Orphans of the Orissa Famine: Capital, Charity, and Coercion in the Missionary System

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

Volume 8 Issue 2 Article 3

May 2024

Orphans of the Orissa Famine: Capital, Charity, and Coercion in Orphans of the Orissa Famine: Capital, Charity, and Coercion in

the Missionary System the Missionary System

Sarah Mende

Southern Methodist University

, [email protected]

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Orphans of the Orissa Famine: Capital, Charity, and

Coercion in the Missionary System

Sarah Mende

[email protected]

Jo Guldi

ABSTRACT

Some of the most profound effects Britain imposed on society in Orissa, India came as a result of the missions that formed the

majority of the protective infrastructure during the Orissa famine. Shortly after the British began their occupation of Orissa, a

network of Protestant Christian missions based in England began to move into the region. Leadership came from the Christian

Missionary Society, an Evangelical Anglican group, as well as Baptist figures such as Rev. J. Buckley. Their move was difficult,

and for many years unsuccessful. However, the British East India Company and the Raj that followed it would pave the way for an

increase in mission power through their laissez-faire policies of ignoring preexisting infrastructure and discontinuing preexisting

social support systems. The missions, through their network of periodical publications, were then able to position themselves as a

charitable counterpoint to the mainstream ideology of free markets at the time. In 1865, when a harvest failed as a result of British

lack of infrastructure maintenance, the Protestant mission network’s opportunity arrived. The famine left many children without

caretakers, and the missions, having begun a precedent of taking in orphans, became one of the only options for these children. The

missions completed their takeover after the British first refused to acknowledge the famine, and then offered an ineffective response.

The mission takeover quickly became so complete that secular authorities turned those seeking to give charity to the missions,

since missions were some of the only organizations with a history of working directly with people in the region. The lives and

identities of these famine orphans formed a microcosm of the changes to Orissa over the course of the Orissa famine.

1. INTRODUCTION

Some of the most profound effects Britain

imposed on society in Orissa, India came as a result of the

missions that formed the majority of the protective

infrastructure during the Orissa famine. Shortly after the

British began their occupation of Orissa, a network of

Protestant Christian missions based in England began to

move into the region. Leadership came from the Christian

Missionary Society, an Evangelical Anglican group, as well

as Baptist figures such as Rev. J. Buckley. Their move was

difficult, and for many years unsuccessful. However, the

British East India Company and the Raj that followed it

would pave the way for an increase in mission power

through their laissez-faire policies of ignoring preexisting

infrastructure and discontinuing preexisting social support

systems.

The missions, through their network of periodical

publications, were then able to position themselves as a

charitable counterpoint to the mainstream ideology of free

markets at the time. In 1865, when a harvest failed as a result

of British lack of infrastructure maintenance, the Protestant

mission network’s opportunity arrived. The famine left

many children without caretakers, and the missions, having

begun a precedent of taking in orphans, became one of the

only options for these children. The missions completed

their takeover after the British first refused to acknowledge

Department of History, Southern Methodist University

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian Province Under Native and British Rule (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.,

1872), 181

Bidyut Mohanty. A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste, and Class in the 1866 Orissa Famine (New York: Routledge, 2022)

the famine, and then offered an ineffective response. The

mission takeover quickly became so complete that secular

authorities turned those seeking to give charity to the

missions, since missions were some of the only

organizations with a history of working directly with people

in the region. The lives and identities of these famine

orphans formed a microcosm of the changes to Orissa over

the course of the Orissa famine. This paper argues first, that

the missionary network achieved a foothold in the Orissa

region because of the gaps in the British takeover of the

network of assistance and unwillingness to take action

against the famine, and second, that this foothold resulted in

a coercive system in which children with few other options

for survival exchanged cultural identity for food and care.

The Orissa Famine plays a central role in this

paper. After a poor harvest in 1865, hunger began to affect

the people living in the Orissa region and the surrounding

areas. The monsoon season which followed was exacerbated

by the British government’s mismanagement of flood-

mitigating infrastructure, leaving the affected region cut off

from imports of food aid.

British economic policy only

worsened the material effects of the famine when the

commissioner of Orissa banned the distribution of rice in

order to protect market prices.

It was not until May of 1867

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

that the government formed a Famine Relief Committee.

then, the famine had ravaged the region and left not only

death and destruction, but also major social and religious

upheaval in its wake.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The role British Christian missions played in

recovery during the Orissa famine appeared occasionally in

academic writing, but was often not centered to the extent

the issue demands. Instead, many discussions of the Orissa

famine analyzed the event from the perspective of caste or

policy, or discussed missions as they first arrived in the

region in the early 19th century and within the post-colonial

context, glossing over the power and influence these

missions and missionaries wielded through resources during

the famine and subsequent cholera epidemic of 1865-1868.

The work of such scholars as Bidyut Mohanty and

Bismawoy Pati offered amazing analyses of the famine, its

causes, and its effects. Mohanty’s book A Haunting Tragedy

exploresd how the famine transformed the caste and class

system and had differential effects by gender. The work also

included a discussion of the famine orphans’ role in the

situation as a whole. Pati wrote many insightful papers

discussing religion and culture in Orissa. However, they do

not, nor do any other previously published works, center the

experiences of the famine orphans and the effects on their

lifeways.

These analyses of famine and caste often

deemphasized or lacked mention of the so-called famine

orphans, children raised in missionaries because of the

circumstances of the famine that left many without parents

or without parents able to care for them.

While works on Orissa did not delve solely into

the missions and mission orphans with the focus the topic

merits, works on missions on British India relegate Orissa to

the fringes. Ian Copeland added nuance to the Stanley-Porter

revisionist thesis of original competition between

missionary and capitalist goals and an eventual coming

together interrupted by the Great Rebellion of 1857.

His

work categorized the whole of British missions in India as

an arm of empire despite competition between the East India

Company and the later Raj and offered important clarity on

how missions functioned as a whole in relation to the entirety

of the subcontinent. This article and many of its

contemporaries, however, make little mention of the unique

nature of the situation of Orissa with its non-Hindu tribal

groups mixing with caste structures. The Indian History

Congress, though they delved into the story of missions in

Northeast India, did not give the Orissa famine its due

diligence as a turning point in the power of British Protestant

Christian missions in the region.

The strength of the role of

missions created lasting impacts that reverberated through

the future of Orissa.

By the time the famine began, missionaries had

consolidated a near-monopoly on structures of charity and

Bidyut Mohanty. A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste,

and Class in the 1866 Orissa Famine

Ian Copeland, “Christianity as an Arm of Empire,”

Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1025-1054

David R. Syiemlieh, “Sectional President’s Address:

Colonial Encounter and Christian Missions in North East

care in Orissa. W. W. Hunter’s account of his experiences in

Orissa included a condemnation of the British lack of

maintenance of previous systems.

The British government

had abandoned previous Mughal storehouses and worked to

shut down the Jagannath temple kitchens, all without a

permanent British settlement, leaving the missionaries some

of the only people in the area with access to resources and

wealth during the famine.

As a result, missionaries would often utilize this

monopoly to increase conversion rates to Christianity, which

had been historically very low in the region. Mission-run

periodicals lamented this low conversion rate but soon began

to offer updates for their readers on the children they had

taken in. Missions tended to feed only those who showed

willingness to convert, especially those who left their

children at missions or children who made their own way to

missions for food. The missionaries fed these children, set

them up with British financial sponsors, changed their

names, and arranged their marriages in the years following

the famine. This drastic difference in the lifeways of these

children and those of their parents often resulted in schisms

of identity, especially for future generations in their family,

who would now be raised Christian in Orissa. These children

and their descendants’ complex relationship to religious and

cultural identity were therefore a testament to the power and

goals of the missions.

3. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF MISSIONS

AND THE BRITISH GOVERNMENTS IN INDIA

Victims of the Orissa famine often received more

aid from Christian missions than from their government.

This missionary monopoly was a direct result of the British

government’s weak response to the famine. The British

adopted a set of laissez-faire economic ideals that left the

historic Indian infrastructure that prevented flood and

famine in shambles. As this infrastructure crumbled,

missionaries set up a network of missions throughout Orissa

and the surrounding regions that began to develop systems

to care for orphans. Because of this precedent in policy and

the missions that seemed to fill the gaps, the British

government originally offered no response to the famine,

and then offered very little. The British governmental

response to the Orissa famine, however, is what truly set in

motion the chain of events that allowed missions the ability

to control systems that supported the starving. The

government did not offer sufficient funding, food, or

infrastructure to combat the famine meaningfully, which led

to increased missionary control over famine relief, especially

for children.

