The ‘Untouchable School’: American Missionaries, Hindu Social Reformers and the Educational Dreams of Labouring Dalits in Colonial North India

Abstract This article investigates Dalits’ dreams and desires for education in the United Provinces by examining hitherto unexplored records of the American Methodist Church missionaries and the Arya Samaj from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focussed on the schools opened for Dalits and Dalit Christian converts by these two religious organisations, it explores the schools’ visions and objectives. The article presents the history of Dalit education beyond the existing dominant analytical frame of educational access and exclusion. It suggests that the mere inclusion of marginalised groups in educational institutions did not guarantee equality; rather, inclusion set in train a process for producing newer forms of exclusion, inequality and suppression. I argue that while these schools opened an important window for Dalit education in the region, the education offered was limited, hierarchical and practical. Both Christian missionaries and Arya Samajis saw Dalits primarily as a labouring community, and the education they offered reflected this thinking; it aimed at making Dalits productive, disciplined and loyal beings. Nevertheless, this limited education allowed Dalits to dream of a literate and dignified life and to pursue non-manual labouring careers.

become docile, industrious, clean, morally sound and loyal religious bodies-male Dalits as industrial and farm workers and female Dalits as productive housewives. As the organisations spread, these educational visions and Dalits' aspirations evolved, and they constituted each other mutually through dialogue. Dalits' demand for education was shaped by both the educational policies of the two religious organisations and their experiences of a subordinated life. Similarly, missionary education was shaped by the needs of the religious organisations (conversions, the need for labour, teachers and pastors) and students' actions. I show that both missionaries and Arya Samajis focussed on the issue of access-opening schools for Dalits and making them literate-which was a unique attempt in the region given the limited presence of Dalits in indigenous and government schools. 1 But they also prepared Dalits for manual labouring positions by not making arrangements for higher education and advanced industrial and technical education. Through this article, I want to stress that the processes of educational inclusion are often accompanied by conflicts, exclusion and the suppression of dreams, which need to be accepted and examined critically.
The question of Dalit education has been generally analysed through the lens of access and exclusion, the role of elite actors in establishing schools for Dalits, caste discrimination within educational institutions, and Dalits' struggles and initiatives for establishing schools and using education to achieve socio-economic equality. 2 Scholars have debated the role of Christian missionaries and the Arya Samaj-the two most important private actors in education in modern India-in opening schools for Dalits. In his work on missionary education in UP, Hayden Bellenoit stresses that missionary schools were primarily meant for the literate elite castes, while 'nearly all converts in north India' remained illiterate. 3 Such conclusions are overdrawn because mission schools in UP did educate poor converts to some degree, but they offered an unequal and hierarchal education.
Missionary education, in general, has been seen as providing education to Dalits, challenging caste inequalities, 4 and generating socio-political consciousness, socioeconomic mobility 5 and spiritual emancipation. 6 Scholars have problematised this image of missionary education through different regional case studies. In the context of the Hindu-ruled princely state of Travancore, Koji Kawashima argued that by the 1890s, missionary education was being subjected to the social conservativism and pressures of the local state. 7 In the Bombay Presidency, Philip Constable re-emphasised that missionary education operated within the constraints set by the colonial state and Indian society, and that the demand for education was led by 'untouchables'. 8 Although there is a consensus in this historiography that missionary education was crucial for waging anti-caste struggles, the nature of missionary education vis-a-vis Dalits' desires is not explored in detail. Instead, missionary education has been seen as a tool for facilitating imperial ideology, nationalist ideas, 9 proselytisation and conversion, 10 and producing religion-based community identities. 11 With regard to the Arya Samaj, scholars have suggested that their pedagogic programmes had transformative effects on Dalits in UP. The uplift agenda of the Arya Samaj-opening schools, public wells and temples and inculcating values of cleanliness-trained and educated Dalits who later became community leaders and led anti-caste organisations. 12 Ramnarayan Rawat's study shows that the Arya Samaj programmes appealed to Chamar leaders who then claimed the higher Kshatriya caste status in the 1920s. 13 In her recent work on Pariahs (Dalits) in Tamil Nadu, Rupa Viswanath provides a radically different view in which she shows that missionaries believed in and practised social hierarchy and difference-a point also made by Jana Tschurenev with regard to gender, race and education in early nineteenth-century India. 14 Viswanath argues that missionaries did not 'uphold an egalitarian ideology, except insofar as that meant equality before God alone', and that they were interested in replacing harsh and cruel 'oriental slavery' with gentler 'free servitude'. According to her, the missionary critique of caste was directed against its 'religious' aspects (rituals, superstitions) and not against its labour, political or economic aspects (labour extraction and occupational hierarchies). 15  producing self-disciplined, thrifty 'free servants' who would be content with their rural labouring positions. For Pariahs, the presence of a pucca (bricks-and-mortar) school building in their ghettoised neighbourhoods worked as a statement of their improved position. 16 Agreeing with her reading, I show that for both missionaries and Dalits in UP, education had wider meanings given the local context, and that these meanings were shaped by a constant dialogue and negotiation between the two groups. This article looks at the history of Dalit education from the perspective of elite visions as well as of subaltern desires. It highlights the role of transnational actors (the global) in producing a discourse and practice of Dalit education in the Hindi-and Urdu-speaking area of North India and focuses scholarly attention on UP where there has been little work on missionaries and Dalit education. The first section explores the American missionaries' engagement with the education of high castes and Dalits' demand for education and their conversion to Christianity through a close reading of the American Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) records. It shows how the conversion of several Dalit communities, and the subsequent need for a trained workforce, led these missionaries to open schools for Dalits and, in some cases, offer 'respectable' non-labouring positions to them. In the main, however, the missionaries saw Dalits as the natural labouring community of India and reinforced this notion through their schooling, preaching and practice. Mass conversion of Dalits from the 1890s, an expanding mission under the leadership of the first-generation Indian Christians, and a highly class and caste differentiated system of education meant that quality education could only be given to a few converts, which ultimately produced a deeply hierarchical Christian community divided along the lines of education, region and occupation. The second section analyses the spread of the Arya Samaj in UP in the 1920s and its attempts to establish primary schools for Dalits. These schools offered a very basic literacy in the absence of any higher educational opportunities. Arya Samajis, with the support of local landlords and businessmen in certain regions, ran these schools as strategies to restrict the spread of Christianity and Islam among Dalits. Combining the two sections, I propose that there was a continuity between the Christian missionaries and the Arya Samajis in terms of providing education to Dalits, offering limited practical education and imagining Dalit lives primarily as labourers and workers.

