I honestly believe that missionaries have done more for women’s education in this country than government itself. The women population of this country has been placed under a deep debt of gratitude to the several missionary agencies for their valuable contribution to the educational uplift of Indian women. Of course, at present India can boast of several other religious bodies such as the Brahmo Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, Arya Samaj, etc., doing work in the field of women’s education, but in the past the Christian missionaries were the only agencies in that field… Had it not been for these noble bands of Christian women teachers, who are the products of missionary training schools, even this much advancement in the education of the Indian women would not have been possible; even to this day, in every province, we find the missionary women teachers working hard in a spirit of love and faith, in out-of-the-way villages, where Hindu and Muslim women dare not penetrate.
— Dr. (Mrs.) Muthulakshmi Reddi, in her presidential address to the All–India Women’s Conference in January 1931.

Being a mission school we had a Bible class every morning which nobody minded attending even though the bulk of the students were Hindus. I happened to be a good student of the Bible and carried away many Bible prizes. This fact, and the fact that I was good in English made me a favourite of the Principal. Even in those days, however, there used to be scare-stories about missionaries trying to convert students to Christianity. I remember a wholly unfounded report having reached my parents that some of the teachers were trying to convert me into a Christian!
— Motilal C. Setalvad, first attorney general of India, in his autobiography, My Life — Law and Other Things)  

Christian schools have been able to inject a large number of non–Christians with a sense of dedication and commitment to education. That has been a very major contribution. Commitment to education that comes from commitment to scholarship is a good thing. But when it comes from a stronger motive, like service to society or religion or God, I think the commitment is raised to an entirely different level altogether; and such commitment is what you have been able to achieve for a number of years and to communicate to others.
— JP Naik, eminent educationist and a former educational advisor to the government of India.

Logic and reason, and even the most elementary notion of fair play should defy the grand lie. If the lie holds it’s own against lived experience, reason, and the harsh reality of statistics, there must be ‘good reason’ for its tenacity. If hysteria governs its currency, an emotion of unreason clouds clear–thinking and honest responses, the lie has hit upon an emotional chord or bed of support, however perverted. The kind of emotion that helps perpetuate the lie.

The grand lie that I speak of — and we have as a nation been piteous victim to a series of small and big lies over the last two decades or so — is the one unleashed against Christian institutions. It is alleged that the insidious intent of ‘conversion’ is the sole reason why,  in the service of their Lord, Jesus, Christians travel to regions ignored and neglected, to people forgotten and even brutalised, to educate, to nurse, to cure and to comfort — all with the missionary zeal that has come to be associated with their life–long work.

The lie took its toll in the past, too. But it has achieved unsurpassed success in the past five years or so, with chilling violence of varied kinds being used against Christians. This despite the dogged service that these women and men of faith continue to perform. We have as a nation allowed the burning of Bibles and the desecration of churches, just as a 400–year–old mosque was demolished to lay the foundation for mass violence against others in our midst. Worse, nuns and priests have been killed and terrorised, sexual violence, too, used to ram home the message.

All these assaults have taken cover under the grand lie. Why do I call it the grand lie?

We need to face our own shame and recognise that based on religion and scripture and the cultures and traditions that have evolved from these, we have created and allowed different levels of denials.

Consider this. As we enter the third millennium of human civilisation, as calculated by the Christian calendar, Christians of various denominations in India, totalling not more than 2.3 per cent of the entire population, are responsible for 25 per cent of the social services provided in the country. Consider this. Forty per cent of the total social work by NGOs undertaken in the country is undertaken by Christian institutions alone.

Consider also this. The UN Human Development Report, 2000, ranks India abysmally low in human development — at 128 out of 174 countries in the world. Low life expectancy (people not expected to survive beyond 40), high levels of adult illiteracy, deprivation in economic provisioning, counted by the percentage of people lacking access to health services, safe water and social inclusion (employment is one indicator) are the areas where Indian governance has failed it’s own people. 

A decade–old UNESCO figure tells us that we had 370 million illiterates amongst us. Literacy rates among women of all classes, castes and communities are lower than those of men; other figures of the vast disparities or differences between the opportunities and privileges available to one section as opposed to another tell their own tale:

For example, in India, the illiteracy rate among the scheduled tribes (about 7 per cent of our total population) is 70 per cent compared to 48 per cent for the country as a whole. What does this mean? That, whereas nearly half of all Indians are today denied the basic right to education, among scheduled tribes who live in remote and far flung areas, the deprivation is far higher.  

What else does this mean? That, the buzzword on development and progress notwithstanding, we need to dig deeper behind the cold comfort of numbers and see their social relevance. We need to face our own shame and recognise that based on religion and scripture and the cultures and traditions that have evolved from these, we have created and allowed different levels of denials.So that the poor and marginalised oppressed castes, were and still are subjected to inhuman levels of spiritual, physical and material denials; long–forgotten tribes who are the original, pre–Hindu inhabitants of this land were and are rendered even more illiterate; our women, whether Brahman to ‘atishudra’ or ‘mleccha’, were and are not only kept away from education and attendant empowerment, but also subjected to violent abuse, within the family and outside.

