Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

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CHAPTER XI WHAT CAREY DID FOR LITERATURE AND FOR HUMANITY The growth of a language--Carey identified with the transition stage of Bengali--First printed books--Carey’s own works--His influence on indigenous writers--His son’s works--Bengal the first heathen country to receive the press--The first Bengali newspaper--The monthly and quarterly Friend of India--The Hindoo revival of the eighteenth century fostered by the East India Company--Carey’s three memorials to Government on female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burning--What Jonathan Duncan and Col. Walker had done--Wellesley’s regulation to prevent the sacrifice of children--Beginning of the agitation against the Suttee crime-- Carey’s pundits more enlightened than the Company’s judges--Humanity triumphs in 1832-- Carey’s share in Ward’s book on the Hindoos--The lawless supernaturalism of Rome and of India--Worship of Jaganath--Regulation identifying Government with Hindooism--The swinging festival--Ghat murders--Burning of lepers--Carey establishes the Leper Hospital in Calcutta-- Slavery in India loses its legal status--Cowper, Clarkson, and Carey. LIKE the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all--the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest future. In countries like India and China, where civilisation has long ago reached its highest level, and has been declining for want of the salt of a universal Christianity, it is the missionary again who interferes for the highest ends, but by a different process. Mastering the complex classical speech and literature of the learned and priestly class, and living with his Master’s sympathy among the people whom that class oppresses, he takes the popular dialects which are instinct with the life of the future; where they are wildly luxuriant he brings them under law, where they are barren he enriches them from the parent stock so as to make them the vehicle of ideas such as Greek gave to Europe, and in time he brings to the birth nations worthy of the name by a national language and literature lighted up with the ideas of the Book which he is the first to translate. This was what Carey did for the speech of the Bengalees. To them, as the historians of the fast approaching Christian future will recognise, he was made what the Saxon Boniface had become to the Germans, or the Northumbrian Baeda and Wyclif to the English. The transition period of English, from 1150 when its modern grammatical form prevailed, to the fifteenth century when the rich dialects gave place to the literary standard, has its central date in 1362. Then Edward the Third made English take the place of French as the public language of justice and legislation, closely followed by Wyclif’s English Bible. Carey’s one Indian life of forty years marks the similar transition stage of Bengali, including the parallel regulation of 1829, which abolished Persian, made by the Mohammedan conquerors the language of the courts, and put in its place Bengali and the vernaculars of the other provinces. When Carey began to work in Calcutta and Dinapoor in 1792-93 Bengali had no printed and hardly any written literature. The very written characters were justly described by Colebrooke as nothing else but the difficult and beautiful Sanskrit Devanagari deformed for the sake of expeditious writings, such as accounts. It was the new vaishnava faith of the Nuddea reformer Chaitanya which led to the composition of the first Bengali prose. 22 The Brahmans and the Mohammedan rulers alike treated Bengali--though “it arose from the tomb of the Sanskrit,” as Italian did from Latin under Dante’s inspiration--as fit only for “demons and women.” In the 22 The Chaitanya Charita Amrita, by Krishna Dass in 1557, was the first of importance. 126
generation before Carey there flourished at the same Oxford of India, as Nuddea has been called, Raja Krishna Rai, who did for Bengali what our own King Alfred accomplished for English prose. Moved, however, chiefly by a zeal for Hindooism, which caused him to put a Soodra to death for marrying into a Brahman family, he himself wrote the vernacular and spent money in gifts, which “encouraged the people to study Bengali with unusual diligence.” But when, forty years after that, Carey visited Nuddea he could not discover more than forty separate works, all in manuscript, as the whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time. A press had been at work on the opposite side of the river for fifteen years, but Halhed’s grammar was still the only as it was the most ancient printed book. One Baboo Ram, from Upper India, was the first native who established a press in Calcutta, and that only under the influence of Colebrooke, to print the Sanskrit classics. The first Bengali who, on his own account, printed works in the vernacular on trade principles, was Gunga Kishore, whom Carey and Ward had trained at Serampore. He soon made so large a fortune by his own press that three native rivals had sprung up by 1820, when twenty-seven separate books, or 15,000 copies, had been sold to natives within ten years. For nearly all these