Dalit dreams, education and the American Methodist missionaries
When MEC missionaries established their first mission posts in 1857 in Oudh and Rohilkhand, a region situated between the Ganges and the Himalayas in North India (Figure 1), they followed the advice of Alexander Duff, a famous Church of Scotland missionary based in Bengal. Duff's advice was simple: to induce the high castes into Christianity, English-medium schools should be established for them. 17 He also advocated preaching in the bazaars.
Over the years, MEC missionaries established primary, secondary and high schools in the region and learned Hindustani for street preaching. However, both methods largely failed to bring in new converts. James Thoburn, one of the earliest missionaries and the first bishop of the MEC, recalled that 'the whole work seemed so utterly unpromising that at times the thought could not but present itself that it might as well be given up'. 18 The congregation consisted of native assistants provided by the American Presbyterians and the domestic servants of the missionaries. 19 Successful conversions only happened when Dalits themselves came to the mission or missionaries visited their neighbourhoods. William Butler, the founder of the MEC, wrote: A group of two or three dozen houses will be found on the outskirt of the town, inhabited by Chumars (Chamars), or leather-dressers; another by Chuhras, a very low caste of labourers, and so on. Going into one of these quarters (a mohalla) the workers began to hold meetings in a more formal way than possible in the bazaars. 20 In their records, the MEC missionaries noted occasional interactions with Dalits in the initial years, in which schooling emerged as a primary demand. In 1859, a large number of 'untouchable' Mazhabi Sikhs from villages surrounding Moradabad city reached out to the missionaries asking for education and employment. Fifteen or twenty of them were baptised. 21 A missionary-converted Chamar came to the MEC missionaries asking for their help in establishing a school for the Chamar community. The school began with fifty Chamar students. 22 In the following year, Chamars in Budaun also asked for schools. 23 Following them, the Bhangis, who were mainly agricultural labourers and brickmakers, also met the missionaries. 24 In 1872, Zahur-ul-Haqq, an MEC preacher and later the first presiding Indian elder of the Amroha Christian region, reported that Chamar weavers at Hasanpura village were enthusiastically educating themselves and sending their children to the missionary village school, and that there was the possibility of a mass conversion of Chamars in the neighbouring Moradabad district. 25 His statement demonstrates how popular missionary schools had become among Dalits and how this was drawing them closer to Christianity.
Dalits' demand for schools needs to be seen in the context of their subordinate position in society and their exclusion from indigenous and government schools for decades. To be a Dalit was to perform unpaid or little-paid forced labour (begar) for the elites who included rich landed upper castes (Hindu and Muslim) and local officials. Rawat shows that since the late nineteenth century, landlords had become more brutal and harsher in extracting begar from Chamars to cultivate their lands. 26 Dalits had to offer their grass, hens, eggs, milk and grains whenever the elites demanded. Moreover, economic oppression was coupled with social oppression that had a gendered element. Dalits were denied entry to schools, travellers' lodgings (sarais), temples, drinking places and city trams; they were forbidden to celebrate their marriages; they were not allowed to carry water while going to the latrine; and their women were denied the wearing of ornaments. Any form of insubordination resulted in shoe-beatings, burning 20. W.C. Barclay of fields and houses, harassing and raping of Dalit women and, in the worst cases, public lynchings. 27 However, the opening of schools for Dalits by white missionaries and their visits to ghettoised Dalit neighbourhoods, situated usually on the outskirts of villages and towns, altered the social fabric and power relations in villages and towns. MEC missionaries reported that elite Hindus and Muslims often became hostile to converts because they feared that Dalits would no longer be submissive to them. 'In the elevation of the Chumars (Chamars)', elites saw 'their own degradation', wrote Thoburn. 28 But conversion to Christianity by aspirational Dalits entailed huge risks: Dalits who used missionaries to get education took years to convert because they feared persecution by caste elites and ostracisation by their own community members, 29 and they feared that once the missionaries were gone from their villages, there would be no one to protect them. 30 Dalits did not attend missionary schools just to become literate, but to make themselves eligible for the jobs that were usually reserved for the educated elite castes. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, upper castes had used missionary schools to receive both vernacular and English-language education and to apply for jobs as scribes, teachers, interpreters, clerks, postmen and advocates and other new positions which had opened up under colonial rule and economy. 31 Once educated, Dalits sought the help of missionaries to get employed as teachers, interpreters, preachers and assistants. J.L. Humphrey, the missionary who had converted the Mazhabi Sikhs, gave details of two converts, Main Phul and Gurdial Singh. Phul attended a missionary school, became a teacher and returned to his village to teach and preach. Gurdial became an assistant of E.W. Parker, the presiding elder missionary and later the bishop of the mission. Gurdial asked Parker if he could bring his wife from the village, to which Parker agreed. She also attended the missionary school and became a village teacher. The missionaries' need for a local Hindustani-speaking workforce and their inability to convert members from high castes provided opportunities for 'outcaste' labouring bodies to emancipate themselves from the bondage of manual labour and caste exploitation.
