NB: The Rev Daniel O’Connor was pastor of St Stephen’s College during the years I was there, in the 1960’s. He and his dear wife Juliet befriended me and my comrades, at a time we were considered trouble-makers. They did not agree with our politics, but for all that, never withdrew their affection. One of the essays in this collection (Spring Thunder) describes that time and his relationship with us. It is extracted from an earlier book, Interesting Times in India (2005) That we have remained close friends over nearly six decades speaks to the depth of understanding with which Dan O’Connor related to his students. I am proud to be a part of his memories of India and even more to have been – indirectly – his student. I post this review of his writings with love and gratitude. Thank you for everything, Dan. May God bless you and grant you many more years of health and reflection. Dilip
Here are some more comments on this book:
- Daniel O’Connor writes from a good memory, by which I do not mean only a strong memory, but a memory that forgives even as it does not forget, is charitable when it is frank and above all is as honest as India’s scalding sun : Gopal Krishna Gandhi
- The examples of Andrews and Elwin chime with O’Connor’s leftist sympathies. An excerpt from his book Interesting Times in India(2005) focuses on the impact on some of the St Stephen;s students of the violent revolutionary impact led by Charu Mazumdar in 1968-9 in rural West Bengal and Bihar, the so-called Naxalite movement. O’Connor had been friendly and sympathetic with three of his most brilliant students who went underground for some months in support of the movement. His colleagues in the college tended to be censorious about this youthful idealism and, at one point, he found himself (and his wife) under police observation after the rebels contacted him while on the run: William Crawley in the journal of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs
Ann Loades & David Jasper (eds.), India and the End of Empire. Selected Writings of Daniel O’Connor Sacristy Press, Durham, 2023 (Available from Amazon)
Review by The Revd Dr Duncan Dormor; The Church Times
THE very existence of this book is testimony to one of its central themes — the transforming nature of deep friendship. Composed of nine pieces of writing selected and introduced by his close friends, David Jasper and Ann Loades (Loades, sadly, died in December 2022), this book provides an introduction to the life and thinking of Daniel O’Connor — priest, scholar, missionary, and teacher.
At the heart of the book lies O’Connor’s deep love of India, where he and his wife, Juliet, spent a decade at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. Within the five chapters that focus on India, it is reflections on two of the most remarkable missionaries of the 20th century — Charley (C. F.) Andrews (1871-1940) and Verrier Elwin (1902-64) — that are the most valuable. Other chapters consider aspects of missionary history and, importantly, O’Connor’s early work on John Cosin’s Collection of Private Devotions (1627): a deeply sacramental Anglican theology permeates the lives and thinking of both O’Connor and the two “rebel”, anti-imperialist, missionaries.
Active supporters of India’s independence, Andrews and Elwin were deeply revolted by the pervasive nature of British racism. Indeed, of the latter, O’Connor writes: “His ‘whole life’ was a ‘protest’ against the kind of life lived by the British in India.” In line with this, Elwin, an accomplished ethnographer, lived for 25 years with one of the most marginalised rural groups in the country, while Andrews almost single-handedly brought the system of indentured labour to an end across the British Empire.
It is in a lecture on inter-religious solidarity, where O’Conner’s reflections on the thought and actions, the theological and practical commitments, of these two individuals is most instructive. Here, he provides an account of two quite different approaches: one of intense religious engagement with Hinduism (Andrews), and the other a more experiential immersion alongside those who are “victims of centuries of ‘caste terror’” (Elwin).
To grasp fully the radical character of “the most committed and effective anti-colonialists that the modern missionary movement has seen”, the book also includes a fascinating account of the Revd John Marks (1832-1915), missionary and teacher in Burma (Myanmar). Highly political, Marks was supremely confident that the military expansion of the British Empire was providential: it was God’s vehicle for the spreading of the Gospel. This book provides access to a thoughtful and nuanced perspective on missionary history at exactly the time when the British Empire and its legacies are being debated with fresh vigour.
The Revd Dr Duncan Dormor is the General Secretary of the USPG.
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Review by Rev Professor Judith M. Brown; Balliol College; University of Oxford
The twentieth century witnessed major upheavals in the world in which global Anglicanism, and the Church of England in particular, operayed. Two world wars, the processes ending the British empire, and the development of major streams of migration into Britain from former colonies changed almost beyond recognition the social, political and spiritual world in which Anglican missionary activity had developed in the previous two centuries as well as the domestic world of the “mother church”.