Serampore supplied the type. But all were in another sense the result of Carey’s action. His first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801, his Grammar in the same year, and at the same time his Colloquies, or “dialogues intended to facilitate the acquiring of the Bengali language,” which he wrote out of the abundance of his knowledge of native thought, idioms, and even slang, to enable students to converse with all classes of society, as Erasmus had done in another way. His Dictionary of 80,000 words began to appear in 1815. Knowing, however, that in the long run the literature of a nation must be of indigenous growth, he at once pressed the natives into this service. His first pundit, Ram Basu, was a most accomplished Bengali scholar. This able man, who lacked the courage to profess Christ in the end, wrote the first tract, the Gospel Messenger, and the first pamphlet exposing Hindooism, both of which had an enormous sale and caused much excitement. On the historical side Carey induced him to publish in 1801 the Life of Raja Pratapaditya, the last king of Sagar Island. At first the new professor could not find reading books for his Bengali class in the college of Fort William. He, his pundits, especially Mritunjaya who has been compared in his physique and knowledge to Dr. Samuel Johnson, and even the young civilian students, were for many years compelled to write Bengali text-books, including translations of Virgil’s Æneid and Shakspere’s Tempest. The School Book Society took up the work, encouraging such a man as Ram Komal Sen, the printer who became chief native official of the Bank of Bengal and father of the late Keshab Chunder Sen, to prepare his Bengali dictionary. Self-interest soon enlisted the haughtiest Brahmans in the work of producing school and reading books, till now the Bengali language is to India what the Italian is to Europe, and its native literature is comparatively as rich. Nor was Carey without his European successor in the good work for a time. When his son Felix died in 1823 he was bewailed as the coadjutor of Ram Komal Sen, as the author of the first volume of a Bengali encyclopædia on anatomy, as the translator of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Goldsmith’s History of England, and Mill’s History of India. Literature cannot be said to exist for the people till the newspaper appears. Bengal was the first non-Christian country into which the press had ever been introduced. Above all forms of truth and faith Christianity seeks free discussion; in place of that the missionaries lived under a shackled press law tempered by the higher instincts of rulers like Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck, till Macaulay and Metcalfe gained for it liberty. When Dr. Marshman in 1818 proposed the publication of a Bengali periodical, Dr. Carey, impressed by a quarter of a century’s intolerance, consented only on the condition that it should be a monthly magazine, and should avoid political discussion. Accordingly the Dig-darshan appeared, anticipating in its contents and style the later Penny and Saturday Magazines, and continued for three years. Its immediate success led to the issue from the Serampore press on the 31st May 1818, of “the first newspaper ever printed in any Oriental language”--the Samachar Darpan, or News Mirror. 127
Page 1 and 2:
LIFE OF WILLIAM CAREY, Shoemaker &
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CONTENTS PAGE I. CAREY’S COLLEGE
Page 6 and 7:
Careys also had fallen on evil time
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for young Carey than for the rest o
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And England’s priestcraft shakes
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the fulness of his fame, that the e
Page 14 and 15:
This cobbler’s shed which was Car
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“He followed Paul; his zeal a kin
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His genial loving-kindness and his
Page 20 and 21:
“FIRST, As to their distance from
Page 22 and 23:
crop, maintain themselves. They wou
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It was from Courteenhall, a Northam
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plied the dealing of the Lord of Ho
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appear to the subsequent subscripti
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CHAPTER III INDIA AS CAREY FOUND IT
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a licence; clouded the early years
Page 34 and 35:
ciety which has so generously exert
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We can now see that, as usual, both
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with letters; the washing is done b
Page 40 and 41:
Warren Hastings Hindoo Christians h
Page 42 and 43:
and is still in good order. There t
Page 44 and 45:
Bengali sounds. It is a language of
Page 46 and 47:
came incarnate, under the threefold
Page 48 and 49:
“Sometimes I enjoyed sweet season
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will do well to associate as much a
Page 52 and 53:
efore magistrates and judges; and w
Page 54 and 55:
time meant the distillation of rum.