In 1864, MEC missionaries educated 209 converts and hired them as servants, assistants, preachers, exhorters, Christian community leaders and, most importantly, as teachers. 32 Two decades later, in 1884, they employed 166 native preachers, 425 teachers and 646 Sunday School teachers in North India. 33 We do not know how many of them were Dalits. Thoburn, in the 1890s, commented that there were more than a hundred 'depressed class' teachers in the MEC. 34 The elevation of Dalit converts to such salaried positions had symbolic meanings for Dalits as well. Education, employment and the company of a 'White' person gave them a sense of importance and worth. For instance, a Dalit Kabirpanthi Guru converted to Christianity, adopted a Christian name (Andrias) and became a salaried preacher. 35 The MEC missionaries did not convert all Dalits who came seeking conversion; later, the missionaries regretted their prejudiced actions. 36 In the initial years, the missionaries were not very happy about Dalit conversion because they felt that Dalits' presence might degrade the status of the mission and Christianity. In 1859, Butler opined to the Episcopal Methodist Missionary Society in America that a large amount of money had been dedicated to schools and church buildings for 'perishing multitudes for whose souls no man cares'. 37 Butler's successor, Taylor, went so far as to say that Dalits could not be raised above their 'servile' state, and that funds spent on them were 'a great hindrance to the spread of the Gospel among the better classes'. 38 Converting members of the upper castes had become an obsession among missionaries because they strongly believed that the upper castes, especially Brahmans, were superior, cultured, dominant and intelligent beings in comparison to the 'outcastes' who lived in an enslaved state and were apathetic towards everything that was progressive and modern, including education. 39 The published records of missionaries celebrated the conversion of high castes by mentioning the name of the convert along with a photograph, the circumstances of the conversion, and the veracity of the convert's religious beliefs. 40 However, such an honour was rarely reserved for Dalit converts. Missionaries constantly reinforced the view that high castes formed the best, truest and most intelligent converts by contrasting them to Dalits who were poor, hungry, 'unclean' and immoral, and who became Christians for socio-economic rather than religious reasons. Thoburn wrote that the 'depressed classes' were not only superstitious, timid, destitute, uncivilised and of low character, but also repulsive because they ate carrion. 41 The missionaries' love for high-caste converts shaped the hierarchical nature of their educational programme. The majority of their educational resources, especially in higher education, were devoted to the educational needs of the elite Hindus and Muslims, even though the majority of converts were Dalits. They maintained exclusively Dalit schools which their records mentioned as Chamar and Bhangi/Mehtar schools for non-converts, exclusively Christian schools for Dalit converts, and general schools primarily catering to caste Hindus and Muslims. Justifying the hierarchised education system to American readers and followers, Thoburn wrote: 'we have long since learned that it is useless to fight against either wind or tide. The people of India, like the people of America, will send their children to schools which are near to their own social level'. 42 The hierarchies of caste, class and race became sharper after the primary education level. The missionaries maintained boarding schools and high schools for the elite castes that taught in both English and the local vernacular (Anglo-vernacular), and English-language boarding schools for Eurasians and Europeans. Fees in these schools ranged from US$1 to US$2.50 per month. 43 The poor Dalit converts were kept out of these institutions. For instance, in 1881, the MEC ran a general Anglo-vernacular boys' school, two separate schools for Chamars, and one school each for Hindu and Muslim girls in Chandausi, a sub-circuit of the Moradabad mission station. 44 High-caste students were taught geometry, science, English literature and higher mathematics, whereas poor converts were taught elementary reading and writing in the vernacular. Only the best converts were given scholarships to attend free Christian boarding schools and the Bareilly Theological Seminary. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the free orphanage-cum-boarding schools for waifs and the poorest. Thoburn stressed: 'even the poorest of our Christians do not care to send their children to be associated with them (orphanage school students)'. 45 In the post-1857 revolt period, catering to the elite castes gave legitimacy to the MEC mission in local society. 46 Educational institutions, supported by the grant-in-aid scheme of the colonial government, provided symbolic power to the mission and an identity to the missionaries. As a result, even though MEC missionaries realised that their schools did not result in many high-caste converts, 47 they continued to maintain these schools for elites. Thus, the major beneficiaries of missionary education were the non-convert elite castes. In 1873, the MEC ran 64 vernacular language schools with 2,253 students, 78 girls' schools with 1,560 students, 33 Anglo-vernacular boys' schools with 2,650 students, and four Anglo-vernacular girls' schools with 444 students across nineteen mission stations in North India. Altogether, there were 190 schools with 6,836 students. In that year, the mission had only 876 fully baptised Christian members and 691 probationers. 48 Despite producing a hierarchised and differentiated education system, MEC missionaries maintained their self-image as an agent of caste liberation, 'human equality and progress'. 49 They contrasted themselves against the conservative high castes who did not allow Dalits into schools, and the colonial government which had not implemented its 'open-to-all castes' educational policy.

