Formation of the ‘Punjab School’

The ‘Punjab school’ emerged amidst a decade of devastating warfare on the north-west frontier of the British East India Company state in India, which included the disastrous First Afghan War of 1839–42, the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845 and the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848–9. Following the First Anglo-Sikh War and the defeat of the Sikh empire, military forces of the Company state occupied the Punjab, or ‘land of the five rivers’, a large, geographically varied and ethnically diverse region in the north-west of the South Asian subcontinent, comprising parts of present-day Pakistan and north-west India. After a further Sikh rising and the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the Company state annexed the region, in a controversial decision taken by the recently appointed governor-general, James Broun-Ramsay, earl of Dalhousie (first marquess of Dalhousie from 1849), an elder, with evangelical sympathies, in the Church of Scotland.Footnote ¹⁰ The Punjab became Dalhousie’s ‘special child’.Footnote ¹¹ ‘From the first’, according to the Calcutta Review, ‘Lord Dalhousie had made the Punjab his peculiar care. The details of its manifold administration had been arranged under his own eye, and the principal agents had been selected by himself’.Footnote ¹² The Company state had the responsibility to impose and maintain order over a vast territory which had experienced many years of conflict and turmoil. Local landholders exploited an impoverished peasantry, while gangs of bandits terrorized travellers. To the north-west was a hostile Afghanistan, and to the north was a largely lawless region, inhabited by hill tribes who regularly raided Punjabi villages. The Russian empire was expanding in Central Asia, and the rivalry between the British and Russian empires, known as the ‘Great Game’, made British control of the Punjab crucial. According to a census taken in December 1854, the Punjab had a population of some 13 million, including about 7.5 million Muslims and 5.5 million Sikhs and Hindus. It was primarily an agrarian region, with some 26,000 villages and only four cities with a population over 50,000: Amritsar, Lahore, Multan and Peshawar.Footnote ¹³

The resident and quasi-regent in the Punjab from 1845 to 1849 was Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry Lawrence (1806–57), a field artillery officer who had played a leading role in the conquest of the region. Raised in Northern Ireland, Lawrence was educated at the East India Company’s military academy at Addiscombe. In 1823, shortly after arriving in India, he experienced an evangelical conversion under the influence of George Crauford, chaplain to the Bengal Artillery, a protégé of the celebrated Cambridge evangelical leader, Charles Simeon. For the rest of his life, Lawrence engaged in regular Bible study and daily devotions, often leading prayer meetings in his tent while on campaigns. His piety was strengthened by his marriage in 1837 to Honoria Marshall (1808–54), an Irish-born author and philanthropist who shared his evangelical beliefs. Beginning in 1847, Henry and Honoria established the Lawrence Asylums, boarding schools for soldiers’ children, who often experienced neglect and high death rates in the crowded military barracks. By 1852, the Asylums were educating 200 pupils, with plans for expansion.Footnote ¹⁴ Located in upland hill districts, which were regarded as a healthier environment, the schools had a strong evangelical Anglican ethos. Lawrence also supported the work of the evangelical Free Church of Scotland educational missionary, Alexander Duff. Lawrence had a love for romantic literature and published an autobiographical novel in 1840. He had little patience for what he called ‘sticking to rules and formalities … when you ought to be on the heels of a body of marauders … or riding into the villages and glens consoling, coaxing, or bullying as it may be, the wild inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁵ In a jointly written article in the Calcutta Review of 1844, Henry and Honoria observed how the soldier-administrator in India, ‘though beset with many temptations, enters on an almost boundless field for useful, honorable, even romantic activity. From the first day on which he enters his office, the destinies of thousands are at his disposal. His word is law.’Footnote ¹⁶ Gaunt in appearance, devout, generous, quick-tempered and warm-hearted, he attracted personal loyalty, especially from younger army and civilian officers, who became known as Henry Lawrence’s ‘young men’.

