuberculosis for every one minute’.45 He made an effort to detect cases
amongst the mission staff and school pupils, and found that two of their
schoolmasters, a boy at the Biladiya boarding school and the hospital
driver were suffering from the disease. There were many other cases in
the area as a whole of tuberculosis of the lungs, abdomen, bones and so
on. He began treatment with the new drug streptomycin – discovered in
1944 – which successfully inhibited the development of the disease.
[ 201 ]

It was however an expensive remedy, and the mission could afford to

provide it only in critical cases, or for those who had the means to pay.
It also invested in some special apparatus for artificial pneumothorax,
or collapse therapy. One major drawback was that without electricity
the medical workers were unable to carry out X-rays, and an electric
generator and X-ray machine were added to their list of needs. In the
meantime, they used tests that measured blood sedimentation rates,
which proved an effective means of monitoring the progress of the
disease and their treatment of it. They set aside a separate block of
rooms for such patients, and they were soon full.46
Tuberculosis had in India become something of a speciality for
medical missions. There were at that time eleven sanatoria run by mis-
sions in different parts of India, and half of the total number of beds for
Indian tuberculosis patients were in mission institutions. The most
famous of these was the Union Mission Tuberculosis Sanatorium at
Arogyavaram, in the Telegu-speaking region of Madras Presidency, an
institution that the Ashirvadams would have been familiar with as
they were from that region. The Indian state governments saw this as
an area in which they could work in co-operation with missionaries,
and recently the government of the Central Provinces had paid for the
erection of two wards for forty patients in a mission sanatorium there.47
Here, it appeared, might be an area that could attract government
support for the hospital at Lusadiya.
Writing in 1952, Vijayam Ashirvadam noted that at Lusadiya the
medical staff often had to treat tuberculosis that had reached a very
advanced and complex stage. The disease carried a strong social stigma,
and many people refused to come for treatment until they were seriously
ill. Without an X-ray machine, it was hard to carry out such treatment
in a satisfactory manner. Those who came at the early stage and main-
tained their treatment were cured in most cases, though she had to report
with regret that two promising young Christians had died because they
failed to follow the prescribed regime.48 Patients often stayed for several
months. In 1952 the medical staff treated a total of ninety-six tubercu-
losis inpatients, in the following year eighty-two. In the case of patients
from a poorer background, who often came in a highly emaciated state,
a diet rich in milk and eggs helped them to build their body weight and
thus fight the disease. Milk and eggs were not at that time consumed to
any extent by most Bhils.49 By 1953, Lusadiya was gaining a wide repu-
tation for this work, and the hospital were receiving more applications
for admission than it could accept. Unfortunately, at the end of that year
the Ashirvadams had to leave for family reasons.50
Despite this, the work that they had initiated flourished and even
took off in new directions. Word spread throughout the region that the
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
clean and pure air at Lusadiya was particularly efficacious for the cure
of tuberculosis. The large number of neem trees in the hospital
compound were said to enhance this effect by further purifying the
atmosphere. The water from the well also gained a reputation for its
healing properties. Many of the patients were housed in grass huts that
were likewise considered to have particular health-bearing qualities.
Some even said that the large numbers of goats in the vicinity added to
this overall effect as their urine and stools countered the tuberculosis
bacilli, and patients in some cases insisted that a goat be tethered to the
legs of their bed at night. Margaret Johnson, who was well aware of the
importance of belief in healing, went along with this. In time, more and
more people from distant towns and cities began to book themselves in
for treatment at Lusadiya, or even to just come for a holiday in a roman-
tic and peaceful setting away from the crowd. As such people had
plenty of money that could be used for the benefit of the hospital, they
were accommodated in the grass huts.51
Malaria continued to be the single most debilitating disease for the
people of this area. It flared up during the monsoon and its aftermath,
being less virulent in years of poor rainfall. It could at times be fatal. In
severe cases, patients were admitted to the hospital and administered
intravenous quinine, mepracrine drips or chloroquine. These treat-
ments were not always effective in advanced cases or with the cerebral,
or falciparum, variety of the disease. The hospital itself was sprayed
with DDT, and prophylactics were given to staff and patients. Those
who were covered by the health insurance scheme were from 1950
advised to take an anti-malarial prophylactic during the monsoon
period. The few who took the tablets regularly were found to be remark-
ably free from the disease, while those who failed to do so suffered
accordingly. This, according to Margaret Johnson, helped to impress on
others the value of such medication.52 A government programme for
intensive spraying of DDT that was funded by the World Health
Organization was implemented in Sabarkantha District from 1954
onwards, with all houses being sprayed by a team of government
workers. This saw a reduction in malaria for a time.53 In 1958, with the
disease once more extremely virulent, the mission acquired a stock of
mosquito nets for patients, which could also be purchased by those who
visited the hospital for six rupees apiece.54
Epidemic diseases could be a killer also, particularly for children.
These were often worst after periods of scarcity, when the malnour-
ished had low resistance. In 1949, for example, there were heavy rains
after two years of scarcity, which brought epidemics of gastro-enteritis,
dysentery, smallpox, typhoid, mumps and whooping cough. Sulpha
drugs were used in cases of dysentery. There were also occasional
[ 203 ]

epidemics of cholera, and anti-cholera injections were given at such

times. Those who fell ill with the disease were – if possible – rushed to
the hospital and given an intravenous drip.55
In 1952 a new operating theatre, labour room, women’s consulting
room and laboratory were added to the dispensary block. Construction
had started in the previous year, using locally manufactured bricks and
roof tiles as much as possible. Sand and gravel were brought from the
nearby river bed in bullock carts and mixed with lime in a large circu-
lar mixer operated by bullocks, while carpenters transformed logs into
doors and store-cupboards. Other materials, such as glass and water
pipes, had to be brought from outside by lorry.56 The operating theatre
was completed first and was opened ceremoniously in January 1952 by
the Bishop of Bombay. It boasted running water from a tap, concealed
drainage, washable walls and an asbestos-cement ceiling. Margaret
Johnson was thrilled, commenting: ‘No longer can the stray squirrel or
inquisitive sparrow menace our sterile operative field. We feel the
height of modernity!’57 The other new buildings were completed later
that year. The operating theatre was named ‘Shanti’ (peace), the labour
ward ‘Anand’ (joy), the women’s consulting room ‘Prem’ (love), and the
veranda where the outpatients waited for treatment ‘Dhiraj’ (patience).
The total cost was Rs. 12,000 for the buildings and Rs. 3,000 for the
equipment, leaving the mission Rs. 2,000 in debt. 58
Looking back at the successful completion of this phase of growth,
Margaret Johnson remarked: ‘We pray that this material extension may
have its counterpart of spiritual expansion so that our medical work
may give unmistakable witness to the gospel of love.’59 Azariah
Ashirvadam, for his part, enthused over the new pathological labora-
tory which he and his wife had played a leading role in designing:
As Pasteur once said: ‘Take interest I beseech you in those institutions

which we designate under the expressive name of laboratory. Demand
that they may be advanced. They are the temples of wealth and of the
future’. In these laboratories humanity grows greater, stronger, and
richer.60
Besides discovering, in common with Margaret Johnson, a spiritual

dimension to their modernisation programme, he also saw it as a step
up the ladder of human evolution.
Already, Margaret Johnson was planning to replace these improved
facilities with an entirely new and much larger building to house thirty
or more inpatients, a surgical and midwifery unit, offices, storerooms,
a prayer room and a library. The mission would generate its own elec-
tricity, and have an X-ray unit. The existing hospital was for the first
time managing to balance its routine expenditure with its income, and
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
she anticipated that in time it might earn a sufficient annual surplus

to subsidise other areas of mission work, such as education and pas-
toral work. Her ambitions required major funding, and she canvassed
the Bombay government for a grant. An inspection by the Sabarkantha
District Civil Surgeon led to a promise of Rs. 50,000. She also per-
suaded twenty-six influential businessmen and professionals from
Sabarkantha District to back an appeal for funds, and set about pres-
surising them and others to donate.61
Fundraising continued over the next few years, with the missionar-
ies touring the villages collecting money in cash for the new hospital.62
While the money gradually accumulated, they tackled the problem of
lack of accommodation in the existing wards by constructing some
Bhil-style houses of bamboo plastered with mud and with tiled roofs.
They cost Rs. 300 each. The number of beds was increased by this
means to fifty. Often, in practice, many more patients were being
treated. When there were no beds available, patients brought their own
bedding, or hired it from a local shop, and settled on the veranda.
During 1954, there were 908 inpatients in all, spending an average of
fifteen days at the hospital. The mission also improved the water-
supply system and completed two washrooms for patients and their rel-
atives.63
While on furlough in England in 1952, the Johnsons purchased a
Land Rover and shipped it to India. There, a body was built on the
chassis that enabled it to be used as an ambulance and for a travelling
clinic.64 The old ambulance was still in service, but it was becoming
increasingly expensive to keep on the road, as it did only nineteen kilo-
metres to the gallon, in contrast to the Land Rover’s forty-eight.65
Having a four-wheel drive, the Land Rover was particularly useful
during the monsoon. Even then, it sometimes became bogged down in
the mud and had to be dragged out by bullocks.66 The main drawback
was that as it was a British-made vehicle, the parts for it were expen-
sive and hard to obtain in India, in contrast to its main rival, the
American Jeep, which began to be manufactured on licence in India
during the 1950s.67 The Land Rover was in use constantly, bringing sup-
plies for the Lusadiya mission, including the hospital, from the railway
station at Modasa, fetching building materials, carrying patients in on
stretchers, conveying mission staff, and taking medical workers for
outside day-clinics. Within five years it was practically worn out with
overuse on the rough, pot-holed village roads.68
The expanding facilities brought a need for extra hospital assistants,
with promising young Bhils being sent for training in larger mission
hospitals in central Gujarat. In October 1954, Kadva Yohan passed
his hospital technician’s exam and began work as the first full-time
[ 205 ]

laboratory worker at Lusadiya, using a microscope to test patients’

blood samples in the new laboratory. By this means he diagnosed many
cases of malaria and dysentery, as expected, but also discovered an
unanticipated number of cases of hookworm and filariasis.69 Girls who
were intended for nursing or midwifery had to learn some English as
well so as to be able to pass their exams in these subjects.70 The second
Bhil woman to qualify as a nurse after Shanti Bhanat was Maniben
Amra – also a native of Biladiya – who returned from her training to
work at Lusadiya in 1955. Margaret Kirk instituted a system of night
duty in 1954, so for the first time there was round-the-clock care for the
inpatients. The young junior assistants who carried out much of this
work insisted on always having at least one companion, owing to a
strong fear of ghosts. As Kirk admitted: ‘as the hospital is overrun with
rats, the noises at night are quite terrifying’.71 The assistants did not
always conform to the expected work discipline; on one occasion when
she was called out suddenly in the middle of the night, Kirk found that
one of the assistants had gone off to attend a wedding feast in a nearby
village.
The hospital assistants knew that wages at Lusadiya were signifi-
cantly lower than those outside, particularly those paid by government
medical institutions. In 1954 they agitated for better pay. Margaret
Johnson told them that unlike the government, the mission could not
raise taxes to pay such expenses and that there was insufficient money
in the hospital coffers to afford their demands. Later that year, nonethe-
less, she agreed to increase their wages somewhat.72 She was also dis-
tressed to discover that she could not rely on the integrity of all of her
staff, for the senior dispenser, Harji Kauda, was found to be stealing the
drugs in his care. The first time he was discovered he was let off with
a warning, but he was once more found with missing drugs in his pos-
session and dismissed. He refused to admit that he was in any way in
the wrong; like Daniel Christian, he appears not to have appreciated the
difference between what the missionaries classed as the public and the
private. The Bishop of Bombay punished him for his intransigence with
minor excommunication.73
With the increase in staff numbers, a system of staff grading was
established in 1955. A mission nurse from Pune with forty years of
experience called Grace Bigriker came to help put the new system in
place. She was designated as hospital matron – being the first person to
hold such a title at Lusadiya. She took charge of all the drugs, linen and
equipment, and also acted as the anaesthetist in operations. She wrote
out the routines for each department and displayed them on a notice
board so that everyone would be clear as to their particular duties.
She gave regular training lectures for first-, second- and third-year staff,
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
and held exams allowing each of them to progress to the next level.
Each was given one, two or three red cloth stripes to wear on their
shoulder according to their grade. A further exam was set for those who
had completed the third grade, and if they passed they were then classed
as a ‘staff nurse’, designated by a red cross on their shirt or blouse
pocket. According to Kirk: ‘All this has given everyone something defi-
nite to work for, resulting in a higher standard of care and efficiency,
and a much greater interest shown in all departments of nursing’.74
Margaret Kirk established an infant and antenatal clinic at the hos-
pital in 1955. Babies were examined and weighed, and mothers given
advice on diet and upbringing. Anti-malarial and vitamin tablets were
also given out. Kirk found it hard to persuade young mothers to attend
regularly, finding that they often put in an appearance only when they
or their babies were ill. Initially, only Christian mothers came, though
the clinic was open to non-Christians also. Kirk found that babies were
fed entirely on breast milk for their first two years, after which they
were given small amounts of the normal food of the Bhils, such as
maize roti and dishes made with a lot of chilli. For the first six to eight
months, babies were generally healthy, but from about nine months to
three years old they were often weak and anaemic, suffering from defi-
ciency diseases and lacking resistance to infections. This was, she
believed, above all due to poor feeding. She felt that the problem could
be best tackled with regular health visiting to mothers in their villages.
This would allow problems to be found and treated before they caused
permanent damage to children. For this, however, the mission needed
a full-time health visitor.75 Two years later, the infant clinic was
reported to be flourishing, with about sixty babies and toddlers being
brought each Wednesday to be weighed and given milk, shark liver oil
and vitamins.76
One of the great problems that the mission faced with such work was
that in general women and young children had a low entitlement to
food in families. The best of whatever could be afforded was provided
to the men, with the justification being that they needed to be well
nourished to carry out their hard work. In fact, women also had to work
extremely hard, becoming malnourished and susceptible to disease.
Women who were unable to bear children were considered practically
worthless, having perhaps the lowest claim to food and with no money
being made available to them for any medical treatment. As Margaret
Johnson remarked in 1958: ‘A woman who cannot have her babies nor-
mally is an incubus and better dead: such is the village verdict.’77 She
cited a harrowing case of this. In 1958, a woman of the Hindu black-
smith caste came to her with advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. She
had treated this woman previously in 1953, when she had been brought
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in after two days of obstructed labour. Margaret Johnson had performed

