THE CONDITION OF THE CONVERT 461
appointments were reserved for Christians and non-attendance at religious schools treated as state offence. By 1685, 3,20,000 Cinhalese had yielded to these methods. The same religious fervour was shown by the East India Company. In 1614, an young Indian had been brought to London by the Captain of the Company’s ship. The Company educated him at its own expense ‘to be an instrument in converting some of his nation’. His baptism was performed at Poplar. The Lord Mayor of London and the Directors of the Company attended the baptism. King James I chose for him the name of Peter and the priest who baptised him presented him to the Audience as ‘the first fruit of India’. In 1617 there took place in Surat the conversion of a Mahomedan. Thus the career of the Company began with conversions at both ends. In 1657 the Directors applied to the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford for a Chaplain ‘the Company having resolved to endeavour the advance and spreading of the Gospel in India’. In 1698 the Company very readily accepted a clause in her Charter which required the Company’s Chaplains ‘should apply themselves to learn the languages of the countries, the better to enable them to instruct the Gentoos, who should be the servants of the Company or their agents, in the Protestant religion’.
Suddenly after 1698 the attitude of the Company seems to have undergone a significant though gradual change. While the Portugal and the Dutch Governments were going on with top speed the East India Company was slowing down. In the very year the Company seems to have been of two minds on this question. While it accepted an obligation to train its chaplains in vernaculars of India so as to make them potent instruments of propaganda it allowed a prayer to be drawn up for the Company which said ‘that, we adorning the Gospel of our Saviour in all things, these Indian natives among whom we dwell, beholding our good works, may be won over’. This prayer continued to be offered, certainly till 1750. A close scrutiny of the wording of the prayer suggests if it does not avow the complete abandonment of the original idea of active proselytising. This attitude of the Company soon became a matter of controversy. Friends of conversion were waiting for an opportunity to force the Company to give up this attitude. The Regulating Act of 1773 and Pitt’s East India Act had put an end to a ‘State disguised as a Merchant’ and brought the Company the chartered agent of Parliament to carry on the Government of the Indian Territories. It was provided under the Act that the charter of the Company should be only for
20 years and should be renewed thereafter. The year 1793 was of immense importance since the revision of the charter of the Company was to fall due in that year.