Following the annexation of the Punjab in 1849, India’s governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, appointed a Punjab Board of Administration, consisting of three commissioners, to oversee the post-annexation ‘settlement’, including the establishment of law courts and police, determinations of property ownership and tax liability, and defence against border raids. The commissioners included Henry Lawrence and his younger brother, John Lawrence (1811–79), an able civilian administrator and also a devout evangelical. According to John’s first biographer, ‘no more sincere Christian ever lived. He walked as in the sight of God. He read the Bible every morning of his life with prayer’.Footnote ¹⁷ ‘He was never ashamed or afraid to profess his belief in those simple truths of Christianity which he found enough for his soul’s support’, observed A. P. Stanley, dean of Westminster, and ‘his whole conduct was grounded on the assurance that he was working with and for Eternal Righteousness’.Footnote ¹⁸ The third commissioner was initially Charles G. Mansel, a senior administrator. He was replaced in October 1851 by Robert Montgomery, another Northern Irish evangelical, who, like both Lawrences, had studied at Foyle College in Londonderry. Montgomery (who was the father of the pro-imperialist bishop of Tasmania, H. H. Montgomery, and the grandfather of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery) had trained at the Company’s military academy at Addiscombe, but now served as a civilian administrator.

In response to a shortage of military and civilian officers, the imperial state in the Punjab pursued what was termed the ‘non-regulation’ system, a practical form of governance by which officers were given considerable autonomy within their districts. The Punjab was divided into seven divisions, each made up of between three to five districts, with each district assigned a district officer.Footnote ¹⁹ The district officers exercised judicial, financial and administrative authority; with communications being slow and difficult, they concentrated considerable power in their persons. Laws and procedures were ‘based, as far as possible’ on local customs, as interpreted by the district officer.Footnote ²⁰ For the historian of India, Percival Spear, the Punjab school was characterized by the ‘doctrine of the “personal touch”’, with officers avoiding local ‘go-betweens’ and going directly among the people, ‘undeviating in their justice and unsparing of their strength’. Under the ‘non-regulation’ system, officers were ‘given wide personal discretion’, acting with a ‘moral and personal dynamism’. They had a sense of being ‘the instruments of Providence’ and ‘went forward confident in their mission to rule, to civilize, and to modernize in the western way’.Footnote ²¹ Local government in the Punjab, according to the evangelical journalist and historian, George Smith, was ‘administered by civilians and soldiers of marked individuality of character and righteousness of aim, who feared no responsibility save to their own conscience and to God’. The aim was to prepare Punjabis ‘for the time when they must be absorbed’ into the more formal imperial system ‘of law and procedure’.Footnote ²² The ideal for Punjab soldier-administrators, Kathryn Tidrick observed, ‘was to combine military with civil command’; they were supported by a police force of some 24,000 men, mainly Muslims and Sikhs, and about 55,000 regular soldiers.Footnote ²³ The Board of Administration overseeing the Punjab broke up in 1853, due to disagreements between the Lawrence brothers. John Lawrence now became the sole commissioner, or chief commissioner, continuing the Punjab system.

Some sixty younger men were recruited to assist with the Punjab settlement, half of them army officers, and half civilians. About thirty of these Punjab assistants had trained under the fervent evangelical and strict sabbatarian administrator, James Thomason (1804–53), whose father had been a chaplain in India and whose family also had close ties to Charles Simeon, the Cambridge evangelical who had inspired George Crauford and, through him, Henry Lawrence. As a child, Thomason had been sent back to England to live with Simeon as his ward and be privately tutored under Simeon’s direction. Thomason then proceeded to study at the East India Company College of Haileybury, returning to India as a civilian officer in 1822. In 1827, he married Maynard Eliza Grant, whose father had been a close relative of the evangelical Charles Grant, a chairman of the East India Company and member of the Clapham Sect. From 1843 until his death in 1853, Thomason served as lieutenant-governor of the north-west provinces and was based in Agra. He recruited capable young men as his assistants; they became his ‘zealous disciples’, holding ‘evangelical views roughly similar to his own’, including emphasizing the importance of regular Bible study and prayer. ‘Religious affinity’, according to Penner, ‘facilitated the formation of the Thomasonian school of officers’.Footnote ²⁴ Thomason and his protégés were especially committed to bringing good government to the ‘lower middle and poorer sections of the community’ and promoting education.Footnote ²⁵ According to his principal secretary, ‘the goal of his measures in governing was the eventual conversion of the people to Christianity’.Footnote ²⁶ In recruiting Thomasonians from the north-west provinces for service in the Punjab ‘non-regulation’ system, Dalhousie and the Lawrences were confident they would be of strong moral and religious character. They needed for the Punjab, Henry Lawrence wrote to Thomason on 10 March 1849, ‘rough and ready men of good business habits and good common sense, men who like camp life, and being among the people’.Footnote ²⁷ ‘I regard your Province’, Dalhousie wrote to Thomason on 24 March 1849, ‘as the mine out of which I may dig good public servants, knowing that others will speedily be forthcoming in their place’.Footnote ²⁸