Laissez-faire government policy marked the early

part of the 19

century, paving the way for missions to gain

control of charity complexes and infrastructure. In his book,

Orissa: or the Vicissitudes of an Indian Province Under

Native and British Rule, Scottish member of the Indian Civil

India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 73,

(2012): 509-527

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 [2024], Art. 3

https://scholar.smu.edu/jour/vol8/iss2/3

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25172/jour.8.2.2

Service William Wilson Hunter wrote, “any rural disaster

tells immediately upon the Land Tax and the floods which

every few years desolate Orissa involve large remissions of

rent. During our first twenty-seven years the Province (1803-

1830) £65,094 were written off from this cause alone. But

such remissions proved wholly inadequate meet evil.”

Hunter criticized the Land Tax system the British had

implemented after acquiring Orissa and blamed it and, by

extension, the officials who created it for the region’s

poverty and poor response to floods. According to Hunter,

the region flooded regularly, and the British system of land

management proved ineffective to handle these floods. Of

the embankment system, Hunter wrote, “The Native system

had never been a complete one. We organised no machinery

for enforcing it, and under British rule it completely broke

down.”

This system had protected farmland from floods

under the Mughal empire.

Hunter observed that under the

British, these embankments fell into disrepair. The British

increased pressure on farmers to devote more time to

producing rice crops for export rather than the communal

maintenance required to keep the embankments functional.

British policy of valuing financial gain over all else formed

a major factor in the severity of the flood that directly caused

the famine.

The British government’s laissez-faire response

allowed missionaries to present themselves as charitable

counterpoints. The British East India Company disallowed

missionary practice completely from their lands until 1813,

when, after years of lobbying from Protestant groups, the

government offered entrance to missionaries with approved

licenses.

It was not due to some concept of religious

toleration that the company regulated proselytization so

heavily, but out of a fear that religious tensions would harm

their business interests. However, as the Company’s control

grew more complete over the course of the first half of the

nineteenth century, their restrictions lessened on missionary

activity. In 1833, the Company lifted their requirement for

licenses, essentially allowing unlimited missionary

activity.

However, this change in regulation did not result

in an influx of missions and converts because Christian

missions in India – especially Orissa – had long been

unsuccessful, and many groups focused the majority of their

resources elsewhere.

The lifting of restrictions in 1833 did

not make the Company friendly to the missions’ goals by

any means. If missionary ideology conflicted with their

profit margins, the Company chose profit.

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 181

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 183

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 183

David R. Syiemlieh, “Sectional President’s Address:

Colonial Encounter and Christian Missions in North East

India,” 510-511

Penelope Carson, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: 1836-

1858,” in The East India Company and Religion

(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 206-236

“The North-India Mission,” Church Missionary Paper,

1842

The early days of British conquest of India saw the

East India Company show a willingness to avoid religion to

make a profit, whereas the missionaries clashed with this

idea and sought to evangelize in the area. In the 1840s, the

British East India Company received criticism from

missions in Orissa in response to its yearly donations to the

Jagannath temple, an important site of religious pilgrimage

in Puri as well as a pillar of community charity through its

kitchens.

The company’s donations may have kept a

tenuous peace as it took over the region and slowly

abandoned social programs and public works, but many

missionaries saw it as a continuation of company policy to

maximize profit through avoidance of religious conflict.

When the Christian Missionary Society, publisher of many

mission periodical articles upon which this work is built,

asked permission to set up a mission, Colonel Mackelson,

Commissioner of Peshawar replied, “no missionary shall

cross the Indus while I am Commissioner … do you want us

all to be killed?”

Responses such as this characterized

official attitudes under Company rule. They granted few

permissions for missionaries, and when missions began to

enter, Mackelson’s successor, the Evangelical

Commissioner Edwardes stated that “it is not the duty of the

Government, as a Government, to proselytise India.… The

duty of evangelising India lies at the door of private

Christians.”

When compared to his predecessor, his stance

on missionaries was supportive. However, missionaries

argued that the Company prioritized the interests of Hindus

in Orissa, where the Company collected taxes on pilgrims to

the lucrative Jagannath temple.

The Church Missionary

Society Intelligencer criticized the temple heavily in its

“Description of a Native Eyewitness of Acts Perpetrated

Within Jaggernath's Temple at Pooree.”

The article

described the ritual of self-immolation. Being a Christian

missionary publication, the Intelligencer presented the

incidents as signs of the evils of Hinduism, from which only

missionaries could save the people. From the missionary

perspective, by profiting from the temple, the company was

prioritizing money over souls, and preventing them from

doing what they believed was an inherent good in working

towards conversion.

The situation did not undergo much change when

the Company dissolved into the British Empire following the

Great Rebellion of 1857. Because of this continuity,

missionaries’ narratives of themselves as standing against

capital to do good persisted. Many officials blamed the

rebellion on earlier attempts to Christianize India. Charles

Penelope Carson, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: 1836-

1858,” 206-236

J. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial

Power in India, 1818-1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2002), 33

S. Neill, The History of Christianity in India, 1707-1858

(Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 184

Penelope Carson, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: 1836-

1858,” 212

“Description of a Native Eyewitness of Acts Perpetrated

Within Jaggernath's Temple at Pooree,” Church Missionary

Society Intelligencer, 1873, 53-54

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

Wood, Secretary of State under the post-rebellion

Palmerston government, called any earlier attempts at

Christianization “a mistake.”

Wood, and many others like

him, regarded the possible mix-up in giving Hindu and

Muslim soldiers pig fat to grease their muskets as the straw

that broke the camel’s back and began the rebellion.

keep their colonies, and their profits, they did not want to

inspire such religious and cultural strife again. Therefore, the

missions operated mostly separate from the government

after 1857, and received funding nearly exclusively from

private donors. Missions gained much of this funding

through their periodical newsletters. These newsletters

offered subscribers updates on mission efforts all around the

world. Many included specific updates on orphanages,

which would grow greatly during the Orissa famine.

It was in this environment in which the British

East India Company and the Raj that replaced it emphasized

draining Indian resources and avoided maintaining or

fomenting systems to support people during hard times that

the network of English Protestant missions arrived in Orissa.

The Church Missionary Society’s Church Missionary Paper

released an 1842 overview of their work in North India,

reading, “Of their principal Missionary centres in North

India, twenty-three in number, eleven will be found on the

great arterial line of communication, some sixteen hundred

miles long, which connects the great metropolis with

Calcutta with Peshawar.”

Peshawar is located in modern

Pakistan, far away from Orissa, which is close to the Bay of

Bengal on the eastern coast of the subcontinent. Therefore,

the Christian Missionary society’s missions formed an

infrastructure of sorts that spanned the subcontinent.

While the British governmental structure

neglected structures of aid in India, missionaries offered aid

in the hopes of saving souls. The Children’s Missionary

Magazine published a letter they claimed was written by an

orphan they had taken in named Maria. The letter said, “For

several years in sinful pleasure and sorrow my time passed

away; through the favour of God I was brought to this place,

and entered this school and was taught in the way of truth,

but continued to love sin till the Lord Jesus gave me his Holy

Spirit, and true light beamed on my mind.”

The periodical

that published this letter was a Christian publication written

to report on the outcomes of and encourage missions, so it is

possible that this child did not exist, but it is equally likely

that she did, as there are sources to corroborate the presence

of these missions as aid for children in Orissa. This letter, if

real, would have been likely heavily edited in order to

support the causes of the Children’s Missionary Magazine.

As published, the letter thanks the missionaries for teaching

its apparent writer about Christianity and expresses a hope

to teach other Indian children as well. This letter, real or

fake, expresses the agenda and desires of the missions in

Orissa that existed before the famine, setting up a narrative

about how they took over networks of community care in

Penelope Carson, “Conclusion and Epilogue: Strangers

in the Land,” in The East India Company and Religion, 239

Jill C. Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British

Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

“The North-India Mission”

“Maria,” Children’s Missionary Magazine, November 1,

1845

Orissa during the famine because of British governmental

neglect. The Children’s Missionary Magazine published

Maria’s alleged conversion narrative in 1845. Therefore, by

the onset of the Orissa famine twenty years later, missions

had accumulated experience raising orphans. Missionaries in

Orissa at the time of the famine were working from an

established network of missions that dated to before the end

of the East India Company’s rule and had, since then, began

to fill the gaps the British left behind in infrastructure and

social services. The precedent the missions had set would

continue in their responses to the British policy surrounding

the Orissa famine.

