Author:

Jyoti Biswas
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Seth Soorajmull Jalan Girls’ College,
Kolkata,West Bengal, India

Email: jbiswas.cu2015@gmail.com

Abstract:: The aim of the present paper is to historicise the role of the South Australian Baptists
among the Namasudras in the formerly Eastern Bengal in the colonial period. In the
background of the 1905 anti-British agitation led by the upper-castes in Calcutta, the
Namasudras, one of the Dalit castes in Bengal not only distanced themselves from the antiBritish agitation but also expressed their willingness to welcome the Australian Baptists to
work among them. The leader in this missionary intervention was Dr. Cecil Silas Mead. From
1893 to 1921, his association with the Namasudras at Faridpur, especially Orakandi village
resulted in the educational, social and cultural mobilization of the Namasudras there.
Following a historical analysis and a discourse analysis, the present paper documents this
missionary intervention among the Namasudras on one hand and evaluates the role of Dr. Cecil
Silas Mead among the Namasudras at Orakandi on the other. If the modernization of the
Namasudra caste became one of the outcomes of the Dalit movement in colonial Bengal, it is
argued that this phenomenon was accentuated because of the missionary intervention among
them in the colonial period

Key Words:: Australian Baptists, caste, Dalit, Dr. C. S. Mead, Missionary, Namasudra etc