Others were selected as district officers in the Punjab based on their military records during the Anglo-Sikh wars. They included the capable evangelical army officer, Major (later Major-General) Herbert Edwardes, son of a Church of England vicar and a protégé of Henry Lawrence. In 1847–8, backed by a military force of 5,000 men, with field artillery, Edwardes pacified the large Bannu region, which bordered Afghanistan, convincing villagers to dismantle over 400 ‘forts’ (in reality, to take down the mud walls surrounding their villages) in response to the combined threat of bombardment and promise of good government. Edwardes made good his promise to the Bannuchi people, overseeing the building of roads, the construction of irrigation canals, and the implementation of agricultural improvements. In 1851, Edwardes published a self-promoting account of the Bannu campaign, in two volumes, portraying it as ‘the bloodless conquest of the wild valley of Bunnoo’ achieved through his role as a ‘pioneer of Christian civilization’.Footnote ²⁹ His book captured the imagination of British readers, helping shape a popular view of Christian knights bringing justice and good government to the Punjab by force of moral character. (Over thirty years later, Edwardes’s close friend, the art critic, John Ruskin, published a selection of extracts from Edwardes’s account, under the title A Knight’s Faith. Footnote ³⁰) Edwardes gained further renown in the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848–9, besieging the Sikh stronghold at Multan with a small force of irregulars until a more substantial military force arrived to take the city. Another military officer recruited for the Punjab settlement was the evangelical cavalry officer, Colonel (later General) Reynell Taylor, also a protégé of Henry Lawrence and a close friend of Edwardes. Taylor served with distinction in the Anglo-Sikh wars, commanded irregular units protecting the northern frontier, and in 1859 was appointed commissioner in Derajat, where he supported the building of schools and personally donated £1,000 for the formation of a CMS mission.Footnote ³¹ Henry Lawrence’s military protégés in the Punjab also included the formidable, Bible-reading, Calvinist Northern Irish Protestant cavalry officer, Colonel (later Brigadier-General) John Nicholson, who as deputy commissioner of Bannu from 1852 to 1856 imposed order and a rough justice on Punjab’s northern frontier. While respected for his courage and prowess, Nicholson’s ruthlessness, volatile temper, floggings and summary executions of suspected malefactors represented a darker side of the Punjab school. Some Punjabis formed a cult devoted to venerating ‘Nikal Seyn’ and his fearsome severity, believing him to be an avatar of Vishnu.Footnote ³²

The military and civilian officers of the Punjab school, with their immense personal power and authority under the ‘non-regulation’ system, made steady progress in the ‘settlement’ of the Punjab. A short, simple civil code of justice was drawn up and enforced.Footnote ³³ The people were disarmed, and the north-west frontier fortified and largely pacified. Numerous roads were constructed, the vital ‘Grand Trunk Road’ was extended from Lahore to Peshawar, and trade was encouraged through the abolition of internal transit duties. The land tax was reduced by half. Slavery, organized banditry, sati (widow burning) and female infanticide were largely suppressed, and the foundations laid for improvements in women’s rights and educational opportunities. Henry Lawrence took a particular interest in improving prison conditions across the Punjab.Footnote ³⁴ There was canal construction, major irrigation projects, and tree planting, which in time would help make the Punjab the ‘garden of India’.Footnote ³⁵ These achievements both arose from, and contributed to, the belief that the Punjab network of district officers represented God’s purpose for the ‘civilization’ of the Punjabis. While the pseudo-scientific discourse of race, including social Darwinism, would not become pronounced in India until the 1870s, racist views of Indians were prevalent among British officials by the later eighteenth century. The Punjab network shared such attitudes, viewing the British as a ‘superior’ white people, who had subjugated ‘inferior’ peoples of colour in India. That said, they also professed respect for the courage and vigour of the so-called ‘martial races’ of northern India, including their opponents during the Anglo-Sikh wars, and they were committed to shaping an improved society in the Punjab.Footnote ³⁶