a caesarean section – the first she had carried out at Lusadiya – and she
had delivered a healthy baby boy. A photograph captioned ‘The radiant
Hindu mother with her baby son’ was published in the CMS Outlook
magazine in October of that year.78 Since then, however, the woman
had lost two babies. When she fell ill in 1958, her husband refused to
pay for any treatment, on the grounds that she had failed as a mother
and was no longer worth maintaining. She saved up five rupees of her
own and walked twenty-four kilometres to the hospital to ask for ‘an
injection and medicine’. There was a strong belief in the villages that
all health problems could be sorted out by a ‘doctor’ with a single injec-
tion. Margaret Johnson commented: ‘She had absolute faith that I could
cure her, but I was helpless, and she went home, not only to die, but in
the process infect 5 other members of her village circle, probably
including the precious son’.79
With its improved facilities, the reputation of the hospital spread
throughout the region. People began to travel greater and greater dis-
tances for treatment, as both outpatients and inpatients. Many of these
had heard about the hospital from friends, while some brought doctors’
letters and X-rays. One of the attractions, according to Margaret
Johnson, was that it was not a moneymaking venture, and the mission
was appreciated for the way in which it that they put the welfare of
patients above profits. She was, however, still very conscious of the
inadequacy of its facilities, lacking as it did a raised tank to supply
running water, electricity and X-ray facilities.80
In 1955, after the Ashirvadams left, there was a series of five
temporary doctors before the missionaries managed to recruit
Dr I. J. Pukadyil. Dr Arthur Banks, a medical missionary from Britain,
joined them in 1957. He arrived to find a crisis, for in May it was dis-
covered that Pukadyil had made the Bhil nurse Maniben Amra pregnant
and had then carried out an abortion on her secretly. He was dismissed,
and Maniben decided also to leave and take further training in Bombay.
She was informed that she could seek re-employment if and when she
married. Pukadyil was furious about his dismissal, and as he left issued
threats that he would see that the hospital was ruined.81
In 1955, plans were drawn up for a new inpatient block to be built
across the road from the existing hospital. The plan was to move the
hospital gradually to the new site, leaving the old buildings for use only
by tuberculosis patients. Work began in 1956, with the site being pre-
pared initially by a bulldozer in eight hours – a sight that caused amaze-
ment in the village, as huge boulders were heaved aside and a slope was
levelled. Again, locally manufactured bricks were used for the building.
It was on a wholly different scale from the old hospital, being a large
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
5 Dr Margaret Johnson seeing outpatient, Lusadiya Hospital, 1955.
multi-roomed block. In it were two ten-bed wards with duty rooms and
sanitary facilities, and an administrative unit, consisting of offices for
the doctors and head nurse, an X-ray room and a storeroom. The build-
ing had a flat roof of reinforced concrete designed to allow a second
storey to be erected when funds became available. There was a second-
hand generator provided by a well-wisher from Bombay, so that for the
first time the mission had electric power. Banks had brought with him
from England a second-hand X-ray machine that could now be operated
using the new power supply. A water tower was also built, financed
from collections from England, and a 300-gallon iron tank hoisted on
top. Once a network of pipes was laid, running water became available
from taps for the first time.82 In all, it cost Rs. 70,000, and it left the
mission in debt.83
Because funds had run out, the missionaries were unable to complete
parts of the plan, such as the provision of all of the desired wards. There
were now two wards, one for men – named ‘Birkett’ in honour of the
original founder of the hospital – and one for women named ‘Mariam’.
In addition, there were some individual rooms for the dangerously ill,
the highly infectious or the well-to-do who could afford to pay
extra for the facility. In all, there were beds for eighty inpatients.
Round-the-clock nursing was provided in the new wards, obviating the
need for care by relatives. Margaret Johnson lauded this new system,
[ 209 ]

complaining that the separate rooms of the old hospital had made it like
a ‘rabbit warren’ with much of the care being left to unskilled relatives.
The patients themselves were not always so positive about these
changes, for their relatives – who still came – were given no separate
sleeping spaces or cooking facilities in the new wards. When a new
nurse, Eve Auerbach, arrived from London in 1958, she was astonished
to find on her first night round that there was multi-occupancy in many
beds, with relatives sleeping with the patients. Higher-caste patients
and their relatives had to occupy beds alongside those they considered
lower in the social scale, something they found unsettling. Some of
the novel facilities were misunderstood. Patients and relatives, for
example, often threw all of their rubbish down the lavatories, causing
blockages. They failed to turn off the new taps, so that the tank often
ran dry. Margaret Johnson had to direct her staff to be constantly
vigilant to prevent these abuses of their hard-earned new facilities.84
With electric lighting, work at the hospital could be carried on more
efficiently and, if necessary, late into the night. Seen from afar, the
twinkling lights were a novelty in the area – many people came to
Lusadiya just to see this wonder.85 A strip of 100 watt bulbs was rigged
up to provide light in the operating theatre, giving better illumination
during daytime operations and allowing emergency surgery to be per-
formed at night. The number of operations increased – 158 major and
925 minor operations were performed in 1958. Eighty-three babies were
also delivered in that year.86 One of the surgical assistants, Ashraydas
Suvera – who was a Bhil from Lusdaiya with pharmaceutical qualifica-
tions – recalled in an interview how efficient the surgical staff became
as a team in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They worked very fast,
taking out an appendix in fifteen minutes, or fixing a hernia in little
more time. They were meant to carry out only sixteen operations in a
day, but he remembered once doing twenty-nine.87 The X-ray unit was
now up and running under the charge of a new recruit, Dr Robert Singh,
who had been trained in radiology at the Christian hospital at Vellore.
He was also an experienced eye-surgeon. He had offered his services as
he wanted the challenge of a ‘pioneering job’.88 His wife, Florence, was
also medically trained, having gained her medical degree at the
Christian women’s medical college at Ludhiana.89
With no comparable modern hospital nearer than 150 kilometres
away, patient numbers continued to swell. The building of the first
metalled road to Lusadiya in 1953 and inauguration of a regular three-
times-a-day bus service meant that it had also become much easier to
reach. Writing in 1960, Margaret Johnson said that the hospital staff had
come to dread the arrival of each bus bearing its fresh load of patients.
They did not, however, have the heart to turn people away who needed
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
help.90 The situation was made worse by the constant haemorrhage of

staff who were attracted by the higher pay and better living conditions
in the towns and cities of central Gujarat. This left the remaining staff
having to work long hours at high pressure, and several fell ill as a
result. Margaret Johnson had, in addition, the strain of supervising the
construction of the new hospital and fundraising against a background
of continuing debt. She also had to face criticism from some Bhil
Christians, who felt that the educational work of the mission was being
starved of funds in favour of the medical work, and that such a big hos-
pital was an over-indulgence.91 Her health began to deteriorate; in 1957,
she went down with a debilitating glandular infection, which was fol-
lowed by a severe bout of dysentery in 1958. She and Paul, fearing per-
manent damage to their health caused by such strains, began actively
to plan their retirement. In the meantime, they took furlough in
England during 1959–60. This in itself brought a setback, for when word
got round that ‘Memsahib’ was away, far fewer patients came to
Lusadiya, and the income of the hospital fell by more than half.92
Writing in 1959, Margaret Johnson stated that ‘our Christian witness
in medical work is vital to the growing church’.93 For her, there could
be no resting on her laurels: the hospital had to expand and improve if
it was to flourish for this important end. The problem was that more
and more funding was required. For some years the Bombay State
authorities had been urging the missionaries to make Lusadiya a centre
for the training of nurses, and she hoped that this would be possible
once they had sufficient experienced staff to act as teachers.94 She felt
that it was best first to start a training school for dais (midwives), and
extend this to nurses later. She accepted that this would all involve a
further extensive building programme.95 Nonetheless, they needed to
do this to keep up with the times, for educated young people now
demanded paper qualifications. As she stated in 1959: ‘In modern India
all keen youngsters demand recognised certificates of training so that
we are losing the best of our young Christians to the government insti-
tutions.’96 There were other needs also, such as more wards and
kitchens for the patients, and a new outpatient unit. An upper floor was
planned for the main building as well, with a surgical and maternity
unit. The Land Rover also had to be replaced by a heavier-duty Jeep.97
Worrying about what would happen once she retired, Margaret
Johnson wrote in 1959: ‘The Bhil Church is not in a position to take
over yet, and we have found no Indian doctor suitable or prepared to
take over the Medical Superintendency.’98 Although Arthur Banks
acted in this capacity on a temporary basis while she was on furlough
in 1959–60, the time had clearly arrived for an Indian to take over per-
manently. It was decided eventually that Robert Singh was the most
[ 211 ]

suitable candidate, and arrangements were made for him to be sent to

England for further surgical training.99 He left in February 1961 and
returned in March 1963. In the following month, April 1963, Margaret
Johnson handed over charge and with Paul departed for England.100
There was the expected drop in numbers after she had gone, but work
was still brisk, and the number of operations and X-ray examinations
even increased in the following months. Road, railway and dam con-
struction works by the government in the area brought a surge in acci-
dent cases, and Singh was able to put his new expertise gained in
England in casualty and orthopaedic work to good use. As a result of all
this, the hospital income went up that year. Overall, Singh reported
that the services of the hospital continued to be in strong demand, and
that the mission would soon have to expand its surgical, radiological
and tuberculosis units. He had, it said, weathered the problem of tran-
sition and the local people had discovered that even without the
Johnsons:
our hospital team is still giving the same good Christian service and that
the workers are full of missionary zeal to help them in their sickness.
Patients and their relatives have now realised that we are all disciples of
Christ, our Lord, who heals the physically and mentally ill and that we
follow His commandment ‘To go unto all people to preach the gospel of
love and to heal the sick.’101
This was, however, to be the last report that he was to write on an enter-
prise that was about to collapse.
Perceptions of healing
Although the emphasis during these years was on creating a beacon of
medical modernity at Lusadiya, the Bhils were drawn to the hospital
not so much because they admired its new technologies and facilities,
but because Margaret Johnson had reputation for being a healer of extra-
ordinary power. This had begun at Biladiya, where she practised briefly
in 1941–42, before moving to Lusadiya. Once news was about that a
new doctor had arrived, patients were soon streaming in from as far as
fifty kilometres away. In the first three months of 1942, she treated
about three thousand patients in all. She found that the local Christian
women were prepared to come to the dispensary ward for their con-
finements, and after it happened that the first four babies that she deliv-
ered were all boys, there was a rush in demand for this service, with
pregnant women even coming for check-ups. Word had spread that a
new ‘English doctor’ had arrived with wondrous powers, which in this
case extended to influencing the sex of babies.102 A year later she noted
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
how ‘women come from near and far expecting me to do magical things
by touching their pulse’.103 Writing many years later, a clergyman based
at Lusadiya, the Reverend W. S. Bhagora, said that former patients of
the hospital had often told him ‘that she was possessing of some godly
power by which she was able to heal the sick people’. It was believed
that even if her shadow fell on a sick person he or she had a good chance
of recovery. This belief, he said, was found amongst both Christian and
non-Christian people.104 Surjibhai Suvera, a Bhil Christian of Lusadiya
who was born in 1929, remembered how when he was once sick she
came to visit him, took his hand in hers and examined him with great
compassion. She was always polite and exuded a spirit of kindness –
you only had to look at her to feel better, such was her demeanour.
People were impressed by the way in which she always held prayers
before starting her day’s work and also before carrying out each opera-
tion, as they felt that her hand was guided by a higher power.105
In all this, it was understood that Margaret Johnson’s power
stemmed from a combination of learnt skills and religious faith, with
her practice being for her not only an expression of her Christian faith,
but also a channel through which the power of a great deity – Jesus
Christ – was invoked for the benefit of her patients. This – it was
believed – gave her the ability to heal in seemingly miraculous ways. In
an analogous manner, the indigenous healers – the buvas and bhopas –
were believed to gain their curative powers from their ability to
combine a hard-learnt practical knowledge of medicinal plants and
healing techniques with divine inspiration. They believed their prac-
tice to be a form of worship, with the power of the supernatural being
channelled through their bodies to provide succour for those who came
to them for help. Indeed, in some parts of Gujarat, such healers
described their power to cure as their bhakti, meaning an act of devo-
tion to a deity.106
Margaret Johnson was not the only medical missionary working in
Gujarat at this time with such a reputation. Dr Bramwell Cook, a New
Zealander who served in the Salvation Army hospital at Anand in
central Gujarat from 1932 to 1952, became famous all over the region
for his great healing abilities. Even high-caste Hindus would insist on
going to him for operations, as they knew that he was sincere in his
practice, unlike many secular doctors, who had a reputation for being
often callous and money-minded. Cook’s pre-operation prayers inspired
trust in this respect – even though they were to a Christian God – with
patients feeling confident that their operation would succeed as a
result.107 In this, such patients were validating a healing practice that
combined biomedical skills with a sincere faith – something that was
perceived as lacking in many other doctors of that day and age.
[ 213 ]

As we have seen in Chapter 7, one of the Birketts’ greatest concerns,

causing them many sleepless nights, had been the continuing hold over
the converts of belief in evil spirits and witchcraft. The issue continued
to be of concern to their successors. The diary of Charles Shaw for
a period in late 1940 provides us with an insight into the ongoing day-
to-day pastoral encounter between the missionaries and their flock in
this respect. Shaw was then based at Lusadiya with his wife Lily. On
2 August 1940, the couple went together to Chhitadara to charge a
Christian woman with using ‘magic’. Four days later, Shaw recorded
that he had managed to make a Christian woman of Lusadiya admit
‘to black magic going on’. Three days later, he and Lily went to
Mewada village to accuse some Christians there ‘of practising magic’.
They all denied it. On 11 September, he addressed the congregation at
Chhitadara on the topic of ‘magic.’ On 8 September the couple had a
discussion with some local Christians about ‘devil-possession’, and to
finish they all ‘prayed that the devil might be cast out’. Two days later,
he grilled another Christian on this topic. On 16 November, he had to
tackle a charge of witchcraft, forcing a confession, and on 5 December
he convened a meeting of church elders to hear charges against three
Christians who were alleged to have been involved in such practices.108
The Shaws and other missionaries of their generation believed very
strongly that the well-being of the church could be maintained – and
the souls of the converts saved – only if such practices were rooted out
energetically. Thus, Agnes Lees – who began working for the mission
in 1916 – stated at the time of her retirement in 1946 that human beings
were naturally evil and drawn to the powers of darkness, but that once
they came under the influence of Jesus Christ, they moved over to the
side of goodness and light. In this way, they passed ‘from darkness to
light, from wrath to salvation, from uncleanness to holiness, and from
being aliens and foreigners to being children of God through faith in
Christ Jesus’.109 From such a standpoint, it was morally wrong to turn
a blind eye to practices that by their nature condemned those who
indulged in them to eternal damnation. The Johnsons, representing a
new generation of missionaries, judged the matter primarily from a
medical rather than a pastoral and theological standpoint. Soon after
her arrival in Lusadiya, Margaret Johnson noted that villagers who took
treatment from local healers such as the buva put themselves at need-
less risk. She noted one case in which a two-year-old boy was suffering
from an easily treatable mastoid infection. He was cauterised behind
his ear with a red-hot poker placed, being burnt to the bone. The burn
turned septic, and by the time he was brought to the hospital it was too
late to save him. For her, such tragedies were the real evil of such beliefs
and practices.110 Paul Johnson largely took the cue from his wife in this
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
respect. In a letter of 1945 he described in detail a propitiation cere-

mony conducted by a buva that he had witnessed, which involved the
sacrifice of a chicken and the expulsion of the evil spirit. He com-
mented that ‘This event took place only five kilometres away from our
Christian Hospital and the sad thing is that the sick person, often in a
dying condition, will be brought to the Hospital.’ For him, this revealed
how the Bhils were still bound by ‘ignorant superstition’.111
From such a standpoint, the prime need was to attack the hold of
‘backwardness’ and ‘ignorance’ through a medical education that
explained the causes of disease, the efficacy of appropriate biomedical
intervention and the need to prevent ill health through hygiene and
sanitation. In this, the missionaries could project themselves as being
in tune with the nation-building and developmental priorities of the
new India. A modern hospital could only be one component of such a
programme – medical outreach through lectures and regular village
clinics was also vital. Margaret Johnson had from the start wanted to
extend the medical work in this direction – one that, as we have seen
in Chapter 10, had until then been largely neglected in the mission –
but understaffing at the hospital, a lack of suitable transport over the
rough and broken roads, and a severe shortage of petrol that had con-
tinued until the late 1940s had all conspired to prevent any significant
outreach work. She was able to rectify this from 1950 onwards, when
she was able to organise regular visits to villages around Lusadiya by a
team consisting of a doctor, a compounder and a lay pastor who
preached to the patients and sold gospels and religious tracts. Besides
holding clinics, they went from house to house trying to discover if
anyone required treatment. Margaret Johnson reported that by this
means:
We . . . often find cases who from their own or their relatives’ inertia
would lie there for months without getting any treatment than the super-
stitious rites practised by everyone in these parts. I am always pointing
out the foolishness of lying down beside a well to die of thirst. The simile
is exact and the cause a combination of laziness, superstition, suspicion
and ignorance, which may be summed up in the one word fatalism.
Village visits can do more to dispel this than a lifetime of sitting in one’s
consulting room.112
Besides treating the sick, they sought to prevent future sickness

through lectures on disease causation, sanitation and hygiene. For
example, they tried to impress on the people the link between stagnant
water and malarial mosquitoes, though, in Margaret Johnson’s words:
‘They don’t believe a word of it.’113 The lay preacher who accompa-
nied them to the villages showed waiting patients picture-books that
[ 215 ]