4. ORIGINS OF THE FAMINE

The missionary presence in Orissa was able to

serve as a substitute of sorts for governmental assistance

because the British government continued in their policies of

inaction when the famine began. The Orissa famine started

to set in after the bad harvest of 1865. A lack of proper flood-

mitigating infrastructure compounded the effect of the bad

harvest when the monsoon season came, cutting Orissa off

from imports.

Despite the suffering that had begun, in

February of 1866, the Orissa Division Commissioner banned

the distribution of rice for fear of the effects on markets.

The Hull Packet, a British newspaper, published an exposé

in October of that year that read, “In India, in the province

of Orissa, it turns out that the famine has been far more

terrible than the reports of the local Governor or the

Governor-General had led us to expect, and it seems to have

resulted in a frightful mortality.”

Being a British

newspaper for British readers, the Hull Packet had no vested

interest in furthering Indian causes or anticolonial narratives.

The article, therefore, was less likely to have a skewed anti-

British perspective, though it did criticize the British

government. The Hull Packet claimed that the Governor

General of India had lied about the seriousness of the Orissa

famine.

Aid was similarly slow to arrive due to a Victorian

cultural emphasis on the sovereignty of the market. The

Friend of India, a British newspaper whose title indicates a

greater likelihood of siding with Indian interests, furthered

the Hull Packet’s claim, writing, “The complaint is that,

when the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal would not only not

ask assistance as Sir George Edmonstone did in 1860-61, but

prevented the public from giving it, the Supreme

Government would not ignore or supersede him in a

crisis.”

The article argued that the colonial government had

not only hidden information on the famine, but had also

suppressed aid for famine victims. Despite its name, The

Friend of India did not exaggerate its claim, because The

Famine Relief Committee did not arrive in Orissa until May

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 181

Bidyut Mohanty. A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste,

and Class in the 1866 Orissa Famine

“At Home and Abroad,” Hull Packet, Oct. 26, 1866

“The Government of India on the Famine,” Friend of

India, Dec. 13, 1866

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 [2024], Art. 3

https://scholar.smu.edu/jour/vol8/iss2/3

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25172/jour.8.2.2

of 1867.

The article came out in late 1866.

In the first

year of the Orissa famine, British officials worked to cover

up stories of the famine’s effects and refused aid rather than

attempting to solve the people’s problems.

Though the government eventually allowed aid for

the Orissa famine victims, the support they provided proved

insufficient, leaving the missions as one of the only viable

backstops for people to access relief and care. The British

Daily News’ explanation of the happenings of parliament

included the anecdote: “For the future he was afraid it would

be impossible to admit that the government could do very

much to prevent the recurrence of visitations which

depended mainly on the seasons, but the prosecution of the

irrigation works on which the government were at present

engaged seemed to be the only means at their disposal for

that purpose.”

The word ‘he’ referred to Lord Cranbourne,

a man who three months later sent out orders to “give largely

and freely out of the public purse in relief of the prevailing

distress,”

according to the Hull Packet. Cranbourne

therefore expanded his view of the means at the

government’s disposal as working on irrigation after the

flood did little to alleviate the resulting hunger.

Cranbourne’s later order, however, was similarly

ineffective, as W. W. Hunter’s narrative of his experiences

with government relief kitchens in Orissa described

crowded, unsanitary conditions in which government

stinginess left famine victims eating on re-used plates and

sleeping and re-used beds left by cholera victims without

being cleaned.

The public purse did open according to

Cranbourne’s directions, and the government did not give

freely nor largely. When the British government responded

to the famine, they did so with half-measures that did not

provide much substantial relief.

5. MISSION PUBLIC RELATIONS IN THE

FAMINE

The lackluster government response to the Orissa

famine created an opening that missions moved to fill, as

they had been operating in the region on a smaller scale for

years by the time of the famine. The Wesleyan Juvenile

Offering, a magazine from the Methodist branch of the

network of missions in India published that “a great deal of

money has been given by good, kind people to relieve the

sufferers; and it is said that one hundred and fifty thousand

people are being thus fed by charity. Let us hope, and let us

pray, that the good deeds of Christian kindness may lead

many of these poor natives to admire and seek after the

enjoyment of the Christian religion.”

Methodist missions

were a robust enough presence on their own to feed 150,000

people, according to this article. As it was a Methodist

missionary periodical, the Wesleyan Juvenile Offering may

have exaggerated their numbers, but with all the donors they

Bidyut Mohanty. A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste,

and Class in the 1866 Orissa Famine

“The Government of India on the Famine”

“Imperial Parliament,” Daily News, July 27, 1866

“At Home and Abroad”

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule

thanked, they evidently received enough to be a pillar of

their community’s support system during the famine.

The Methodist missions were not the only

missions working, either. They belonged to a network of

Protestant missions linked loosely by communication,

transportation of orphans, participation in the Paris Mission

showcase, and an 1868 Pan-Missionary meeting that made

these connections official.

The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering

then offered a prayer that their work would result in more

conversions. The Methodist missions were not the only ones

who emphasized conversion in their narrative of their famine

relief work. Many fed famine victims with the expectation

they would convert. The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering

expressed that same expectation in its article on its famine

response. The government’s inaction and subsequent

insufficient action in response to the Orissa famine resulted

in a religiously-controlled system of famine relief that would

offer support often to serve their own interests of conversion.

Secular authorities looking to help children during

the famine had no choice but to turn to the missions without

any other option. The Friend of India published an article

that began by criticizing the government’s apathy to famine

victims: “Orissa seems now to be abandoned by public

benevolence. India, which subscribed for a time with its

wonted liberality, is ceasing to give. England… sought to be

allowed to help, but the Secretary of State for India and the

Lord Mayor rejected the offer.”

Though the Friend of India

was not a Christian publication, it called for a system of

Christian charity in response to the failings of the

government relief efforts when it followed its criticisms

with, “England was compelled by those who should have

known better to act like the Levite and the Priest of the

parable, while the heavy task of the good Samaritan

devolved on the small community of Englishmen and a still

smaller number of Natives in India… But surely it is the part,

nay more, the privilege, of the Christian to care for the

orphan.”

The secular Friend of India newspaper invoked

Biblical stories to call for aid, likely because the only

institutions that would support famine victims were

Christian ones. The article also emphasized care for orphans

as it sought donations. The Friend of India did not itself

provide care for orphans; it was a British publication that

collected donations and sent them on to other groups that

actually operated on the subcontinent.

Its willingness to

use religious reasoning to ask for financial support for the

orphans implied that the funds it sought would go on to

support the children living at various missions as a result of

the Orissa famine. This private charity likely forwarded its

money to religious groups since they were some of the only

groups working towards a modicum of famine relief.

This transfer of responsibility for children from

secular authorities to religious ones occurred on the ground

as well, with the Children’s Missionary Magazine outlining

“The Famine in India,” Wesleyan Juvenile Offering: A

Miscellany of Missionary Info, October 10, 1866

“The Pan-Missionary Meeting,” Friend of India, Jan. 30,

1868

“The Famine and Its Orphans,” Friend of India, June 13,

1867

“The Famine and Its Orphans”

“Orissa Famine Fund,” Friend of India, May 17, 1866

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

how when the Magistrate of Police found the orphaned

Nasliean, he delivered her to the Benares Girls’ Orphan

School.

The Magistrate did not explain how he had found

her, but she arrived at the Benares Girls’ Orphan School after

the poor harvest 1865, meaning her parents were likely

victims of the first wave of famine. The near-monopoly on

famine relief systems the missions had was so great that

secular groups and authorities sought their help to aid

orphans.

In the aftermath of the negligent government

response and mission takeover, mission and non-mission

news sources looked to the Rev. J. Buckley, a missionary in

Cuttack, as an authoritative source of information and a

figure worthy of praise. The mission periodicals and secular

news sources that quoted and discussed him made little

mention of his origins. They all agreed, however, that he was

responsible for the care of an influx of orphans in Cuttack,

where he ran a Baptist mission during the Orissa famine. The

Pictorial Missionary Society published an article

highlighting the Orissa Mission House in which Buckley

stayed and from which he ran the mission that included the

famine orphans:

“In this house it was the privilege of Dr. Buckley to

complete the new edition of the Old Testament in the

Oriya tongue. Mrs. Buckley's orphanage now contains

about 321 orphans; of these 231 are famine orphans

supported by Government, and the remaining 90 are

dependent on the kind support of friends in this country.