The soldier-administrators of the Punjab supported Christian missions to the Punjabis, attending missionary meetings, joining missionary societies, and contributing to mission schools and colleges. They were especially drawn to the Church Missionary Society, the evangelical missionary society of the established Church of England in India, which represented the alliance of church and imperial state. Just as the British annexation brought order, roads, canals, irrigation and freer trade to the Punjab, so it would also bring Christian religion. While the East India Company State discouraged missionary activity among its officials elsewhere, this was not the case in the Punjab, where ‘the practice of official neutrality [in religion] collapsed entirely’. The period after 1846 ‘saw the firm establishment of Christian rule there’.Footnote ³⁷ According to the evangelical Punjab official Donald McLeod, writing in 1849, ‘we have never heard a whisper of the order respecting non-participation on the part of public officers in missionary operations – and I cannot believe that any such has been issued’.Footnote ³⁸ Army officers in the Punjab, to be sure, did not use their authority to exert pressure for Christian conversions among their Indian soldiers. They held that officers must not require or encourage Indian soldiers to attend religious services, and missionaries were not permitted access to military barracks. Nonetheless, in the Punjab (unlike Bengal), when Indian soldiers did convert they were allowed to continue serving in the army, and Punjab officers insisted on their right to support missions in their capacity as ‘private Christians’.Footnote ³⁹

British officers celebrated their victory in the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849 with a special thanksgiving subscription for the CMS.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thomason supported the formation of mission schools, including the CMS St John’s College in Agra (founded in 1851). Here, the first principal was the gifted evangelical linguist and scholar, Thomas Valpy French (who in 1877 became the first bishop of Lahore). By 1857, there were 320 students at St John’s College, and several branch schools had been established in the district.Footnote ⁴¹ Writing on 6 September 1851, Thomason assured Henry Venn, London secretary of the CMS, of his commitment to an ‘active Christian instruction, the powerful setting forth of Christian doctrine, and Christian example in conjunction with secular learning, as its handmaid, its ornament, and its necessary result’.Footnote ⁴² Henry and John Lawrence, Montgomery, Edwardes, and others of the Punjab school attended the meeting on 9 February 1852 in Lahore that formed the Punjab Church Missionary Society, raising subscriptions of £1,145 at the meeting.Footnote ⁴³ Henry Lawrence became president of this Society and subscribed ₹500 a year, while the other two commissioners of the Punjab Board of Administration, John Lawrence and Robert Montgomery, became members of the Council.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Board of Administration gave the CMS a site for a school in the Lahore city centre and the Deputy Commissioner undertook to build the school to accommodate 200 pupils.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1856, the Punjab CMS established the Lady Lawrence Schools for girls, as a memorial to Honoria Lawrence, who had died of rheumatic fever in 1854.Footnote ⁴⁶

There was a prospect for missions in the Punjab, the CMS Punjab missionary, Robert Clark, informed Major Hector Straith of the London CMS Committee in June 1853, ‘which has seldom if ever been equalled in the history of missions’.Footnote ⁴⁷ ‘You have in this Country [Punjab]’, Clark further observed to the CMS committee on 3 October 1853, ‘in the highest offices and through all ranks men of God earnest in their efforts to do good and willing to assist your missionaries’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As they expanded their operations across the Punjab, CMS missionaries came to share the imperialist attitudes of the Punjab school, embracing what the historian Jeffrey Cox described as a military discourse of ‘geo-religious triumphalism’, which viewed the Punjab as the ‘ecclesiastical pathway to central Asia’.Footnote ⁴⁹ From the early 1850s, the CMS missionary Robert Clark was attracted by the soldier-administrators of the Punjab school, calling them the ‘Christian heroes of the Punjab’. ‘They were men’, he later wrote, ‘who honoured God, and were therefore honoured of God; and they speedily rose to great distinction.’ They became ‘the founders of several of our Mission stations’, helping create what he described as ‘our frontier line of [missionary] stations’, strategically laid out like a line of military forts across the Punjab.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘The great army camps’, observed Clark’s son and biographer, ‘… collected substantial sums’ for the CMS mission in the Punjab, and ‘the Punjab mission was intended to be a thank-offering to Almighty God for victory granted over a terrible foe’.Footnote ⁵¹ According to the evangelical Donald McLeod, a divisional commissioner in the Punjab, writing in March 1853, ‘if the hand of the Lord has ever been distinctly shewn in respect to any country on the face of the globe I think it may be emphatically said of the Punjab’.Footnote ⁵²