Thoburn
The social and economic mobility provided to the lowest castes by the MEC missionaries was limited and forced by circumstances. Had the high castes converted to Christianity in large numbers via the mission schools, the missionaries' reaction to Dalit  of white Christians. 50 And when Dalit converts were hired as teachers, it became a statement of the missionaries' civilising mission and their commitment to uplifting the degraded Dalit souls. 51 Instead, Dalits had to create a space for themselves within this limited and differentiated education system. Otherwise, their lives were fixed as labouring bodies, often as waged workers. 52 The MEC missionaries' early attempts to settle Dalits on land as agricultural labourers failed, and to explain the failure, they blamed Dalits' uncivilised, uneconomic and corrupt character. In the 1860s, the mission secured huge grants of wasteland in Lucknow and Shahjahanpur from the government and began settling Dalit converts there as tenants who would cultivate it and pay the land rent to the mission. They also established a carpentry industry school in Bareilly to teach converts carpentry. However, such acts of landlordism and efforts to produce wage workers failed badly. 53 In his diary, Thoburn noted various incidents of missionary benevolence and converts' unwillingness to work hard and honestly, and their disobedient and uneconomic behaviour. An industrial association was formed for farmers to give them credit to buy seed, for day labourers to buy carts, and for weavers to purchase yarn. All these initiatives failed. The missionaries put the blame on the converts' impatient and childlike behaviour because Dalits used the credit to buy things for their immediate comfort. 54 Thoburn described how, on one occasion, he had arranged apprenticeship contracts for twelve convert children to work as bricklayers under an English engineer, but they had refused to work because they wanted adult wages, not apprentice wages. A second attempt to provide work to forty converts as bricklayers also failed. Thoburn reported, 'All went well for two or three days; but as soon as their stomachs were well filled, and they had a little surplus money in hand, they became insubordinate, made unreasonable demands, and finally left in a body and went back to their village homes'. 55 Other efforts to establish factories and farm colonies did not succeed either. 56 The converts' unease and failure to work as labourers were in contrast to their success as teachers, preachers, exhorters and assistants. It brought the conflict between missionary and Dalit desires to the forefront. The missionaries' inability to settle converts as agrarian wage labourers or industrial workers was reflected in their changed policy of employing converts. Their new conviction that Dalits should remain in their existing vocations freed them from finding alternative employment for Dalit Christians. Thoburn wrote: 'It does not seem to be God's plan to gather out the converts from among their countrymen, but rather to encourage each man to remain in the place where the providence of God has placed him'. 57 He quoted Ellice Hopkins, the author of Work among Working-Men, to argue that it was 'sin', not poverty, that kept the lowest classes at the bottom. 58  conditions were a product of their own attitude, behaviour and actions. Similarly, Wesleyan Methodist missionaries in Tamil Nadu believed that Pariahs were their 'own worst enemies'. 59 The MEC missionaries' framing of the poor male Christian converts as wage workers, and of the female converts as productive housewives, was more apparent in the two orphanage-cum-industrial schools established in 1860. Orphaned boys and girls, collected during various ongoing famines, along with the children of the poorest converts, were taught and trained at the Bareilly female orphanage and the Shahjahanpur male orphanage. Because of their orphan status, missionaries had greater control over the lives of these children. Along with giving them a basic literacy education, the missionaries trained the girls in sewing, knitting, cloth-making and domestic work, and the boys in farming, carpentry, metalwork, shoemaking, rope-making and tailoring. 60 In the initial decades, they selected clever boys and girls from the orphanages and trained them further for jobs such as teaching, nursing and preaching that the mission required. Out of 182 boys who passed through the Shahjahanpur orphanage before the 1880s, 107 were reported as being employed as mission workers (41 as preachers, 27 as teachers, nineteen as missionaries, eight as exhorters, four as doctors and apothecaries) and 36 as skilled artisans, servants, farmers and clerks. Thirty-nine of them had either failed or died. Of 124 girls in the same period, eight became doctors, five dispensary and hospital assistants, 28 schoolteachers and zenana visitors, and 84 wives of mission workers and converted Christians. 61 But as time passed and non-labouring jobs in the mission were filled, more and more students had to work in labouring positions. However, the missionaries' framing of these poor children as solely labouring entities was challenged from time to time by the converts and their guardians. In 1892, J. Blackstock, in charge of the Shahjahanpur orphanage, wrote: There seems to be very strong amount of opposition on the part of native Christians to have their youth learn any trade or engage in any kind of manual labour. Frequently impertinent letters come to us, telling us that they did not send their brothers or cousins, as the case may be, to work, but to be taught, and if we do not do that to send them home. This prejudice is due, in part, to the low estimation in which any kind of physical labour is held by the people of India. 62 By the late 1880s, the MEC mission began mass conversions of Dalits in UP. Chamars, Lal Begis and Bhangis converted in the hundreds. Missionaries recognised the caste/clan as a powerful tool of solidarity. 63 They found that in contrast to individual conversions, when a large neighbourhood or clan accepted Christianity together, the fear of persecution and reconversion to Hinduism was significantly reduced. 64 These conversions happened against a background of recurring famine, growing poverty and a slight improvement in the status of some Dalit converts. The MEC Christian  (Figure 1). The Christian community grew from 26,611 full members and 43,899 probationers in 1895 to 71,000 and 181,000, respectively, in 1920, and 103,000 and 220,000, respectively, in 1939. 67 However mass conversions had posed several serious questions for the mission. What should be the missionary responsibility towards educating the mass of Dalit illiterates? What should be the aim of their education and who should finance it? The MEC missionaries accepted that Dalits sought to be baptised for varied reasons: while a few groups had joined to save themselves from starvation during the famine, other 'less desperate' ones had joined because of the better economic prospects and greater comfort for themselves and their children-better education, food, property and wellfurnished living quarters. 68 Missionaries believed: '[Christianity] opened to them doors of opportunity that for a hundred generations had been closed. It alone offered them education, a self-respecting status, and improved condition'. 69 Yet missionaries also insisted that these conversions were religiously motivated: For many baptism meant ostracism from those nearest and dearest, in some cases even from wife and parents. While the convert stood to gain economically, at the same time he was paying a price. Again, what might be interpreted as an economic motive may have been, and often was, accompanied by a realization of the powerlessness of his former religious faith, of the helplessness of the idols to which he paid obedience, and a disgust for practices associated with their worship. 70 The MEC missionaries' simultaneous acceptance and denial of the socio-economic motives of Dalit converts and the ultimate framing of mass conversion as a religious phenomenon was also a way to limit missionary action in the realm of the social. E.W. Parker, the head missionary in Moradabad, wrote to the All-India Missionary Conference in 1892: Many of them (Dalits) have an idea of 'moving on'.