illustrated each phase of Christ’s life, as well as health charts and

stories with a sanitary moral. The latter had been procured from an
organisation called India Village Service.114 In 1953, the touring group
was joined by one of the mission schoolteachers who had been cured of
tuberculosis through treatment at Lusadiya, who gave similar talks.115
Something of the flavour of this work of medical education was con-
veyed in an interview with Rajnikant Christian, who said that the
mission workers sought above all to convince the people that diseases
were not caused by the blow of an evil spirit (bhutmar), the curse of a
witch (dakhan) or the anger of a goddess (matajino kop), or as a curse
(shrap) caused by the past misdeeds of themselves or their ancestors,
but by a pathological condition that could be cured medically. It was
widely believed, for example, that evil spirits might make people grad-
ually weaken and die while coughing blood. The mission workers
taught them that the real cause was probably tuberculosis, or perhaps
a peptic ulcer. If the former, the blood that was coughed from a diseased
lung would be of a brick-red colour, if the latter, the blood came from
the stomach and was dark red in colour. Doctors, the villagers were
told, could thus diagnose the problem and treat it in the hospital.
Similarly, when a person had a high temperature and began to convulse
and shout in pain, it was not because an evil spirit had entered into his
or her body and was crying out, but because of – most probably – malar-
ial fever, which again could be treated through drugs. The missionaries
used to project pictures on a wall illustrating different diseases. They
also tried to explain the need for medical care in delivery, showing pic-
tures of women’s bodies and explaining, for example, how the common
practice of pressing on the stomach of a woman in labour was likely to
tear the uterus and cause severe injury to the mother.116
The campaign was extended from 1954 in a way that linked the
message of health, hygiene and sanitation with instruction on citizen-
ship, education, sobriety, agricultural improvement and the Christian
way of life. All the mission staff – medical and non-medical alike – were
expected to take part in this. Paul and Margaret Johnson were inspired
by work that was being carried out at a Christian organisation at
Ankleshwar in southern Gujarat called the Rural Service Centre. This
body promoted a range of programmes that were designed to improve
the lot of peasant farmers, such as, in Paul Johnson’s words, ‘literacy,
farmer’s associations, agricultural and poultry improvements, rural
libraries, home crafts, health and sanitation, Bible study and the
Christian Home movement’. They sent two young Bhils there in 1954
to be trained. After their return, the two toured villages teaching
improved agricultural techniques and the need for ‘personal cleanli-
ness, sanitation and drinking “safe” water’. The schoolmasters in the
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MEDICAL MODERNITY
mission schools also were encouraged to focus more strongly on incul-

cating the idea that good citizenship involved ‘knowledge of health and
hygiene, cleanliness, discipline’.117
In the past, the mission workers had sought to capture audiences
through magic-lantern shows that illustrated scenes from the Bible. By
the mid-twentieth century, this particular media was losing its novelty.
The movies had arrived, with, for example, two cinemas plying their
trade at the annual mela at Shamlaji, and a circus as an added attrac-
tion. Faced with such competition, magic-lantern shows could no
longer attract large audiences.118 In 1954, the mission put on the first
film shows of its own when a visiting Methodist missionary arrived
with a portable electric generator, film projector and loudspeakers. His
shows at Lusadiya and Biladiya combined the religious epic King of
Kings with health documentaries. About 2,000 Christians and non-
Christians turned up to view the open-air show at Lusadiya.119 The
mission also acquired a Kerascope filmstrip projector from a donation
by an English well-wisher.120 This was used by the two young men
trained at Ankleshwar at a camp they held in 1955 for twenty-one
Bhil students from the parishes of Lusadiya, Biladiya and Kherwara.
Lectures on ‘marriage, money and giving, health and certain common
diseases’ were illustrated with relevant filmstrips.121 In the same year
a group of Lusadiya women went to a conference at Ankleshwar, and
on their return held regular meetings for women that consisted of a reli-
gious discourse followed by a talk on health and home-making illus-
trated by filmstrips. These attracted large and appreciative audiences,
and there were, according to Margaret Johnson, ‘keen and interested’
discussions of these issues.122 The group also assembled a set of flash
cards and posters that explained about germs, dirt, tetanus, the effects
of drinking dirty water and so on.123
Margaret Johnson believed that a key to breaking down the old
beliefs lay in educating mothers on the causes of disease and the need
for cleanliness and hygiene. For this, she needed to take the message to
women in their villages, but during the early years she had lacked staff
with time to do this.124 This began to be rectified from the mid-1950s.
Gladys Smith, who had been appointed initially as a nanny for Margaret
Johnson’s children, became free for other work when they were sent to
boarding school in early 1955. Smith moved to Biladiya, where she
worked as a village health visitor. She organised baby welfare clinics in
villages in which flash cards and posters were used to dispel ‘ignorance
of infant feeding and care’ and to promote ‘positive health teaching ’125
Efforts were made also to organise meetings for women and establish
local women’s organisations. In 1957, for example, Rupji Bhanat organ-
ised a conference for the women of the Biladiya area that was attended
[ 217 ]

by about sixty women. A projector and films were brought over from
Lusadiya to show religious and health educational films.126 In 1958,
Margaret Johnson established the first Gujarati branch of the Mothers’
Union, based in Lusadiya. Twenty-six women who were willing to
serve their community joined and began visiting homes and instruct-
ing mothers on the need for cleanliness.
From 1957 onwards, Margaret Kirk and two young Bhil women who
had been trained in midwifery made regular medical propaganda tours
to villages around Lusadiya. They showed pictures that set out the
causes of diseases and simple forms of prevention. They also distrib-
uted dried milk, rice and beans to malnourished children in Lusadiya
and three nearby villages, and rice and beans to old and destitute people
and those recovering from severe illnesses. The food came from the
USA under the PL 480 ‘Food for Peace’ programme that had been inau-
gurated in 1954. One difficulty they encountered was that they were in
general prevented from meeting and talking to expectant mothers.
According to Kirk, there was a widespread belief that women should
never take any medicine while pregnant, and it was feared that the
medical workers would try to persuade them otherwise. She gave an
example of a young pregnant woman called Shantibai whom, as an
exception, they had managed to examine. They were gravely concerned
about her weak and sickly condition, but despite strong encourage-
ment, she refused to take any treatment. Her family backed her up in
this. Kirk told them that they were putting her life in danger and that
they should at least take her to Lusadiya for her delivery. As it was
Shantibai gave birth at home, but had to be brought to the hospital six
days later with acute sepsis. Despite being given the latest drugs, she
was by then very weak and she died. Kirk concluded: ‘We are hoping
and praying that as people get to know us better, they will gradually
trust us more, and that we shall be able to break down this most diffi-
cult of all barriers of fear and superstition.’127
Margaret Johnson was well aware that attitudes would not be shifted
overnight. Writing in 1954, she said that ‘It takes time to change the
habits of thousands of years and the village homes are the strongholds
of the old bad habits so it is there that we must tackle them.’128 She
stressed that without gaining the confidence and friendship of often-
suspicious villagers, the missionaries had little change of success.
There were a few hopeful signs. Writing in 1955, she noted that patients
at the hospital were accepting the need for blood tests, and that ‘the
superstition about having their blood drawn off is being dissipated’.129
Other reports were less sanguine. Gladys Smith reported in 1956 that
it was extremely hard to convince Bhil women of the need for hygiene
and preventive measures. When she tried to persuade them, they
[ 218 ]

MEDICAL MODERNITY
replied that it was not necessary, for if their babies or children fell ill
they could always take them to the hospital at Lusadiya or dispensary
at Biladiya for treatment. She noted that even the dispensary staff at
Biladiya continued to be careless over matters of hygiene.130 In all,
progress in this sphere was frustratingly slow, encountering all sorts of
stubborn opposition at every turn.
Despite all of this publicity focusing on the physical causes of ill
health, there was also a continuing emphasis on the psychosomatic in
healing. Patients of all sorts at Lusadiya – whether Christian, non-
Christian Bhils, caste Hindus or Muslims – joined without complaint
in the weekly ritual of prayers, Christian homilies and hymns that was
celebrated on the veranda.131 All those involved regarded this as central
to the healing process. The organic link between the hospital and the
church on the nearby hill was underscored with an annual celebration
of ‘Hospital Sunday.’ This involved a procession by the hospital staff to
the church while singing Christian bhajans, accompanied by drums
and manjira (small cymbals).132
The Christian doctors at the hospital were all, without exception,
firm believers in the efficacy of prayer in treatment. Margaret Johnson
thus reported in 1960 how she and Paul had performed constant prayers
while she was operating to try to save a Bhil woman who had been
burnt severely in a domestic accident. The case seemed hopeless, but
to their amazement, the woman had survived.133 Writing two years
earlier, Arthur Banks wrote about two children whose parents had
removed them from the hospital before they had recovered. He had held
prayers for them, and he later found out that they had made unexpected
progress. The two cases, he said, had ‘convinced me how much more
vital is prayer than our instruments and medicines’. He had established
a Healer Prayer Circle Union to perform mass prayers for sick parish-
ioners.134 Robert Singh wrote in 1964 of a small boy who had been
brought to the hospital with a smashed skull. His brain was exposed
and damaged, and Singh was sure that he would die. He told the boy’s
father that only a miracle could save the child, and that they must pray
to God. Their prayers were, he believed, answered, for the boy soon
recovered ‘miraculously’. ‘From that case’, Singh commented, ‘I have
learnt not to give up hope even for the worst possible case, but to trust
the Lord and do whatever we best can do in our small hospital.’ He felt
that God was using their hospital to show that through faith ‘anything
and everything’ was possible.135
Although the medical missionaries had always sought to augment
their biomedical treatment with prayer, it is possible to detect in these
statements a more confident assertion of the efficacy of prayer, as well
as an attempt to use prayer in treatment in a more systematic way, as
[ 219 ]

in the establishment by Banks of a prayer circle that canvassed the

prayers of the Christians community as a whole to be directed in a
focused manner on particular cases. Thus, while on the one hand the
obsession with banishing all ‘satanic’ healing practices from the life of
the local congregation was fading away to be replaced by a new stress
on the need for medical education, on the other hand there was a
greater emphasis on the role of prayer in healing. In some respects, this
represented an adjustment by the missionaries to the values of the con-
verts, for the Bhil Christians placed a firm emphasis on combating
illness through prayer. In Ghodi village, for example, the congregation
as a whole took it on themselves to visit the houses of sick people to
perform mass prayers. According to Philip Parmar, their results were
such that even those who had not converted had requested them to
come to their houses to perform the prayers. By this means they had
managed to save a non-Christian who was considered to be on his
deathbed.136 The new prominence given to prayer by the Christian
doctors and priests can in this respect be seen as a part of the ongoing
decolonisation and democratisation of the church. But also, new
psychoanalytical theories on the realm of the unconscious in human
behaviour had provided an opening for a more confident assertion
in mainstream Anglican circles of the power of psychosomatic forces
in healing. Theologians could now make a case for the power of
faith and prayer in healing that could no longer be dismissed as mere
superstition.137
We may close this chapter with an anecdote about Margaret Johnson,
related to me in an interview, that sums up many of these particular
themes. Patients often used to tell her what the buva had advised them
with respect to their illness. If on examination she found that the
problem was minor, such as headache or excess gas, she would give
them a note to take to the compounder, prescribing either a B-complex
tablet dissolved in water or perhaps just plain water. After taking this
drink, they would invariably say that they felt better. She would then
tell them that although they had not in fact been given any medicine,
their faith in her medical abilities had cured them. She pointed out that
faith in the buva might have a similar effect, as did faith in God and
prayer. However, she would continue, if they had a serious condition,
such as tuberculosis, faith by itself was unlikely to help them. Nor
would the buva be any use, however many coconuts, chicken or goats
they paid him. The only remedy was the correct medicine, as prescribed
by her. Even then, they would need to pray and be prayed for if they
were to be sure of healing in full.138 In this way, rather than condemn-
ing the buva outright, as her predecessors would have done, Margaret
Johnson appreciated that such healers might be effective at some
[ 220 ]

MEDICAL MODERNITY
levels. They had, however, severe limitations, so that it was better

for people to place their trust in Christian doctors, who would cure
them of their ills more surely through a combination of good medicine,
compassionate care and prayer.
Notes
1 John R. Stanley, ‘Professionalising the Rural Medical Mission in Weixian, 1890–
1925’, in Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls, pp. 119–31.
2 Ruth Compton Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing
Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902–69 (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2002), pp. 8–13.
3 Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism
1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. vii.
4 Ibid., p. 7. Paul A. Carter, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and
Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920–1940 (Ithaca: Cornell
5 Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, pp. 319–26.
6 Carter, Decline and Revival, pp. 4–5.
7 Ibid., pp. 220–5.
8 The staff are described in ‘Mrs. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1942), 11–12.
9 M. Johnson to H. Anderson, Lusadiya, 16 July 1942, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1942; ‘Mrs.
Johnson Writes’, BMR (1942), 12.
10 P. Johnson, annual letter, 28 August 1942, Paul Johnson papers.
11 Ibid.
12 M. Johnson to H. Anderson, Dohad, 21 September 1941, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1941; P.
Johnson circular letter, 17 November 1941, Paul Johnson papers.
13 The Biladiya dispensary continued to function during the 1940s and 1950s much
as it had done in the past, as described in Chapter 10. It did not expand at all. I have
therefore not set out its further history in this chapter.
14 ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’, BMR (1942), 11–12.
15 H. Anderson to M. Johnson, London, 16 November 1942, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1942.
16 ‘Mrs. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1943), 13; ‘Mrs. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1945), 11.
17 Ibid.
19 ‘Mrs. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1943), 14.
21 ‘C.M.S. Bhil Mission Medical Statistics, 1943’, BMR (1943), 38.
22 M. Johnson to Dr Anderson, Lusadiya, 16 July 1942, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1942; ‘Mrs.
Johnson Writes’, BMR (1942), 11.
23 ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’, BMR (1943), 13.
24 ‘C.M.S. Bhil Mission Medical Statistics, 1945’, BMR (1945), 24.
26 P. H. and M. H. Johnson, ‘Lusadia Hospital: Report for 1944’, autumn 1945, CMS,
G2 I 3m 1, 1945.
29 Dr H. G. Anderson, ‘Journal’, no. XV, entry for 20 November 1949, CMS, M/AD 4,
1949.
31 Agnes Lees to Cranswick, Malvern, 17 April 1940, CMS, I 3 I, sub-file 1, 1939.
32 M. Johnson to H. Anderson, Lusadiya, 16 July 1942, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1942.
33 Agnes Lees to Cranswick, Malvern, 17 April 1940, CMS, I 3 I, sub-file 1, 1939.
34 Dr H. G. Anderson, ‘Journal’, no. XV, entry for 20 November 1949, CMS, M/AD 4,
1949.
[ 221 ]