In 1852, Major (later Colonel) William Martin of the 9th Bengal Native Infantry donated £1,000 anonymously to the CMS to establish a mission in Peshawar, in the far north of the Punjab on the Afghan frontier. However, the commissioner in Peshawar, Colonel Frederick Makeson, although he supported CMS missions in Agra and elsewhere in the Punjab, blocked the proposed CMS mission there as too risky in this volatile frontier district, where there were serious concerns that Muslim clerics would soon declare a jihad or holy war for the expulsion of the British.Footnote ⁵³ Makeson was assassinated by a Muslim zealot in September 1853, and he was replaced as commissioner by Herbert Edwardes, who arrived in Peshawar with his wife Emma in December 1853. The mission advocates now approached Edwardes, who reversed Makeson’s decision, giving his backing for the CMS Peshawar mission. He insisted that while the imperial state protected freedom of worship for Muslims and Hindus, this was not done out of fear and did not preclude Christians from pursuing missions. Edwardes called and chaired a public meeting to inaugurate the Peshawar CMS mission on 19 December 1853. The meeting was attended by a number of military officers, including Colonel Bartle Frere, Major Martin, Captain Brind, and lieutenants Bamfield, Crommelin, Norman, Pritchard, Ross, Stallard and Urmston, while the mission received warm support from the chief commissioner of the Punjab, John Lawrence.Footnote ⁵⁴ In his address, subsequently published and widely circulated, Edwardes emerged as the evangelical voice of the Punjab school, enunciating what he believed were the providential purposes behind Britain’s Indian empire. ‘That man’, he insisted, ‘must have a very narrow mind who thinks that this immense India has been given to our little England for no other purpose than for our own aggrandisement.’ ‘The conquests and wars of the world’, he continued, ‘all happen as the world’s Creator wills them; and empires come into existence for purposes of His, however blindly intent we may be upon our own’. ‘We may rest assured that the East has been given to our country for a mission … to the souls of men.’ The British had a duty to support missions, and ‘we may be quite sure that we are much safer if we do our duty than if we neglect it; and that He who has brought us here with His own right arm will shield and bless us, if in simple reliance upon Him we try to do His will’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Within a few weeks, ₹30,000 had been raised for the Peshawar mission, including a substantial donation of ₹500 from Edwardes’s friend, Colonel John Nicholson.Footnote ⁵⁶ According to the CMS missionary, Robert Clark, the Peshawar mission was to be ‘one not of defence, but of attack – an outpost of Indian Missions carrying the Gospel into the midst of a hostile enemy, and bearing on Persia and Central Asia’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1855, it expanded its activities into Afghanistan, at the same time that Edwardes managed to negotiate a peace treaty with Dost Mohammed, ruler in Afghanistan, after fifteen years of conflict. For Edwardes, the Afghan mission and peace treaty were providentially linked. ‘Dull would be the heart’, he wrote to Henry Venn in February 1855, ‘which could not feel these coincidences to come from the Disposer of events. And they awaken busy speculation as to what the future will bring forth.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Not all CMS missionaries, however, were comfortable with the close relations between the CMS and the Punjab soldier-administrators. For the Punjab CMS missionary, Thomas Valpy French, those relations could be an obstacle to reaching people. ‘What grieves me more deeply’, he wrote to Henry Venn on 29 January 1857, ‘is that a Missionary … can do but little to dispel the ill impression which the rapidity of British conquests, or as they would have it, British oppression, not unreasonably creates’. ‘The Bible in the one hand’, he added, ‘has no attractiveness, when it seems to them accompanied by the sword in the other.’Footnote ⁵⁹

The ‘Mutiny’ and its Aftermath

Beginning in May 1857, north-central India was swept by a series of mutinies among the Indian sepoy soldiers, which quickly developed into a general uprising aimed at expelling the British and restoring traditional rulers. There were widespread killings of Europeans, including missionaries and their families, as well as Indian Christian converts (reflecting Hindu and Muslim hostility to Christian missions). The ‘Great Rising’ was suppressed by British and loyal sepoy troops by July 1858, with British victories often followed by large-scale summary executions of suspected insurgents, the burning of villages, and plunder of Indian possessions. During the rising, the Punjab did not experience any significant unrest, due partly to pre-emptive action against suspected mutineers. Regular and irregular military units from the Punjab were then employed to help suppress the rising elsewhere.