Nearly all of them can read the Word of God in their

own tongue. It is believed that the Holy Spirit is inciting

earnest desires after God in the hearts of many of these

orphans.”

Published a couple years after the famine, this

article discussed the Rev. J. Buckley and his mission in

Cuttack. This article was part of the missionary periodical

network that gave Buckley the status of a minor celebrity in

the international Christian community over the course of the

famine. Like many other periodical mentions of Buckley, the

article promoted his work in converting orphans.

Buckley was the member of the network of

missionaries in Orissa and the surrounding area the media –

secular and religious – chose as a spokesperson. He featured

in the New York Times as well through an article that

informed on the famine: “There are, says a correspondent,

1,700 orphans by this time in Orissa and Midnapore alone. I

find that the total number from the first, in the hands of the

missionaries, has been 2,673 in these districts, besides the

many in Ganiam and Chota Nagpore. Most pathetic are the

descriptions of the missions, both Protestant and Roman

Catholic. Nothing in the blue-books gives such a horrible

idea of what that great famine was. Parents lost all natural

affection for their children.”

The article associated the

missionaries and the orphans as well as credited the

“The Coral Missionary Fund,” Children’s Missionary

Magazine, Aug. 1, 1865

“The Orissa Mission House,” Pictorial Missionary News,

Nov. 1, 1873

“Orphans of the Orissa Famine,” New York Times, Oct.

28, 1867

missionaries. Missions were the only relief effort the article

mentioned, illustrating the extent of the mission takeover.

The New York Times also echoed the parenting rhetoric from

the mission periodicals. The Times did not follow this claim

with any source but Buckley. After introducing the missions

alongside the orphans, the article quoted Buckley,

introducing him as “Mr. Buckley, Baptist missionary of

Cuttack: ‘it has been more affecting than we know how to

express to hear one after another say, ‘mother dead; father

dead; brother dead; sister dead; all dead. I have not a friend

or relative anywhere.’”

It was through Buckley that the

Times explained the situation in Orissa to their readership.

The article did not address any biases Buckley may have

held or factors that may have influenced his explanation of

the situation. To the author of this article, Buckley was the

only necessary reliable source on the subject. The Times’

usage of Buckley as a voice of authority exemplified the

importance of Buckley’s testimony in framing the story of

the famine to the world.

As secular papers such as the Times considered

Buckley a reputable source and cited him in articles that

raised the profile of the famine, mission periodicals invoked

Buckley and the other orphanages in their bids for funds that

they raised successfully. The Pictorial Missionary News

began an update on Orissa with: “‘The state of things,’ says

the Rev. J. Buckley, ‘is truly awful.’”

Buckley continued

to describe cases of cannibalism, starvation among converts,

and the high price of rice.

Like the New York Times, the

Pictorial Missionary News found Buckley a suitable source.

However, the religious nature of the Pictorial Missionary

News meant this appeal to the authority of a reverend was

simply in the periodicals’ long tradition. Unlike the Times,

the Pictorial Missionary News attached this account to a

fundraising effort: “Such is the trying position in which the

General Baptist Missionaries are placed. Donations in aid of

the sufferers will be thankfully received by Thomas Hill,

Esq., Arboretum Street, Notting- ham, Treasurer of the

General Baptist Mission; or by the Rev. H. Wilkinson or

Rev. J. C. Pike, Secretaries, Leicester.”

The article

followed Buckley’s words with a plea for donations.

Therefore, the author found Buckley not only impactful but

capable of spurring the readership to financial action.

Buckley’s ascent to minor public figure beyond religious

circles allowed him to become more influential and

fundraise more effectively.

Communications through missionary periodicals

illustrated the usefulness of invoking children for

fundraising in the tradition Buckley had begun. Missionary

E. Droese worked at the orphanage at Bhogulpore alongside

her husband Rev. Droese. Because of overcrowding in the

orphanages in Puri and Cuttack, members of the network of

Protestant missions sent many Orissa famine orphans to

Bhogulpore as well as nearby Benares. E. Droese began a

conversation with the subscribers to the Children’s

Missionary Magazine. She wrote: “it would be a very nice

“Orphans of the Orissa Famine”

“Orissa,” Pictorial Missionary News, July 14, 1866

“Orissa”

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 [2024], Art. 3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.25172/jour.8.2.2

thing indeed if we could manage to get a magic lantern for

our orphans! What a treat, what a pleasure would that be for

them! A pleasure which could at once convey useful

instruction to the mind. But how to get it? This has always

been the question, and not finding a way, we had always to

relinquish our wish with a sigh. I want now to ask you, my

dear friend, whether you think you could assist us. Do you

think you could interest some mission friends to contribute

to such a thing; at least to some extent?”

This letter read as

though it was addressed to an individual at the magazine, but

as it appeared in the magazine’s pages, Droese likely wrote

it both to the recipient and to her readers. The missions

required funding to function, and therefore their periodicals

were geared towards reaching new subscribers and keeping

existing ones. These updates on the children, then, worked

alongside the rest of the publications’ content to seek

payment.

Droese’s letters not only asked for money, but

explained the role donations played when they arrived. She

wrote in her Christmas letter, “You may then fancy how glad

we were when almost every week in the month of December

brought us quite unexpectedly a box from England, and in

each presents for the school children. We all then set about

preparing for Christmas, and you should have seen how

diligently, and with what happy faces, the girls plied their

needles from morning to evening, in order to get all things

ready…Each child received one or more presents: the girls,

petticoats, jackets, needle-books, bags, boxes, etc.; the boys,

jackets, books, pens, pencils, toys, caps, etc., not to forget a

large plate full of sweetmeats.”

The Children’s Missionary

Magazine published this letter in 1867, though it described

the Christmas of 1866. Christmas in 1866 took place after

the failed harvest of 1865, during the height of the food

shortage at the beginning of the famine. It was not until

September of 1866 that rice aid arrived, just two months

before Christmas. These children had been living in scarcity

for over a year before the Christmas Droese described

arrived. The Children’s Missionary Magazine’s most loyal

readers would have been following the stories of the children

in the mission network, and therefore would have had some

idea of the time these children had gone without or close to

it, as donations kept the missions better fed than any other

parts of Orissa. Either way, the readers and donors among

them would have had access to a personal story about the

impacts their gifts made. This would have inspired positive

feelings and made them more likely to donate. The missions

needed material goods such as these if they were going to

continue in their success converting orphaned children.

Without a materially better option, children were much more

likely to end up at the missions and therefore convert. The

missionaries relied on these statements of the value of

donation that invoked the children to continue to raise

adequate funds.

Missionary periodicals also explained to their

more religious readers that famine provided an opportunity

for increased conversion, as hardship had sometimes

weakened existing religious ties. Though W. W. Hunter –

E. Droese, “A Magic Lantern for Bhogulpore,”

Children’s Missionary Magazine, Nov. 1, 1867

E. Droese, “Christmas Time at Bhogulpore,” Children’s

Missionary Magazine, April 1, 1867

among many other scholars – traced the lack of options for

children orphaned over the course of the famine to the

actions of the British Empire, the missionary network

utilized these issues to declare to one another and to the

British public the need for their work. Mission periodicals

described Hinduism as ineffective and framed problems with

Hindu structures as reasons their work was necessary. “A

silver idol in the Mysore was supposed to have power to cure

diseases. When the cholera raged, the goddess was brought

to the city [Cuttack], but its presence had no effect, although

the people presented to it numerous offerings. They learnt its

powerlessness,” concluded an article in the Pictorial

Missionary News.

The periodical celebrated the fact that

the suffering of the cholera epidemic had led in some cases

to losses of religious belief. The statement came with the

implied conclusion that the famine was the perfect time for

widespread conversion.

Mission periodicals accused Indian parents of

poor parenting, connecting it to their religion and culture,

therefore conveying to their readers the need for mission

work and, thus, the need for donations. Rev. J. Buckley, as

part of his interview with the New York Times, described a

situation where “fathers unable to provide for their families

had left wife and children to their fate, and fled to some

distant place in the hope of securing some remunerative

employment; and mothers, forgetting the compassionate

tenderness which the Creator has implanted in woman’s

heart, left their offspring to languish and die. One little child

that we recovered had been partly buried in the sand by her

who should have watched over and protected

her.”