Daniel O’Connor’s working life, as an Anglican priest trained in England, working in post-independence India, and then back in the United Kingdom, particularly in his time as Dean of Mission at the Federation of Selly Oak colleges in Birmingham, and Principal of the USPG College of the Ascension, immersed him in these changes. This selection of his writings shows him to be an acute and sympathetic analyst of many of these changes. They range in time from his earliest work (1967) on Bishop John Cosin, whose “Devotions” deeply formed his own spirituality, to his central role as author and editor to a new history of the USPG (2000), and his contribution on India in the second volume of The Oxford History of Anglicanism (2019). They have been sensitively chosen and edited by the late Ann Loades and David Jasper, who recognised their spiritual importance and also their testimony from an eye witness to a rapidly changing world.
India lies at the heart of this volume, and of O’Connor’s continuing interest and affection. Ten years of his early ministry (1963-72) were spent as chaplain and lecturer at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, one of the premier colleges of Delhi University and flagship of Christian Higher Education. Here Dan and his wife, Juliet, made their home, raised their young family, and forged many friendships which have lasted well into the 21st Century. (A distinguished Indian academic, Harish Trivedi, who first met Dan as a colleague in Delhi, writes an illuminating and moving ‘Afterword’.)
Chapter 7 is specifically about the college and its student body of “Stephanians” at a time of political turbulence, taken from his 2005 account of his years in India. India became independent in 1947 and among the many streams of political thinking and action as the new nation state was forged was a radical and violent Communist-inspired movement particularly in some of the poorest parts of India, whose exponents were known as Naxalites. St. Stephens’ students were highly privileged in many ways, and though many of them remained politically disengaged or vaguely sympathetic at this time, some were deeply involved and went underground for a time. Dan made it his business to try to understand them all and to keep n touch with those who had left the college.
Several other chapters deal not with current or very recent events in India but with two interesting English one-time missionary priests of the earlier part of the 20th century who moved away from the comforts of an expatriate community and an Anglicanism heavily implicated in the British raj – C. F. Andrews (1871-1940) and Verrier Elwin (1902-1964). Andrews was deeply influenced by Gandhi and became a major campaigner for the abolition of indentured labour – a system within the British empire which took some of the poorest Indians to work in sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery, but in circumstances almost as degrading. (An early historian of this system called it “A new system of slavery”.)
Andrews engaged at a deep spiritual and emotional level with both Gandhi and another “reformist” Hindu, Mahatma Munshi Ram. By contrast the younger Elwin engaged with the tribal world of western India, and accompanied by an Indian friend went to immerse himself in tribal life. He became a serious anthropologist and eventually advisor on tribal life to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It is important to note the very significant difference in the engagement of these two men with the Indian spiritual world. It is implicit but could have been made more explicit in these chapters. Andrews never really explored the daily life of ordinary Hindus. His was a dialogue at the level of theology and spiritual vision with a version of “Hinduism” considerably removed from the local level worship of gods and goddesses, and a struggle against malign forces which formed the religious environment of most of the rural Hindu population. Elwin by contrast was personally immersed in the world of India’s tribal populations as well as seeking to understand that world at an intellectual level.
One of the author’s interests is the “changing face of Anglican mission”, as indicated in his major contributions to the new history of the USPG. How former “missionary societies” transformed themselves into “partners” in global mission is an important strand in the history of late 20th century Anglicanism. As significant, however, is the response of the Church of England in particular to the post-colonial phenomenon of large-scale migration of people from former colonies into Britain, making it a far more ‘religiously mixed’ society. In this collection of essays, we do not find much about changing Christian attitudes in England to Muslims and Hindus who were now their neighbours. Nor is there mention of how Christian migrants found or failed to find a home in British Anglican churches. These are urgent issues in our post-imperial situation.
Rev Judith M. Brown; Emeritus Beit Professor of History;
Balliol College; University of Oxford
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Closing the Circle (Frontier, August 2012)
Achintya Barua remembers Ranajit Guha
Ajay Singh: Fiji – A Love Story
Permanent Spring: Indian Maoism and the Philosophy of Insurrection
Annihilation – 50 years of Naxalbari
Yesterday once more – 50 years after Naxalbari
Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution
After the truth-shower 