Some leading figures in the Punjab school passed from the scene during these years. Thomason had died in 1853. Lord Dalhousie had resigned as governor-general due to poor health in 1856, before the outbreak of the Mutiny, and he returned to Scotland, dying in 1860. At the onset of the Mutiny, Henry Lawrence travelled to Lucknow to organize what would prove to be the successful defence of the city after a prolonged siege. Severely wounded by an artillery shell on 2 July 1857, he survived for forty-eight hours and, according to his friend William Kaye, ‘expressed the deepest humility and repentance for his sins, and his firm trust in [Christ’s] atonement’, speaking ‘to several persons present about the state of their souls, urging them to pray and read their Bibles’.Footnote ⁶⁰ His was a model Victorian evangelical death, and for his death in defence of civilians and his pious deathbed, ‘Lawrence of Lucknow’ became regarded by many as a Christian martyr of the Mutiny, alongside his friend, the devout Baptist Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, who died of illness in November 1857 after leading the force that relieved Lucknow. Another soldier-administrator of the Punjab and protégé of Henry Lawrence, John Nicholson, died in the assault on Delhi. After the Mutiny was suppressed, the British imperial state took over the governance of India from the East India Company, and this was followed by major legislative reconstruction.Footnote ⁶¹ In her Royal Proclamation on India of 1858, Queen Victoria affirmed her own Christian faith, but her government disclaimed ‘alike the right and desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects’. That said, her imperial state in India remained a Christian state with an established church, and that church continued to receive financial support from the imperial state.

For many in Britain, as the historian Brian Stanley has observed, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ was both a divine judgement on Britain for not having done enough for missions, and a divine summons to redouble its efforts to Christianize India.Footnote ⁶² Many viewed the Christian victims of the Mutiny as ‘martyrs’ and hoped their suffering would now lead to increased Christian conversions across India. Through ‘the blood of our martyred fellow-countrymen and countrywomen’, observed the earl of Chichester, president of the CMS, at a meeting in January 1858, ‘in God’s good time some of us – or if not ourselves, our children – will be permitted to witness the precious fruits of a wise repentance, will see that great territory occupied from one end to the other by a Christian population’.Footnote ⁶³ From 1858, evangelicals conducted a public campaign to persuade the government to mandate a forceful Christian policy in India.

The campaign began in early 1858, when Edwardes, commissioner of Peshawar, issued a lengthy memorandum of nine points calling for a Christian policy in the new imperial state in India, including the teaching of the Bible in all government schools, an end to government recognition of caste differences, an end to government support of non-Christian religious places of worship and holidays, suppression of prostitution, and an end to government involvement in the opium trade between India and China. For Edwardes, God had renewed English dominion over India for a purpose, and this was not simply material improvement through better roads, irrigation and trade; it also meant India’s moral and religious regeneration.Footnote ⁶⁴ With the defeat of the Mutiny – a victory gained through the deaths of those he described as his ‘father’ (Henry Lawrence) and ‘brother’ (John Nicholson) – Edwardes maintained that ‘India was now being given back again to England as a new trust from God, and that both the army and the Government needed to be wisely reorganised’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Edwardes sent a copy of his memorandum to the English evangelical politician, Lord Shaftesbury, to encourage a parliamentary movement for the Christian policy in India.Footnote ⁶⁶ The evangelical Donald McLeod, financial commissioner of the Punjab, issued a letter on 26 February 1858 in support of Edwardes’s memorandum. ‘It becomes us’, he wrote, ‘as a Government no less than as individuals, to acknowledge and avow our conviction that the Christian religion is alone the true one, and to avail ourselves of every legitimate opportunity of encouraging our subjects to learn the truth and follow it’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In April 1858, John Lawrence, chief commissioner of the Punjab, expressed his support for many, though not all, of Edwardes’s recommendations in a despatch directed to the governor-general, Lord Canning, and widely circulated. Lawrence insisted that it was the ‘aspiration of every Christian officer’ that the Bible be ‘taught in every school across India’.Footnote ⁶⁸ To those who objected to a Christian policy because the large majority of people in India were not Christian, Lawrence, reflecting the paternalist ethos of the Punjab school, had a stark response:

Edwardes lauded Lawrence’s despatch as ‘a noble expression’ which promised ‘to do whatever Christianity requires’.Footnote ⁷⁰

In Britain, the CMS and other missionary societies campaigned for the Christian policy in India with public meetings and petitions. In the summer of 1859, the leading evangelicals John Bird Sumner, archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Shaftesbury led a high-profile deputation of seventy persons to meet with the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and secretary of state for India, Sir Charles Wood, and press for the Christian policy. Although both Palmerston and Wood professed sympathy for the ideal of a Christian India, they declined practical support for the Christian policy.Footnote ⁷¹ Lawrence, now retired as Punjab chief commissioner, had recently returned to England to a hero’s welcome. At a public meeting on 24 June 1859 in London, he was presented with an address commending his Christian policy in the Punjab, and signed by the established church’s archbishops of Canterbury, York and Armagh, twenty other Church of England bishops, twenty-eight members of the House of Lords, and seventy-one MPs.Footnote ⁷² Later that summer, Lawrence had two long interviews with Wood to press the case for the Christian policy, but without success.Footnote ⁷³

Edwardes, lionized by the British public for his role in defeating the Mutiny, had returned to England on furlough in the summer of 1858, and he now took up a prominent role in the Christian policy campaign. (Before leaving Peshawar, he had gifted his house to the CMS mission there.)Footnote ⁷⁴ Unlike the taciturn Lawrence, Edwardes was an eloquent and engaging public speaker, who aroused enthusiastic responses from audiences. In March 1860, he was invited to address the Conference on Christian Missions held in March 1860 at Liverpool, giving the main address at a large public meeting chaired by Lord Shaftesbury. According to the conference report, Edwardes’s arrival at the podium was met by ‘tremendous and repeated cheers’. He provided an overview of the military victory in India, describing a series of episodes that he insisted could only have been providential – including how the Punjab, which should have been ‘raw and galled’ following its recent conquest and annexation, had instead been ‘the main means of our salvation in British India’, providing military forces that were vital in defeating the Mutiny. Edwardes insisted that ‘if ever in the history of any nation, the hand of God was seen coming out of the cloud to interfere on behalf of any people, the hand of God was seen fighting for us in British India during this war’. The Mutiny’s lesson was that ‘the giver of empires is our God’, and Britain must ‘no longer go on with the godless, heartless, senseless theory, that you can have a nation without a national feeling of religion’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Speaking at the sixty-first anniversary meeting of the CMS in May 1860 at Exeter Hall, Edwardes observed that due to the ‘Punjab system’, with its close connection of soldier-administrators and missions, the Punjab had stood firmly with the British, and sent soldiers to help defeat the Mutiny elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁶ For example, ‘at Peshawur, we derived our safety from the presence of the Christian mission like an Ark amongst us’.Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘It is not the language of fanaticism’, Edwardes insisted, ‘which says “Christianize your policy”. It is the language of sound wisdom; it is the language of experience. I say that the Christian policy is the only policy of hope.’ For ‘if we Christianize a people’, he added, ‘we have made an empire’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Lawrence shared the platform with Edwardes, warmly supporting the speech.Footnote ⁷⁹ Later that year, Edwardes addressed the YMCA at Exeter Hall on ‘Our Indian Empire’, arguing that India ‘was put into our hands by God’ as a form of ‘stewardship – a trust in which England was to seek and find her own national benefit in benefiting God’s Indian people’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Despite Edwardes’s eloquence and the widespread support among the British missionary public for the Christian policy in India, the Liberal government of Lord Palmerston opposed the policy, believing it risked provoking further unrest in a multi-faith India. The campaign culminated on 2 July 1860, when the duke of Marlborough brought to the House of Lords a resolution to remove the exclusion of Bible education from government schools in India.Footnote ⁸¹ By now, he claimed, some 1,500 petitions had been sent by the British and Irish public in support of Christian education in India, including the 400 petitions he presented to the Lords that evening. He directed attention to the Punjab, including Commissioner Henry Carre Tucker’s work in promoting Bible teaching in schools, and John Lawrence’s support for Christian teaching in government schools.Footnote ⁸² But in the debate, government ministers firmly opposed Marlborough’s resolution, and the Lords decided that the resolution was inexpedient. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford (whose father had famously campaigned to open India to Christian missions in 1813), supported Marlborough by presenting a petition in support of his resolution in the Lords a few days later, but they were again opposed by government ministers in an ill-tempered exchange.Footnote ⁸³ Over the following years it became clear that the British imperial state would not respond to pressure from the missionary public to implement the Christian education policy in India. The government recognized the benefits of education for India, but it held that to maximize those benefits for Hindus and Muslims, teaching in government-supported schools must be strictly secular. British public zeal for the Christian policy subsequently waned, and by the mid-1860s, the campaign had failed. Reflecting in 1865 on the campaign, Edwardes observed that ‘there was a good stand-up fight, and our party was defeated.’ ‘In the course of years’, he added, ‘we have become accustomed to a much wider separation of Government from the public profession and teaching of religion than would have been thought possible forty years ago’.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the post-Mutiny Punjab, soldier-administrators continued to support missions, churches were built across the province, the mission was expanded into Kashmir, and the number of mission stations increased. For many, the Punjab was ‘a natural base of missionary work in Central Asia’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This support found expression in the Punjab Missionary Conference held in Lahore between 26 December 1862 and 2 January 1863.Footnote ⁸⁶ This was the second major missionary conference in India (the first having been held in 1855 in Calcutta). The Punjab conference was attended primarily by CMS and American Presbyterian missionaries, and by officers of the Punjab school, who played prominent roles. Donald McLeod, financial commissioner of the Punjab, served as president of the conference, giving opening and concluding addresses. Colonel (later Major-General) Edward Lake, commissioner of the Jalundar Doab, Punjab, chaired two sessions, presented a paper on lay support for missions, and gave a major address at the conference public meeting. Other chairpersons and speakers from the Punjab school included Captain Charles McMahon, Colonel Robert Maclagan, Major McLeod Innes, VC, Captain J. R. Pollock, R. N. Cust, and Colonel Sir Herbert Edwardes. The conference resolved to form a ‘Bible and Tract Society for the Punjab’, with Sir Robert Montgomery, Punjab lieutenant-governor, as patron, Donald McLeod as chairman, and Edwardes, Lake, Maclagan and Cust among the council members. Speaking at the concluding public meeting, Edwardes emphasized that it was given to ‘our province [the Punjab] to take the lead in the regeneration of India’. He re-emphasized that Britain had conquered India as part of the providential plan. ‘We have come to conquer India, it is true’, he told the conference, ‘but let each one of us go home with the thought, that we have not come to conquer it for ourselves; our mission here is to conquer it for God’.Footnote ⁸⁷