Buckley criticized first the many men who traveled

to other regions to find work, often leaving their families

behind.

Anant Das, a man who wrote an account of his

childhood in Orissa during the famine, faced this experience

when his father abandoned his family during the famine

because he was unable to feed them.

Buckley moved on to

women and offered them a much harsher criticism in which

he juxtaposed the actions of women who could not feed their

children with an ideal of Christian motherhood. Buckley did

not include any details of the mother’s situation with

starvation and poverty. Instead, he pitted her against a straw-

woman ideal. Then, Buckley invoked the missionaries at the

same time as he discussed her child, describing how the

Cuttack mission “recovered” her. Buckley’s story used the

mentions of famine’s effect on parenting to set up a gallant

tale of rescue. This language came as part of Buckley’s 1867

New York Times interview that solidified him as an authority

on the subject of the famine and famine orphans. The New

York Times, though quoting a religious figure, was a secular

publication. It left this quote with no critical analysis, and

therefore tacitly endorsed Buckley’s story. Parenting

criticisms that ignored the context of famine fueled

missionaries’ and missionary supporters’ beliefs that

missionary monopolies on charitable structures were

necessary.

“Cuttack, Orissa,” Pictorial Missionary News, Dec. 12,

1867

Orphans of the Orissa Famine”

Mayadhar Mansingh, Durbhikshya, 1962

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

6. W.W. HUNTER: AN EYEWITNESS

PERSPECTIVE

Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian Province

Under Native and British Rule is the product of Scottish

scholar W. W. Hunter’s years in the area.

Hunter came

from a manufacturing family in Glasgow.

He found social

mobility through education and the Indian Civil Service,

which he entered in 1862.

His first post was as a record

keeper in Birbhum, from where he began to work on surveys

and histories of the local area in North East India.

His work

received notice when Governor General Lord Mayo sought

his expertise in planning a nationwide survey.

It was during

his work on these surveys that Hunter spent time traveling

Orissa while the Orissa famine happened to rage around him.

Hunter compiled his experiences into the book Orissa,

which became one of the few eyewitness narratives of the

Orissa famine. In two volumes, the book summarized the

history of the region, discussed existing religious and class

divisions among Indians, surveyed the landscape, explained

his experiences with famine, and leveraged criticism against

both the British government and many Indian traditions.

Hunter’s position as an outsider to the British aristocracy and

a simultaneous colonial ruler over Indians gave him a unique

perspective, not wholly separate from the British power base

or the missionary organization’s salvation goals, but not

fully in line with either.

Hunter wrote openly about the failures of the

missionary system and leveraged knowledge of Indian

culture the missionaries often lacked or refused to

acknowledge. He prefaced his discussion of the orphans by

writing, “If the famine orphans be excepted, missionary

efforts have made but little progress in actually converting

the people.”

Hunter separated the famine orphans’

conversion with those of other Indians, demonstrating an

understanding of the uniqueness of their situations.

Missions had been fairly unsuccessful in

converting groups that still had support systems during the

famine. When discussing the non-orphaned converts, Hunter

noted that higher caste Hindus had nothing material to gain

in conversion, whereas the lower castes that were more

likely to convert often did so for material reasons.

This

willingness to employ a material analysis of mission work

denoted a difference in Hunter’s perspective and the piety of

mission publications. Missionary writings often excluded

discussions of caste inequity when relaying stories of

conversion. While missionary periodicals tended to

celebrate conversions and leave out any possible secular

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule

Francis Henry Bennett Skrine, Life of Sir William Wilson

Hunter, K. C. S. I., M. A., L. L. D., a Vice-President of the

Royal Asiatic Society, Etc. (London: Longmans, Green, and

Co., 1901)

Skrine, Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter (London:

Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901)

W. W. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (London: Smith,

Elder, and Co., 1868)

Skrine, Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 142

motivations, Orissa accepted the realities of a place where

during a famine, missionaries were some of the only

guarantors of resources. Hunter acknowledged the unequal

balance of power among the missionaries, the average

Indians, and the orphans, telling the story of the mission

takeover through the differences in conversion rates in

groups with more or less material resources.

Hunter described his visits to the Rev. J. Buckley’s

Cuttack mission in Orissa, where he offered a retrospective

analysis comparing the children at the height of the famine

and after it. He described the “famine orphans”

as “these

miserable creatures, the children of parents who had died of

starvation or who in the last extremity of hunger had deserted

their offspring, formed six years ago a collection scarcely

animate puny skeletons.”

Then, as he revisited these

orphans in the Reverend J. Buckley’s Cuttack mission, he

relayed that

“six years of good food and good training have made

these strays and waifs of the famine one of the most

interesting sights I have seen in India. Two large

Orphanages- one for boys, the other for girls- in Cattack

city are thronged with clean and bright-looking young

people, who have been educated on the ennobling

Christian system and trained in some bread winning

occupation, to enable them play their parts reputably in

life.”

Hunter followed these children from parentless starvation to

working trades, marriage, and settlements in Christian

villages, and discussed the missions as the arbiters of these

transformations. Though willing to criticize the government

and its ideologies, Hunter offered nothing but glowing

reports on the missionaries’ work with the famine orphans.

He did not mention their work of exclusively offering food

to those willing to convert.

However, he did supplement

his praises of the orphanages with an explanation that the

children often had no choice but to settle in Christian villages

upon reaching adulthood, as Hindu purity customs

disallowed them from working in many fields due to their

status as converts.

These were some of the only options

available to children left orphaned during the Orissa famine,

and many survived at the cost of losing their Hindu

communities. Hunter witnessed the children as famine

victims and as Christianized members of the orphanages.

Hunter noticed these two options of conversion or starvation,

and in his support of these orphanages, elected the best of

the two, though this decision was likely influenced by

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 142

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 142

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 143

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 143

J. Buckley, “The Indian Famine,” Morning Post

(London), Oct. 26, 1866.

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 142

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 [2024], Art. 3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.25172/jour.8.2.2

Hunter’s religion as well as a material analysis of the

circumstances.

From a 19th-century British Christian perspective,

Hunter approached Hinduism with more empathy than his

peers. He offered criticism of the poor sanitary practices of

pilgrims to the Jagannath temple, but he also discussed their

beliefs separately from the area’s issues with cholera that

compounded following the famine. Hunter’s religious of

analysis of Hindus came in his discussion of the Jagannath

Temple in Puri.

“Scholars tell us that in pre-historic times the Hindu

race fell into polytheism by recognizing God too

vividly in His mani-festations, and worshiping the work

rather than the worker. Jagannath represents the final

result of the converse process. It exhibits the goal to

which a highly intellectual race painfully arrives after

ages of poly-theism, during which the masses were

sunk in darkness, while the higher spirits of each

generation have been groping after the One Eternal

Deity.”

While not positive, this analysis represented

Hunter’s willingness to understand the Hindu perspective.

Hunter described Hindus as “highly intellectual” even as he

referred to their beliefs as “darkness.” With this “darkness,”

Hunter represented Hindus as capable of spiritual growth on

their own terms in his discussion of “groping after the One

Eternal Deity.” Rather than representing Hindus as satanic,

as Rev. J. Buckley does in his response letter to Hunter’s

book, W. W. Hunter saw their religious and cultural

practices as an imperfect piety.

The British Protestant missionary found

themselves facing what had come closer to a criticism of

their taking advantage of people’s desperate situations for

conversions than anything else at the time in Orissa. Their

publications responded negatively to Hunter’s work. While

modern readers may not read Hunter as progressive or

subversive, his book inspired responses by the missionaries

that ran the orphanages he praised. The Rev. J. Buckley

wrote a letter responding to the book, in which he said, “It

will, I suppose, be admitted by candid and reasonable men

that the missionaries in Orissa are far better acquainted with

Poree than their fellow country-men.”

Buckley began his

letter by seeking to discredit Hunter. Though Hunter spent

years traveling and working in Orissa, Buckley asserted that

his knowledge from working in the Cuttack orphanage was

superior. Buckley would continue the letter with a series of

disagreements. He proceeded to argue that Hunter had been

too willing to accept views his contemporary Rev. C. Lacey

categorized as “one of the most horrid spectacles I ever

beheld.”

“Dr. Hunter, in correcting prevalent

misapprehension in one direction, has, as it appears to me,

gone to the other extreme,” Buckley wrote in a discussion of

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 88

J. Buckley, “On Dr. Hunter’s Orissa,” Adam Matthew

Digital, Christian Missionary Intelligencer, January 1873.

