THE ORISSA MISSION

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THE ORISSA MISSION

The General Baptist Missionary Society established itself in the worst place in the world they knew of. This is the story of James Peggs, who was to an extent broken by his horrific experiences in India, but instead took up the pen to force the British Government into outlawing the worst excesses of Hinduism. The story of these missionaries is astonishing – in a later post I will include some details of how they succeeded in establishing churches in ‘Satan’s abode.’ http://tiny.cc/5p5cmz

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FIGHTING EVIL BY WORD AND PEN

The General Baptist Missionary Society was formed in Boston in 1816. Many of its early missionaries were from the East Midlands. They endured great hardship.

In 1821 James Peggs, a graduate of the Baptist academy at Wisbech (pictured), travelled to India with fellow GBMS missionary William Bampton accompanied by William Ward, who had previously been with the Calvinist BMS at Serampore, to take advice from William Carey; then they went to the Orissa region in 1822. Because of East India Company and government policy, it had been closed to missionaries in order to avoid upsetting Hindus and thereby trade.

Bampton and Peggs established a mission at Cuttack, setting up some schools, and in 1823 Bampton with his wife made the huge step of moving to Puri, the Hindu site considered the ‘seat of Satan’ where the desperate and deluded were crushed beneath the Juggernaut ‘car’; they were perhaps inspired by the writing of Claudius Buchanan, who had visited the area in 1806 and described the scene of a man squashed by the wheels of the ‘car’. The practice of child sacrifice, widow-burning and self-torture were also noted here. The Bamptons based themselves at Piplee (Pipili), a ‘Golgotha’ place where human bones were scattered. They chose to establish a mission there as the worst place in the world that they knew of, enduring great persecution.

In 1825 they witnessed a cholera epidemic breaking out at the same time as the Ruth Jattra festival, with ‘a small river quite glutted with corpses, and the wind drifted them together, they formed a complete mass of putrefying flesh.’ Peggs concluded, ‘Surely this is Satan’s own abode’ whilst they also saw a man, still living, being pecked apart by ravens. But Peggs proved unable to cope with the stress of Puri, overcome by ‘the huge temple of the horrid Moloch, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears, always conspicuous; the constant sight of human skulls and bones wherever you ride…’ They also saw a ‘sati’ the burning of a widow (widows were also buried alive).

Ill-health forced Peggs to return to England where he became a vociferous campaigner against the wickedness he had seen in India. He and his wife left behind the graves of three children, all born and buried at Cuttack. Nowadays we would recognise this as traumatic stress, as he described the struggle at night as ‘I cannot resist the torrent of thoughts that wears my health and spirits away.’ It seems that the casual abandonment of the dead and dying due to Hindu fatalism especially affected him.

Peggs became minister of the Baptist church in Coventry from 1828 to 1834, where he became a campaigning writer. John Poynder had been campaigning against the East India Company’s toleration of ‘suttee’, its collection of the Pilgrim Tax and its toleration of the excesses of Hinduism -Peggs was able to add field experience and some great pictures. Peggs’ works included A Suttee’s Cry to Britain (1827), Slavery in India (1828), Ghaut Murders in India (1828), India’s Cries to British Humanity (1830), The Present State of East India Slavery (1840) and History of the General Baptist Mission (1846). He formed the Coventry Society for the Abolition of Human Sacrifices in India, arguing that the sati was actually a distortion of Hinduism, not a fundamental teaching, and could therefore be abolished by the British government. A campaign on this issue had actually started in 1820 and women like Hannah More proved adept at getting many British women mobilised, leading to a first petition to Parliament in 1823.

Peggs provided further impetus to Poynder’s campaign against the East India Company and in 1827 a English court ruling against sati was obtained. Sati was made illegal by the Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck, in the Bengal Sati Regulation of December 1829. Rather bizarrely, this campaign has been criticised as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men.’ Bentinck was a reformer who worked to stop several other practices including polygamy and child brides. The Pilgrim Tax was abandoned by the company in 1833.

Peggs’ interest next focused on capital punishment and in 1839 he wrote a ‘prize essay’. At the Baptist Union conference in 1840, Peggs proposed motions for the abolition of capital punishment and of slavery in the East Indies, though the first was unsuccessful. Peggs wrote again on the topic in 1844 for Thomas Cook’s National Temperance Magazine. Another 1840 effort was A Cry from the Tombs about burial procedures. Public execution became a key issue for Baptists, who led agitation against it until success in 1866.

Peggs also focused on severing all British commercial and government connections with the Juggernaut temple, which was achieved when the East India Company ceased this connection in December 1844. Nonetheless, British government grants for the Juggernaut festival were still continuing in 1851 when the missionaries at Cuttack signed a petition against them. In 1849 he was also still campaigning on the issue of child sacrifice amongst the Khund people, with a report from Bailey who was then at Cuttack .

In 1847 his interest switched to the opium trade and he published A Voice from India and China Relative to the Evils of the Cultivation and Smuggling of Opium, although this prompted the Baptist Magazine to complain that he had copied seventeen pages of their own reporting.

Peggs became minister at Bourne Baptist church (where his colleague Bampton had grown up) in 1834 and also had some connection with Fleet. In 1841 he moved to Ilkeston and then in 1846 to Burton on Trent, where he died in 1850. He was an indefatigable preacher in the cause of mission. Peggs also supported church planting into towns like Chesterfield, in 1843. He died in 1850 – his death notice in The Times stating, ‘His end was peace.’5David Lilly and 4 others1 Comment