[In] many places they have broken away from their old traditions to some extent, and are doing work their fathers did not think of ever attaining. Being thus willing to rise, they will take hold of those who may seem able to aid them; hence the way is open to teach and lead them. While there is encouragement in this point, there is also danger to be guarded against, lest the benefits of being raised socially become the motive that draws them to Christianity. 71 The MEC missionaries, including Parker, agreed that the converts should at least be literate in order to read Christian literature. 72 But the reality was that many of the new mass converts did not receive any education 73 and that there were not enough schools for all of them. Questions were raised in 1889 as to why the mission was spending large sums of money in educating non-Christians when the mission itself needed a large trained and educated workforce. For the purpose, US$70,000 was appropriated from the home office in 1891. In 1892, Bishop Thoburn started training 500 children as teachers. 74 Fundamental changes were made in the organisation of the mission with greater power and responsibility being shifted to Indian converts. The elevation of the best Indian converts to the position of missionaries, first in 1864 as an exception, and then in 1882 as policy, was a radical step in the history of foreign missions, 75 even though it was a move to make the mission self-supporting. Indian missionaries received certain privileges and rights that had until then only been granted to the American missionaries-the privilege of heading a mission station, voting on financial and ecclesiastical matters, and sitting in the Bishop's Council and Cabinet meetings. 76 By 1895, the number of Indian Christians who were members of the central committee (the North India Conference) had increased from eight in 1877 to 62 in 1895, and of American missionaries from 24 to just 25. The number of 'native local preachers' mainly coming from a Dalit background increased from 51 in 1877 to 231 in 1895. 77 By the late 1890s, the mission lacked funds to finance village schools, train teachers and provide quality education, 78 and the congregations suffered from what the missionaries called 'spiritual illiteracy'. 79 The missionaries insisted that mission stations and circuits should become self-supporting, converts pay for their education, and education be limited to providing only religious education with reading and writing skills. 80 As a result, converts in powerful positions began collecting funds from new poor converts to establish evangelical MEC schools. One preacher-cum-teacher alone looked after fourteen such schools in 1888 with students distributed across 100 villages. 81 In Kasganj, about 1,400 people converted to Christianity in 1893, and they donated Rs540 for schools to Hasan Raza Khan, the presiding elder (chaudhari).
However, he could not open and run all the required number of schools with that money. He wrote: These newly baptized people entreated us very much to open small schools amongst them for the education of their children, so I opened fifteen small schools, but I could not do anything for other stations where similar help was needed. 82 The proportion of uneducated Dalit Christians continued to increase. In 1892-93, only 40 percent (3,142) of 7,884 converts' children attended schools. 83 Converts were asked to pay one-tenth of their earnings to the church. Often not able to pay in cash, the converts paid in grain. Kauria Paltans (Cowrie Armies) were created in Sunday Schools, and they brought cowrie shells, grain and lentils to the mission station/ branch. 84 However, the crisis deepened when a series of famines and plague and a cholera epidemic hit the region in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Not only was the ability of the converts to contribute financially reduced, but the mission also received a large influx of new converts. Concerned with limited American financial support and the prospect of having to baptise between ten and fifteen thousand people at once, Hasan Raza Khan wrote to the American missionaries: 'About 40 or 50 congregations have no teachers at present and members come to us and ask for teachers. Others send similar requests, telling us that the mission has forgotten them. They cry out that they with their children are left in ignorance'. 85 'Send us teachers! Give us instruction!' was what the Mehtar, Chamar and Dhanuk converts repeatedly asked. 86 Until the 1910s, the MEC missionaries had not established any organised plan to handle mass conversions. In 1915, a plan was made to secure US$27,900 from India and America, but it was only enough to educate 16,000 children, whereas the mission had 60,000 children who had no access to schooling. 87 The plan was not realised. However, in 1916-17, US$40,000 was sent from the US. In 1918, India's Mass Movement Commission, established to support mass conversion to Christianity, decided to spend US$137,000 for '30 training school teacher[s], 11 training school buildings, 509 training school scholarships, 70 primary school scholarships, 15 new missionaries, 188 preachers, 208 village schools, and 11 mission plants'. 88 But only US$47,000 of the promised money reached the mission. The MEC missionaries repeatedly reported that there were considerable problems in educating Christian communities located in distant rural locations. 89 In the 1920s, Bijnor had 45 village schools with 408 Christian children, but hardly any students could read beyond the first page of the primer: 'Most seemed to be learning the alphabet "forever"', reported an inspecting missionary. 90  middle schools, high schools and colleges located in towns and cities. As early as 1903, it was reported that the MEC community was going through a process of socioeconomic inequality. Two classes among the Christian community were visible-a literate, educated, wealthy class that resided in small towns and cities and had access to service jobs, and the other an uneducated poor class that lived in villages and hamlets and remained in agricultural employment. 