35 Interview with Rajnikant Daniel Christian, Nava Rewas, Idar Taluka, 17 December
2002.
36 M. Johnson to H. Anderson, Dohad, 21 September 1941, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1941.
37 Gladys Christian, ‘Report of the Lusadiya Branch of the Mothers’ Union 1959’,
BMR (1957–58), 14.
39 ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’, BMR (1946), 17–18; M. Johnson, ‘CMS Mission Share Plan,
New Sheet 1947 B, Lusadia Hospital’, CMS, G2 I 3 m1, 1947; ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’,
BMR (1947), 9.
41 Ibid.
43 This was true in general in the field of tropical medicine at the time. See Mark
Harrison and Michael Worboys, ‘A Disease of Civilisation: Tuberculosis in Britain,
Africa and India, 1900–39’, in Lara Marks and Michael Worboys (eds.), Migrants,
Minorities and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies (London: Routledge,
1997), p. 93.
44 ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’, BMR (1948), 10–11.
45 ‘Dr. Ashirvadam Writes’, BMR (1950), 13. By the mid-twentieth century, tubercu-
losis was the second-greatest cause of mortality in India as a whole. See Harrison
and Worboys, ‘A Disease of Civilisation’, p.116.
46 ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’, and ‘Dr. Ashirvadam Writes’, BMR (1950), 9 and 13.
47 Harold Balme, ‘Medical Missions in the World of To-Day’, Conquest by Healing,
25:1 (March 1948), 10.
48 ‘Dr. (Mrs) Ashirvadam Writes’, BMR (1951), 9 and 13.
49 Interview with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Rewas, Idar Taluka, 17 December 2002.
50 ‘Dr. (Mrs) Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1953), 15 and 24.
51 Interview with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Rewas, Idar Taluka, 17 December 2002.
54 ‘Dr. Arthur Banks Writes’, BMR (1957), 15.
56 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes from Lusadia’, BMR (1952), 17.
57 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1951), 11 and 17–18.
58 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes from Lusadia’, BMR (1952), 17–18.
59 Ibid.
60 ‘Dr. Ashirvadam Writes’, BMR (1952), 21.
61 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1951), 18–19.
62 M. Johnson to Anderson, Modasa, 19 April 1954, CMS, G2 I 3/2, 1954.
63 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1954), 18–19.
65 M. Johnson to Campbell, Birmingham, 28 April 1953, CMS, G2 I 3/2, 1953.
67 T. Tate to D. Stevens, Lusadiya, 2 December 1959, CMS, G2 I 3/1, 1955–59, sub-
files 3 and 4.
68 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, LMHR (1958), 7–8.
70 ‘Miss Kirk Writes’, BMR (1953), 18.
75 ‘Miss Kirk Writes’, BMR (1955), 19 and 20–1.
77 Ibid., 8.
78 Margaret Johnson, ‘Bringing Health to the Bhils’, CMS Outlook (October 1953), 5.
[ 222 ]

MEDICAL MODERNITY

81 M. Johnson to Campbell and Anderson, Lusadiya, 10 June 1957, CMS, G2 I 3/1, sub-
file 1, 1955–59.
82 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1956–57), 7–9.
84 Ibid., 4–5; ‘Miss Auerbach Writes’, BMR (1957–58), 11.
85 Interview with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Rewas, 17 December 2002.
87 Interview with Ashraydas Kavdabhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 19 December 2002.
88 P. Johnson to Wittenbach, Lusadiya, 16 June 1958, CMS, G2 3/1, 1955–59, sub-file 1.
89 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, LMHR (1957), 6; ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’,
LMHR (1958), 6.
90 ‘Dr. Margaret Johnson Writes’, LMHR (1959–60), 4.
91 Norman Macpherson to Dr Anderson, 31 January 1959, CMS, G2 I 3/2; M. Wilson,
Secretary of CMS, Bombay, to Wittenbach, Bombay 28 April 1958, CMS, G2 I 3/1,
1955–59, sub-file 3 & 4.
92 ‘Dr. Banks Writes’, LMHR (1959–60), 6.
93 ‘Precis of Dr. Margaret Johnson’s Talk to Medical Committee on 3rd November
1959’, CMS, G2 I 3/1, 1955–59, sub-file 5.
96 ‘Precis of Dr. Margaret Johnson’s Talk to Medical Committee on 3rd November
1959’, CMS, G2 I 3/1, 1955–59, sub-file 5.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 ‘Dr. Banks Writes’, LMHR (1959–60), 7.
100 Robert S. Singh, ‘Christ Church Hospital, Lusadia’, LMHR (1963–64), 5.
101 Ibid., 9.
102 M. Johnson to H. Anderson, Lusadiya, 16 July 1942, CMS, M/Y I 3, 1942.
104 Rev. W. S. Bhagora to P. Johnson, Lusadiya, 20 December 1978, Paul Johnson papers.
106 Information from Gauri Raje, from research on healers in the Dangs.
107 Interview with Makrand Mehta, Ahmedabad, 13 December 2002. Dr W. J. Wanless
of the Miraj Mission Hospital in Maharashtra had a similar reputation in the early
years of the century. A well-to-do Parsi patient who had come a great distance for
medical treatment rather than use the hospital near his home stated: ‘I know that
Dr. Wanless prays before he performs an operation, and because he personally visits
and is interested in all his surgical patients, and because he tells us the exact truth
and does just what he says he will do.’ Alice K. Ebey, ‘India Notes’, The Missionary
Visitor, 15:12 (December 1913), 402. Another report said of Wanless: ‘He has often
spent several hours before daybreak praying over difficult cases that were entrusted
to him’. Anna M. Ebey, ‘Marathi Mission in India’, The Missionary Visitor, 18:1
(January 1916), 25.
108 Diary of Charles Shaw, 1940, Charles and Lilian Shaw papers, CMS, Unofficial
Papers, Acc. 162, Box F1, 1934–46.
109 ‘Miss A. J. Lees Writes’, BMR (1946), 33.
111 Paul Johnson, Circular Letter no. 4, 20 August 1945, Paul Johnson papers.
115 ‘Address by the Rev. P. H. Johnson (Bhil Mission) at CMS House, Salisbury Square,
London, 1953’, Paul Johnson papers.
116 Interview with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Rewas, Sabarkantha District, 17
December 2002.
117 ‘The Ven. P. H. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1954), 12–13.
[ 223 ]


119 ‘The Rev. R. G. Bhanat Writes’, and ‘The Ven. P. H. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1954), 9
and 17.
120 ‘Miss Kirk Writes from England’, BMR (1952), 23.
121 ‘The Ven. P. H. Johnson Writes’, BMR (1955), 6–7.
123 Nicholas Johnson, ‘India – My Home’, 14 November 1998, p. 8, Paul Johnson
papers.
124 ‘Dr Margaret Johnson Writes’, LMHR (1958), 8.
125 ‘Miss G. M. Smith Writes’, BMR (1955), 15.
126 ‘The Rev. R. G. Bhanat Writes’, BMR (1956–57), 15.
127 ‘Miss Kirk Writes’, BMR (1956–57), 11–12.
128 ‘Mrs. Margaret Johnson Writes’, BMR (1953), 15.
130 ‘Miss G. M. Smith Writes’, BMR (1955), 15.
131 ‘Dr. V. G. Koshy Writes’, BMR (1948), 11.
132 ‘Miss N. F. Tate Writes’, BMR (1957–58), 13.
133 Circular letter by Paul and Margaret Johnson, 18 November 1960, p. 3, Paul
Johnson papers.
134 ‘Dr. Arthur Banks Writes’, BMR (1957–58), 17.
135 Robert G. Singh, LMHR (1963–64), 7.
136 ‘The Rev. P. B. Parmar Writes’, BMR (1946), 23.
137 For a study of this development, see Mews, ‘Revival of Spiritual Healing’, pp. 300–1.
138 Interview with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Rewas, 17 December 2002.
[ 224 ]
C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N
Closure
In 1964, a special meeting of the World Council of Churches was con-

vened at Tübingen in Germany to discuss the role of the medical
mission in the postcolonial era. Lesslie Newbigin, a former bishop of
the Church of South India, recalled how medical missionaries working
in remote villages had once been at the forefront of the evangelical
battle against ‘the forces of evil’, revealing to the people the superiority
of Christian over and above pagan forms of healing. Successful healing
by missionaries had validated the preached Word in a simple and direct
way. Now, however, as secular medical services were extended into
remote areas by modern governments, medical missionaries were no
longer in such a unique position. The errors of local healers were being
exposed by other, secular means. In some respects, this could be seen
as a fulfilment of the work of medical missionaries – they had started
a system of health care for the poor that governments were now taking
up. However, it also meant that the missionaries had lost a particular
advantage. He wondered whether this meant that the time had come to
wind up this branch of Christian evangelical work. Would it not be
better to now teach Christians doctors and nurses to act as good
Christians within a secular medical system?1
In his contribution to the debate, Erling Kayser, a Norwegian who
had served as a medical missionary in Indonesia, pointed out what he
saw as an even deeper problem. Newbigin took it as a given that
modern biomedicine was superior to indigenous systems that were
associated with paganism. In this, he ignored the disquiet that had
grown in recent years about biomedicine, with scandals such as the
thalidomide affair, ‘which was in a sense, an epidemic of a very handi-
capping disease, brought about by a modern drug, the result of the
physician’s work’. There was a widespread feeling that something was
seriously wrong with biomedicine. Also, much disease was hardly
understood, and it was increasingly realised that many illnesses were
[ 225 ]

psychosomatic. This being the case, ‘Can the medical profession . . .

continue to ignore or look askance at pre-scientific forms of healing?’
Citing Freud, he argued that disease was likely to develop if strong emo-
tions were repressed or were in conflict. ‘The point is that there is no
dichotomy between soul and body.’2 The implication here was that
Christians might serve their cause better if they focused on spiritual
rather than biomedical healing. Whether from Newbigin’s or Kayser’s
point of view, the wheel appeared to have turned against the medical
mission project.
This was certainly the case in western India, where there was a spate
of closures of Protestant mission hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s. The
main reason given at the time by the various denominations was that
with the growing indigenisation of their churches in the past decades,
funding was no longer forthcoming from Europe and America to
maintain such costly establishments. Within the state of Gujarat,
the Methodists closed their hospital in Baroda in 1956, the Irish
Presbyterians their hospitals in Bharuch, Surendranagar and Anand in
1956, 1965 and 1966 respectively, the Church of the Brethren their hos-
pital in Valsad in 1965, and the CMS its hospital in Lusadiya in 1964.
Of a total of eleven Protestant mission hospitals in Gujarat, six closed
during this period, leaving only five. In many cases the closures caused
much bad feeling. This was the case in Anand, where the mission hos-
pital was a flourishing and much-loved institution. The closure split
the local congregation, with those who resented it running parallel
church services and other activities. The dispute continued for five
years, until a compromise was reached when the hospital premises
were rented out to a Christian doctor who opened a private hospital
there.3
The closure of Lusadiya Hospital in 1964 was, similarly, the cause of
strong local controversy. Some felt that the Bishop of Bombay at that
time, C. J. G. Robinson, was out of touch with local feelings in the
matter. Since 1961, the medical work of the CMS had come under the
direct administration of the Anglican Diocese of Bombay, and faced by
financial problems, Bishop Robinson had sanctioned widespread slash-
ing of both medical and educational spending. Lusadiya Hospital was
one of the establishments that lost out.4 There was no doubt that it was
in a state of financial crisis. Although there had been a time in the
1950s when it had been breaking even and even at times making a profit
from fees and donations, the situation had changed for the worse in the
early 1960s. One reason for this was that Margaret Johnson had been
reluctant to pursue those who had failed to keep up their health sub-
scriptions, even when they had taken treatment for themselves and
their families. This generosity had enhanced her popularity, but it had
[ 226 ]

CLOSURE
created a problem for the hospital that became all too apparent when
the books were examined by her successors. When the new superin-
tendent, Dr Robert Singh, tried to make the subscribers pay their dues
so that he could balance the accounts there was much acrimony, for
many of the Christians felt that they had a right to free treatment.5 In
his report for 1963–64, Singh noted that the problems were such that
they were severely tempted to close the hospital. The cost of living was
rising every day and they could no longer afford to pay a realistic wage
to their staff of fifty at Lusadiya and six at Biladiya.6
Some long-term opponents of the hospital managed to turn the situ-
ation to their advantage. The leader of this group was Dr Daniel
Christian, who had continued over the years to snipe at what he saw as
the unnecessary and unviable expansion of the hospital.7 One of his
leading supporters was Dr I. J. Pukadyil, who had been dismissed in
1957 – departing with threats of vengeance – and who was now running
a small clinic in Tintoi village. Others who joined him included several
Bhil Christians who had for some time been aggrieved that the educa-
tional work of the mission had been starved of funds to pay for the hos-
pital.8 The opponents were able to mobilise considerable support for the
closure of the hospital, to the extent that Bishop Robinson was able to
claim that a majority of Christian Bhils supported the move. Whether
or not this was true, a significant number also protested against the
decision.9 The affair as a whole left a bitter taste within the Christian
community.
The hospital thus lay abandoned. Without maintenance, the older
country-style buildings eventually collapsed, leaving derelict shells.
The main concrete structure of the new hospital – built in the 1950s –
proved more substantial. In 1996, a Tamil Christian couple from south
India who work for a Christian social service organisation called the
Navjeevan Seva Mandal took charge. He is a compounder by training
and she is a nurse. They live in the large and sprawling house that was
once inhabited by the Birketts and their successors, and they have
opened up some of the rooms of the hospital for use as a small dispen-
sary with one bed for an inpatient. Today its cavernous main hall is
largely empty but for a few worn tables and chairs, left only with the
memories of a busier past. It attracts a fitful number of patients –
around ten to twelve each day.10
The doctors, nurses and others with recognised medical qualification
who lost their jobs in 1964 had little difficulty in finding alternative
ones elsewhere, normally on much better pay. One such person was
Ashraydas Suvera, a Bhil who was born in Lusadiya in 1935. His grand-
father was one of the original converts in Lusadiya, at the time of the
great famine. He had studied at Lusadiya, at Biladiya, and then at a
[ 227 ]

secondary school in Modasa, where he gained his matriculation. He

was trained in pharmacy under Dr Cook in the mission hospital at
Anand between 1951 and 1953, gaining a certificate. He returned to
Lusadiya and worked there as a compounder and surgical assistant.
After the hospital was closed, he found employment with the govern-
ment and worked at medical centres in three different places in
Sabarkantha District before he retired in 1993.11
Many of mission medical staff had however been recruited from the
mission schools and trained on the job, and although generally compe-
tent in their tasks as compounders, dressers, nurses or midwifes, they
lacked the paper qualifications that were essential for outside medical
employment. The church authorities took the matter up with the
Government of Gujarat, explained the situation and requested that
the talents of such people should not be wasted and that they be given
the status of Registered Medical Practitioner (RMP). They were inter-
viewed, and in many cases given the required certificate as a one-off
concession. Armed with this piece of paper, they were able to once
more practise their skills.12
Some used their certificates to get positions in government-run
institutions. One such person was Singrabhai Varsat, the son of another
famine orphan. He had studied at Biladiya to the seventh standard, after
which he was taken on as a compounder at Lusadiya. When the hospi-
tal closed he was given what I was told was a ‘Memsahib’s Certificate’
that enabled him to find work as a compounder in a government health
centre elsewhere in Sabarkantha District. He worked in two other
health centres in other parts of the district before he retired, after which
he went to live in Vaghpur, near Lusadiya. While there, he used to treat
a few patients who requested ‘English medicine’, but this was not a
regular practice. He died in 1992 at the age of sixty-six. I was told these
details by his younger brother, who seems to have been under the
impression that Margaret Johnson (‘Memsahib’) had the power to hand
out RMP certificates, a confusion that says something about her con-
tinuing repute in the area.13
Others decided to work as community ‘doctors’ based in villages.
They had the competence to carry out basic diagnosis and treatment,
providing allopathic drugs, injections and minor surgery. One such
person was Harjibhai Asari, who was born in 1915. His father was one
of the Bhil orphans who had been converted at the time of the great
famine of 1899–1900. Harjibhai was educated in the mission school
at Kherwara, and after he passed his vernacular final exam he was
appointed a teacher in the mission school at Bavaliya in Idar State. After
the Johnsons arrived, he was persuaded to join the medical side of the
mission, and was sent to the mission hospital at Anand for training
[ 228 ]