J. Buckley, “On Dr. Hunter’s Orissa”

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 13

Hunter’s account of the Temple of Jagannath.

While

Hunter did not present a positive view of Jagannath, Buckley

considered this “extreme” and worthy of rebuttal. Their

argument about the ritual of Jagannath was also one about

how the British public and missionaries should view

Hindusim, and therefore about how they should respond.

Buckley was in a position of power over

missionary response as a respected part of a network of

missionaries running orphanages in Orissa, whereas Hunter,

being a member of the Indian Civil Service, had the ear of

the government.

They were well-matched, and other parts

of Buckley’s missionary network decided therefore to step

in. In an article that published parts of Buckley’s response

letter, the Christian Missionary Society Intelligencer

periodical offered a response to Hunter’s criticisms of the

low conversion rate. “If the antagonists of Indian Missions

really did care to know why Missions have not been more

successful, they might find at least one reason in the perusal

of such dispatches and minutes,” the periodical rebutted.

sought to explain to the British public — especially those

who had subscribed to mission funds — why they were

seemingly unsuccessful, and therefore justify their existence

in order to continue to control the British discourse around

the best practices for India. While Hunter represented the

orphanages generally positively compared to the few or no

alternatives that existed for the famine orphans, his

discussion of the missions as a whole was not wholly

complimentary, and he included a similar mix of

compliments and critiques in his analysis of the Hindu

Temple of Jagannath. These religious unorthodoxies,

however slight, created in the mission authorities a desire to

push back, leading to works by missionaries justifying their

work where previously this had gone unspoken.

7. COERCION IN THE MISSION SYSTEM

The other options available for children left

without caretakers during the Orissa famine proved Hunter’s

insinuations regarding missionary success coming from a

lack of support during the famine years. Notoriously

unsanitary government relief centers spread disease and

disregarded cultural norms of the time, making them much

less effective than they could have been had they improved

sanitation or consulted Hindu practices. A tribal group

purchased children for practices of human sacrifice.

Girls

beyond the mission walls often entered into lives of

prostitution.

Therefore, the alternate lifeways of children

outside the missions contrasted to show the coercive nature

of the mission system when there were no other options

available to children.

Without systems in place that had evolved

alongside Oriya culture, lackluster British government

support clashed with Hindu tradition, leading to material

decreases in famine relief. In his work A Statistical Account

“The Question of "Cruelty"- Dr. Hunter versus the Rev.

J. Buckley of Cuttack,”, 61

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule

Bidyut Mohanty. A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste,

and Class in the 1866 Orissa Famine, 120

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

of Bengal, Puri and the Feudatory States, W. W. Hunter

relayed his experiences at government feeding centers.

Hunter wrote that many Brahmins and other higher-caste

people chose to starve rather than eat in the relief centers

because the government-run centers did not follow caste

purity rules when preparing and dividing food donations.

The government ignored issues of caste prejudice, which

greatly lessened the effectiveness of their efforts. Whether

caste purity beliefs were moral or immoral, the government

lack of cultural competency led to starvation deaths among

people of higher castes.

Those famine victims who did relinquish caste

prejudice to feed themselves and their families found

themselves members of a new caste– the Chhatrahkhias, or

those who eat in relief kitchens.

The Oriya newspaper

Utkal Dipika described the origin of the caste in an article

claiming they had already paid their penance to the

Brahminical system and needed to be allowed to return to

their former castes.

This petition seemed to have been

culturally denied, as the Chhatrahkhia still exist in areas of

Orissa today.

The Chhatrahkhia distinction evolved from a

combination of existing caste prejudice and government

ignorance. Since the government relief centers did not

follow caste purity restrictions when preparing and

distributing food, those who ate the food in desperation had

broken caste restrictions. Therefore, according to hard-line

Hinduism, these desperate famine victims needed to be

punished through a revocation of their status. British

governmental relief centers’ lack of care to Hindu customs

conflicted with the conservatism of many higher-caste

Oriyas, creating a situation in which starving people needed

to choose between caste status and life.

The missions existed in a climate with few other

options for children without parental care during the famine.

These options were often much less desirable than mission

life, and contributed to an atmosphere of coercion for

children with little other choice than to enter the missions.

One such option was life with the Khands, a tribal group that

lived in forested hills around Orissa. The Pictorial

Missionary News published a sensational article that told

their British audience that

“The buying and selling of little boys and girls in India

is carried on by the Banjaries and Gonds. The former

are the gipsies and carriers of India. They travel with

bullocks laden with salt or grain, and are ever on the

alert to steal or buy dog, bullock or child. During the

famine many parents sold their children, and some of

those who fell into the hands of Gonds, it is feared, were

slain as a sacrifice to the goddess of the earth. The

Orissa Missionaries have rescued a great many children

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule

Bidyut Mohanty, “Relief and Caste,” in A Haunting

Tragedy: Gender, Caste, and Class in the 1866 Orissa

Famine

Utkal Dipika, April 11, 1868

Bidyut Mohanty, “Relief and Caste,” in A Haunting

Tragedy: Gender, Caste, and Class in the 1866 Orissa

Famine

who were about to be killed by those wicked Gonds,

and have placed them in schools.”

The British transliterated the name of the Khands to Gonds,

Khonds, Kondas, and many similar phonetic

transfigurations. The Pictorial Missionary News referred to

the group as Gonds, arguing that because they bought famine

orphans for sacrifice, the Khands’ practices illuminated the

necessity for missions. Without the missions, the option of

life and sacrifice with the Khands would have a larger

‘market share’ of sorts of children with few options during

the famine. W. W. Hunter’s Orissa corroborated much of the

mission claims about the Khands’ practices of sacrifice, but

added much context in his ethnographic approach. The

sacrifice victims, according to Hunter, were known as

Meriahs and occupied a respected place in Khand society.

Hunter wrote that Meriahs would often live for many years

with the Khands before sacrifice. The Khands, according to

Hunter, would only practice sacrifice when they felt the

Earth goddess needed it, which was typically when

misfortune befell the community. Hunter wrote that these

sacrifices were few and far between, and Meriahs often

integrated into Khand communities and lived there for years

after purchase.

Though human sacrifice is a less-than-satisfactory

option for a person’s child, Oriya parents would have known

about these time differences between purchase and sacrifice.

In the case of the 1866 famine, it is possible that many

Meriahs would have starved before they would have been

sacrificed, and parents likely extended their lives by selling

them to the Khands, who fed them for many years in most

cases before death. Missionary periodicals often excluded

this information, as the more dire the situation appeared to

their British readers, the more money they would be likely

to donate. Though often misrepresented in missionary

periodicals, the fate of a Meriah was eventual human

sacrifice. As an alternative to immediate starvation, eventual

human sacrifice did not seem too bad. However, these two

options did not materialize out of thin air. W. W. Hunter

attributes the severity of the famine to the British

government’s allowance of preexisting support systems such

as embankments and grain storages to degrade and go

without maintenance over time.

The mission periodicals,

though critical of the government’s lack of charitability

when it hindered their efforts, did not discuss these root

causes of the famine orphans’ lack of options. Instead, they

invoked the scary image of the violent Khands in order to

gather more funding to continue their monopoly as the safest

option for children.

Many female children, if not living as Meriahs,

could only find support and food outside the missions

through entering prostitution. Bidyut Mohanty noted this

“The Buying And Selling of Little Boys and Girls in

India is Carried on by the Banjaries and Gonds,” Pictorial

Missionary News, April 1, 1869

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 95-97

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 180-187

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fact in her valuable book A Haunting Tragedy.

Older

prostitutes, she wrote, would house and feed famine orphans

while training them in their line of work. These girls who

began to work as prostitutes had few other options. These

options were death by starvation, life as a Chhatrahkhia

outcaste, eventual human sacrifice by the Khands,

prostitution, or life in the missions. Secular periodical The

Friend of India noted this coercion into prostitution when

telling the story of “girl named Trilochun under sixteen years

of age.”

The paper relayed that “her mother had gone out

to beg when a woman induced her to leave home on the

pretence of going to the house of a relative. In a strange

house she was sold and sent out to pursue an infamous

calling.”

The periodical told of her “being discovered by

the chowckedars, (which) led to her rescue.”

