In September 1819, shortly after the ‘principal idol’ sent by Pomare II from Tahiti was conveyed around a Chapel in Falmouth, Cornwall, the Missionary Chronicle reported the arrival in London of further additions to the Missionary Museum. Sent by the Rev. Henry Townley as a gift from the Bengal Auxiliary Missionary Society, they were described as:

Twenty-two models of Hindoo deities, [carved in wood, about a foot in height, and painted] such as are ordinarily manufactured in that idolatrous country. Prints taken from these are intended to be given in the Missionary Sketches, accompanied by explanations from the Rev. Mr. Ward’s History of the Literature and the Religion of the Hindoos.¹

A month after their arrival, the cover of Missionary Sketches featured nine of Townley’s models, each with the name of the God they depicted printed beneath.²

Abbreviated descriptions of each God, summarising Ward’s text, were given on the following pages. In a footer at the end of the descriptions, a paragraph clarified their intended message, positioning the work of missionaries in India as a direct continuation of a long-term battle against religious idols, documented in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible:

These are specimens, Christian Reader, of the gods of the heathen in India, worshipped by more than a hundred millions of deluded people. These are the creatures of a corrupt imagination, and the workmanship of men’s hands ­­­— “they have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; they have hands, but they handle not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither speak they through their throat. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusted in them. O Israel, trust thou in the Lord.” Psalm cxv. 5—10.³

These conjunctions of artefact, image and text illustrate the strong connections between items sent to the Missionary Museum and the images and texts that appeared in missionary publications. It seems likely that Townley, like John Smith in Demerara, had seen the early issues of Missionary Sketches from 1818, featuring the Trimurti from Elephanta, Mantis the Soothsayer from South Africa, and the Family Idols of Pomare from Tahiti. A fairly recent arrival in India, Townley had been sent to Calcutta by the Missionary Society’s Directors in 1816.

The Rev. Mr. Ward, on the other hand, was William Ward, something of a veteran with nearly two decades of experience working for Baptist Missionary Society in India. In the aftermath of the French revolution, non-conformist churches in Britain had been associated with political radicalism, and the official line of the East India Company prohibited their missionaries from operating in areas it controlled. Sympathetic Company officials, however, had turned a blind eye to the activities of William Carey, the original Baptist missionary, after he arrived in India in 1793, particularly when he was officially employed on an indigo plantation.⁴

7The arrival of William Ward, along with three other Baptist missionaries and their families, in 1799, was harder to ignore. The recently arrived Anglo-Irish Governor-General, Richard Wellesley, pursuing a war against the French and their allies in Mysore, refused them permission to join Carey in Bengal. As a consequence, the Baptists established themselves at Serampore, a Danish controlled town less than twenty miles north of Calcutta, the capital of British India, much to Wellesley’s initial displeasure.⁵

Originally a printer and journalist from Derby in the British Midlands, Ward was responsible for the printing press at Serampore, established in 1800, where translations of the Bible were printed in Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and other Indian languages.⁶ The project of religious translation involved working closely with Indian scholars such as Ram Ram Basu, who was worked for Carey as his munshi (language teacher).⁷

When Governor Wellesley established Fort William College in Calcutta in 1801, it was Carey he appointed to teach Bengali, assisted by Basu. The project of translation operated in multiple directions—Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana were published in Bengali in 1802-03. From 1805 the Baptists were even paid a stipend by the Asiatic Society at Fort William College to translate and publish Sanskrit texts in English.⁸

A compendium of Indian religious texts printed in English, alongside descriptions of Hindu practice, Ward provided British evangelicals with an accessible guide to ‘the religion of the Hindoos‘. Even before the arrival in London of Townley’s ‘models’, Ward’s text had been used to compile a description that accompanied an image of Ganesh that was printed in the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle in March 1818. 

It was noted that many Hindus kept a small metal image of the god in their houses for daily worship. The Evangelical Magazine, however, was not content to adopt a position of straightforward condescension in relation to this ‘idolatry’, noting that:

The superstitious regard paid by these blind idolaters to a senseless image, may put to shame many who are better informed, and who call themselves Christians, but who live practically “without God in the world;” who never acknowledge the Creator and Preserver; and who daily go out and return home, amidst a thousand dangers, without seeking his guidance or protection.⁹

The London Missionary Society sent their first missionary to India in 1798. Arriving five years after William Carey, also without an official licence, Nathaniel Forsyth preached in and around Calcutta with the tacit support of Company officials. With minimal financial assistance from the Society in London, he found Calcutta expensive and lived for a time on a boat, until appointed minister of the Dutch church at Chinsurah (Hugli-Chuchura) in West Bengal.¹⁰