91 While the rural Christian community suffered from lack of education, the urban Christian community, mainly comprising second-and third-generation Christians, not only benefited from the advanced educational institutes, but also consumed 95 percent of the total mission educational fund. 92 This was the dominant picture even though a few stations like Hardoi and Bareilly-Kumaon defied these trends. 93 Missionaries reported that while rural Christians continued to be engaged in caste-stigmatised 'ancestral callings' (as agrarian labourers, leather-workers, farmers or scavengers), the urban Christian community had joined 'respectable' professions. 94 They obtained government and non-government jobs as skilled workers in the railways and printing presses, as shoemakers, tailors, doctors, clerks or as domestic servants in European households. It was from this welleducated urban Christian community that the majority of teachers, pastors and preachers of the MEC were recruited. 95 This continued to be the case even after the 1920s, and the MEC authorities accepted that they had done little to resolve the problem. 96 Along with reducing the extent of education for rural converts and limiting education to basic literacy, the MEC missionaries decided to make converts' higher education (if any) more practical and vocational, which suited their vision of keeping Dalits as wage workers. In other words, the educational progression of Dalits was framed within the labouring world, with missionaries claiming that Christianity was lifting Dalits out of their slavery-like status to better-paid manual work. 97 The mass conversion of Dalits and the custody of thousands of 'famine' children throughout the subcontinent forced all the major missionary societies in colonial India to embark upon industrial missions and industrial education. Industrial missions were a strategy to make missions self-supporting and to train converts in useful crafts and industries. 98 At the 1902 Madras Decennial Conference, missionary organisations unanimously agreed that industrial work should form 'an essential element in mission enterprise' and be considered as 'spiritual work'. 99 This formal recognition of industrial work as 'spiritual work' was a big change because it legitimised the missionaries' economic and industrial enterprises which until then had been viewed with contempt and as profitdriven efforts or landlordism. 100  mission: first, it had to impart practical, industrial and vocational education to converts which either suited their existing occupations or skilled them for a trade; second, it had to build industrial and agricultural establishments to provide employment to converts in a Christian environment; and third, it had to discourage lofty ambition among the converts and teach them the dignity of manual labour and the value of a disciplined, industrious life. The effect of these broader shifts in the missionary world was that the MEC missionaries not only strengthened their existing institutions (six orphanages with 300 boys and 350 girls in 1898), 101 but they also introduced new industrial establishments and made the school curriculum more practical and attuned to the converts' existing occupations. They opened new industrial and orphanage schools at Kanpur, Aligarh, Phalera and Tilaunia which taught trades such as carpet-and cloth-weaving, basketand rope-making, printing-press work, carpentry, smithing, farming and housekeeping. In 1905, the Phalera and Tilaunia orphanages produced 170 farmers, nineteen weavers, 54 carpet-makers, forty lace-makers, eighty embroiderers, six carpenters, twelve teachers, twelve servants, ten tailors, seventeen gardeners, four blacksmiths, four printers and two electroplaters. The Central Day School (named the Holman Institute) in Agra had trained as many as 600 children of poor converts in industrial trades such as rugmaking and soap-making by the early 1920s. A Ford bus carried girls and boys living in various working-class neighbourhoods to the mission compound where they learned the new trades. 102 A new industrial school (the Ingraham Institute) was started in Ghaziabad in the 1930s to train Dalit Christians as peasants and tinsmiths. 103 The hours of the village schools were adjusted to fit in with the occupational needs of the students; in Meerut, one school ran in the mornings and evenings when boys were able to attend after tending pigs. 104 Nevertheless, the mission retained the high-caste and -class character of its higher educational institutions. Of 268 male students at the Lucknow Christian College in 1919, only 27 were Christian, although the case was different at the Isabella College which had 28 Christians out of a total of 32 girls. 105 Isabella College had begun as a boarding school. It was established by the first radical female missionary of the MEC, Isabella Thoburn, who considered that the standards of female education should be equal to those of male education. 106 However, like Lucknow College, it only catered to the educational aspirations of elite Indians (Christian and non-Christian), Eurasians and Europeans who could pay the fees. The mass of poor Christian girls received an education that prepared them for housework. And if the mission required, they were sent to the free boarding schools to be trained as teachers, preachers or medical women. 107

Dalit lives and the Arya Samaj