However, this

human interest story ended its mention of Trilochun there,

moving on to discuss the arrest and prosecution of her

traffickers. The Friend of India made no mention of a

reunion between Trilochun and her mother. This omission,

when combined with the mission periodicals’ many tales of

officials dropping famine orphans off with them, implies the

possibility that Trilochun ended up in a mission. The story

of Trilochun, therefore, illustrated how missions had framed

themselves as the only acceptable alternative in a world

where all safe alternatives had been lost to British

governmental negligence.

8. EFFECT ON CHILDREN’S LIFEWAYS

When the network of Protest Christian missions in

Orissa became the main source of care for a multitude of

children left without families during the famine, they shaped

the future of those children’s lives and even the lives of their

descendants. Orphans in the mission would be quickly

baptized with new European names following their entrance

into the mission orphanages and schools. The missionaries

would run many aspects of these children’s lives even after

their graduations, setting up careers and choosing marriages.

Decades later, the Orissa famine orphans’ descendants may

still feel the moment their ancestral chain broke from older

practices when the famine came. From the moment they set

foot in one of the many Christian missions throughout Orissa

and the surrounding area, these children experienced life-

altering consequences of their time in the missions, from

cultural disconnection to loss of control over their

lifeways. However, missions in the region affected by the

famine did save the lives of many of these children. Cultural

sensitivity was not an aspect of the moral landscape of these

missionaries. Instead, their emphasis lay on saving both lives

and souls according to their religious paradigms. This

section of the paper is not a moral condemnation of the work

of these missionaries, but instead simply explores its impacts

on cultural reproduction in these children’s lives.

Bidyut Mohanty. A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste,

and Class in the 1866 Orissa Famine, 120

“The Government of India on the Famine”

E. Droese, “Have I No One to Care for Me? or, The

Bhogulpore Orphans,” Children’s Missionary Magazine,

Jan. 1, 1868

One of the first major life changes the missions

imparted upon these children was the changing of their

name, whether simply by a missionary’s decision, or by the

request of a donor. Mrs. E. Droese explained one version of

this practice in a letter published in the Children’s

Missionary Magazine, “‘Mulwa,’ which is the heathen name

of this little boy, was baptized at the end of last year, but

hoping that we would find some supporter for him, his name

was not changed at the time of his baptism; but he shall now

be called Lewis Holland.”

Mulwa was one of the many

children orphaned as a result of the Orissa famine attending

one of the orphan schools associated with the Bhogulpore

mission, run by the Rev. and Mrs. Droese. Name changes

such as these were commonplace in the missions and appear

often in the Children’s Missionary Magazine, discussed as

everyday anecdotes, no more exciting or life-changing than

a story about feeding the dog. The magazine took it as a

matter of course that these children would receive European

names upon their baptisms, treating a coerced change in

religious affiliation as a complete change in cultural practice

as well. Often, after the magazine mentioned a name change,

it would no longer refer to the aforementioned child by the

name their parents had given them. Instead, in all future

issues, the magazine would only mention the child by their

European name. The same is true for Mulwa/Lewis Holland.

Mrs. Droese also mentioned that she did not change his name

immediately upon baptism because he did not have “some

supporter.” The supporters she referenced here were

individual donors who could, for a sum of money, decide the

name of a given child. Nearby missionary Rev. J. Fuchs

discussed it in an earlier article: “We have chosen a girl for

Miss H-, who will, as desired, -be called Maria Helen

Hibbert. Her name is Nasilean. She was sent here by the

superintendent of police in August, and may be about five

years of age.”

In this case, Droese did not have to wait for

a supporter for a decision on the name, as one had already

arrived before Nasilean. The article informed Miss H- and

their other readers that the name Miss H- had preselected had

been matched with a child. Miss H- was likely a Miss

Hibbert, since she decided to pay to name a child Maria

Helen Hibbert. Miss H- continued to donate to

Nasilean/Maria Helen Hibbert over the next few years, as

was documented in the Children’s Missionary Magazine.

Many other children besides Nasilean had their names

selected by donors. A Miss Hinton paid to change Gangia to

Ann Hinton.

Another donor paid to turn Parvatia to

Florence Bickersteth.

Missions baptized the orphans as

soon as they could, giving them European names and

permanently altered their identities in the beginning of a

string of methods they would use to shape their lifeways.

After growing up in the mission, many of the

orphans of the Orissa famine came of age in a world that did

not offer a mechanism of self-support for Christians, leaving

J. Fuchs, “School Report,” Children’s Missionary

Magazine, March 1, 1865

“Annual Report of the Coral Mission Fund, June 1866,”

Children’s Missionary Magazine, June 1, 1866

Letter of the Rev. J. Fuchs to the Co-Helper,” Children’s

Missionary Magazine, April 2, 1866

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

them continually dependent on the mission network as they

entered their working lives. In a separate published letter

from the Children’s Missionary Magazine, E. Droese noted,

“seeing such a number of big boys who ought to be doing

something, besides sitting in school, and learning little or

nothing, my dear husband insisted that they should learn a

trade, or do something to ensure their future livelihood; plus

every one of the bigger boys had to begin something. Some

are now learning the carpenter's trade, some are tailors, again

others want to become servants, and others agriculturists,

and they have been put to it.”

As the immediate wave of

children left without families during the famine began to

grow older, the missionaries needed a way to transition the

children into adult life. However, as W. W. Hunter noted in

his account of visiting the missions, the Hindu framework of

hiring power was not built for an influx of young converts.

This left the famine orphans without opportunities as they

aged out of the missions. Therefore, in Bhogulpore, Rev.

Droese filled this gap by setting up a program to train many

of the young boys under his care to work various jobs. Mrs.

Droese wrote that the boys had “been put to it,” which was

likely a reference to the Christian settlements Hunter

discussed in his book. These settlements developed as the

famine orphans aged out of life in the mission and were not

accepted in wider Hindu society.

Though the settlements

were the only option for adult life for these orphans,

continuing to live and work under the purview of the

missions left them dependent on the mission network into

their adult life, leaving them no recourse if they were to

question the mission’s beliefs or methods. The girls in the

missions experienced a similar situation, as Mrs. Droese

wrote, “only the other day I learned with much pleasure that

the teacher we got from the Benares Normal School was

formerly a girl of the Coral Fund, Caroline Cobb. You will

be glad to hear this, and more, that she is a very good teacher,

and a good Christian. Her cheerfulness and good temper, and

the nice way she has in teaching, has quite touched our girls'

hearts, that they begin to wish to become teachers too; and I

think we shall soon be able to send from our school one or

two girls to the Benares Normal School, to be educated for

teachers.”

Droese’s letter here illustrated the later part of

the path onto which the missions set the children in taking

over their careers. Caroline Cobb, as stated in the letter, was

an orphan who grew up in one of the Orissa missions just

before the onset of the famine. The Coral Fund, a group of

donors affiliated with the Children’s Missionary Magazine,

supported her throughout her childhood, and a member

likely picked the name Caroline Cobb for her. As she grew

older, she experienced the same lack of work opportunities

as the other mission children, and studied at Normal School

— a 19th century term for a teaching academy — affiliated

with the nearby Benares mission. She then taught at one of

the very group of missions that had raised her. Therefore,

like the boys mentioned in Droese’s other letter, Caroline

Cobb’s career fell within the jurisdiction of the mission

E. Droese, “A Picture of the Bhogulpore Orphanage,”

Children’s Missionary Magazine, May 1, 1866

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 143

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 143

network. The missions wrested control of the Orissa famine

orphans’ careers as they came of age.

Just as they exerted influence over the children’s

working lives, the missions continued their input on the

orphan’s lifeways through setting up marriages. In W. W.

Hunter’s account of his visit to the Cuttack Mission after the

height of the famine, he wrote of the children, “many of them

are now entering manhood and womanhood, and a number

of couples have been married off.”

Hunter’s use of “have

been” implied an actor separate from the couples themselves

in these marriages. While arranged marriages were common

in the Hindu world, the actors in those cases were parents,

whom these children lacked. Instead, the missionaries

arranged marriages among the famine orphans. “A good

number of the girls are grown up now, of whom it were better

if they could get out of their Orphanage, but they must wait

until husbands can be found for them; young men are scarce

in our congregation since the regiment of hill-rangers has

been disbanded, to which most of our Christians

belonged,”

relayed Mrs. Droese to the Children’s

Missionary Magazine. Droese explained that the girls would

not be allowed to leave the orphanage unless they were

married. Their marriages were under the purview of the

missionaries, meaning only the missionaries could decide

when a young girl could leave the mission. The missionaries

set the girls up with boys from either the same or nearby

missions, most of whom had received job training and jobs

from mission network and would settle in one of the

affiliated mission villages. Therefore, arranging marriages

allowed the missionaries totality in the control they could

exert over the Orissa famine orphans.