CLOSURE
under Dr Cook. He returned to Lusadiya to work as a compounder in

the hospital, working there until it closed in 1964. He was one of the
ones who received an RMP certificate, and he decided to set up an inde-
pendent practice at Bavaliya. He worked from a room in his house,
which was identical to the houses of his neighbours. He was known
as a ‘doctor’ who prescribed ‘English’ medicine (angreji dawa). He
obtained his medicine from the towns of Idar and Himatnagar. He often
gave injections and vaccinations, and performed minor surgery, such as
draining pus or extracting teeth. He took a small fee, for example eight
annas for an injection. If a patient was very poor, he would not demand
payment. He was, he told me in an interview, a very popular ‘doctor’,
and people would come to him from surrounding villages for treatment.
Some came from as far away as Rajasthan. He continued to practise in
this way until about 1990, when his eyesight began to deteriorate. His
son Enjalkumar had meanwhile trained as an Ayurvedic doctor in
Ahmedabad, for which he received a certificate to practise medicine.
He took over his father’s practice, and continues to this day to work in
Bavaliya as, essentially, a biomedical ‘doctor’. Enjalkumar told me that
nowadays the people of the area generally approach him rather than go
to a buva.14
I was told of a number of other former staff members of the hospital
who opened similar practices in villages in the area.15 Some of those
who had managed to find government employment also carried on such
a practice from their homes after their retirement. They generally
worked from very modest premises, stocked with a small range of
drugs. They were addressed locally with an honorific ‘Dr’ before their
names, being distinguished in this way from other local healers, most
notably the buva. The closure of the hospital thus had a diasporic
effect, scattering men and women trained in allopathic medicine
and with a biomedical understanding of disease all over the area. In
each place, they became a nucleus for such medical provision, gaining
acceptance for it on a day-to-day basis through their ongoing practice.
While they have not displaced the buva and suchlike diviners and exor-
cists, they exist alongside them, providing an additional service for all
those who choose to avail themselves of it. Like the buvas, they enjoy
status within their society.
Because of their relative isolation, and also perhaps because they
are limited by their training, they have tended to focus on a rather
narrow range of treatments. Their main repertoire of drugs consists of
chloroquine (for malaria), terramycin and chloramphenicol (two broad-
spectrum antibiotics), B-complex (for debilitation and also it seems as
a general panacea) and calcium gluconate (for ‘weakness’). The latter is
much appreciated as it makes the body warm, and patients feel that it
[ 229 ]

is having a good effect on them. They also provide injections and

glucose drips, both of which are in strong demand. Because of this,
these drugs are, if possible, administered in a solution in a drip or
injection rather than in tablet form. They also carry out deliveries.16
Some of these remedies are open to question, either on the ground of
unsuitability or because of potential harmful side-effects, and because
wrong dosage and overuse can build bacterial resistance. Be that as it
may, this is how biomedical treatment is most widely provided and
practised in India today.
In many respects, this has vindicated the approach that had been
favoured by Dr Daniel Christian, namely that of providing small-scale
local biomedical facilities run by Bhils for Bhils as a community
service. Daniel himself continued to practise in this way in Lusadiya,
as well as playing a leading role within the Christian community of the
area, up until his death in 1996. Other medically qualified Bhils – not
all Christians – have subsequently followed his example in this respect.
For example, Dr B. D. Damor and his wife Suryaben, who are non-
Christian Bhils with medical training, have practised in Sabarkantha
District since 1985. In 1994, they opened the small ‘Shamlaji General
Hospital’, which serves the people of this small town and its surround-
ing area. Trained as an orthopaedic surgeon, he specialises in fractures
but also carries out basic general surgery, while she deploys her quali-
fication as an anaesthetist to assist in the operations. He is strongly
critical of beliefs about supernatural causation of disease and popular
healing practices, and in an interview he suggested some ‘scientific’
reasons why such remedies at times appear – mistakenly – to work. He
is a strong Bhil patriot who is involved in local politics, and in my inter-
view with him he also deplored the failure of the Gujarat Government
to acknowledge or commemorate the participation of the Sabarkantha
Bhils in India’s freedom struggle. In all this, he is very well rooted
within his community.17 Daniel Christian’s own son, Rajnikant, fol-
lowed a similar path. Born in 1945, he studied initially at Lusadiya, and
then in towns outside the area. He wanted to become an engineer or a
lawyer, but his father insisted that he become a doctor and serve his
people. He studied medicine in Ahmedabad, and after qualification
worked for two years with Dr Pukadyil – Daniel’s old ally – in Tintoi
village. After working for two further years with his father in Lusadiya,
he established his own practice in 1980 at Nava Rewas village. His
surgery consists of a single very modest room on the main road between
Bhiloda and Idar, where he sits throughout the day examining and treat-
ing all comers, mainly with the allopathic drugs that he stocks there.
He has a car, which he uses to go to see people in their homes when
requested, and he carries out deliveries. He has no assistants.18 I found
[ 230 ]

CLOSURE
that in general, such people are strongly critical of the buvas, bhopas
and other indigenous healers, whom they regard as quacks and often
charlatans.
Despite the presence of such allopathic doctors, it is clear that the
medical mission to the Bhils failed to inculcate any general or wide-
spread understanding of the principles of this system of medicine. The
attempt to carry out active health education got off the ground only in
the 1950s, just before the mission closed down, coming too late in the
day to have any widespread impact. This failure can be seen, to take one
striking example, in popular beliefs about intravenous injections, in
which an allopathic remedy is understood to possess almost magical
powers. Its origins go back to the period after the Second World War,
when new ‘wonder-drugs’ such as antibiotics became available that
were able – when administered correctly – to bring rapid relief from a
range of maladies. The belief soon developed that the strongest and
most certain cure for many complaints was through ‘an injection’, and
soon people were demanding this ‘fast’ remedy, even when it was not
appropriate. When Margaret Johnson set up her health insurance
scheme at Lusadiya in 1946, injections were considered too expensive
and exceptional a remedy to be covered by it – those who wanted one
had to pay extra. Nonetheless, she also reported at this time that injec-
tions were becoming increasingly popular. By the late 1950s, she was
reporting that villagers were commonly demanding ‘an injection and
medicine’ in the first instance. There was a strong belief that all that
was required was a single injection. This had no clinical base, for
allopathic practice requires that antibiotics and most other drugs be
administered as a course of treatment – a single dose might bring a
seeming improvement, but would fail to provide any long-term cure.
Nonetheless, the belief in the power of the single injection soon spread
to even the most out-of-the-way places. A doctor called Navnit Fozdar,
who volunteered his services within the Gandhian Sarvodaya move-
ment, was surprised to discover when he began his medical work in a
remote tribal tract in south Gujarat in the mid-1960s that people who
had almost no previous contact with biomedical doctors demanded ‘an
injection’ from him, regardless of his diagnosis. He tried his best to
educate his patients as to when injections were necessary and when
they were not, and how they should be administered.19 He was unable
to make many inroads into shaking this belief: a doctor who today oper-
ates a regular travelling clinic in this area told me in an interview that
the demand for injections is almost universal among the tribal people.20
Anyone who can use a syringe is now a potential ‘doctor’. A fertile
ground has thus been created for flourishing practices in tribal areas by
syringe-wielding quacks.
[ 231 ]

Recent research on beliefs about sickness and appropriate forms of

treatment among the Bhils of southern Rajasthan has revealed that the
large majority consider disease to have dual physical and supernatural
aspects, with both requiring treatment in their own ways. Thus, in
the first instance, a family member may use herbs reinforced with a
charm. If the illness persists, a village-based specialist is generally con-
sulted. The herbalist (jaangar or jaankar), who administers desi-dvai
(country medicine derived from herbs, bark, roots, etc.), the pulse spe-
cialist (nabj or nadu), and midwives-cum-‘wise woman’ (dai) caters to
the physical side, while the bhopa exorcist, grain diviner (devala) and
priest (khoont) – who use mantras fitted to specific complaints – seek
to combat the supernatural causes. Beliefs persist that are alien to
modern allopathy, such as the classification of sicknesses according
to whether they move ‘down’ or ‘up’ the body. Many fevers are seen to
move gradually down the body, passing through it and away after some
days. Others are believed to move up the body, and treatment seeks to
prevent the poison reaching the head. Besides physical treatment
through herbal and other remedies, it is believed that in each case the
sequence may be interrupted through appropriate ritual before it
causes lasting damage, or even death. Painful parts of the body con-
tinue to be cauterised with hot irons, with a similar intent of both
treating the physical manifestation of the problem as well as driving
out evil spirits. When allopathic facilities are available – and in many
cases they are not – Bhils will use them. It is, for example, widely
believed that certain problems, such as fever and headache, yield well
to allopathic drugs and injections. These are often described as angrezi
bimari or ‘English illnesses’. Nonetheless, while taking this ‘English
medicine’ from ‘doctors’ – who may be qualified or unqualified – Bhils
will still consult their own ritual specialists so that the efficacy of the
allopathic cure is enhanced with charms, mantras and exorcism.
Although it was found that some educated Bhils had a better grasp of
allopathic principles, the majority, including many educated Bhils,
continued to understand disease in this dual and non-biomedical way.
Intriguingly, this research has also found that there is a widespread
belief today amongst Bhils in humoral principles, with distinctions,
for example, being made between diseases of cold (sardi ki bimarai)
and diseases of heat (garmi ki bimari). Such beliefs were not rec-
orded in earlier ethnographic reports on the Bhils, and this opens up
the possibility that they have become widespread only in recent
years, being evidence for a growing popularisation of Ayurvedic
principles during a period when this system of medicine has received
a certain degree of state patronage. Further research is needed to
elucidate this.21
[ 232 ]

CLOSURE
As a whole, the Christian community that was created in the early

twentieth century is thriving, despite a political atmosphere that is
today often hostile to Christians. Since 1970, most of the Protestant
denominations of this region – including the Anglicans – have merged
into the Church of North India. A Bhil who was born and brought up
in Lusadiya – the Reverend Vinod Malaviya – today serves as the Bishop
for the Diocese of Gujarat. Christ Church has been rebuilt more than
once on its hill over the years to accommodate the growing congrega-
tion, and today it is a large and substantial concrete structure that
is filled with enthusiastic worshippers each Sunday. Its vicar, the
Reverend Emmanuel Christian, lives in a relatively modest one-
storeyed structure, constructed in more recent times. In Biladiya, the
other major centre for the old Anglican mission, the dispensary has long
gone, but the former missionary residence – another very imposing
structure – has been converted into a boarding school for boys. Run by
Christians, it is has a high reputation throughout the region. The small
church of St Andrew’s serves the Christians of a number of villages
round about. As in Lusadiya, the Christians of this area are a self-con-
fident and flourishing community. As they embrace so many of the
values that were considered by the missionaries to be a mark of ‘civil-
isation’, the present-day life of the Sabarkantha Christians represents a
success of sorts for the mission project that was inaugurated in this
region by C. S. Thompson in the late nineteenth century.
Notes
11 Lesslie Newbigin, ‘The Healing Ministry in the Mission of the Church’, in Frank
Davey (ed.), The Healing Church: The Tübingen Consultation 1964 (Geneva: World
Council of Churches, 1965), p. 10.
12 Erling Kayser, ‘Medicine and Modern Philosophy: An Introduction’, in Davey (ed.),
The Healing Church, pp. 18 and 20–1.
13 Boyd, Church History of Gujarat, pp. 189–90. It may be noted that Gujarat became
a state in 1960, when Bombay State (the erstwhile British presidency of Bombay) was
divided into the two new states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. The hospital closures
stretched to other areas also – the Scottish mission hospital in Udaipur that had been
founded by Shepherd was also closed around this time. A. D. Stirling, Indian
Harvest: The Story of the Scottish Churches’ Mission to Rajputana 1860–1960
(Stirling: Art of Crafts, 2001), p. 27.
14 Malaviya, ‘Anglican Contributions’, pp. 80–1.
15 Interview with Surjibhai Timothibhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 15 December 2002; inter-
view with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Rewas, 17 December 2002.
16 Robert S. Singh, LMHR (1963–64), 8.
17 For example, see ‘Mrs Johnson Writes’, BMR (1950), 11.
18 Mabel Wilson, 28 April 1958, CMS, G2 I 3/1 1955–59, sub-files 3 and 4.
10 Interview with Sister Nirmala Wilson, Lusadiya, 19 December 2002.
11 Interview with Ashraydas Kavdabhai Suvera, Lusadiya, 19 December 2002.
12 Interview with Harjibhai Kavdabhai Asari, Bavaliya, Bhiloda Taluka, 16 December
2002.
[ 233 ]

13 Interview with Virjibhai Daniel Varsat, Vaghpur, Bhiloda Taluka, 19 December 2002.
14 Interview with Harjibhai Kavdabhai Asari and Enjalkumar Harjibhai Asari, Bavaliya,
Bhiloda Taluka, 16 December 2002.
15 Interview with Dr B. D. Damor, Shamlaji, 14 December 2002; interview with
Fr. Ignas Ordonez, Mankroda, Bhiloda Taluka, 16 December 2002; interview with
Rajnikant Christian, Ahmedabad, 12 December 2004.
16 Ibid.
17 Interviews with Dr B. D. Damor, Shamlaji, 11 December 2001.
18 Interview with Rajnikant Christian, Nava Revas, 17 December 2002.
19 Interview with Dr Navnit Fozdar, Gora Colony, Kevadia, Narmada District,
8 December 2004.
20 Interview with Dr Daxa Patel, Dharampur, Navsari District, 2 December 2004.
21 Sushila Jain and Seema Agrawal, ‘Perceptions of Illness and Health Care among
Bhils: A Study of Udaipur District in Southern Rajasthan’, Studies of Tribes and
Tribals, 3:1 (2005), 15–19; Veena Bhasin, ‘Sickness and Therapy among Tribals of
Rajasthan’, Studies of Tribes and Tribals, 1:1 (2003), 77–83.
[ 234 ]
C H A P T E R F O U RT E E N
Conclusion: mission medicine and

Bhil modernity
Mission medicine was made possible by European colonialism, and it

inevitably shared some of its characteristics. It was, for example, based
on the premise that the subjects of its work were ‘backward’ in com-
parison with Europeans. The missionaries also applied ‘the rule of colo-
nial difference’. Although they sought to educate and ‘civilise’ the
natives, they proved very reluctant in practice to hand over power to
converts. In many cases, they retained effective power within their mis-
sions for some time after the demise of colonial rule. In the case of the
mission to the Bhils, it suited the missionaries to depict the converts
as ‘primitive’ and ‘childlike’ up until the 1940s, so as to justify their
continuing rule within their ‘little empire’. This was despite the fact
that an educated stratum had emerged from amongst the Christian
Bhils by the late 1930s that was quite capable of taking over much of
the educational, medical and pastoral work of the mission.
Although to this extent a form of colonial practice, the work of
medical missionaries must, nonetheless, be distinguished clearly from
the medical work of colonial states. Missionaries held no official posi-
tion and lacked, for the most part, coercive powers over the mass of the
people. They had no power to carry out, for example, enforced vaccina-
tion or inoculation, compulsory checks for epidemic diseases, or pro-
grammes to enforce sanitary cleanliness. The only coercive power
available to them lay in their ecclesiastical authority over members of
their congregation; and this they did deploy, as they ordered Christian
transgressors to be excommunicated, fined or even whipped. It was,
however, a form of power that could be exercised over only a limited
number of people.
Many medical missionaries worked in areas that were not ruled
directly by colonial officials, through they were under their broad influ-
ence. This was the case with the CMS mission to the Bhils, where the
local rulers were Indian princes and the Rajput gentry. The same was
[ 235 ]

true for medical missionaries working in areas of indirect rule in Africa,

such as the Emirates of Northern Nigeria,1 and also in the interior of
China, which was never ruled directly by European colonial powers,
though its rulers were forced to allow Christian missionaries to operate
in their territories after the Opium Wars of the 1840s.2 In such regions,
the missionaries had to negotiate a series of highly complex local poli-
tics, winning a foothold for themselves through the provision of needed
services, such as education and health care, while being careful to
avoid being accused of trying to convert people in an underhand
manner. The missionaries often felt that it would be of advantage for
them to disassociate themselves somewhat from the representatives of
the colonial powers in their region. In the case of the mission to the
Bhils, C. S. Thompson distanced himself from the British-officered
MBC in the 1880s so as not to be associated with its punitive raids on
the Bhils. In 1902, the mission shifted its headquarters away from
Kherwara – the base for the MBC – so as to escape this influence, after
Arthur Outram had fallen out with its commandant.
Mission medicine also differed from state medicine in its aims and
intentions. It was devised in the first place as a means to gain an access
for missionaries to ‘difficult’ areas and win the trust of the people. This,
as we have seen in the case of Thompson’s entry into the Bhil villages
in the 1880s, often proved a successful strategy. Medical work hence-
forth became a central feature of the mission. Secondly, it was believed
that those who were cured by mission doctors would be more open to
conversion; indeed, it was anticipated that many who were healed
would take this as proof of the superiority of ‘Christian’ technology and
culture and thus embrace Christianity. On the whole, this strategy was
far less successful. In the case of the mission to the Bhils, the mass con-
version came as a result of a devastating famine and a resulting crisis
of faith. Very few people converted primarily because the missionaries
had cured them.
The third main objective of medical missionary work was to reveal
the compassion of the Christian, providing an example in action of the
best of ‘Christian civilisation’. In this respect, missionaries had a moral
duty to apply their skills as healers, regardless of whether or not the
work led to conversion. In practice, this was how much mission medi-
cine was practised after a base had been established and consolidated in
a particular area. Non-Christians utilised the service and appreciated it,
and thus tolerated the missionaries even if they rejected their religion.
Fourthly, the extension of skilled medical work in a remote tract
required the presence of trained physicians. This provided a justifica-
tion for the continuing employment of white missionaries, who were
perceived to be better qualified and more capable than converts. In this
[ 236 ]