We do not, however, rise as a people in anger and shame even while these figures and searing tales of humiliation and cruelty stare us in the face. We are not outraged when the current–day perpetuators of the big lie travel long distances to perform ghar vapsi (return to the home) rites on children, women and men from whom their own forefathers have snatched land, food and shelter for centuries. And then, having forced the re-conversion on the tribal people, and unconcerned about issues like food, education, health and empowerment), say they will construct separate temples for them to pray!
Within this larger sphere of material and spiritual disparity, present day statistics and our history of the past centuries, lies embedded the contribution of Christian individuals and institutions,  of varied denominations but all driven by the message of Christ — in building schools to educate girls as well as boys, in reaching inaccessible areas and holding out a caring hand to sections brutalised and excluded by scriptural faith and certainly by living tradition. 

It was inevitable that the mission of Christians in India would take them where the Indian establishment, still shackled by caste–bound prejudice, dithers and even after Independence, gingerly refuses to tread. To provide succour and to empower the poor, the tribal, the Dalit, the women.
We turn a blind eye to both realities. And both denials together make up the grand lie. The first is the collective denial of present human development figures that stare us in the face and which are linked to the historical denial of opportunity and fair play to large sections of our population in the past. The second denial is our refusal to recognise the contribution of Christian institutions.

The second denial is indeed linked to the first because it is in the arenas of these past and present day inequities and injustices that Christian individuals and institutions have located their work, their mandate being to work for the most marginalised and underprivileged. To deny the existence of disparity now, and historically, is to deny Christian contribution, then and now, and to claim that its all nothing but convenient cover for conversion. To accept their role is to face our moral and cultural poverty, the rank injustice and marginalisation that we have perpetuated on sections of our people. To accept their role is to nail the grand lie.

It was inevitable that the mission of Christians in India would take them where the Indian establishment, still shackled by caste–bound prejudice, dithers and even after Independence, gingerly refuses to tread.

We have heard so much in recent years about the offensive language contained in the Minute of Macaulay (March 7, 1835). But what we refuse to accept is that elementary and higher education came in through different Christian missions long before the colonially driven and objectionable Macaulay edict, that spoke brazenly about the promotion of European literature and science among the people of India, and that referred to the indigenous people as persons of inferior (heathen) status.

There was a St Francis Xavier who trailed the path in elementary education by exhorting companions to build a school in every village next to which a church was built; today Christian schools number 11,801 (pre–primary, primary and village level); secondary and higher secondary schools total 3,614! 
Since as early as the 16th century, several Christian colleges have existed in western and southern India. These colleges were not only in the business of education, but they also created fine libraries and collected archival material valuable for oriental knowledge. Missionaries who set up these institutions of education got engaged and embroiled in the land they came to inhabit. The tracts on biological species, the first dictionaries in many Indian languages, the singular contribution to indigenous dialects, are some of the fruits of that engagement. 

It was the Scottish mission, begun in South Konkan in 1822, that inspired the young, Jyotiba Phule, a radical mind from the region of current–day Maharashtra, who was a strong critique of the Hindu caste system in the 19th century. Pandita Ramabai, a Brahmin widow who chose conversion to Christianity as a means of emancipation from the persecution and drudgery of life as a Hindu widow, gave her testimony before the Education Commission in 1882. Official estimates of the time stated that one hundred million women were uneducated, with both Hindu and Muslim traditions historically denying women these rights. Included in this were girls, married women and, worst of all, widows who were subjected to humiliation and denied the dignity of living autonomous lives. 

Testifying before the commission, Ramabai had remarked that in ninety–nine cases out of a hundred the educated men of the country were opposed to female education and the proper position of women. It was of little use to build schools without girls to fill them, or without a staff of female teachers. The teaching profession for women was thought to be incompatible with womanly modesty, she had said.  

As far back as 1823, the Church of England Missionary Society ran 23 girls’ schools in Calcutta. In 1824, the American Mission opened the first school for girls in Bombay, a school that, incidentally, was open to children of all castes. The threat of the democratising processes that these contributions unleashed are undoubtedly behind the violent resistance to their work, then and now. 

In South India, too, it was the missions who pioneered women’s education — the first university college, the first medical school and the first training college for women — the Sarah Tucker College, Palamcottah, the Christian Medical College, Vellore in 1918 and St Christopher’s Training College, Madras in 1923 were set up by them.

In failing to nail the grand lie, we deny not just our past but also present day Indian reality. A few weeks ago, the RSS chief KS Sudarshan demanded, if you please, the ‘Indianisation’ of the church in India. It needs a great lie to hide the truth of the Church’s engagement with the marginalised people of India who are perceived by some as the real ‘problem’ of India. 

It is not my intention to uncritically glorify the role of the Church in India. It is definitely my intention to challenge the insidious attempt to deny and dismiss decades, even centuries, of compassion and commitment with a grand lie.