One of the major consequences of this clause was the establishment of schools across India, including for girls, supported financially by the East India Company—the Rev. Robert May of the London Missionary Society established thirty schools, educating nearly 3000 children including 700 sons of Brahmins in and around Chinsurah between 1812 and 1816.¹⁷  The exterior, interior and plan view of one of these schools was depicted on the cover of Missionary Sketches in October 1820, a year after the cover had featured Townley’s ‘Hindoo Idols’.¹⁸

It was in the wake of this campaign and the resulting new clause that Henry Townley had been sent to re-establish the Society’s mission at Calcutta, following the death of Forsyth. The Bengal Auxiliary Missionary Society was established in December 1817 to raise funds locally to support missionary activity.¹⁹ Prompted to contribute to the stock of missionary images, Townley, acting on behalf of the Auxiliary Society either purchased or commissioned a set of twenty-two murti (models)—images of Hindu gods.

It is significant these were described as “models”. This may have been an attempt to translate the word murti, which carries a sense that such figures take the material form of a god, without being gods in themselves, but it more likely suggests that they were acquired from the craftspeople who made them, rather than from temples or homes, where they had already been the focus for puja or bhakti (religious devotion). Unlike Pomare’s Family Idols, these were not given up by converts to Christianity, but they remained useful in illustrating the religious practices of India for missionary supporters across the world.

The fact that eight of the murti were arranged on the cover of Missionary Sketches around the black-faced figure of Jugunnathu is significant, reflecting this figure’s centrality to early nineteenth century British imaginations of Indian religion. A note in parentheses in the accompanying written account points out that the name of this God is ‘usually written Juggernaut’, explaining that this name is a title for a deified hero meaning “Lord of the World”.²⁰

The form of the image, with no legs and only stumps for arms but a very large head and eyes was explained: having been commissioned to house the bones of Krishna, its maker was interrupted at work, leaving the image unfinished. Brahma, himself, however, was said to have given the murti its eyes and a soul.

The focus of the printed description in Missionary Sketches then shifts from the image itself to the temple to Jagganath in Orissa and its annual Car Festival. As part of this, the crowd drew a tapering tower containing the image of Jagganath, between 50 to 60 feet high and with sixteen wheels. The description ends by noting:

Unnumbered multitudes of pilgrims, from all parts of India, attend this festival, among whom a great mortality frequently prevails; and hundreds, perhaps thousands of persons, diseased or distressed, have cast themselves under the wheels of this ponderous car, and have been crushed to death.²¹

The subjugation of Orissa during the Second Anglo-Maratha War of 1803, pursued by Wellesley, placed the temple of Jagannath at Puri, a major site of regional pilgrimage, under the control of the East India Company. The appointment by the Company of a tax collector and committee to manage temple affairs upset evangelicals, who argued that this amounted to state-sponsored idolatry.

The person most responsible for advancing this concern was Claudius Buchanan, an evangelical Scottish Anglican minister appointed to an East India Company chaplaincy in Bengal in 1796, who became vice-provost of Fort William College in 1800, where he worked closely with William Carey. 

Buchanan’s reference to Moloch connected Jagannath to the Old Testament book of Leviticus but also to Milton’s Paradise Lost, making it clear he regarded the procession at Puri as a form of demonic idolatry, endorsed and managed by a British commercial company. The image of the immense and unstoppable car of Juggernaut, crushing pilgrims beneath its wheels was so potent that it captured early nineteenth century evangelical opinion, finding an enduring place in the English language.²⁴

In the years that followed, the front cover of Missionary Sketches featured further Indian gods, with commentary supplied by Ward. In July 1820, an image of “Kalee, the black goddess of India” included a description of the animal sacrifices Ward witnessed at a festival in Calcutta:

Never did I see men so eagerly enter into the shedding of blood; the place literally swam with blood. The bleating of the animals, the numbers slain and the ferocity of the people employed actually made me unwell; and I returned about midnight, filled with horror and indignation.²⁵

In January 1821, the cover featured a representation of “Doorga, a principal goddess of the Hindoos” based on a drawing made and purchased at Chinsurah along with a number of others, distinctive in that:

all the lines by which the figures are delineated are composed of the name of the idol, in the Bengalee character, many thousand times repeated. The ornaments (here omitted) which are very profuse and not inelegant, are formed in the same manner.²⁶

The text described Durga and the features of ceremonies at which she was worshipped, noting a ceremony Ward witnessed at Calcutta in 1806, when:

The whole scene produced on my mind sensations of greatest horror. The dress of the singers – their indecent gestures – the abominable nature of the songs – the horrid din of their miserable drum – the lateness of the hour – the darkness of the place – with the reflection that I was standing in an idol temple, and that this immense multitude of rational and immortal creatures, capable of such superior enjoyments, were, in the very set of worship, perpetrating a crime of high treason against the God of heaven, while they themselves believed they were performing an act of merit.²⁷

Rumours of human sacrifices to Durga were reported, and a footnote enumerated the far larger number of annual deaths in ways that were, according to Ward, sanctioned by the ‘shasters (religious books of the Hindoos)’, which he had calculated:

Although not given a number, the body of the text listed another cause of death: ‘by the wheels of the idol Juggernaut’.

