William Carey

William Carey was born in England in 1761, arrived in India in 1793, and died in Serampore, near Calcutta in 1834. In the beginning, he was only a shoemaker, rather a cobbler as he used to say, since he was only mending the shoes of others. But his love of people all over the world, born out of his love of Jesus Christ, and his passion to preach the gospel of Jesus to all the nations, led him to India. He had such passion for knowledge early in his life that he taught himself Latin and a few other subjects. Over the years this love of people and Jesus helped him to learn several Indian languages and enabled him to translate the Bible into many languages of north and east India. He was first introduced to the Indian languages through Bengali, which he learned while working as a manager of an indigo factory in a Bengali village. He also had the help of a musnshi to learn Bengali and Sanskrit. From the beginning the goal of Carey was to translate the Bible into Indian languages. So, as soon as he started learning the Bengali language and Sanskrit and had developed some confidence regarding the structures and words of these languages, he started the translation of the New Testament into Bengali. In the process Carey became an excellent grammarian and lexicologist of many Indo-Aryan languages, but it soon turned that his translation skills were far behind his knowledge of grammar and lexicon.

Carey was instrumental in translating the Bible into Marathi, Hindi, Oriya, Panjabi, Assamese, and Gujarati. While others did help, Carey was also totally involved in all these translations! Carey learned Telugu and Kannada to bring out the translations of the Bible in these languages. Later on work on Pashto and Khasi were undertaken. On a rough estimate we may say that Carey either worked or influenced heavily the translation of the Bible into as many as thirty-five languages. And in all these languages and dialects. Carey was breaking new grounds and laying the path for the development of these languages as vehicles of education. It is no wonder than that Rabindranath Tagore, himself a master of Bengali, wrote: "I must acknowledge that whatever has been done towards the revival of the Bengali language and its improvement must be attributed to Dr. Carey and his colleagues. Carey was the pioneer of the revived interest in the vernaculars".

William Carey came to India because he loved the people and wanted to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was not personally successful in converting the Hindus and Muslims to the Christian faith in large numbers. In fact his score on this count is next to nothing! That did not deter him from finding other avenues of service to His Lord and to the people he came to serve. Through the translation of the Bible and through his various other publications he enriched modern Indian languages, encouraged prose as the preferred medium of expression for education, introduced a strategy of translation based on Sanskrit, and established procedures of translation such as team work. But he was not satisfied by all these linguistic efforts, which came so naturally to him.

Carey pioneered selfless work against certain social practices such as infanticide and sati (suttee: burying wife after the death of husband). Along with his colleagues, John Marshman and Ward, Carey had been unremitting in his endeavor to draw the attention of the government to the practice of sati. Support received in the person of Raja Ram Mohan Roy brightened the prospects for the abolition of sati. Carey with the help of the learned pundits connected with the Governor-General's College in Calcutta, collected from the Hindu sacred books the passages upon which this custom was believed to have been raised. These investigations showed him that sati was a rite simply encouraged as a virtue and not enjoined as a duty. The vernacular newspapers pioneered by the Serampore missionaries were used to enlighten the minds of the Indians. At length, their continuous fight against this practice paved the way for the abolition of suttee.

"Carey was preparing to preach, a courier from the Governor-General arrived with an urgent dispatch, an order in council which Carey was requested immediately to translate into Bengali. It was nothing less than the famous edict abolishing suttee throughout Britis dominions in India. Springing to his feel and throwing off his black coat he cried, "No church for today!"