ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the transmission and influence of certain specifically Christian ideas which, it is argued, contributed to the embryonic development of Indian nationalist thought prior to about 1860. Throughout this period the Christian community in India was a tiny and internally fragmented community whose social marginality was a factor of its size, its recruitment largely of socially isolated individuals who were normally denied any status within the caste system and placed on conversion in a social limbo, and its dependence upon European patronage. Earlier Protestant missionaries had, it is true, put characteristic stress on education, but on the whole it was vernacular education at an elementary level which they offered and this for various reasons proved attractive only to low caste Hindus and those who were already Christians. There were significant differences in the content of the teaching of Duff and his colleagues as compared with that of earlier Protestant missionaries.