However, Edward Lake observed, there were some ‘in high places, both in England and in India’ who objected to military and civilian officers of the Punjab taking part in the Punjab Missionary Conference.Footnote ⁸⁸ They insisted that the imperial state in India must be neutral in religion. By the mid-1860s, despite the success of the Punjab Missionary Conference, support for an alliance of the imperial state and missions in India was waning. Furthermore, the Punjab school, with its ideal of heroic, evangelical soldier-administrators governing ‘wild inhabitants’ through force of moral character, was losing its hold on the public imagination. The Punjab was no longer a pioneer field for British soldier-administrators; routine was setting in. The Punjab ‘non-regulation’ system was coming to an end, as the Punjab was brought under more centralized, regular imperial governance with the legislative reconstruction in post-Mutiny India, and as communications with the Calcutta central government improved with the spread of telegraph lines and railways. Local military and civilian officials no longer exercised extensive personal autonomy and authority within their districts. Leading Christian soldier-administrators of the Punjab retired from India service or moved to other provinces in the country. John Lawrence returned to India to serve as viceroy from 1864 to 1869, but his health was failing, and his tenure was not a success. The defeat of calls for a Christian policy in India served to undermine hopes that a Christian India could be achieved through an alliance of church and imperial state. While mission schools and medical dispensaries were valued by Punjabis, there were very few Christian converts – only about four thousand by 1881 in the Punjab. For many Punjabis, as the historian Kenneth Jones observed, ‘the Christian missionaries were seen as part of a government machine that first defeated the Punjabi, next sought to govern him, and then to convert him’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The discourse relating to a providential purpose for the empire in India was fading.