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land, America, Germany, and France,
Page 58 and 59:
ies, rightly trusting to Danish pro
Page 60 and 61:
efore sent missionaries to Tranqueb
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other; brother Carey is treasurer,
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CHAPTER VI THE FIRST NATIVE CONVERT
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whom, thirty years after, Macaulay
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hammedan convert was Peroo, another
Page 70 and 71:
not join them occupied the missiona
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as one of the “great things” fr
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While the Marshmans gave their time
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CHAPTER VII CALCUTTA AND THE MISSIO
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“The number of inquirers constant
Page 80 and 81: on probation, there were five survi
Page 82 and 83: chapters of Matthew are translated
Page 84 and 85: for one family, say also what will
Page 86 and 87: cannot be insulted without your bei
Page 88 and 89: CHAPTER VIII CAREY’S FAMILY AND F
Page 90 and 91: “MY DEAREST LOVE,--I felt very mu
Page 92 and 93: “A mission into Siam would be com
Page 94 and 95: Marshman could not resist joining t
Page 96 and 97: constant and familiar converse with
Page 98 and 99: his instrumentality, and what a tri
Page 100 and 101: than be accessory to a misunderstan
Page 102 and 103: CHAPTER IX PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT, B
Page 104 and 105: Bhagavat-Geeta or Dialogue of Krish
Page 106 and 107: When Carey and his colleagues were
Page 108 and 109: The seventy students, their governo
Page 110 and 111: on the public service, enjoy the fa
Page 112 and 113: thought it incumbent upon him to at
Page 114 and 115: CHAPTER X THE WYCLIF OF THE EAST--B
Page 116 and 117: colleagues accomplished, that which
Page 118 and 119: Sir Charles Wilkins, the Caxton of
Page 120 and 121: cape of the Peninsula to Benares).
Page 122 and 123: eady, 500 copies of it were struck
Page 124 and 125: of the valley of the Brahmapootra.
Page 126 and 127: Lahore “the book of Jesus is spok
Page 128 and 129: the Serampore fire. I could scarcel
Page 132 and 133: It was a critical hour when the fir
Page 134 and 135: The practice of infanticide was rea
Page 136 and 137: weapons, in winning the first victo
Page 138 and 139: merchants as well as Arabs from Eas
Page 140 and 141: lunted the natural shrewdness of th
Page 142 and 143: “I therefore only observe, respec
Page 144 and 145: attending him, for exposing himself
Page 146 and 147: “17th September 1816.--I approve
Page 148 and 149: held on 14th September, when the co
Page 150 and 151: educated as the cultivators. Before
Page 152 and 153: At a time when the English and even
Page 154 and 155: of the Society. He concluded his ad
Page 156 and 157: It was by this means that Carey edu
Page 158 and 159: sion spirit directly gave birth to
Page 160 and 161: ings for promoting Christianity, wi
Page 162 and 163: tion the Governor-General yielded t
Page 164 and 165: thus expressed in a letter to Franc
Page 166 and 167: 1812 the Committee had been increas
Page 168 and 169: property, or thirty-two letters ran
Page 170 and 171: men as theirs differ from one anoth
Page 172 and 173: we may edify one another may abound
Page 174 and 175: CHAPTER XIV CAREY AS AN EDUCATOR--T
Page 176 and 177: Bible as at last tolerated under th
Page 178 and 179: and the Brotherhood, to confer degr
Page 180 and 181:
manner all the points of difference
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In 1826 Carey, finding that his fav
Page 184 and 185:
Dr. Carey’s last report, at the c
Page 186 and 187:
ence, representing all the Protesta
Page 188 and 189:
CHAPTER XVI CAREY’S LAST DAYS 183
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annual revenues collected for this
Page 192 and 193:
the college, and remained, assiduou
Page 194 and 195:
might India now have been!” In Se
Page 196 and 197:
weather will permit us to expect. I
Page 198 and 199:
am Carey to the converts’ burial-
Page 200 and 201:
What must have been the feelings on
Page 202 and 203:
its own people and to half the huma
Page 204 and 205:
performed by these respectively for
Page 206 and 207:
II.--STATUTES AND REGULATIONS OF SE
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III.--ARTICLE VI., CLAUSE 2, OF THE
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