CONCLUSION: MISSION MEDICINE AND BHIL MODERNITY
way, as time went by, medicine gained a new emphasis within mission
work as a whole. Although, for example, the medical mission at
Lusadiya was successfully indigenised as early as 1938, with Daniel
Christian taking over its management in that year, Margaret Johnson
was appointed over his head in 1941, thus reversing this process. This
strategy collapsed finally only in the 1960s, and along with it the hos-
pital. In all of this, medicine was more than just a technology; it pro-
vided, rather, a fulcrum for a number of evolving strategies that were
designed to consolidate, extend and legitimise the mission project. It
thus had a fluid quality, being deployed to different intent in changing
historical situations.
In contrast to official colonial medicine, mission medicine sought to
situate itself very strongly within non-European social and institu-
tional milieus as a form of day-to-day practice. Rather than being
enclosed in centralised urban medical establishments, military can-
tonments and prisons, mission medicine reached out to embrace all
classes of ‘native’ society – the rich and the poor, the high-caste and the
low-caste, men and women. The mission hospital or dispensary was
merely a focal point, with medical work being carried on also by
mission schoolmasters in their villages, and by missionaries on tour.
The mission doctors also made regular medical itinerations, travelling
from village to village and living in tents, discovering people who
required treatment and providing it to the best of their ability. Those
who needed more elaborate treatment were encouraged to come to the
mission hospital as inpatients. In this way, a medical service was pro-
vided that operated relatively cheaply, in that it provided biomedical
treatment over a wide area without maintaining a large and costly
network of local clinics. It was hardly an adequate form of medical pro-
vision, as most people of the regions covered by missions had no ready
access to treatment – having, as a rule, to travel long distances to
consult a mission doctor. It is nonetheless a model that is still followed
very widely to this day in India, with inadequately funded medical ser-
vices operating travelling clinics both to provide on-the-spot treatment
and to identify cases that require hospitalisation at a central facility.
Medical missions made great efforts to reach out to and provide
treatment for women, who were seen as being oppressed and victimised
and were often denied access to modern medical treatment, even when
it was available. Many of the missionaries were themselves women,
including – in the case of the Bhil mission – its two most important
mission doctors, Jane Birkett and Margaret Johnson. Such missionaries
were often guided by a belief in a sisterhood of women, and saw them-
selves as reaching out across racial barriers to embrace and uplift
women everywhere. They sought to gain an entrance into homes
[ 237 ]

through their medical work, which then provided them with an oppor-
tunity to inculcate a sense of self-worth in their patients as to the value
of their bodies and their position in society. As was the case generally
in India, Bhil society was deeply patriarchal, with women being con-
vinced of their own inferiority. Although it proved hard to shift such a
mentality, it became gradually chipped away as more and more Bhil
women began to demand education and accord greater value to their
own well-being. This dimension to the medical work of the missionar-
ies was to a large extent lacking in the medicine provided by the colo-
nial state – it never saw the empowerment of women as a guiding
concern. The missions’ attack on beliefs about witchcraft and the evil
eye was also potentially liberating for women, for many were routinely
suspected of practising witchcraft, and in some cases tortured or put to
death as a result. The missionaries provided an alternative understand-
ing of the underlying rationale of disease, and by this means sought to
free Bhil society from the fear of malign spirits that were alleged to be
under the control of female witches. Nonetheless, for all their talk of
‘sisterhood’ with native women, the white female missionaries did not
in general regard the latter as their equals.
The mission clinic was an institution with a clear internal hierarchy.
At the top, in charge, was the white doctor with training in Europe or
America. Below this figure was the ‘hospital assistant’, whose medical
training had been in India. These assistants tended to come from
outside the mission area, and regarded themselves as being socially
superior to the local converts. They in turn trained local converts to act
as nurses, pharmacists and wound-dressers. The hospital thus provided
a microcosm of colonial society, with its white ruler, educated inter-
mediaries and subaltern staff. In this respect, the mission clinic differed
little from that of the colonial state.
In its institutional practice, nonetheless, it was generally far more
responsive to local need. This could be seen in the way in which the
architecture of a mission hospital such as Lusadiya differed profoundly
from that of the metropolitan hospital. The most important space
within the latter was the large ward with its lines of beds. Relatives
were allowed to intrude into this space only as temporary visitors, con-
fined to strict ‘visiting hours’ and only barely tolerated by the medical
staff. In a mission hospital such as Lusadiya, by contrast, each patient
was housed in a small apartment along with her or his relatives, who
cooked her or his food and acted as nurses. This system had arisen in
part because of caste distinctions that required food to be cooked sepa-
rately, in part because of a lack of nurses, and also because such an
arrangement was preferred and the missionaries had to maintain the
trust of their patients. Many people feared that once they were in
[ 238 ]

hospital the missionaries would have great power over them – both
physically and mentally – and this can be seen as having provided a
means to assuage some of these fears. When space ran out, patients
were allowed to erect temporary grass huts in the mission compound,
where they lived with their families. This was much less of a discipli-
nary space than the metropolitan ward, with the medics having to
concede some of their power to relatives. In her first building scheme,
initiated in the 1940s, Margaret Johnson continued to provide separate
apartments for patients, arguing that failure to do so would hamper
their work. The emphasis began to change after 1948, when a fully qual-
ified nurse – Margaret Kirk – was appointed from Britain, which meant
that the existing nursing staff could to be trained to handle a metro-
politan-style ward and constantly supervised while doing so. When the
new and much enlarged hospital was built in the 1950s, two ten-bed
wards were included with their ordered lines of beds, each with its own
duty room and sanitary facilities. These wards were not popular, as
people of different caste were made to sleep and eat alongside each
other. Relatives often insisted on staying by the patient’s bed – or even
sharing it at night. The sanitary facilities were misused, with taps not
being turned off and rubbish being thrown down the lavatories, block-
ing them. These wards proved to be short-lived, not surviving the
closure of the hospital in 1964. Nowadays, the norm in many Indian
hospitals is for relatives to stay with patients, sleeping by them, with
extra beds often being provided for this purpose. Again, this limits the
power of the nursing and other medical staff, who have to negotiate
constantly with the relatives, rather than merely impose their will on
the patient. The system of medicine today being almost entirely priva-
tised, Indian medical practitioners are forced to heed their patients in a
way that is not often found in the more centralised and hierarchical
medical systems of the West.
Because mission medicine was not a government project, it was
carried out in a less bureaucratic and regularised manner than the med-
icine of the colonial state. The downside to this was that it could be
erratic, relying on the availability of adequate personnel and their
quality as practitioners. If the mission doctor was incompetent, as was
the case with the unfortunate Dr Frank Read, the work suffered accord-
ingly. When a missionary doctor was absent on furlough, there was
often no fully qualified doctor practising in the mission, so once again
the work was affected. Dispensaries such as that at Biladiya tended to
be operated by whoever was available, irrespective of their medical abil-
ities or qualifications. In good cases, a woman missionary with train-
ing in nursing might be available; otherwise an unqualified missionary
would have to suffice.
[ 239 ]

Despite this, mission medicine gained a reputation for being prac-

tised with integrity. Mission establishments were far more popular
than government ones, where the doctors were considered to be
careerists who lacked empathy and were often careless in their
methods. This was despite the fact that government institutions might
be better funded and equipped. Mission doctors had a reputation for
being guided by compassion, commitment and selflessness, rather than
a desire to make money from their practice. They thus provided a stan-
dard against which other practitioners were judged, as well as a yard-
stick to measure the ‘good doctor’. In this way, a reference point was
created that continues to be deployed by patients to judge their doctors,
regardless of whether or not they are Christians. In today’s India, for
example, the Gandhian hospital at Sevagram – though rather unim-
pressive in terms of its facilities – has a similar reputation for being
staffed by particularly upright, empathetic and committed doctors, and
patients are drawn by its reputation from great distances.3
There was a strong focus on the personality, even charisma, of the
doctor in mission work. Margaret Johnson was thus considered to have
semi-miraculous powers. Her great faith in Christ, her compassionate
demeanour and her prayers at the bedsides of the patients all con-
tributed to this effect. It was popularly believed that devotion to a
deity – bhakti – enhanced a healer’s powers, and in her case she was
seen to gain it through her devotion to Christ. Mission doctors such as
Margaret Johnson gained a reputation in this respect that often survived
long after they left the mission field, again providing a reference point
for what was considered a particularly exemplary form of biomedical
practice. In this, mastery of medical technology was not in itself con-
sidered to be sufficient; the exemplary doctor-hero should be able to
combine technological ability with a thaumaturgic touch. Even edu-
cated people who understood the principles of scientific medicine com-
monly believed that strong and sincere devotion greatly enhanced the
ability of a doctor to heal. In a similar manner, the mission hospital
itself might sometimes attract a reputation that went beyond any
science. For example, the atmosphere in the vicinity of Lusadiya, the
water from the hospital well and the presence of goats in the grass
wards were said to be highly effective in curing people of tuberculosis.
In all this, prayer was of central importance, being another feature
that distinguished mission medicine sharply from colonial medicine.
As David Arnold has pointed out, colonial medical officers made a
point of purging their practice of any religious content, even in
situations in which their work would have benefited if they had
included some, as when they refused to mollify strong beliefs about the
goddess Sitala when carrying out smallpox vaccinations.4 Prayers were
[ 240 ]

considered essential in the mission hospital or dispensary at the start

of each day’s practice, at the bedside of patients and before any surgical
operation. Services were also conducted to bless the hospital and its
equipment. This was all greatly appreciated by patients, who saw such
ritual as sanctifying the work of the mission doctors and guiding their
hands more surely. I have suggested that prayer acquired greater impor-
tance in the practice of mission healing in the final years of the mission,
that is, during the 1950s. This, I have argued, can be seen in part as
a response to popular Christian practice in the region. The Bhil
Christians greatly valued all sorts of prayer for the sick and often organ-
ised group prayers when one of their number was ill. These types of
gatherings in turn gave rise to special healing services in which con-
gregational prayers were directed to the cure of sick individuals.
Anglican theologians were able to respond to this development far
more positively than had been the case in earlier years, as new devel-
opment in psychology provided an opening for a greater acceptance of
psychosomatic forms of healing. Today, healing services are a regular
feature of the work of the Church of North India.
A Christian modernity for the Bhils

The first attempts to ‘civilise’ and modernise the Bhils of this region
came from the British – namely, the political agents in princely states
and the officers of the MBC. They suppressed the Bhils in military cam-
paign, laid down laws that the princes were required to implement and,
through the MBC, provided education and medicine for the Bhil sepoys.
They had hoped that the Bhil people as a whole would respond readily
to these initiatives. This hope was not realised, for up until the closing
years of the nineteenth century, the mass of the Bhils continued to live
their lives according to the old values, forcibly asserting their indepen-
dence from outside authority, carrying on their internal feuds, raiding
and looting villages outside their own pals and persecuting alleged
witches. The more significant reform came initially from a very differ-
ent direction, namely from Surmaldas and his Bhagat movement.
Although it can be argued that, in preaching as he did, Surmaldas was
challenging his fellow Bhils to adapt themselves to the Pax Britannica
imposed by the MBC, the idiom that he employed was rooted in the
local vernacular.
With the arrival of the CMS, a governmental strategy began to be
implemented that had a very different quality from that of the colonial
state. The mission organisations emerged from and operated within
the sphere of civil society in Europe and North America, and were
autonomous agents that did not act for any state, and in fact often
[ 241 ]

existed in some tension with governments at home and in the colonies.

Although the colonial state and the missionaries shared a ‘civilising’
agenda, it was carried through in very different ways and using differ-
ent means. The missionaries sought to bring about a very personal
reformation, with an emphasis on pastoral care and day-to-day guid-
ance. Converts were expected to become Christian through conviction,
rather than because they wanted charitable handouts, jobs or economic
support. They were encouraged to learn to read and write and think for
themselves, to become economically self-sufficient and to learn to
impose self-discipline in their lives and thoughts. They were encour-
aged to see themselves as members of a universal church that brought
together peoples of different regions and ethnic groups on a basis of
equality before God. In these ways, converts were guided through close
pastoral care towards a personal cleansing and reformation of their
minds, bodies and souls.
In the case of health and healing, Christians were expected to have
faith in scientific medicine and disavow exorcism and non-allopathic
remedies – such as the holy ash that Surmaldas provided to his follow-
ers as a cure-all, or the protective charms that Bhils used to protect
themselves from the malign influence of evil spirits. Christians were
required to make use of the services of mission medical workers and
accept their allopathic remedies. Prayers for the sick were nevertheless
valued, as it was recognised by mission doctors that healing was not a
purely technological process, for faith in a cure was often an important
element in recovery. The mental transformation that the missionaries
demanded was therefore secular only to a degree, for it also involved a
radical restructuring of belief about the supernatural in the process of
healing. Whereas unreformed Bhils deployed charms and exorcism to
ward off the evil spirits and other supernatural forces that caused
illness and misfortune, Christians were expected to deploy prayer as a
channel for the goodness and mercy of Christ. Whereas the charm or
ritual of exorcism was directed against spirits that had the ability to
harm in the hope that their evil aspect would be countered and their
benign aspect reinforced, prayer appealed to an inherently benign God.
In the process, the understanding of the supernatural and the divine
was to be transformed.
To this end, the missionaries deployed what Foucault has defined as
‘technologies of governance’.5 They provided new tools and techniques
for the converts – such as school education, councils with written
constitutions, new forms of building and architectural space, and a
scientific medical technology. In this respect, it is significant that the
missionary couple who guided the mission during some of its most for-
mative years were technicians: one, Arthur Birkett, had architectural
[ 242 ]

training, and the other, his wife Jane, was a doctor. The former took
charge of creating a physical space that defined what the mission stood
for and required from its converts. The latter filled this space with her
own technology, that of biomedical practice. In these ways, an envi-
ronment was created that provided the conditions to lead people
towards a new way of life and being. In Foucault’s terms, the
missionaries provided the ‘technologies of the self, which permit
individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a
certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to
attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality’.6 Christianity can thus be seen to have provided the tech-
nologies that made possible radical social and intellectual change, and
the development of a new form of personhood.
We may nonetheless question the extent to which this process
created a new sense of individuality amongst the Bhils. Modernity is
often equated with the growth of individualism. It is held that the indi-
vidual comes to be seen as a quasi-sacred being, absolute in his or her
own right. An antagonism is then posed between the individual and
society.7 It might be argued that in this respect, Bhil Christians, by
opting out from the wider Bhil society, were demonstrating an individ-
ual self-determination that brought them into conflict with this
society. It would be noted that ‘traditional’ Bhil society was charac-
terised by a lack of individualism, with each individual being subject to
the will of the group – as expressed through the panchayat of the pal –
and punishable for transgressions through fines, ostracism, expulsion
or even torture and death. Against this, we need to note that even in
this so-called ‘traditional’ society, there were cases of people opting out
through conversion to devotional sects that imposed their own social
codes and rules on members. This was the case with the Bhagats of
Surmaldas, and it created considerable tension and strife within Bhil
society. Conversion to Christianity was largely an extension of this
process, though in this case the values and religion were those of white
missionaries rather than caste Hindus, and it created similar tensions.
In both cases, the groups that opted out formed new communities
with their own rules, and can hardly be seen to have embodied a new
individualism.
There was one particularly important respect in which the agendas
of both the Bhagats and the Bhil Christians eluded such a governmen-
tal project, namely that both sought to create sects that restricted them-
selves to members of the Bhil community. In this way, they believed,
the Bhils could assert themselves against the dominant classes, in time
reversing the social order so that they would be dominant while the
[ 243 ]