The missions’ impacts lasted far beyond the

children’s names, jobs, and marriages, affecting not just their

identities, but the identities of their descendants. Jayanta

Mahapatra was a successful poet from the Orissa region, and

much of his work draws on the impacts of the Orissa famine

he faces, even though he was born many years after the next

good harvest and the end of the cholera epidemic.

Mahapatra’s account was one of few first-person stories of

the effects of conversions of Orissa famine orphans or their

later family lines. The second most significant account is the

Diary of Anant Das, a firsthand account from a famine

orphan whose original work was lost. The only access

currently available to Das’ work is through its use as a source

in Oriya writer Mayadhar Mansingh’s discussion of his own

town’s experiences with famine.

Mahapatra was one of the

only first-person voices left when he asked in his poem:

“You left your family behind, the buried things, the precious

clod that praised the quality of a god. … The imperishable

that swung your broken body, turned it inside out? What did

faith matter? What Hindu world so ancient and true for you

E. Droese, “Have I No One to Care for Me? or, The

Bhogulpore Orphans”

W. W. Hunter, Orissa, or the Vicissitudes of an Indian

Province Under Native and British Rule, 143

E. Droese, “A Picture of the Bhogulpore Orphanage”

Mayadhar Mansingh, Durbhikshya

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to hold?”

The poem, “Grandfather,” is addressed to the title

figure, Mahapatra’s grandfather, who converted to

Christianity to access the food at the Cuttack mission during

the Orissa famine. He asked his grandfather these rhetorical

questions about the importance of faith and culture to

express an understanding that such things became a faraway

second priority during the years of the famine, when people

focused first on feeding themselves and their families.

Mahapatra grew up as a Christian because of his

grandfather’s desperation two generations ago. He lamented

the discontinuity in his family’s culture when he stated, “you

left your family behind.”

The mission monopoly on charity

left Mahapatra a member of a minority religion a hundred

years later. However, he did not blame his grandfather in the

poem, referring to the “imperishable” hunger that led him to

his decision as well as questioning the importance of faith in

a world where missions guaranteed access to food only to

those who would convert. The poem, therefore, expressed a

tragic understanding for the suffering the author’s

grandfather had undergone.

The poem also displayed the long-term

repercussions of the missions’ control of the lifeways of

those they fed. Mahapatra then explained the effects the

famine would continue to have into the future with the lines,

“Now in a night of sleep and taunting rain / My son and I

speak of that famine nameless as snow… Does he think of

the past as a loss we have lived, our own?”

Mahaptra linked

his son to his grandfather in the poem, relaying that his

family line would bear the mark of the famine long into the

future. He was not the last generation to experience

disconnection from his ancestral culture and the dominant

culture around him as a result of missionary practices during

the famine. His son, too, he wrote, would feel these effects

and could claim the loss as his own. Mahapatra’s poetry

declared the long-term effects of life at the missions for the

Orissa famine orphans and, as Mahaptra demonstrated, their

families.

The orphans of the Orissa famine would have their

life paths altered forever upon entrance to the missions.

Inside the network of Protestant Christian missions,

missionaries changed the children’s names simply to

European ones or to European ones selected by a financial

benefactor. The children would then come of age to a

working environment without precedent for Indian people

with their names or religion, leaving them more dependent

on the missions as the missions scrambled to offer jobs and

job training. Around the same time, the missionaries selected

partners for the children as they reached adulthood. These

matches finalized the control missions had over the

children’s lives. The mission network enjoyed near-total

control of the paths the lives of the children within would

take, reaching even a hundred years into the future and

beyond.

Beyond Mahapatra’s and others’ individual family

histories, the history of social and religious movements in

Jayanta Mahapatra, “Grandfather” in The Table is Laid:

The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing

(Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2007)

Jayanta Mahapatra, “Grandfather”

Orissa since the famine conveyed a desire from many other

famine converts to reintegrate into Hindu or tribal society. In

her article outlining the history of religious conversion in

Orissa, Bismawoy Pati explained that following the famine,

“converts to Christianity observed certain customs and

beliefs that were antithetical to the basic tenets of

Christianity. They participated in tribal festivals and when

asked about their identity, mentioned their tribe, suppressing

the Christian connection.”

People who had converted from

their tribes during the famine abandoned Christian principles

as soon as food was more readily available. They avoided

displaying their conversions, and instead worked to rejoin

their original cultural networks. This trend reflected the

coercion the missionaries employed in order to increase their

numbers of converts over the course of the famine. The tribal

members had not truly left their former affiliations for

Christianity, but instead needed to eat. As the missionaries

were the only groups with steadier access to food during the

time, the people came. The Utkal Dipika Oriya newspaper

reported that in 1868, the efforts of activist Sri Bichitranand

Das paid off when zamindars agreed to return a number of

Chhatrahkhias to their former villages to readmit them to

their former castes, and expressed regret that villages refused

to readmit orphans who had been fed in the missions.

The

famine orphans remained outcastes. Das and many

Chhatrahkhias worked for two years to achieve this shift in

status for themselves and the orphans. Their work indicated

a desire to return to Hindu lifeways, even if just to access the

resources they had before the Orissa famine and resulting

caste changes. Later, in the 1930s and 40s, when many

famine orphans were outcaste adults with outcaste families

of their own, Gandhian nationalist principles advocated for

a change in status from outcaste to “Harijans.”

Elevating

their social status would integrate famine orphans and their

families into the nationalist movement and incentivize an

alliance between outcastes and high-caste nationalists. Many

people took the opportunity, especially as it came with

material benefits of an increase in caste status. However,

Hinduisation also offered the famine orphans the ability to

close the gaps in their family lines and have their

descendants avoid such feelings of disconnection as

Mahapatra’s. In the closed practice of Hinduism, these

waves of reconversion indicated a dissatisfaction with

coercive missionary practice and a desire to reconnect

culturally in the famine orphans.

The story of mission takeover and the Orissa

famine is a long one, and it extends far before and far beyond

the years during which the famine actually struck. It may

have begun with the Biblical command to make disciples of

all nations, the colonial fervor sweeping Europe beginning

in the sixteenth century, Adam Smith’s theories of laissez-

faire capitalism, or the arrival of the British East India

Company. It could have begun anywhere in that long, long

range of time. However, action started to pick up in 1813,

when the British East India Company allowed the

Bismawoy Pati, “Identity, Hegemony, Resistance:

Conversions in Orissa, 1800-2000,” Economic and

Political Weekly, 2001, 4208

Utkal Dipika

Bismawoy Pati, “Identity, Hegemony, Resistance:

Conversions in Orissa, 1800-2000,” 4208

Mende: Orphans of the Orissa Famine

Published by SMU Scholar, 2024

missionaries entrance to India. Since the British were

working steadily to erode the embankment systems that had

protected Orissa from floods and drain the Mughal grain

storehouses, the charity work the missions did became, by

the time of the Orissa famine, one of the only systems that

functioned to help people experiencing hardship left in the

region. This situation turned the missionary relationship

with the people of Orissa – especially orphaned children –

into a coercive one. Coercion is evident in the lack of safe

alternatives to mission life available for children left without

care during the famine. As the mission network managed to

keep food on the table through their donors and advertising

campaigns, the children needed to show a willingness to

convert in order to eat. For their troubles, the children ended

up away from home in Benares and Bhogulpore, and,

whether they could stay in Cuttack and Puri or not,

answering to new names bought by mission periodical

subscribers, and awaiting arranged marriages and arranged

employment in arranged Christian villages. The

documentation of these events is scarce, which likely

explains the lack of previous research on the topic. The story

lived in Protestant missionary periodicals such as the

Children’s Missionary Magazine, the Pictorial Missionary

News, the Church Missionary Society Intelligencer, and the

Wesleyan Juvenile Offering. It appeared almost exclusively

in connection with missions in secular news sources like the

New York Times and the Friend of India. It haunted the

outskirts of the W. W. Hunter’s account of his time studying

the history and present life in Orissa. It resided in every word

of the Diary of Anant Das and the intergenerational pain of

the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra. No matter where it

appeared, the story of the Orissa famine orphans was one

that outlined the ethical issues with missionaries serving as

the only source of community support, displayed the lasting

effect of laissez-faire policy, and continues to leave its mark

on Orissa to this day through family and cultural lineages.

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