In April 1822, the cover of Missionary Sketches once again featured an image of Juggernaut, as well as diagrammatic representations of Boloram and Sabattra, his siblings.

The text included a mythical history of the creation of the three murti, abridged from an account drawn up by a Brahmin from Orissa.

The commentary that followed listed a number of features of the narrative, each provided with biblical references, suggestive of Christian parallels that might make the bible—referred to as the “True Veda”—appealing to Hindus.²⁸

The following issue, printed in July 1822, included an image of the procession of Juggernaut, with the textual description taken from Buchannan’s account, eleven years after it had appeared in the Missionary Chronicle—to lay before readers ‘the horrible enormities and abominable idolatries attending the Festival of the Car‘.²⁹

This was juxtaposed with another description by Buchanan of baptism and preaching at Serampore, alongside texts quoted from William Carey and William Ward. Readers were told:

‘Surely no reader of this sketch would hesitate to exert himself, or to subscribe a portion of his property, to put a stop only to the evils connected with the IDOL JUGGERNAUT.’³⁰

Just as Townley’s models were followed on the cover of Missionary Sketches by an image of a Chapel and school at Madras in January 1820, the succeeding issue, printed in October 1822, depicted Union Chapel in Calcutta, opened in April 1821. A centre for missionary activity, it was also intended to make evangelical Christianity available to the many dissolute Europeans living what evangelicals regarded as immoral lives in the capital of British India.³¹

Readers were provided with a history of the city, including an account of English prisoners dying crowded into the Black Hole Prison in 1756. This was followed by an account of the Serampore translations by the Baptist Missionaries, the work of Forsyth, as well as the arrival of Townley and more recent missionaries in the city.

The London Missionary Society’s grant of 1000 Rupees a year to support the School Society was noted, with the implication that schools and chapels would rapidly replace temples of idol worship across India.

While the missionary critique of India and its religious institutions was frequently harsh and intemperate, it is striking that it seems to have induced a response from Indian intellectuals.

Ram Ram Basu, who worked with Carey from the 1790s onwards and never converted to Christianity, nevertheless argued for the reform of Hinduism based on the Vedas. He even wrote a Bengali text about Jesus Christ, Christabibaranamrta, in 1803.

In 1817, Mrityunjaya Vidyalankar, an orthodox Brahmin depicted working alongside William Carey on translations at Fort William College compiled a legal report suggesting that the practice of sati (widow burning) was not sanctioned by any Indian holy texts.³²  

Most famously, Rammohum Roy, who worked alongside Basu, Vidyalankar and Carey at Fort William College spearheaded a movement to reform Hinduism, the principal targets of which were shared with evangelical missionaries:  idolatry, the caste system and sati. Sometimes remembered as the “father of the Bengal Renaissance”, Roy was significantly influenced by his engagement with Christianity, publishing The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness in 1820, setting out ethical teachings drawn from the gospels.³³

Criticised by some Baptist missionaries for extracting the teaching of Jesus from their framing within a narrative of salvation by grace, premised on Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, Roy continued working on a revised translation of the New Testament with the Baptist Missionary William Adam, only for Adam to leave the Baptists to establish a Unitarian Society in Calcutta with Roy.³⁴

Although they appear in nineteenth century images, such as that depicting the case ‘Indian Idols’ at the Missionary Museum, published in 1860, I haven’t been able to locate any of the original twenty-two models, two centuries after they arrived in London.

The closest I have come is a somewhat damaged painted clay figure of Jagganath held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (1910.62.84). Made from clay rather than wood, it has a different, less waisted, shape to the image located at the centre of the cover of Missionary Sketches in October 1819.

It therefore seems more likelyto be one of the numerous other representations of Jagganath associated with the London Missionary Society, including some that found their way into a case chiefly featuring images of the Buddha in 1860.

The Pitt Rivers Museum Jagganath appears to best match a black and white photograph, published in 1899 that includes a miniature model of Jagganath’s car.