Brahmans, Baniyas and Rajputs would be subordinate. This was not

therefore a universalistic project. In this, there was clearly a conflict of
expectation between the missionaries and the Bhil Christians. The
former believed that a modern church had to be open to all who
embraced the Christian message, regardless of caste or community –
this was the path of ‘modernity’. The Christian Bhils rejected this tele-
ology; for them the church was an instrument for their self-assertion as
a discrete community. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, there
was continuing tension in India between two competing narratives of
change. On the one hand, there was the programme, initiated by the
British and carried on by their Indian successors, that sought to create
a modern state composed – ideally – of individual citizens who were
equal under the law. On the other hand, there were a multiplicity of
indigenous narratives that situated the self within a community and its
particular agenda for self-assertion. While the former claimed that its
schema was a matter of historical inevitability, the latter eluded it not
so much by proposing a legitimising counter-narrative as through its
everyday practice. Although this appeared to be a conflict between
‘modernity’ and ‘backwardness’, in fact it was a struggle for the asser-
tion of two very different narrative trajectories that each existed on its
own terms in modern times.8
As it was, the strategies pursued in practice by the Christian mis-
sionaries often furthered the community-based agenda of the Bhils
rather than a more universalistic agenda. For example, they sought to
encourage the generational reproduction of the Christian community
through a rule that in marriage both partners should be Christian, or
that the non-Christian partner would agree to convert after marriage.
In this, they found themselves in conformity with the existing Bhil
practice of non-tolerance of liaisons outside their community, but
adapted in this case to the new community of Christian Bhils. They
also accepted the need to provide brideprices. This all helped to ensure
that such liaisons were confined almost entirely within the community
of Bhil Christians.
This attitude continued even after the first generation of converts
was replaced by a second generation of educated Bhil Christians who
were qualified to take over the running of their church, schools and
medical facilities. They too tended to see themselves as working for the
good of their community rather than for the church as a whole. Thus,
Dr Daniel Christian – the first Bhil Christian to qualify as a doctor –
returned to Lusadiya to practise there, and he remained there till his
death, running a small dispensary that he saw as being more appropri-
ate to the needs of his fellows than a large and modern hospital that
would have served the region and its people as a whole. Because of all
[ 244 ]

this, the ideal of a universal church remained unrealised – the Bhil

church remained essentially just that, and it has remained so to this
day.
Today, the Christian Bhils stand socially apart in a society that seeks
to define itself increasingly as ‘Hindu’. The community has therefore
to insist on its right to inhabit a separate space within a civil society
that is based on the principle of providing rights for religious minori-
ties. The Christian Bhil has, in other words, to be a champion of secular
values and inhabit a political space that strongly asserts the values of
religious and cultural pluralism against the sectarian nationalism of
Hindutva. In this, the Christian Bhils’ struggle can be situated within
a much wider global battle for the right of minorities to peaceful co-
existence within a plural world. They are now both citizens of the
world and, uniquely, Christian Bhils.
Overall, the success of the mission project was in this region very
partial, for as a whole very few Bhils converted to Christianity.9 Rather
than becoming a new religion for all the Bhils, as the missionaries had
hoped, Christianity became merely a marker for a small sub-category,
that of the ‘Christian Bhil’. This group has become in many respects a
small local caste, or jati. In common with other such jatis there is a
general feeling of loyalty to the collectivity that emphasises the value
of solidarity against outsiders, while within the group there is often
competition and a struggle for status.10 Christian Bhils tend to marry
amongst their own and promote their own interests first and foremost.
This they have done with notable success, raising themselves from
their often-impoverished state in the earlier years of the twentieth
century to a condition of relative prosperity today. In this, they have to
a certain extent fulfilled the long-term aspirations of first the Bhagats,
and then the early Christian converts. In the process, new values have
been accommodated and adapted to local agendas. The boundary
around a community that was forged through the conversion move-
ment of the early twentieth century has thus remained firm even as the
Christian Bhils have transformed themselves internally. In this way,
the governmental project that the missionaries inaugurated has borne
a certain fruit, but it is not one that they – with their dreams of a church
for people of all castes and communities – would have desired.
The way of life that the missionaries propagated was in many
respects a middle-class one, incorporating values such as sobriety, hard
work, thrift, literacy, medical rationality and so on. The Christian Bhils
absorbed this, and in the process became to a large extent a middle-class
stratum within their wider society. There remains a very much larger
lower class of Bhils whose modernity has taken a very different form,
namely social marginalisation and increasing dependence on migrant
[ 245 ]

labour – the ‘footloose labour’ that Jan Breman has written about so
graphically.11 A Catholic missionary who worked in the area around
Lusadiya in the 1970s and 1980s has written a collection of short stories
about Bhil women who live by migrant labour that brings out in har-
rowing detail the ways in which high-caste people as well as middle-
class Bhils exploit and sexually abuse them in a routine manner.12 This,
for the large majority of present-day Bhils, is the reality of modernity
and India’s much-hallowed entry into a new global society.
The Bhil converts to Christianity had been attracted by the modern
forms of power that the missionaries had brought with them, and were
among the first to adapt to them and apply them. In time, however, a
stratum of non-Christian Bhils also began to adopt these technologies,
but without any adherence to Christianity. The way was thus paved for
a wider Bhil modernity that enmeshes self-disciplinary techniques
within devotion to Hindu deities. This process, as yet, has been only
very partially realised in the region as a whole. It continues apace,
however, as modern Hindu sects such as that of Swaminarayan and
Swadhyaya Parivar implement a concerted programme of proselytisa-
tion in the ‘tribal belt’ of Gujarat, building lavish temples and carrying
out their own forms of social work.13 Today, the majority of middle-
class Bhils – whether officials, teachers, medical workers or traders –
now maintain small shrines in their homes with pictures and images
of mainstream Hindu deities. These now provide the chief focus for
their devotional practices. In this way, modernity has been freed from
its association in this region with Christianity, being now aligned
predominantly with forms of contemporary Hindu practice.
Notes
11 For a study of such work, see Shobana Shankar, ‘The Social Dimensions of Christian
Leprosy Work among Muslims: American Missionaries and Young Patients in
Colonial Northern Nigeria, 1920–1940’, in Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving
Souls, pp. 281–305.
12 For such work in the interior of China see Stanley, ‘Rural Medical Mission in
Weixian’, pp. 119–31.
13 See Kavery Nambisan, ‘The Mahatma and the Medics’, The Hindu (1 October 2006),
magazine section.
14 Arnold, Colonizing the Body, pp. 141–4.
15 Michel Foucault, ‘Chapter 4: Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon
and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87–104.
16 Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and
Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 18.
17 On this, see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its
Implications (London: Paladin, 1972), pp. 38–9.
18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for
“Indian” Pasts?’ Representations, 37 (1992), 10–11.
[ 246 ]

19 In 1961, Christians made up only 2.6 per cent of the population of Bhiloda Taluka of
Sabarkantha District (the area in which both Lusadiya and Biladiya were situated,
and with a predominantly Bhil population). Gujarat State Gazetteers: Sabarkantha,
p. 187.
10 On this, see David Pocock, Kanbi and Patidar: A Study of the Patidar Community
of Gujarat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 132–40.
11 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
12 Marija Sres Mishkaben, To Survive and to Prevail: Stories of the Tribal Women of
Sabarkantha (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1996).
13 I have examined the spread of the Swadhyaya movement in this part of Gujarat in
‘The Politics of Water Scarcity in Gujarat’, in Amita Baviskar (ed.), Waterscapes: The
Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006),
pp. 58–9.
[ 247 ]
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archives and manuscript collections

Church Missionary Society archives, University of Birmingham Library
Church Missionary Society library, Partnership House, Waterloo, London
Gujarat State Archives, Vadodara branch
Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai branch
National Archives of India, New Delhi
Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, London
Paul Johnson papers, held by his son Nicholas Johnson and daughter Hilary
Griffiths
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The Annual Reports of the Church Missionary Society in Western India
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Missionary Information
The Church Missionary Outlook
The Church Missionary Review
Church Missionary Society: Extracts from the Annual Letters of the
Missionaries
Church Missionary Society Report of the Mission to the Bhils
Conquest by Healing
Medical Missions at Home and Abroad
Mercy and Truth
The Mission Hospital
The Missionary Visitor
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North India Church Missionary Gleaner
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[ 248 ]

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[ 254 ]
INDEX
Africa 5, 9–10, 12, 55, 189, 236 Belgian Congo 15, 183
Agra Medical School 168 Bengal 20
Ahmedabad Bhagat sect 57, 60–69, 83–7, 90, 95,
archdeacon of 186–7 151, 157–8, 241, 243, 245
city 79, 110, 148, 161, 184 Bhagora, Revd W. S. 213
college 172, 229–30 Bhanat, Peter 4
Ajmer 156, 166–7 Bhanat, Revd Rupji 183–4, 186–7,
Amra, Maniben 206, 208 196, 217
Amritsar Medical Mission 76 Bhanat, Shanti see Pandav, Shanti
Anand Joria
Irish Presbyterian high school 172 Bharuch mission hospital 226
Irish Presbyterian mission hospital Bhavsar, Narsinhbhai 182
166, 169, 226, 228–9 Bhetali, thakor of 99, 155–6
Salvation Army mission hospital Bhil mission of Church Missionary
213 Society
Anderson, Dr H. (CMS medical church councils 90, 94–6, 183,
superintendent, London) 194, 185–7, 199
197–8 church discipline 147, 183, 186,
Anthropological Society of London 235
26 churches 52, 90, 97, 147, 183
Arnold, David 5, 240 educational work 54, 56, 66–8, 74,
Arya Samaj 70, 97, 115, 181 96–7, 100–1, 147, 157, 159,
Asad, Talal 43–4 180–1, 186, 211, 227–8
Asari, Harjibhai 228–9 hymns (bhajans) 91, 160
Asari, Revd Jakhi Kanji 161, 183, 193 Indian doctors 112–13, 115, 117,
Ashirvadam, Dr Azariah 201–2, 204, 199–20, 132, 134–5, 165–74,
208 192–4, 197–9, 201–2, 204, 206,
Ashivardian, Dr Vijayam 201–2, 208 208, 210–12, 219, 227, 238, 244
Auerbach, Eva 187, 210 Indian pastors and catechists of 3,
Ayurvedic medicine 15, 38–9, 229, 54, 56, 69, 79, 85–6, 88–9, 95–6,
232 99, 113, 131, 134, 136, 143,
158–61, 172, 183–7, 193, 215
Baleta 152 Indian schoolteachers 56, 67, 106,
Baniyas 64, 68, 77, 90, 92, 95, 115, 155–6, 159–61, 193, 237
151, 156, 244 marriage regulations imposed by
Banks, Dr Arthur 187, 208–9, 211, 92–5, 244
219–20 medical subordinates 56, 105–6,
Baroda 109, 112–13, 119, 161, 166, 174,
city 184 180–1, 192, 196, 201, 205–7, 210,
mission hospital 226 217–19, 227–30, 238
Bastar 20 medical work 1–4, 53–7, 66–8,
Bavaliya 75, 77–8, 80, 85, 87, 105, 76–80, 89–90, 99, 101, 105–20,
109, 111, 157–8, 166, 171, 180, 165–76, 178–9, 182, 186, 192–21
228–9 nurses 113, 120, 143–4, 166, 168, 172,
thakor of 80 196, 201, 206–7, 210–11, 238–9
[ 255 ]

INDEX
Bhil mission of Church Missionary dispensary 67, 77, 80, 105, 109–10,
Society (cont.) 117–19, 153, 172–5, 194, 201,
opposition to exorcism 92, 95, 212, 217, 219, 227, 233, 239
124–35 orphanage 74, 77, 88–9, 94, 99, 133
origins 1–4, 51–2 school 4, 67, 98–9, 106, 174, 180,
orphanages 73, 76–8, 87–9, 93–4, 201, 227–8, 233
144 Birkett, Revd Arthur 79–80, 87,
women’s education 142 89–96, 98–9, 112, 116–17,
women’s work 141–5, 196, 199, 128–37, 142, 144, 214, 227,
207–8, 217–18, 237–8 242–3
Bhils Birkett, Dr Jane 34–7, 79–80, 85, 87,
agriculture of 27 89–90, 92–3, 109–17, 119, 128–9,
attitudes towards Europeans 1–4, 131–4, 136, 139, 143–4, 154, 158,
61, 63–6, 148 165–6, 170, 209, 214, 227, 237,
caste practices of 53–4, 61, 83 243
death ceremonies 158 Bodding, Revd P.O. 37
diet of 27–8, 53, 61, 94–5, 198, 202, Bombay
207 Bishop of 100, 159–61, 186, 204,
British attitudes towards 2, 5, 206, 226
21–4, 26, 51–4 city 96, 110, 156, 172, 184
headmen 3, 22, 28–9, 44 Presidency, government of 58, 100,
healing practices of 4, 37–40, 43, 156
62–3, 92, 105, 108, 127–35, 159, State (1947–60) 178, 181, 186, 211
171, 213–15, 220–1, 229, 232 Booth, William 14
health of 3–4, 32–7 Borsad mission hospital (Irish
Hindu attitudes towards 65 Presbyterian Mission) 172
Hindus, interactions with 2–3, Brahmans 30–1, 45, 57, 64, 68, 95–6,
53–5, 57, 60–6, 88 115, 156, 168, 172, 244
insurgency by 1–2, 4, 21, 58–60 Brand, Dr. John 112–13, 115, 117,
language of 23, 53, 58, 65 199–20, 132, 134–5, 165–6
marriage customs of 70, 92–5, 142 Breman, Jan 246
pals (villages) 27, 29, 58–9 Britain 6–8, 13–14
panchayats 29–30, 243 Brouwer, Ruth Compton 189–91
patriarchy of 28–30, 142–3, 200, Browne, Dr A. H. 76–9, 109–11
238 Bull, A. H. (Helen) 76, 87, 117, 127–9,
religion of 28–32, 53–4 132, 134, 139, 141–5
religious reform amongst 19, 57, Burns Thomson, Dr W. 10
60–70 Butcher, Revd L.B. (CMS secretary,
Bhiloda Bombay) 150, 160, 167–8
dispensary (Idar state) 174 Butler, Dr Fanny 140
town 75, 136, 230 buva see Bhils; healing practices of
bhopa see Bhils; healing practices of
Bickersteth, Bishop Edward 51–2, Calvin, John 13
55 cancer 34, 36–7, 55, 110, 180
Bigriker, Grace 206 Carstairs, George 31
Biladiya village 79–80, 87–9, 90, Carter, Paul 190–1
111–12, 115, 133, 152–3, 174, Carter, Rose 83, 87, 89, 132, 142,
183–5, 187, 206, 217 154–5, 159
Christian community 90, 157, 175, Catholicism see Roman Catholicism
180, 183–4 cauterisation 37, 110, 135, 214, 232
church building 99, 133, 233 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 244
[ 256 ]