The Hindu reform organisation, the Arya Samaj, saw the success of the American missionaries in converting Dalits to Christianity as a threat to Hindu society. Led by Swami Shradhanand, an Arya Samaji from Punjab and a member of the Congress nationalist party who denounced Hinduism for its ill-treatment of Dalits, a radical group of Arya Samajis initiated a grand project of 'reconversion' and 'purification' (shuddhi) of 'untouchables' who had converted to Christianity, Sikhism or Islam. 108 Thousands of Rahtia Sikhs, Ods and Meghs in Punjab were reconverted to Hinduism by the Arya Samaj at the turn of the twentieth century. 109 Initially Shradhanand's radical ideas of incorporating 'untouchables' into the fold of Hinduism (wearing of the sacred thread, access to schools, wells and temples) were vehemently opposed by conservative Arya Samajis and Hindus who did not consider them as part of the Hindu religion. It was only during the 1910s and 1920s that the idea gained wider acceptance due to both Shradhanand's invocation of enumerative identity politics (Hindus as a dying race) and the idea that Dalits might become an autonomous group that could pose a threat to Indian nationalism. 110 By the 1920s, the influence of the Arya Samaj was very much present in Delhi, UP and Punjab. Arya Samajis had become active in Meerut, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Saharanpur, Bareilly, Oudh, Ballia-regions where the MEC missionaries had carried out mass conversions. What had started as counter-proselytisation (prachar) by the Arya Samaj soon turned into violent conflict between Dalit converts and the Arya Samajis, and the systematic organisation of education and welfare for Dalits by both the Christian missionaries and the Arya Samajis. The Arya Samajis, often upper-and middle-caste Hindus, formed alliances with landlords, businessmen and Dalit caste leaders who wielded power over impoverished Dalits. Such alliances were also predicated on the fact that Dalits' conversion had unsettled the 'reservoir of subservient labour' that they provided for the landed elites. 111 The missionaries noted that landed elites in Ballia invited Arya Samajis from Benares and Mathura to appeal to Chamars and Chamar chaudharis (caste leaders) to not convert to Christianity. 112 In Hathras, Hindu cotton mill and printing press owners, merchants and businessmen supported Arya Samaji activities financially. Through these alliances there was an intermingling of religious, social and economic activities at the local level. MEC missionaries alleged that a 'reign of terror' was launched against Christian converts. According to them, Dalits who showed interest in converting to Christianity faced the prospect of losing caste leadership, land, houses and social ties. Instead, Arya Samajis offered them social recognition and entry into schools. 113 MEC preachers, colporteurs 114 and school teachers often reported incidents of harassment and persecution of Dalit converts by a trio of Arya Samajis, landlords and Chamar chaudharis. 115 They complained that converts in the Ballia region felt so threatened during the 1921 census that they publicly refuted their Christian status. 116 At Mathura, where 18,000 Christians lived in various villages and towns, and where many more Kolis (weavers) and Chamars were at a conversion ceremony, missionaries reported that Arya Samajis came and disrupted the ceremony. Those who converted were later persecuted, and existing converts lived 'amid threats and abuses'. 117 Christian colporteurs said that they were not being allowed to distribute or sell Christian literature at fairs and markets, and material distributed to readers was seized and burnt in front of them. 118 Joel Lee shows that coercion and force were seen as part of the emerging militant Hindu nationalism and the Shuddhi movement. 119 By the late 1930s, local heads of the MEC circuit stations were reporting that Christian schoolteachers' houses were being burnt down in the night. 120 In a show of strength, local Christian preachers organised jalsas (marches) and paraded from village to village shouting 'Yeshu masih ki jai!' ('Victory to Jesus!'), 121 but the missionaries saw the period as a phase of defeat during which many of their converts returned to the fold of Hinduism. 122 We do not know to what extent these incidents were true, but there was certainly tension between the two groups. Arya Samajis complained that missionaries, Christian schoolteachers and students were harassing Dalit students of the Arya Samaji schools. They accused Christian missionaries and their followers of beating Dalit students and spitting in their mouths. They also alleged that far from Christian converts being persecuted by landlords, Christian Dalits, unlike non-Christian Dalits, had become free labourers. 123 Rawat argues that the Arya Samajis' competition with Muslim and Christian organisations for Dalit converts gave Chamars the bargaining power to demand equal participation in public life. 124 Dalits used the power of Arya Samaji officials and members to claim wages for their unpaid forced work, settle disputes with landlords, attend government schools, and to complain to the police about landlords' torture, beatings and forced labour. 125 A missionary report of 1921 stated: Where there were almost no orphanages a generation ago, except those fostered by Christians, now there are Hindu, Mussalman, and Arya Samaj orphanages, each jealously vying with us for patronage … . Where there were almost no aided schools but ours, now aided schools exist in many communities of other religions. 126 While the Arya Samaj had been maintaining high schools, middle schools and general primary schools for Hindu girls and boys, it had begun to focus on Dalits' education. Like the Christian missions, it established exclusive schools for Dalits in North India. In 1925, when the first all-India statistical report on the Arya Samaj's educational work was published, it stressed that the Arya Samaj was one of the pioneering non-state actors in running schools, after the Christian missionaries. 127 It maintained 505 schools with 54,886 students; of these, 55 were depressed class schools with 1,444 students. In UP, the total number of Arya Samaji schools was 121, with the highest number in Bareilly (32), followed by Meerut (nine) and Budaun (six). 128 However, many of these schools, as I show later, existed for only a few months or had no teachers or textbooks.