INDEX
Chamar community 94 Dadhvav 152, 154

Champaran district 148 Damor, Dr D. D. 230
Chandarni, thakor of 156 Damor, Sukha 68
Charan, Masih 3, 56 Damor, Suryaben 230
Chatterjee, Partha 7 Danta state 60, 151
Chhitadara 90, 92, 97, 128–9, 131–2, Davis, Kingsley 32
141, 157, 171, 214 decolonisation in India 178
China 12, 123, 140–1, 189, 236 Delhi city 140, 148
cholera 33, 35, 37, 75–7, 108–10, 204 Devni Mori
Christian, Dr Daniel 172–3, 184, thakor of 155
192–4, 197–9, 201, 206, 227, 230, village 90, 100, 134, 155, 159, 171
237, 244 Dey, M. M. 119, 173
Christian, Revd Emmanuel 233 dispensationalism 13, 125–6
Christian, Gladys 172, 198–9 Dungarpur
Christian, Rajnikant 198, 216, 230 maharaja of 100, 117
Christian Medical Association 10–11 state 24, 44, 100–1, 117
Christian socialist movement 190 town 117
Church of England 13–14, 43, 52, dysentery 33, 36, 77, 108–10, 171,
124–6, 233, 241 174, 203
Church of North India 233, 241
Church of South India 225 Edinburgh 8–10, 195
‘civilising mission’ 7–8, 21, 42, 65–6, Medical Missionary Society 10
147, 149, 179, 191–2, 235, 241–6 Enlightenment, the 5–6, 20, 43
Collins, Revd W. B. 34, 106 evangelical Christians 5–9
colonialism 6–8, 14, 145, 147–8, 156, eye diseases and complaints 33, 36,
184, 235–8, 240 106, 108, 110–11, 116, 171, 195
Comaroff, Jean and John 10
compassionate healing 212–13, famine
220–1, 236, 240 1899–1900 (the ‘great famine’)
Congress Party 181–2 73–80, 83–5, 108–11, 236
conversion to Christianity charity by Indians during 74
Bhils 4, 19, 56–7, 68–70, 83–90, 92, missionary relief activities during
96, 100, 132–3, 135, 142–3, 73–80, 87
157–8, 179–80, 241–6 prophesy of 63, 83–4
caste Hindus of Bhil mission First World War 98, 137, 148, 190–1
region 100, 115–16 Foucault, Michel 113, 242
Gandhi’s views on 149 Fox, George 13
general 7, 178, 242–3 Fozdar, Dr Navnit 231
in India 19–20, 45, 97 French revolution 5, 32, 113
legal restrictions on 180–1 Freudian psychoanalysis 137, 220, 226
medical strategy for 1–4, 12–13, 57,
66–7, 114, 236 Gandhi, M. K. 148–50, 153, 190
opposition to 95–101, 114–15, 134, missionary attitudes towards
143, 157, 159, 180–2 149–51, 178
untouchables 94–5 Gandhians 147–8, 153, 156, 181–2,
Cook, Dr Bramwell 213, 228–9 231, 240
Cook, Dr. J. Howard 126–7, 169–70 German missionaries 11
craniognomy 26 Ghodi 157, 220
Cranswick, Revd G. F. (CMS Ghoradar
secretary in London) 161 estate 75
Croce, Benedetto 20 town 111
[ 257 ]

INDEX
Gill, Revd Charles H. (CMS secretary Indian Christian priests see Bhil
for North India) 76, 78–80, 86–8 mission of Church Missionary
Girasia community 153 Society; Indian pastors and
glucose drips 230 catechists of
Gonds 51–2, 54, 76, 85 Indian Medical Service 25, 113, 115
Goodwin, Revd J. W. 87 Indian nationalism 8, 97, 147–54,
Government of India, British period 178, 181–2, 184, 190, 230
7, 21 Indian princely states
Gujarat state, government of 228 medical facilities in 25–6, 33–4, 36,
Gurevich, Aron 31 169, 174
individualism 243–4
hakims 110 Indonesia 225
Hall, Catherine 145 injections, intravenous 200–1, 208,
Hamilton, Dr John 168–72 229–32
Hari, Revd Laxman 85–6, 88–9, 93, Irish Presbyterian Mission 159–61,
96 226
hashish 65 Islam 6, 61
Hatya village 143 itineration see medical itineration
Hendley, Dr Thomas Holbein 25–8,
30–2, 34–5, 37, 39–41, 43–5, 60, Jains 31–2
64, 144 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in
herbal remedies 37–8, 232 Amritsar 153
Herbert, Revd E. P. 76, 78, 80, 105–6 Jesingpur 96–7, 99, 127, 136, 143,
Heywood, Rhodri 14, 123 155–7, 171
Himatnagar 98, 180, 182, 229 Jesus Christ 150, 191, 213–14, 216
Hindu Mahasabha 181 as healer 10–11, 13
Hindus and Hinduism 2, 20, 22, 26, Jharkhand 20
30–1, 37, 51, 80, 84, 88, 96–7, Johnson, Dr Margaret 161–2, 178,
106, 115, 149, 168–9, 181, 184, 187, 192–7, 198–201, 203–21,
190, 207, 213, 219, 245–6 214, 226, 228, 231, 237, 239–40
Hodgkinson, Margaret 118–19, 133, Johnson, Revd Paul 161–2, 178, 181–7,
139 193–4, 211–12, 214–16, 219
Hodgkinson, Revd William 79, 87–9, Jorgensen, Else 187
94, 100, 115, 118–19, 133, 142
Holdom, Winfred 158, 166, 174–5, Kabir Panth sect 184
196 Kagdar 76, 157
homeopathy 15 Kalasva, Yusuph 158–9
Hopkins, Charles 190 Kalbai 75, 79
Hunt, Nancy Rose 15, 183 Kaliparaj, the 21
Kanthariya village 96, 100
Idar Karchha, thakor of 60, 66, 99, 112,
chief minister of 67, 97, 155–6 115
famine relief work by 75 Kayser, Dr Erling 225–6
maharajas of 58–61, 63, 92, 97–9, Khandesh region 25, 51, 54
155 Kheda district 148
praja mandal (people’s association) Kherwara
156, 181 Christian community 90, 157, 180,
state 24, 31, 57–60, 66, 73, 96–101, 185
109, 115, 151, 155, 175, 178, church building 52
180–2 dispensary 54–6, 105–6, 108–9
town 34, 229–30 orphanage 73–4, 76–8, 87–8
[ 258 ]

INDEX
school 54, 56, 106, 161, 184, 187, political agents 40, 42, 59, 60–3,
228 66, 68, 98, 100, 153, 155
town 1, 25, 27, 51–8, 73–5, 79, Scott College at Sadra 99, 115
87–8, 90, 105, 131, 168–9, 184, malaria 9–10, 33–4, 36, 73, 77, 106,
217, 236 108, 110, 115, 171, 173, 179, 196,
Kipling, Rudyard 23 203, 207, 215–16, 229
Kirk, Margaret 201, 206–7, 218, 239 Malaviya, Bishop Vinod 233
Koch, Robert 108 Malcolm, John 21–2, 24
Korea 140, 189 Marx, Karl 6–7
Kotada 25, 74, 124, 154, 157–60 maternity care and obstetrics 144,
Koya, Waga 131 171, 192–3, 199–200, 207,
210–12, 216–19, 230
Lambert, Helen 35 Mayo College, Ajmer 156
landlords 21, 29 Mayoh, Revd John 187
lantern slide shows 117, 175, 217 medical fundraising 115, 166, 194,
Lea, Revd James 4–5, 153–4, 157 199, 205
Lees, Agnes 124, 169, 172, 175, 184, medical itineration 116–17, 237
197–8, 214 medical mission movement 8–15, 53,
liquor (daru) 28, 38–9, 41, 61, 63, 65, 101, 119, 126–7, 189–92, 235–41
92, 95, 98, 151, 198 Medical Missionary Association
liquor dealer 21 (London) 11, 166
Litchfield, Revd G. 36, 55–6, 105 medical practice by missionaries,
Livingstone College, London 174 forms of
Livingstone, Dr David 9–10 decolonisation period 191–4,
London School of Medicine for 225–6, 236–7
Women 140–1 early-nineteenth century 9–10
Lowe, Dr. John 119 early-twentieth century 108–20,
Lucknow mission of CMS 79–80 165–76, 189–92
Lusadiya late-nineteenth century 14–15, 34,
Christian mela (fair) 90–3, 129–30, 105–8, 119
142–3 medical education by 175, 215–19,
Christians of 66, 83–91, 94, 157, 231
171, 172, 180–1, 185, 213, 227–8, women, work amongst 140–1
230 Meigh, Revd Frank 161, 167–9, 174
church building 90, 171, 233 Meigh, Marjorie 160, 173–4
dispensary 66–8, 99, 105, 165, mental health 32
192–4, 196 Methodists 7, 140, 226
hospital 111–19, 131, 134, 143, Mewar Bhil Corps (MBC) 1–2, 25–6,
159–60, 165–73, 180–2, 192–221, 30, 40, 42, 44, 51, 54, 56, 60, 64,
226–7, 237–9 73–4, 87–8, 96, 101, 152–4, 236,
Mother’s Union 199, 218 241
orphanage 88, 144–5 famine relief work by 73–4, 76,
school 66–8, 83, 90, 172, 184 87
village 57, 60, 62–3, 66, 83–91, 108, medical work of 25–6, 51, 54–5,
135, 136, 155, 161, 170, 186, 195, 106, 111, 118
210, 214, 217, 230, 233 Mewar State 1–2, 21, 24–5, 33, 42,
Luther, Martin 13 73, 101, 153, 178
Praja Mandal (People’s Association)
Maharana of Mewar 25, 28, 41 181
Mahi Kantha Agency 25, 42, 58–60 Mews, Stuart 14
medical work by 35 Mildmay hospital, London 174
[ 259 ]

INDEX
Miraj medical school (American Protestantism 8, 20, 45, 125–6, 147,

Presbyterian Mission) 172, 190–1
198 psychosomatic healing 14–15,
Modasa town 181, 228 219–21, 226, 240–2
modernity 6–7, 241–6 Pukadyil, Dr. I. J. 208, 227, 230
Moloney, Revd Herbert (CMS
secretary for central India) 111, Quakers 13
133, 144–5
Mould, Revd Horace 56 racialist science 26
Mughal emperors 63 Rajputs 23, 28, 54, 58, 60, 101, 143,
Muslims 6, 20, 30–1, 45, 59, 61, 97, 148, 181, 235, 244
133, 149, 155, 181, 219 values of 28, 61
Read, Dr Frank 165–8, 174, 193, 239
Nana Kanthariya village 90 religious evolution 20, 57
Nathadwara 68 Reuben, E. 112–13
Navjeevan Seva Mandal 227 Rikhabnath temple 31–2
Nevius, Revd J. L. 123 Robert, Dana 139, 141
Newbigin, Bishop Lesslie 225–6 Rockefeller Foundation 189
Newton, B. M. 144 Rogers, Leonard 108
Nigeria, Emirates of Northern 236 Roman Catholicism 45, 126, 131,
nurses 113, 120, 143–4, 165–6, 168, 190, 246
172–3, 196, 201, 206–7, 210–11, Rural Service Centre, Ankleshwar
227, 238–9 216
operations see surgery Sabarkantha district 178, 203, 205,

opium 66 228, 230, 233
Orissa 20 Salvation Army 14
Outram, Revd Arthur 73–8, 85–8 Salvi, Dr D. K. 165–6
Outram, Gertrude 76, 78 Santals 37–8, 45, 51–2, 54
Outram, James 25, 58 Sarsau 76
Sarvodaya movement 182, 231
Pal estate 152 Satan (the devil) 4, 15, 123–5, 128,
thakor of 59, 67, 98–9, 115 214
Pandav, Shanti Joria 166, 172, 184, Satgurudas (Sava Suvera) 83–7, 90,
186, 192, 196 94–5, 130, 135, 157
Pandav, Revd Valji 186–7 Satyadas, Sadhu 68
Parmar, Revd Philip 184, 220 Scottish Presbyterians 159–60
Patel community 69, 80 Scudder, Dr Martyn 11
Patel, Premji Hurji 69, 79, 85, 134, Second World War 179, 194–5, 231
136, 157, 165, 167 secularism 6
Pathans 155 Sevagram hospital 240
Pathik, V. S. 153 Shah, K. K. 182
Pentecostalism 126 Shamlaji
plague 33 ashram 182
pneumonia 35–6, 105, 168, 173–4 hospital 230
Pol State 24, 59–60, 151 temple 31
Posina region 60 town 35, 63, 75, 156, 217
prayers for healing 131–2, 168, 213, Shaw, Revd Charles 136, 161, 165,
219–21, 240–2 180, 183–4, 214
‘primitive, the’ 8, 160–1, 169–70, Shaw, Lilian (Lily) 165, 167, 214
176, 193, 198, 235 Shepherd, Dr James 33–6, 74, 77
[ 260 ]

INDEX
Shukla, Gangaram 156 Tod, James 21–2

Singh, Dr Florence 210 Trench, Archbishop Richard
Singh, Dr Robert 210–12, 219, 227 Chenevix 124–5
Sirohi state 151, 153 tribal people of India in general 20–1,
skin diseases and complaints 33–4, 23, 51–3, 55
36, 105–6, 116, 171, 173–4, 196 tuberculosis 33–5, 201–3, 207–8, 212,
Slade, Madeline (Mirabai) 149 216, 240
smallpox 33–5, 76, 203, 240 Tübingen consultations of 1964
Smith, Gladys 187, 217–18 225–6
Social Darwinism 8
social gospel, the 189–91 Udaipur 25–6, 33, 35, 41, 74, 77
Soma, Jiva 95 Union Mission Tuberculosis
Som-Sabarkantha church 178, 186–7 Sanatorium, Arogyavaram 202
Spinoza, Baruch 43, 124 untouchables 20
spirit possession 37–9, 123–35, 214 Christian converts 94–6
spiritual healing 126, 226, 241 usury 21, 64
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 24, 145 Utilitarians 7
Stanley, John 189–91
Student Christian Movement 11 Valsad mission hospital 226
Surendranagar mission hospital 226 Varsat, Singrabhai 228
surgery 1, 10, 14, 15–16, 33, 106, 110, Vaughan, Megan 5
114, 116, 119, 166–7, 170, 193–7, Vellore Christian hospital 210
200, 204, 210, 212, 229–30 Vyse, Revd G. C. 79, 87–9, 93
Surmaldas, Sant 19, 57, 60–67, 69,
83–6, 90, 95, 105, 241–3 Walker, Edward 62, 85–7
Suvera, Kavada Soma 172 Watts, Rowena 119, 139, 176
Suvera, Peter 94–5 Weber, Max 6
Swadhyaya Parivar sect 246 Wesley, John 7, 9
Swain, Dr Clara 140 witchcraft beliefs 38–44, 59, 129–30,
Swaminarayan sect 246 142, 214, 238, 241
Women’s Christian Medical College
Tate, N. F. 187 (Ludhiana) 140, 210
Tejawat, Motilal 151–2, 154 Women’s Foreign Mission Society
thakors 25, 27–9, 41, 44, 58–61, 64, 140
66, 69, 73, 75, 80, 92, 97–100, World Council of Churches 225–6
107, 111, 114–16, 151–3, 155–6, World Health Organisation 203
160, 168, 181, 199 worm infestation 33, 36–7, 74, 108,
Thompson, Revd Charles Stewart 171, 196
1–3, 19, 23, 33–5, 41, 52–8, 61, Wyatt, Revd Walter 96, 135, 155
66–70, 73–6, 79, 84, 105–6, 136,
233, 236 Yunani Tibb medicine 15
Tintoi
estate 59 Zenana Mission Society of the CMS
village 116, 227, 230 79, 140
[ 261 ]

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M1308 HARDIMAN PRELIMS.

qxp:GRAHAM Q7 12/5/08 16:51 Page i

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general editor John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more

Missionaries and their medicine

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distributed exclusively in the USA by

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Copyright © David Hardiman 2008

Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7802 6 hardback

First published 2008

Typeset in Trump Medieval

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List of illustrations — page vii

Select bibliography — 248

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1 Bhil Christians of Chhitadara, 1904. Source: Paul

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GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

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BMR Bhil Mission Report, used to denote the annual Church

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Baniya merchant caste

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administrative, judicial and taxation powers over the

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CMS Bhil mission area

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In November 1880 the Reverend Charles Thompson arrived at

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largely on doctors of the colonial medical service and state initiatives.12

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radical politics, as anti-slavery campaigners and electoral reformers.

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For middle-class evangelicals, the labouring poor of their own nation as

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of white superiors.25 This ‘rule of colonial difference’ was imposed in

The mission clinic

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by others in later years.27 By demonstrating their concern and compas-

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founded in 1853 to encourage an active faith amongst doctors in Britain.

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were, nonetheless, expected to have some theological training, to know

Heathenism, in other words, had to be attacked on the medical as

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