In fact, the education of Dalits in UP was looked after by branches of the All India Shradhanand Dalitodhar Sabha Delhi, established in 1921. Led by Arya Samajis, it aimed to educate Dalits, inculcate in them high morals and teach them hygiene. 129 The Sabha's vision of Dalit uplift was based on the idea that landlords should learn to respect Dalits, consider them as brothers and pay them wages for their work. The Arya Samajis held conferences in Bulandshahr requesting Rajput zamindars to not ill-treat their Dalit servants and show 'leniency' towards Dalits. 130 But the Sabha did not upset the economic relationship between Dalit labourers and the landed elites. Education that was given to Dalits did not aim at disrupting the rhythms of the local economy. The curriculum included lectures on cleanliness, vegetarianism, morality, nationalism and religion. 131 In UP and Delhi, in 1927, the Sabha ran 27 schools with 655 students. While the majority of the students were Dalits, records show the presence of a few upper-and middle-caste students as well. 132 In 1928, 32 Arya Samaji schools in Bareilly came under its organisation. However, since these schools often depended on the government's grant-in-aid scheme, their existence was ephemeral: once the government grant ended, the schools also stopped. 133 As in the missionary schools, Dalits attended these schools in large numbers, with an average daily attendance of 73 percent. However, when the schools failed to attract students, Sabha officials blamed it on Bhangis' apathetic attitude towards education. 134 Factors such as poverty (lack of proper clothing, food and study materials), the absence of leisure time, and resistance by elite and landowning castes were never considered as reasons for failure. It was not that such an explanation was not thought of: school inspectors' reports did mention these causes, but they were sidelined for an easy explanation that put the blame on Dalits themselves. The District Board inspector wrote the following report on the Jahangirpur school (Bulandshahr, UP, 1928): I inspected the Achhut School (the Untouchable School), Jahangirpur on 6th April, 1928. Enrolment was 31 and attendance 21. Detail according to caste is 17 Chamars, 1 Koli, 5 Thakurs, 3 Vaishes and 5 Jats. Examined copy books and Takhties (slates). Writing is generally good and reading ordinary. Writing to dictation is good … . The Chamars are interested in reading. Owing to harvest attendance is poor … . 135 Sabha schools operated in a constrained environment both for students and teachers. Teachers were hired at low salaries. Educated youth often used these teaching posts to earn a regular income and prepare themselves for the teacher training course or the matriculation exam. 136 It was often found that teachers only taught reading, writing and arithmetic and neglected other subjects such as cleanliness. 137 School inspectors constantly reported on the lack of furniture, textbooks, good teachers and arithmetic lessons. In some schools, teachers did not even use textbooks. 138 However, the Sabha did help exceptional students to get admitted to government middle schools. For example, it helped six Sabha school students to attend vernacular-language middle schools, one student to enter an Anglo-vernacular school (Class 9) and another to enter an intermediate college (Class 12). 139 Like the MEC mission, fighting for the oppressed against an oppressive system exhibited the Sabha's progressive thinking, but it did not have any middle or high schools for Dalits. The only advanced institution it ran was an industrial school in Khurja, very similar to the missionary industrial schools. It offered classes in smithing, carpentry, weaving and tailoring, and aimed at training Dalits as efficient wage workers for local mills and industry. 140 Despite the Dalits' aspirations for higher education, the number of institutions that would admit them easily was very limited. The Sabha industrial school co-opted educated Dalits and thus they remained within the labouring frame.

Conclusion
I conclude this article by discussing an event that shows how Dalit converts to Christianity had to operate within the limited vision of the MEC. In 1935, Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar called for Dalits to embrace non-Hindu religions. MEC missionaries were excited at the prospect of receiving millions of 'untouchables'. William W. Reid of the Mission Board in America visited Ambedkar to learn more about his expectations. Ambedkar told him to send India 'a commission of agricultural experts and educational experts' who would study industrial and educational institutions which Dalits could attend, and design laws that would protect Dalits from intimidation by high castes if they refused to work on their fields as labourers. He also asked for advanced scientific, technical and management education for intelligent Dalits, a body like the American Civil Liberties Union that would protect Dalits from false court charges, and a greater politicisation of the Christian community in India. 141 Accepting Ambedkar's demands meant bringing about a complete socio-economic revolution that would go against what the MEC missionaries themselves stood for-the socioeconomic status quo and limiting the mission to the realm of religion. The missionaries were willing to offer only a basic literacy programme, the abolition of untouchability, and a promise to study how Dalits' economic, sanitary, housing and family conditions could be improved. Ultimately, they rejected Ambedkar's call saying that his demands were too revolutionary for the mission to fulfil. 142 Through this article, I have tried to show that a focus on access and exclusion cannot alone explain the history of Dalit education in modern India. When we move beyond this frame, we find that schooling, its curriculum and objectives shaped the lives of students and their educational trajectories. MEC missionaries and Arya Samajis, who opened schools for Dalits in large numbers and provided them with an opportunity for education, each had their own agenda, which sometimes conflicted with Dalit desires and treating Dalits as equal beings. Missionary education, which remained hierarchical and casteist in nature, educated Dalits so that they could read Biblical literature, become true Christians, and learn trades and farming. The limited socio-economic mobility available to educated Dalits within mission life was structured by the missionaries' need for teachers, preachers, exhorters and medical staff, their prejudiced caste views, and their inability to convert high castes. The Arya Samaji schools for Dalits too were interested in making Dalits literate, but not in enabling them to become doctors, advocates, teachers, clerks or accountants. In the case of female Dalits, we do not know what the Arya Samajis envisioned for them, but the missionaries prepared them to be good, productive Christian wives. These visions were shaped, respectively, by missionaries' experiences as landlords and employers of labour (in printing and carpentry) and by Arya Samajis' experiences as landed high and middle castes and as collaborators of the landed elites.
Dalits, who often approached the limited education provided to them with the hope of transcending their fixed labouring and caste identities, were subject to the elite politics that kept them as manual workers, either in their existing occupations or as industrial wage workers. They had to create a space for themselves in an educational structure that was overtly hierarchical and unfair. We have seen that while higher institutions, teaching and resources were devoted to non-Christians, high-caste Hindus and elite Christians, impoverished Dalits were offered just a basic literacy programme. To move up the socio-economic ladder and create a space for themselves in a hostile world, they had to prove their loyalty and intelligence to religious organisations and local teachers and win their support. In 1920, H.J. Sheets, the superintendent of the Bijnor mission station, reported that Hindus and Muslims in government schools would not admit intelligent Dalit boys; instead, he had to send them to MEC high schools in Lucknow or Moradabad, or to the girls' school in Bijnor. 143 The result was that intense competition occurred between Dalit converts for the limited school places and jobs that the mission provided. Second-generation Christians and converts living in the cities close to the central mission stations gained the majority of the resources, funds and infrastructure that were meant for the whole Christian community. For the rest, labouring was the only frame in which their lives could be envisioned. Due to financial pressures and an increasing number of converts, missionary education became subordinated to the goal of providing only religious education. At the same time, the only higher educational institutions that were intended for Dalits were free boarding schools that prepared them for mission work, or industrial and vocational schools where they were trained as industrial wage workers and craftsmen. Opportunities for education came with exclusion, the suppression of dreams and newer forms of control.